Good evening, current affairs listeners. My name's Nathan Robertson. I'm here with my colleague, Eli Massey. Eli, hello.

Howdy?

Our guest tonight is Dr. Abdul-El-Sahed. He is a friend of Current Affairs Magazine. He is a CNN contributor, former head of the Detroit Health Department.

He is also the host of the America Dissected Podcast and the author of the new book Healing Politics, a doctor's journey

into the heart of our political epidemic. And I'd actually like to start by talking to him about

that book, because even though it was written before the onset of the present crisis, and I don't

know if the word coronavirus even appears to it probably,

it probably does not, because it went to press and then all of this happened, right?

Yeah, that's right. It's a sort of weird moment to have written a book about the sort of

underlying epidemic of insecurity in a moment where, you know, we're facing now a pandemic

that everybody's watching in real time. Right. And that's the thing,

right? The book could not be more relevant to the present crisis in one way, because one of the

central themes of healing politics is that you can't really think about problems in medicine as

being isolated from politics and broader questions of social structure. And I was thinking,

you know, reading it,

I realized you kind of had a similar awakening as you were trying to become a doctor that I had when I was training to become a lawyer where you're trying to help individual clients or patients

in your case. And then you realize it's impossible to actually solve their problems without

thinking about social and political context. And you became a social epidemiologist

in your academic work has focused on health inequality. But then eventually, you just had to

explicitly enter politics and you ran a campaign for Governor Michigan that we covered in current

affairs. So I'd like to start setting aside the present crisis for now, going back to the book

and sort of you're coming to

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