Hello and welcome to the GZero World Podcast.

Here you'll find extended versions of the interviews from my show on public television.

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today I'll sit down with a doctor who helped defeat smallpox

and actually observed the very last case of it.

Dr. Larry Brilliant is among the world's leading epidemiologists,

and we'll talk about how the past informs the present

and what can be done to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Let's get to it.

Compare what's happening now with the way the world has responded to previous pandemics, recent pandemics.

Well, there's no real comparable since, you know, 1918.

But the way the world has responded to SARS and MERS and Ebola, what's called those regional

epidemics, just to be a little technical.

That was the derivative benefit of the post-World War II, a new global order.

And you and I've talked about this before, but after World War II, when we all

collectively, we're never talking to each other, we saw the skeletons come out of Auschwitz.

We saw the firebombing of Dresden and the mushroom clouds over here at Shima. It was as if

a silent vow was taken that everyone agreed to give up a little

bit of our sovereignty, our national sovereignty, even our personal sovereignty.

And we created that alphabet soup of acronyms from the Security Council to the UN General

Assembly, to the World Bank, to the IMF, to FAO, and

WHO, UNESCO, UNICEF, we can go on.

And while that patchwork quilt seemed cumbersome and clearly is now long in the tooth, it held

...