Sibling Revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson - Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World with Fareed Zakaria

Episode Date: February 3, 2021

On this week's episode, Kate and Oliver sit down (remotely) with CNN host and best-selling author Fareed Zakaria to discuss his latest book, "Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World."  From past pandemics to virtual learning and the new normal, they cover it all.Executive Producers: Kate Hudson and Oliver HudsonProduced by Allison BresnickEdited by Josh WindischMusic by Mark HudsonThis show is powered by Simplecast.This episode is sponsored by Coors Light.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. September is a great time to travel, especially because it's my birthday in September, especially internationally. Because in the past, we've stayed in some pretty awesome Airbnbs in Europe. Did we've one in France, we've one in Greece,

we've actually won in Italy a couple of years ago. Anyway, it just made our trip feel extra special. So if you're heading out this month, consider hosting your home on Airbnb with the co-host feature you can hire someone local to help manage everything. Find a co-host at Airbnb.ca slash host. I'm Jorge Ramos. And I'm Paola Ramos.

Together we're launching The Moment, a new podcast about what it means to live through a time, as uncertain as this one. We sit down with politicians, artists, and activists to bring you death and analysis from a unique Latino perspective. The Moment is a space for the conversations we've been having us father and daughter for years. Listen to The Moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos

on the IHeart Radio app, podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. On a cold January day in 1995, 18-year-old Krista Pike killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee. Since her conviction, Krista has been sitting on death row. How does someone prove that they deserve to live? We are starting the recording now. Please state your first and last name. Krista Pike. Listen to Unrestorable Season 2.

Proof of Life on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Kate Hudson. And my name is Oliver Hudson. We wanted to do something that highlighted our relationship. And what it's like to be siblings. We are a sibling rivalry. No, no. Sibling rivalry.

Don't do that with your mouth. Sibling revelry. That's good. Oh, you're in the dead. Oh, I'm in the dead! Dess is short in desert. For those of you who don't know that.

I'm so happy. I just feel. like it's hot today, it's 80 degrees. The Super Bowl weekend's going to be fun. We're both extreme football fans. You know, a lot of people hate Brady. A lot of people hate him. Oh.

I don't. Anybody who hates Brady is, here's what I think. I love Tom Brady. I see him win. I just do. Here's a thing. Okay. Here's why I want to see Tom Brady win.

Because he is the greatest of all time. He's no joke, hands down, the goat. You can't even touch him. Now, if he wins this thing, it's the biggest, greatest fuck you of all time. They should have, he should have played out his career in Boston. He deserved that. There was probably a part of him that wanted to go. You know, I think, I think there was a, there's got to be an interest in, let's see what I can do with another team.

No, no. You don't spend your whole career at one place and not. This is, I mean, look, maybe I'm projecting. Maybe I'm projecting what I would be like. It's like, let's get out of here. Let's go do something else. Come on, Oliver. Yeah, but the Buccaneers, their team was sick.

Anyway, regardless of all of that, I just want to see Tom Brady, go to Tampa Bay. His first year, he wins the fucking Super Bowl. I mean, it's just crazy. But can we talk about... In Tampa, it? The Holmes. Isn't he, like, 23? Yeah, he won a Super Bowl last year. I mean, he's been in the league.

He's so sick. What I love about this Super Bowl is you have the oldie, the oldie goat, and you have the new star facing off. So I hope it's a good game. I think it's going to be great. Well, let's get into a guest who you're about to listen to right now, who's an amazing human being, by the way. Forreid Zakaria, he hosts Farid Zakaria GPS for CNN worldwide.

So I didn't know what to expect when we started the interview. I had a feeling that he would have a great sense of humor and would be cool. I just felt like maybe that's because after interviewing Sanjay and it kind of, I kind of feel like all the CNN guys are going to be kind of cool, you know? So we interviewed for Reid And I loved every second of it I could have talked to him for hours Me too

He was so informative and such a great teacher I just make a great point though Because I've watched him on CNN On the weekends do his show And I thought that he would be I was predicting he was going to be a little more straight-laced You know what I mean And he's

cool like he was sitting in his cool study and he just i wanted to have like a scotch with him you know and just bullshit i want him to be a part of like my book club you know because you know he's the kind of person that you say something to you have an idea and he never makes you feel ever dumb so for reed wrote a book called ten lines lessons for a post-pandemic world, I felt like talking to him was not only informative, but hopeful. And I think it's important to educate ourselves on the history of pandemics and understanding the difference between where and what we have experienced in history

and the difference of how it will be experienced now and to come. you know the digital world and technology and we got into all of that I just thought it was really it was great the topic itself is great you know it's about what we've just been through this and and I'll let you guys listen but one of the questions that I actually asked was have we experienced this pandemic long enough to actually affect the way that we move forward or are we going to get over it like we get over everything else of course time will always you know remove and heal and you know, in 20 years from now, I'm sure we're going to be wherever the hell we are. But, you know, just to explore this, this concept is really, really cool of what it's going to be like once we go back to normal, quote, unquote.

Whatever that means. Or will we. Will we? We will, you will hear the answer because hopefully you're going to listen to this. What? What? I got to go. I love you.

I've got, we can keep this in. I've got a reading assessment with my daughter. She's in first grade. and she is at I think what she's a two-year-old level she can't read so she's doing all right the irony of what you're saying right now is that we actually were so excited to talk to him and then got right into talking about virtual learning and the challenges that it brings so hope you enjoy the combo as much as we did is an oxymoron.

