Fareed Zakaria: 'My Fear Is COVID-19 Will Be The Dress Rehearsal And We Will Have Another Crisis Too Big To Handle'
(CBS Local)-- Fareed Zakaria is one of the most respected journalists and authors in the country and his new Simon & Schuster audiobook "Ten Lessons For A Post-Pandemic World" analyzes how COVID-19 has made our country change its social and political behavior.
While Zakaria has written several books before, he calls this one the toughest of his career because this was different than anything he had done before.
NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 24: Journalist/news anchor Fareed Zakaria attends the ArtsConnection 35th Anniversary Spring Benefit at 583 Park Avenue on April 24, 2014 in New York City. (Photo by Mireya Acierto/Getty Images)
"Remember when COVID-19 first hit in late March, it was almost like the world had shutdown," said Zakaria, in an interview with CBS Local's DJ Sixsmith. "All of the sudden every trip I had got cancelled and all of the sudden I'm not going into the office. As a result, even though I had my kids with me, I had a lot of free time. At the same time I started thinking how does one make sense of this. What is this world going to look like. I decided to do my therapy on paper. I started to write down what I thought was happening. For about four months, I would wake up and write without looking at the day's news. I wanted to elevate myself to that longer term horizon. It proved to be a very good disciplining tool to force yourself to get out of the moment."
In his book, Zakaria addresses issues like racial inequality, how we should govern, the future of globalization and why we are all social animals.
"The biggest message I want to get across is we've been living our life in a way that has taken on a lot of risks," said Zakaria. "It's given us a lot of dynamism and it's given us a lot of progress. If you think about it, we have this very open system. Everybody in the world can participate. We're moving very fast and all that gives us upside. It also creates a lot of instability. If you think back to the last 20 years, we've had 9/11 where the world almost careened to a halt. There was the massive war on the terror and the global financial crisis. Now we have covid. They're all a part of a very open, very dynamic system. One thing I want people to understand as we go forward is let's ask ourselves, do we need a little more resilience and do we need to give ourselves a little bit more stability. My fear is that this pandemic will turn out to be the dress rehearsal and and we will have another crisis one of these days that is going to be too big to handle."
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Zakaria's audiobook is available for download now wherever you listen to your audiobooks and watch all of DJ Sixsmith's interviews from "The Sit-Down" series here.
