This is Sarah Stewart Holland. This is Beth Silver's. You're listening to Pantsu Poohletics, where we take a different approach to the news. Thank you so much for being here today. Sarah and I are continuing to try to learn from our recent past.

This week marks four years since the majority of the country went into lockdown at the start of the COVID-19

pandemic.

And if you hear that and think, Beth, I do not want to talk about COVID-19,

I understand.

I am still recovering from my recent round of COVID.

It does not feel like history to me at all and I very much want to run away from it.

But Sarah and I have been trying to stick with it because the pandemic was one of the most significant events that will happen in our lifetimes, and it still influences almost everything in our economy, in our politics, in policy, and in our culture.

So last year, Sarah and I did an episode where we reflected on what we got right and wrong during the pandemic.

I think that is probably due for an update, especially after we read lessons from the COVID war. A group of professionals,

medical professionals policy experts, people who were really in the trenches of

making decisions during COVID-19 got together to do what our government didn't.

A real after-action report. We have needed a 9-11 style commission to be

appointed by Congress to do this kind of look back and look forward. What did we get wrong? What did we

get right? What can we learn from all of that? But Congress hasn't done it.

And so these professionals stepped in to fill that gap and they have written a very readable excellent illuminating important book.

We knew in the first chapter as we were texting each other back and forth about it that we wanted to have one of the contributors to the book on the show.

And Dr Charity Dean joins us today for that exact reason.

Before we start, a very big thank you to Commerce Lexington and everyone who came to the

emerge conference this week Sarah and I spoke to that group of rising

professionals about having hard conversations in the workplace. It wasn't political

at all. We did discuss what happens when politics come up at work, but mostly we talked about asking for a raise or responding to someone who was asked you for a raise. We talked about giving negative performance feedback. We talked about teams where personalities aren't aligning with each

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