It's like, it just doesn't work. Like, there's, they've got to rethink the model. The kids are not learning that much. They get distracted. They're on their phones. They're looking at their searching on Google. Yeah. And they've taken, you've taken all the fun out of education, you know.

The, the sort of social interaction, the making fun of the teacher, the flirting. It's like all it is, you know, it's like one person monologue. Yeah. But I guess what's the ultimate? alternative at this way. No, you're right. You're right. But it makes me, it makes me understand that the promise of online education has to be really seriously rethought that you need a hybrid model. You can't just, you can't just say all of Africa is going to be educated online. No, they won't do anything. No, and also like this, like you said, the social interaction, you even say it in your books, we are social animals. I mean, we need the connection. We need to have that like the, even just the, the, the, same. of touching someone or being able to connect in person. That's why I sometimes feel like technology can only go so far, what I mean by that it will go very far,

but that the human connection will always be a necessity. You know, when people start saying, when people start saying, oh, we'll have a chip and we'll never see each other. And I'm like, I don't think that we'll ever, I mean, I don't want to jump the gun here because we haven't gotten to your book yet, but I don't think we'll ever be like that

because even this pandemic, and you say this in the book, that it sort of sped up history didn't change it. It's just speeding it up. Right, right. What I'm feeling is that I can't wait to snuggle my friends. Like, I can't wait to sit in a bar and, like, actually talk. A crowded bar with a buzzy atmosphere.

It's like, my God, that sounds like the biggest treat in the world. It sure does. Oh, God, I know. Well, there's a few things, actually. I'm so excited to talk to you, by the way. I watch you every weekend. Oh, thank you. So I'm a bit starstruck.

But when you talk about speeding up history, first of all, I'd love to know what that means, but the other thing, too, is this pandemic has seemed to slow us down a little bit as far as being together, that cuddling, that being cozy, that being a family, sometimes to the detriment to the family, I guess, because people aren't used to being together like this. And they get to learn more about each other in one year than they have in 15. You know, but when you talk about the speeding up of history, what does that exactly mean? What I mean by saying it's speeding up history is that, you know, I use that line of Lennons. There are decades when nothing happens and then there are weeks when decades happen.

You feel as though what's happened is this has put certain trends that we were all living with into overdrive. You know, the biggest one is, of course, we've all in somewhere the other been living a digital life. And all of a sudden, we are consumed by digital life. I mean, I don't know what your lives are like at this point. I'm doing, you know, Zoom meetings after Zoom meetings, after Zoom meetings. And that's everything from a doctor's appointment, my regular meetings. What I'm amused by is I'm now finding people with whom I would normally have telephone calls. It's all Zoom meetings.

I'm thinking, why am I looking at all these people? I just needed to have a short phone call. I've already nixed that out of my life. I've already, I piebosch that months ago. I was like, no, we'll just talk. Yeah, I have a catch-up call with somebody, you know, and it's great. And it's like, oh, my God, I haven't shaved. I haven't, you know.

Anyway, so, but I think that it is even true for things like online retailing. It's also true for things like geopolitics where, you know, for example, the simmering rivalry between the United States and China has just not rank. because everywhere the stakes have become higher, you know, getting things right, has become higher, the issue of whether government should spend money, you know, the so-called universal basic income issue. Suddenly it's front and center because nobody can work. So this whole question if you have lots of people who are not doing any work, is it the government's responsibility? Is it smart policy for the government to just give them money because at least they can spend

and that keeps the economy going. So all these questions suddenly have gotten heightened urgency. It's almost like the tape is moving on fast forward or they've gotten intensified. But I think I take your point that there are some aspects where weirdly we have become more socially isolated. Weirdly, whether there's less contact, for example, I feel this a lot because I travel a lot.

I feel less contact between myself and a lot of the rest of the world. Even though I do do some of the Zoom, But that physical connection of walking through a city that is decidedly foreign, you've lost that. You know, you've lost that experience. I live for that experience. So, you know, you wrote this book, 10 Lessons for a post-pandemic world. You say that, you know, clearly we're not post-pandemic. But I mean, I'm interested in the choice of, you know, post-pandemic meaning we're kind of over the hump.

And what do you mean by that? because I think for a lot of people, we still feel like we're very deep in it. Yeah, you know, it's a very good question because I was trying to think through at the start how to phrase this, because it really was the shape of the future. And what I realized, so I did a lot of research on the health care, the medicine, the science, and I came to the conclusion, it was a bet that we would have vaccines pretty fast. Now, to give you a sense of what a big bet this was, if you had asked somebody five years ago, how long it would take to develop the vaccine, they would have told you 10 years.

10 to 15 years is the normal time frame. But talking to a lot of the experts in March, I realized that, no, for a variety of reasons, and there are complicated set of reasons, but for a variety of reasons, we are likely to get a vaccine quite soon. And so while I was watching the public health disaster that was America's response to COVID, I was talking to the people in the private sector who were telling me, great confidence, and scientists were telling me with great confidence, we're going to get past this. So I knew that, you know, we're going to go through a very bad phase, or at least I guessed,

but we could see the light at the end of the tunnel. And that's where we are now. Look, if we, if Biden does it fantastically, if the Biden administration does a fantastic job, America will achieve herd immunity by June. If it does a bad job, it will achieve it by August. If it does a fantastic job, I am advocating, actually, this week's column, I'm saying they should throw everything they can. Even if you can speed it up by one month, it's a huge accomplishment. It'll be seen as such in the world. It'll give the impression of America as a can-do superpower again. And by the way, you'll save, you'll make billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars in taxes because economic activity will start up again.

