My guest is Mark Leonard.

Mark Leonard.

Mark Lenned is co-founder and director of the European Council and Foreign Relations,

the first pan-European think tank.

His new book, Surviving Chaos, Geopolitics, When the Rules Fail, has just been published.

Welcome to the podcast, Mark.

Thanks so much for having me back. Right, and you say back because just to remind you, we did one of these 2016, 10 years ago, can you imagine? You're one of my very first podcast guests. Right. We're going to talk about your new book. Congratulations. It's a really interesting read and very elegantly written as well, if I may say so. Thank you. What was the motivation?

What spurred you to write this particular book?

And we'll go into the main themes in a second.

But why this topic and why now?

Well, it's called surviving chaos.

And it is motivated by the fact that there is more and more chaos in our lives at the moment, people dealing with a world that's going through

some quite massive geopolitical, economic, societal and political changes.

And we're doing it without having a clear roadmap or a way of judging what is happening. And I first started thinking

about this book during COVID, which was a big kind of shock to all of our systems. And I was stuck

like everybody else for, you know, I normally lead this very peripatetic life on planes and trains

and going around the world in different ways.

But I had several weeks or months where the end of my world was the edge of my bedroom.

And I was sort of trying to work out how other people around the world were feeling about what we were going through.

And the pandemic had started in China.

I'd go to China a lot normally.

And I thought it would be interesting to reach out to some of my Chinese friends.

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