Music

And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Axe Files, with your host David Axelrod.

As we continue to fight our way through this pandemic, the question is, what will America and the world look like on the other side?

What will we have learned? How will we have changed? One of the world's great public thinkers Farid Zakaria of CNN in the Washington Post has written a great book called Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World.

I sat down with Farid, a return visitor to the Axe Files to take stock of where we are and where we're going. Here's that conversation.

Music

Farid Zakaria. So, so good to see you again. Thank you for being here.

It's my pleasure, thanks for having me on again.

Yeah, well, the first time we got together, we spent a lot of time on your extraordinary life and journey.

It seems propitious at this moment to talk about the life and journey of the planet, of humanity, and of the Western democracies as we know them.

And you capture a bunch of that in your extraordinary book, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World.

If you were here, you would see that it's well read because I've turned over a lot of pages, flapped a lot of pages here.

But I was wondering, that book came out in the fall. When did you send that manuscript away? How long in this journey of the pandemic were we when you wrote the book?

So, I took a big risk, David, which is right at the start of the pandemic. I started to think about, you know, what does this all mean?

Partly, I got to confess. I suddenly had a lot of free time on my hands, right? All travel was canceled. All, you know, business meals, lunches, dinner.

So, you did what anybody would do. You write this, you write a book.

Well, I spent a bunch of time with my kids, but I still had a lot of time left over. And I started to try and sketch out what was, you know, what were the main themes, partly for my television show, for the columns.

But I realized that I was something bigger here to explain, to try to understand myself.

So, what I started to do was, I talked to my publisher and said, I think there may be a book here. And I would get up at about 6.6.30 in the morning.

And I wouldn't look at any of the day's news, because I felt like that was going to get me distracted into all the debates about Fauci and Trump, and, you know, particularly with Trump, the madness.

So, I would just sit and think about the longer term, and I would read, I'd research, and I'd write, and I sometimes make, you know, make notes from myself that I had to call people to try to understand something better.

And I just got at it, and I started doing it in mid-March, and I finished basically in June. In the middle of June, I sent the manuscript.

...