So I could tell that we were now, you know, we were going to enter that phase. where we're going to have to ask ourselves, okay, how much of this do we keep? You know, what will it look like when we go back to office? What will it look like when we go into a movie theater? You know, all those post-pandemic questions. Do you think that it has fundamentally changed the way that we go about living our lives? Because I've thought about this right when the pandemic actually happened. And I was sort of asking myself the question, how long does it take for the new normal to actually become normal. How long does it take for it to seep into us so much that it actually alters the way that we go about our lives? And has it been long enough? I know it's

been catastrophic. I know it's been life-changing. But it has barely been a year. Is a year enough time to fundamentally change the way that we feel and think and go about living our lives? Moving forward. It's a great question. It's a great question because if you look at that, you know, what follows the great Spanish influenza of 1918, 1918, the roaring 20s, the jazz age. The time I should have been. I should have been in that time. Well, it's so funny. Katie and I have talked about this like a couple weeks ago and Kate was like, it's going to be the roaring 20s. And I'm like, will this happen? And what age group? What demographic? I mean, for us, for the 20-year-olds, is everyone going to all of a sudden

just be like making out in the streets? But here's why I think it's different. I think it's different for two or three reasons. One, the big alternative we have now, which we didn't have in the 20s, was this digital life. In the 20s, if you wanted to go back to work, you had to physically go back to the office. If you wanted to be entertained, you had to physically go into a movie theater or a play or a vaudeville show, whatever it was. If you wanted to, you know, anything you wanted to do had to be physically done. where now we have this whole alternative of digital life that I talk about.

But the second part of this, I think, is also we have experienced vulnerability in a way that we have not for 50 or 60 years at least. You know, because of science and technology and medicine, people have forgotten, you know, these used to be the big killers of life. I mean, if you go back over thousands of years, wars actually were set-piece battles between small, numbers of soldiers, until you get to the civil war and kind of mass industrial warfare, the thing that killed you was the plague, was, you know, all the various plagues in history. So there was this deep sense of vulnerability and fragility of life, which I think we don't have. And the third part, I would say, is just I try to remind myself about this all the time. You're absolutely right.

Although when you say it's just been a year, it's going to be a year and a half to close to two years by the time we're done, right, when people are back fully. And while for many of us, it has allowed us to continue to work and generate income and, you know, it's not been that bad. There is a vast segment of the population around the world for whom this has been much worse than the Great Depression. You know, you're talking about anyone in a restaurant, in a hotel, in a theme park, in a cruise ship, in retail, anyone in third world country.

You know, so that feeling of like massive dislocation. I do think will be longer lasting than it was in the 1918 period. Interesting. So you think that that part of the economic effect is going to, is going to take a long time to either mend or heal? Do you think we're going to go back to work? Do you think movies will come back to normal, get back to normal? I mean, look, everything in time will find its way.

You know, 20 years from now, will this have impacted? you know, whatever we're doing in 20 years. I mean, we're such a fast-paced society that we're so quick to not just forget, but also to heal. You talk about that in your book. We are extremely resilient. Yeah, we are very good at forgetting, which is a useful skill, you know. Look, I think we're everything, my sense is everything will be a hybrid model.

You're not going to go back to work the same way in the best. because companies have found massive efficiencies. I mean, let me just show you, you know, CNN. We're putting out a product that I guess, you know, if you're watching, I think it's not exactly the same show. It's on the show I would like to perfectly do. We don't have editing capacity and such. We're putting out a pretty good product.

Most people, you know, if you look at viewership, it's way up. And we're not using any office space or barely using the offices we have. And we have 10 floors, I think, at Hudson Yard is one of the most fanciest, you know, real estate complexes in New York City. And it's lying empty with the, you know, while we go in periodically, but very specifically, large parts of it are lying empty. What does that tell you, right? What are the corporate executives learning? I think we're learning a lot about education. We were talking about this earlier, right?

I think that you're going to have to have a hybrid model. we are definitely going to go back to in-person because the richness of the educational experience is so much in the in-person. But there are things that are very easy to communicate, you know, via Zoom, via whatever it is, and I think we'll do that. With the theaters, I think that, as you know, is a longer-term trend, but I think my gut is you'll still have a hybrid model. Just for the PR value alone, a big movie studio is not going to want to just release. on streaming. You know, the release in the theater gives you a lot of free publicity.

It gives you, it calls it to attention. It makes people review it. So, yeah, there's exactly. There's a physical event in that, you know, you can't pay for that publicity. That if there's a physical event, people pay attention to it differently than if it's a virtual event.

So I suspect we are moving into, you know, the next phase will be this hybrid life and we're all going to be trying to figure it out. based on history because you talk a lot about there's a lot of information in your book about previous diseases administrations etc but we have a deadly pandemic an an insurrection deeply divided country all at the same time now is this a coincidence or is there some sort of interconnectedness to all of these issues it's a great question I think think that the larger phenomenon of Trump and right-wing populism is not really connected to

the pandemic. So it is part of a kind of growing globalization, development, you know, this sort of fast-forward world we've been in really ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Right. And this is the, you know, in some ways Trump is the backlash to that world. It's the people saying stop the world, stop the strain, I want to get off. Or, you know, standing a thwart history saying stop. But what the pandemic did do, which I think is related to the insurrection into the tensions, is it exposed the reality that Donald Trump was uniquely ill-suited for the presidency because he doesn't really believe in government. He doesn't, you know, that's not really, he is more indifferent to government than any person who has ever become president. He really

thinks it's a kind of TV show where you tweet and you make, you know, it's symbolic, it's performative. There isn't actually a job of governing, administering, corraling, bureaucracies. So the pandemic forced, you know, forced us to recognize that and it made his supporters angry and it made his opponents even angrier. And so it all ended up coming to a head on January 6th. So in that sense, I think the pandemic did, in a sense, it accelerated the tensions around the Trump presidency. Well, I think it was also just another catalyst for division. You know what I mean?

