Hey, everybody.

Great one today.

You know, for a change.

The brilliant George Packer is with me, and he's written another great book.

George is a National Book Award winner.

He wrote one of my favorite books on the war in Iraq, The Assassins Gate.

And toward the beginning of COVID, he wrote a pretty scathing article for Atlantic Monthly

about how COVID had revealed the weaknesses in our country.

And now he's come out with a book, The Last Best Hope, America in Crisis.

And, you know, he acknowledges what's very obvious that 2020 was kind of the worst year in this country since, well, I don't know, civil war.

I don't know.

You got a lump in.

There's World War II.

There's a depression.

But we lost more people than we had There's World War II. There's a depression, but we lost more people

than we had since the World War II. 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War, and that's how many

have died from COVID. And this was just a complete failure by a United States president, the abdication of any accountability by this

guy, Trump.

And this is not a book about Trump, per se, but how we, actually more about how we got

Trump, how we as a country uh were so ill-equipped

uh compared with the rest of the world remember uh we've led the world in deaths from the start

of covid through the finish, finish line.

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