I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Tuesday, May 18th.

Fareed Zakaria is thinking about virtuous cycles and vicious ones. The Washington Post columnist and host of

Farid Zakaria GPS on CNN wrote a column this month called The Pandemic has led to innovation.

It's a reason for optimism. He cites a renewed interest and massive investments in science

and technology inspired by the epically successful vaccine

development as hopefully fostering a virtuous cycle. But this week, Farid also hosted a CNN special

report called A Radical Rebellion, the Transformation of the GOP, in which he sees a few vicious

cycles at work, like Republican presidents from Reagan

to Trump, promising big conservative changes that never happen, which contributes to the

base, becoming more radicalized and aggrieved. Freed was here, most recently in October,

for his book, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World. Let's pick up these

threads. Always great to have you, Farid. Welcome back to WNYC. Thank you so much, Brian. Always

a pleasure. Can we start with your use of the term virtuous cycle in the Washington Post

to describe what might be happening in this country right now with innovation? Sure. I mean, I think we all

sense some of it anyway. We're all working in ways that are different, in some ways are more

productive. You lose some things for sure. But that's when innovation happens. You know, when you're

forced to adapt, when you're forced to change the ways you do things,

we're all creatures of habit. And it's very hard to cast aside the old habits and adopt new ones.

So one of the things that's happened in all of our personal lives in corporate America and in, you know,

in even broader ways, even government, is that we've all

been forced to cast aside always and find new ones. Not all of them will stay. Not all of them

are more productive. But that ability to be open to change is in many ways the essence of innovation.

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