It was just another widget, even though I'm not calling it a widget, but in a sense it was like, oh, here's another thing that we can pit people against. Fuck masks. I don't believe it. It's a hoax. It's overblown. Now everyone's like, oh, yeah, it's all bullshit. You know, it's just another.

Yeah. And, you know, part of that was rooted in a force that has been kind of exacerbated by the pandemic, which is, you know, a lot of what. is motivating this political divide in America is a sort of cultural slash class conflict between an urban, more educated, more liberal, you know, city dwellers and the more rural, less educated people, you know, living outside. If you look, there was a very good article in the Atlantic that said the two strongest predictors of this election in terms of how you voted were density and diplomas. If you lived in a densely populated place, if you had a diploma,

you voted for Joe Biden. If you lived in a sparsely populated place and you didn't have a diploma, you voted for Trump. Why is that? It's a great question. I mean, I think it's become a proxy for culture, for values, for, you know, at some level your degree of openness to this world of change and diversity, you know, because we are going through a lot of change. I mean, I think the people, the people who look at this and say, my world is disappearing. And to a certain extent, they're right, you know, that kind of monocultural, white majority, Christian-dominated world. Part of it is it's a bit of a fantasy, you know, it wasn't, it's been changing slowly for a while, but they're right. And then the question is, are you open to the fact that, yeah, and it may be

more interesting, more diverse, more energetic, more dynamic world, or do you look at it with horror and say, you know, I want to stop this all? So I think part of it is that in education and city dwelling tends to open you up. I think it's always fascinating to me that the people who are most opposed to immigration in America live in places that have no immigrants. Right. And the people who are most open to immigration in America are surrounded by noisy, crowded neighborhoods with immigrants. And I think it's, you know, it's like people who live with immigrants notice, they're just like everyone else. They are not to be feared. They're, you know, some nice, some bads, or, you know, whereas the people who don't see them, it's this, this paranoid fear

of the thing which you actually have no, you don't encounter. Well, there's also, there's so much anger and hostility and vitriol and just, do you think, and I've always, I've thought about this question. Were these people sort of laying in the weeds and unafraid to express themselves and how they really feel because they were the minority, so to speak, and they couldn't actually voice that opinion for political correctness and other various reasons, right? And Donald Trump came along and enabled them, allowed them to be able to be who they are and say what they feel or was he did he incite these people did he sort of you know bring this out in these people um i think it's a combination of the two look there's always been this strain of american politics

um you know the people who liked mccarthy uh the people who voted for george wallis in 1968, people often forget. The election of the 1968 wasn't just between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's vice president, but there was a third-party candidate. George Wallace ran on an explicitly pro-segregation platform, and he got about 15% of the vote. So in some in some ways, maybe the question you're asking is, did the 15% become 40? And I think that's a complicated question, because some part of Trump support is obviously not racist, some part is just angry. But I think that there's no question he legitimized it. He gave permission to people to, you know, look, we all have different parts of our, I think of this about even, I mean,

myself to be honest, like, you know, I've got a dark side. I've got a nasty side. I've got a mean side. And it's part of leadership is to appeal to the better angels in Lincoln's phrase, rather than those demons. And Trump is all demons, you know. He really looks at, life, I've all been struck by this. It is such a profoundly nasty view of life where, you know, everyone is in it for themselves. So he's talking like nobody else talks. He's assuming you are as narrowly self-interested as he is. And he celebrates that. I was also saying that I had this like very emotional response to his exit. And I didn't quite understand it. I mean, I mean, I did. I understand it. But when I really reflected on why it felt like an emotional release, I think that

anyone who, like any woman, any person of color that has experienced in their own life, that kind of that person, that we actually experience more often than I wish we did, you know, it's almost like being with an abusive partner and having that kind of abusive leader that you see and you experience and when he left it was like watching it was like finally the abusive partner is gone you know uh i i i felt that way when i when i was watching him him leave you do say though in lesson seven and in your book it which scares me i don't like this uh but you say that inequality will get worse. And so we're talking about all these things. But I'd love for you to kind of share what you mean by that because it's a scary thought. Yeah. Well, first of all, I just want to say

what you said really resonated for me because, you know, I'm an immigrant and I've come to this country and I found it like a totally magical place. I had fallen, I fell in love with America when I first came. I wanted to become an American. And one of the things I loved about it was that I was just able to do my thing and do what I love. And it was never about what skin color I was, what religion I was, you know, that just seemed irrelevant to the places I was moving into. And I never, I tried very hard not to be somebody who was using my identity as an explanation for why you should listen to me or anything. I almost never wrote an article that said as a person of color, as they and then Trump comes along and he starts attacking people you know and he and he's

attacking Muslims and I'm Muslim and he's attacking people who look different and I suddenly felt exactly what you were saying which I'd never felt before I suddenly felt part of it is it also unleashed to all of this point it unleashed a lot of a torrent of abuse that I had to deal with on Facebook and Twitter and you know all this to go back to where you came from amusingly Americans know little so little about the world that they would always get my country of origin wrong. So it would be like, go back to Indonesia, go back to Egypt, go back to, you know, they knew it was somewhere weird. But, but then, you know, I got, I got phone calls that, you know, threatening my daughters, you know, saying to them, you know, do you know,

saying nasty things about their father and stuff. So all that sort of suddenly put me in a position where I felt like now I, now I'm feeling like a spokesman for, you know, immigrant people of color like that's not what i want to do i'm a guy who just you know tries to understand the world studies for my identity isn't that central to my work but it was sort of forced on me and so the relief i feel is i i can get back to doing what i what i really like to do i don't have to be you know some symbol of you know because it's an act of coward is not to claim your identity if somebody is attacking you for it so i'm just glad to to kind of be back to normal i mean that's the The relief I feel about Joe Biden and his administration, it's just they all talk like normal people.

They all talk like normal politicians. They, you know, like everyone seems to be approaching this like a normal person. And to feel like the freak show is over is a huge relief. Inequality. Inequality, let me just quickly say. Oh, yeah. So I think that think about what we had been talking about earlier, right? The digital kind of elite, like if you are.

a businessman, a banker, a lawyer, a consultant, a journalist, an academic, you can do, you can do your job just fine online. My guess is that actually for actors, it's a little bit more complicated. But, you know, you can, there's a lot of income that can be generated digitally by all those professions. But if you're a person who works with his hands or her hands, you know, the retail, hospitality, all that, it's like the great depression for you. So, you know, and those people are low wages anyway. So you're seeing this rise of the digital world producing more income, the non-digital world producing less.

I give you an example of the book itself. So publishing has in general done well through the pandemic because it turns out not everyone is watching Netflix. A few people like you are reading books. And so book sales are up. There are, I think, about 12 to 15%. That's so great. But here's the thing.

In February 2020, Amazon was 30% of book sales in America. It's now 65% of book sales in America. So the big get bigger and who's losing out. It's all the mom and pop bookstores that didn't have good websites that don't have amazing delivery, that don't have huge discounts, right? And that's happening with hardware stores. That's happening. You can see in each of these areas, Walmart is doing well, Home Depot is doing well.

the little guy is not. So in all these areas, you're seeing this, this exacerbation of inequality, which will continue to create the resentments, the tension. And so, yeah, on that front, that's probably the thing I'm most worried about and most gloomy about is this rise of inequality. I have a question about that. This is a bigger, it's a much bigger question, okay, about equality. I mean, has there ever, first of all, what does equality mean on the bigger sense? Has there ever been true equality? When we're striving to be equal, it's very broad and it's big. Historically, has there ever been true equality?

And can you exist with true equality? It's kind of esoteric, it's bigger, but, you know, what are we striving for? Yeah, it's a very profound question. And of course, you're right. I mean, if you think about it in terms of like in ancient even, Egypt, was it equal? No, there was the Pharaoh and there were the slaves and there were the courtiers, right? So I think what we're talking about is, if you look at the last couple hundred years, which is probably the most relevant comparison, between the Depression in the 1930s and the 1980s, Western societies were able to achieve something that seemed like a miracle, which was that they got really good, robust economic growth. the societies grew there was a lot of dynamism but yet it was not something that created a massive

degree of inequality everyone moved up together yeah the rich may have gone a little bit faster than everybody else but you know if you were a steelworker you were seeing your wages go up if you no matter what you are doing average wages median wages are all going up and what happens around the time of the 1980s, that connection between every, you know, the general economic growth and middle class wages stops going up. So if you're doing, if you're a high flyer, you start doing really well. And if you're middle class, your wages start stagnating. And that produces this huge inequality. So everyone is trying to figure out, like, how did we do that? How did that happen? Part of the answer may be it was a very unusual set of circumstances. You know, you have,

had a great depression that all these countries were climbing out of. You had a World War, which created a huge collective enterprise where everyone was in it together. You had, you know, still a lot of regulations on economies. You had a lot of regulation on globalization. So it may not be possible to replicate that. You know, that's the square. But some countries have done better than others. And one has to say the U.S. has done pretty badly at that.

So if you look at, you know, the two things I look at is one in this, the central thing I think that matters to most people. This is what I think the American dream means is can you do better than your parents? Do you have the opportunity to do better than your parents, right? And that's what historically people have come to America for and things like that. Well, now it's pretty clear. If you live in most countries in Europe or Canada, you have a better chance of doing better than your parents economically. in the United States. And that's a tragedy, right? And that's something we can fix. And the reason why that happens, we've got a really lousy education system that basically funds on the basis of

where you live, you know, because we fund education through property taxes, unlike almost anybody in the world, which means if you're in a rich neighborhood, you get a good school, if you're in a shitty neighborhood, whereas actually it should be the opposite. We should be spending more money on poor neighborhoods because those people needed more, right? So it's a lot of things like that which we have, which have developed in America that keep poor people down, even though it's supposedly equality of opportunity. So to me, that's the big fix. That's what I'd like to fix. Well, you do talk about, you do talk about capitalism and that it's broken, you know, and what is the fix? Is it just education? I mean, it's, I mean, there's health care. There's all these, I think,

more than ever, maybe the, one of the silver linings of a Trump presidency is that more people and more young people are understanding what the actual issues are in our country. And I'm even seeing my son, who's 17 years old, I didn't know with any issues that were going on in our country at 17. And my son is well-versed on a lot of them. So I wonder, you know, what is the answer to a broken, if capitalism is broken? Where do we go as Americans? And what do we do about people who are staunch capitalists who, that's the way forward for

them, you know? It's a tough balance because clearly capitalism is the most dynamic for economic system. It's the most productive. It gives you all the innovation. And you want all that. But the point I'm trying to make in the book is that there are some areas where it's driving us to a place where we don't want as a society. So for example, look in technology. You're just ending up with these massive oligopolis or really monopolies. When I go to Silicon Valley now. What I'm struck by is, and I've been going for 20 odd years, you used to have a lot of young entrepreneurs who wanted to take their company's public, who dreamed of taking their company's public. That was the big goal. Nowadays, most of them realize they're never going to be

able to make it on their own. Their goal is to get bought by one of the five monopoly players, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google. It's sort of become its weird world that is totally. totally dominated by five companies. And each one in their own space, they don't really compete with one another. They collude sometimes. They make competitors impossible. So that can't be like the right.

But from a market point of view, it's pretty efficient, right? It's better to have one simple platform where you can buy everything rather than having thousands and thousands of these stores. But what happens to all those thousands and thousands of shopkeepers?

who used to make a living, right? So it feels like the market can't solve that problem because the market is giving you a solution, which is hyper-efficient, but it's not socially acceptable in a society. So we need government, we need politics to solve this problem for us. And sometimes it means regulation.

I think some of these companies do have to be regulated. I think some of these companies, we need to explore whether breaking them up into some of their parts makes sense. I think in some cases it means more redistribution. It's not just education. I think a lot of poor kids in America don't do well because they're malnutrition. I mean, they're literally their brains are being deformed because they're so poorly,

you know, they face so many challenges. And when you face those challenges nutritionally, when you're three months old, four months old, five months, there's very good brain science on this now. You're just underdeveloping the brain, right? So there's so many areas where I think what we have to just. do is recognize that the market isn't going to solve that problem. There is no market reason why the poor kid in Harlem or in Appalachia is going to get, you know, but that's why we need an aggressive federal effort. That's why we need, you know, to use money to help that. So that's what

I mean. I don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. I love capitalism. But I think we have to recognize there are problems in society that, you know, the idea that the market will solve everything you just gives everybody a voucher or something that like they'll all be happy no that's it's not going to work now now people love to use denmark as an example and it's interesting because i've i've been reading a lot about it and then you you mention it as well and this is might be a very dumb question even though people tell me there is no dumb question it's so small i mean we're talking about 300 million people and denmark is what made up of six just about five yeah yeah i just wonder how realistic it is when people talk about, you know, governments that run like Denmark and how

realistic. Bernie Sanders is essentially using Denmark as an example. How truly realistic that would be in America. What do you think? No, no, it's, look, it's a good question. Here's what I would say. A couple of reasons why I think it's not, it's not a bad example. A lot of American government happens at a very local level. In fact, a lot of American government, a government happens at a county level. That's one of the reasons we have this crazy quilt patchwork of healthcare systems because actual authority in America is held by 2,900 different county public health systems. Look at our crazy quilt patchwork of voting.

Every county has a different. Remember the 2000 election? Within Florida, every county had authority over their own ballots and some were, you know, butterfly ballots and some were machines and stuff. So we actually, a lot of what you'd need to implement is implemented at a county level, which is much smaller than Denmark. It's often a few hundred thousand people. And secondly, that basic spirit that I describe in Denmark, which is, you know, be very pro market, but at the same time use the money to create greater equality and greater opportunity. It's true of Germany. And the most interesting example is it's true in Canada. Canada now has much better. social mobility than the United States. If you're a poor kid in Canada, you are more likely statistically to move out of your poverty, up the income ladder than in the United States. Canada is a reasonably big country. It's very similar in many ways to the United States.

Canadians don't like to hear that, but it is. And so, you know, I feel like, you know, at the very least at the state level, you should be able to experiment with these kinds of ideas. I'm going to tap your Rocky. I'm tapping the Rockies. It's Coos Light. It's Coos Light. It's Coos Light. Big game is right around the corner.

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Check it out at Coorsbigamdream.com and experience the first big game ad that only runs in your dreams. Celebrate responsibly 2021 Coresby Run Company, Golden, Colorado and FT, Fort Worth, Texas. Beer. what about it's what's in the news social media you know you're you're seeing all of these these social media companies now banning people Trump and various others right then you're getting into the first amendment stuff um regulation right should there be government regulation on these private companies well now you're getting into his personal politics oliver

Well, I'm just saying because I've had conversations with some of my more conservative friends and I'm sort of right down the middle. I'm an independent. I can't go one way or the other. I don't understand that how I can put all my beliefs in one side or all my beliefs in another. But I've had conversations with conservative friends who are not happy about all of what's going on. And I'm like, well, it's a private company. You're a capitalist. You should be cool with it. They can do whatever the fuck they want. Well, I think, I kind of want to reframe your question, if that's okay, which is the power. And since, you know, historically, like, they hold so much power, clearly, these media, social media companies, you know, they are a huge part of our economy and our growth. I mean, I have my own beliefs on this, but just from a, like a historian's perspective, if you give someone that much power, are we setting ourselves up? for disaster. Yeah, it's a, it's a huge subject. And you guys, you're just listening to the two of you, I see you're coming at it from two different,

very interesting places. I think the way I would put it is this. First of all, when you think about, you know, the power that Mark Zuckerberg has to ban a Trump or Jack Dorsey has, yeah, it worries me a lot. I do think it's a private company, but these are huge public utilities almost. These are public platforms that really,

it's different from just, you know, it's not that Mark Zuckerberg owns one newspaper. It's that he owns really the oxygen in which everybody breathes. And so, and the way I think about it is, would I be comfortable if it had turned out that Rupert Murdoch ended up being the guy not Mark Zuckerberg,

which could very easily have happened if you remember, Murdoch bought MySpace at about the same time that Zuckerberg found Facebook and many people believe MySpace was the one that would win out in that battle for social media platforms and if it had been MySpace would we all be saying oh let's leave it to so you know let's leave it to Rupert

Rupert can figure out what's good speech and what's bad I think people would have a very different view on all that so I great point we it makes me crazy and yet you know I don't know how do it does the government do it how does it bans free speech so here's here's where I come out the biggest problem is this I like social media in the sense that it has allowed enormous vitality and democracy and you know people have been able to find audiences and find each other and you know all that stuff is great

here's the fundamental problem politically, which is that social media privileges lies and sensationalism over truth and boring facts. And I'm not saying this about some distant person, me, I, I am more likely to click on something that seems bizarreo too weird to be true than I will on some boring policy initiative that, you know, you can tell, okay, I get it, I get it. Biden is reaching out to the European allies, right? Versus that between Biden's son ran a Chinese prostitution ring. Like, I am more likely to say, hmm, that can't really be true. And you click on it, right? And that dynamic of lies being privileged over truth, of falshoods over fact, it's inherent in the nature

of the of the system and the algorithms that they use ensure that because they're trying to maximize engagement all they're doing is they're getting you to do more more more more more so i have this from an indonesian friend of mine who's a great tech entrepreneur he said maybe the answer is you have to force them to modify the algorithms the algorithms cannot just be on this one maximization of saying we're just going to you know just engagement engagement engagement which leads to profit, profit, profit. There has to be some sense that this has become a kind of information highway. And maybe everybody has to see randomly generated, you know, other points of view,

opposing points of view, fact-based, you know, I'm trying to think this through. But ultimately, if you don't fix the algorithm, we being human beings, we are going to go for falsehood over fact. And we are going to end up in a culture that is drowning in falsehoods, you know, while the facts are desperately trying to bubble up to the surface. I have an idea. You mix falsehood with fact. So Biden is signing the Paris Climate Accord, but naked. So then you're like, what? And it's a picture of Biden sort of like maybe half closed. And you're like, oh, my God, what? And then you click on. it and it's a real article but now you're waiting for the butt naked part and at the end you don't really get there so isn't that what they do anyway that's what they do anyway i have a new media

i have a new media company for you to found and i think maybe it'd be called really sexy news or something like that yeah real news but with sex thrown yeah yeah exactly exactly i know we're going totally the opposite way. But at some point, I just want to hear about your upbringing a little bit and coming to America just for a second. And what got you so inspired to do what you do? I grew up in India. My dad was a politician and my mom was a journalist. So, you know, in my house, this was like, it was alive with this kind of discussion. They were, there was sort of upper middle class. But I felt incredibly privileged, not financially, but in the sense that, you know, we met people from all walks of life. We knew people from all, they were very well connected, I guess, would be one way of thinking about it. But for a kid, what it did was it sort of opened up the world, like everything seemed possible

because I would meet architects and I would meet scientists and I would meet, you know, with politicians and just fascinated by the world, fascinated by, I don't know why. Like I read Henry Kissinger's memoirs when I was 15 years old. I still remember that, you know, and I didn't even think it was as weird as I now look back at having had 15-year-olds. I'm like, what was I thinking? But, but, and I then, you know, it was fascinated by America, apply for a scholarship. And I got a scholarship to Yale, came to Yale, fell in love with America, and just was always like, initially I didn't think I could do this for a living. And I still think it's kind of,

kind of like I'm, it's like a big scam for as far as I'm concerned, because I would do this for free. I don't, I don't, you know, I mean, to me, it doesn't feel like work except that I get paid. And so I, you know, this is what I love to do. I would read this stuff anyway. I would analyze it anyway. I would talk to these people anyway. And what I love about it is, most probably, is that I get to communicate this interest and this passion to people, you know, and to be able to do it. As long as I can do that, I feel like I've sort of, you know, I've just hit the jackpot of life. I'm very, I feel very deeply satisfied with what I do, you know, professionally, even though, you know, by many metrics, there are people who are much, much more successful than I am. Do you have brothers or sisters?

I have a brother who's two years older and he is a hedge fund manager. and by the normal metrics of American life, which is to say money, he is vastly most successful than I am. And are you, are you, do you like sports? Are you a sports fan? So I play, I like to play more than I do to watch. Part of it is that I grew up in India,

a complete cricket fanatic. And then I came here before the internet and all. And, you know, to talk to an American about cricket, they think you're like talking about, you know, having a tea party or something like that. on unscends, a very intense competitive sport. But I play tennis and I follow tennis. That's probably the one main one, and I basketball a little bit.

Basketball is the easiest one for immigrants because it's like fast, high scoring. You don't need to, like, I still have problem with football. Like, I look at it and I'm like, what exactly just happened? And my favorite description of football is the columnist George Will said it combines two of America's worst features, violence punctuated by committee meetings. That's amazing. You know, here's a good example of like globalization and all the things we've been talking about.

So cricket has now been totally transformed by India because India is the biggest market by far. Everybody else fails in comparison. So the Indians now essentially run global cricket. It is the place that everyone wants to play. They have all the largest advertising revenues. And the Indians have adapted, actually, it was an Australian innovation. So the new hard way to play cricket is what I call limited overs. Basically, there are two-hour matches.

Everything goes fast. Oh, wow. No one's wearing whites anymore. Everyone's wearing very, very colorful clothes. And it feels a little bit like you're in the middle of a Bollywood movie. Oh, really? Yeah. A lot of googlys.

Oh, nice, googly. I know. Okay, 100 years from now, what do you think historians will be saying about this post-pandemic world? Yeah, I think, you know, I end the book with this idea that, look, it's all up to us. I actually end with my favorite scene out of Lawrence of Arabia, where this guy, so Lawrence is trying to get these Arab tribes to attack Akaba, an Ottoman port. and they're taking a bunch of people along with him and one of the Arabs gets lost and Lauren says I want to go back and get him and they say no no no his time had come it is written so Lauren says no and he then there's this Peter O'Toole and this impossibly

handsome you know dashes back through the sandstorm so it picks and finds him and brings him back and triumphantly brings him to the Arab chieftain who was Omar Sharif and he and he plunks him down to him and he says, nothing is written, you know, meaning we write our own destiny. So to me, it feels like, you know, nothing is written, nothing is said. A lot depends on whether we learn the lessons from this pandemic. To me, the central lesson, you know, it's my lesson number one, is we are living in a very fragile world, and nature is telling us that. You know, this is nature's way of telling us you are not paying attention to the risks here.

You know, the way we are developing and crowding out and destroying the natural habitat of animals, the way we engage in factory farming, which is an invitation for the next pandemic. Thousands of cattle and chickens hoarded together in just utterly in human conditions, the virus is jumping from one chicken to another so that by the time they get to the 10,000 chicken, they're now very potent. This is all, you know, look at the forest fires we've had. You know, we, we had five million acres of land burned in America last year to the ground. That is the entire state of Massachusetts, burnt to the ground. You know, we need to, like, really wake up and recognize what we are doing to the planet, what we are doing in terms of development is reckless. And there are actually a ways to deal with this.

There are ways to buy insurance. There are ways to put in seatbelts. There are ways to put in, you know, airbags. And I think if we get that right, that sort of, you know, the most central lesson will be okay. The other stuff, you know, it's a question of do you have the best society you can? Are you living up to your potential? Are you bringing every, those are second order questions? To me, the big question is, have we really understood what we are doing here?

Pope Francis actually says, this is nature's revenge. I don't know. I wouldn't quite put it that way, but I think it's nature's we have telling us, look, you know, you're overlooking the risks of the way you are living. Thank you so much. I just want to say everybody who's listening, like get this book, read this book. And I was going to say to you, you know,

I was going to thank you for ending your book like that because it's empowering to know from someone as smart as you. It is up to us and that we can move the needle in the direction that we'll either. be in all of our best interests or not. You know, what puts my mind at ease to it personally is that we are a constantly evolving species. Take everything away for a second. We have evolved to where we are over time and we're not done. We're still evolving. So we are always in transition. Always. Or as Dr. Sheffali says,

we might be devolving. Yeah, but I don't, I, maybe. be emotionally. But I love that. I mean, for some reason that that makes me feel just not to be, not to all of a sudden be inactive in trying to create change. But I don't know. It makes me always feel a little bit better to think that we're just constantly in transition. We're not settling. And you know what? Farid does say that the realists are usually the idealists. That's exactly the point that's exactly the point that the people who think big and dream they're the they're the ones who actually are changing the world and the world does change i think you're exactly right it's like we are evolving and how do we evolve we evolved by learning and we have evolved a lot by cooperating

like those are the ways that things have you know move forward and i think we will keep doing it you know and and people don't recognize how much we've already accomplished right yeah that's one of the things I make in that realist, idealist chapter. I mean, think of where we are compared to, you know, the middle of World War II, the middle of World War I, the middle of the religious wars in Europe, with a bubonic plague killing half of the entire population of Europe. And here we have with a vaccine in nine months. So, you know, there's a lot of good news out there, but it shouldn't make us, should make us want to run fast, not run scared, you know? Right.

We should recognize that we've got to get stuff right. Guys, I have to tell you, this was so much fun. So fun. Didn't know what you expect. And this is like one of the most fascinating conversations I've had. So thank you. Thank you. I'm so excited.

Sibling Revelry is executive produced by Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson. Producer is Allison Bresnick. Editor is Josh Windish. Music by Mark Hudson, aka Uncle Mark. I'm Jorge Ramos. Together we're launching The Moment, a new podcast about what it means to live through a time as uncertain as this one. We sit down with politicians, artists, and activists to bring you death and analysis from a unique Latino perspective. The moment is a space for the conversations we've been having us, father and daughter, for years.

Cheers. Listen to The Moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On a cold January day in 1995, 18-year-old Krista Pike killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee. Since her conviction, Krista has been sitting on death row. How does someone prove that they deserve to live? We are starting the recording now. Please state your first and last. name. Krista Pike. Listen to Unrestorable Season 2, Proof of Life, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Introducing IVF disrupted, the Kind Body story, a podcast about a company that promised to revolutionize fertility care.

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