 Welcome to the latest Lowey Institute Live event. I'm Michael Fulilove, the executive director of the Lowey Institute. And today I'm speaking with Lawrence Wright, the award-winning author, journalist and playwright. Larry has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992 and in that time he's written on a variety of topics, including Scientology, The Rise of Al Qaeda, Middle East Politics and more recently, Global Pandemics. Larry's best-selling book, The Looming Tower, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 and his latest book is The Plague Year, America in the Time of COVID, a brilliant account of how the United States responded to the coronavirus pandemic. Larry is one of my favorite non-fiction authors and I'm delighted to be hosting this conversation with him. Thank you very much for joining me today Larry Wright from your home in Austin, Texas. Thanks Michael, it's good to be with you. Larry, before I come to COVID I'd like to ask you a few questions about your life BC before COVID. You're a lifelong Texan, you went to high school in Dallas, you wrote for Texas Monthly Magazine, you published a book on the history and culture of the Lone Star State, you're a long-term resident of Austin where you play keyboard in a blues band. Now non-Americans probably have a lot of misconceptions about Texas. What do you love about your state? What has kept you in Texas all these years? It's a question that my editor asked me in The New Yorker. A lot of people are puzzled by my tendency to remain in place in Texas. I guess it all comes down to the feeling of home Michael. There are a lot of things in Texas I would change where it in my power. On the other hand, I love the culture, I love the food, I love the music. Our friends are dear to us, our family has grown here. All of those things make me feel like if I left Texas, I would be home somehow away from home. For all of his flaws, I find that I'm more at ease here in Texas than I am anywhere else. I must say that I find it a relief to talk to such a storied non-fiction writer who doesn't live in Brooklyn. One thing that always puzzles me is how all these authors congregate in one borough of one city, albeit a great city, New York City, but surely that affects the stories they tell, the stories they discover upon, the truths they try to expose. Do you think that by living in the heartland, as it were, you get a different angle on America from some of your colleagues living in places like New York? No doubt about it. There are pluses and minuses. I think a lot of people live in New York so they can be close to the media centers and get a little more attention. Also, story ideas tend to come if they're circulating in the office, they're not likely to reach to me. I have to come up with most of my own ideas. I'm always grateful when an editor or a friend proposes something. On the other hand, there's a kind of unanimity of thinking that I'm hostile to. I mean, I find it's very difficult to break through the perceptions that I think is true in Texas as in New York, but being able to straddle both of those cultures gives me a little bit more of a circumspect idea about how we should conduct our politics and how to value other people. Before I come to COVID, I want to just ask you about a couple of those ideas that you've written about over the course of your career. As I mentioned, you won the Pulitzer for your brilliant book, The Looming Tower, Al Qaeda and The Road to 9-11. What did writing that book tell you about how easy or difficult it is for a few people to change the course of history? It was very upsetting to realize how an individual or a small group empowered by modern media and modern technology can actually change the course of history. I mean, when Al Qaeda, on 9-11, Al Qaeda was about 300 people. It was a very small organization centered in Afghanistan, as remote as you can imagine, and that they used the tools of modern technology, airplanes, and turned it against society. I feel as a person who's spent a lot of time writing about terrorism that, you know, this template that Al Qaeda has created is something that's not going to go away anytime soon. And technology has only gotten more powerful and more available, I think in particular of things like drones and CRISPR, you know, biological editing of the genome. And one time I was talking to, when I was writing about the intelligence community, I've got to meet the American equivalent of Q, the guy in bond, you know, makes all the cool weapons, and I did not get to see the cool weapons. But I asked him what he worried about most in the future, and he said that high school kids who are now making up computer viruses will soon be able to manufacture actual real biological viruses. And I, you know, given our experience with COVID, it's a chilling thought. Alright, in 2013 you wrote a remarkable book on the Church of Scientology called Going Clear. I wanted to ask you, in recent years with the rise of QAnon, anti-vaxxers, even the personality cult around former President Trump, have you found yourself going back in your mind to some of your reporting on Scientology's cult of personality? Is there a common thread there? Yeah, there is. I mean, I'm fascinated. I think there's always going to be a contingent of the population that is susceptible to being in a cult, whether you call the, you know, the Trump followers a cult or, you know, other religions like Mormonism were considered cults when they started and then they became established and got to be respectable. I don't know if that's ever going to happen to Scientology. But you know what is interesting to me, I think, I've thought a lot about this, Michael, you know, why people go into these stigmatized religions or political movements. And you know, I would ask people about their beliefs and they would say, well, we believe this or we believe that and I kept thinking about what they believed. And finally, I focused on the we part of it. Once you start thinking about, you know, we are a community of belief. There is, I think, a longing for community and all through history, but especially now. And some of these communities, like Scientology, like Mormonism, I don't really mean to equate the two of them, but there are, there's a set of beliefs that you have to and once you do, when you climb over this wall of disbelief, you enter a community that says that is there to protect you and empower you. And that's very powerful. So I think they're all, I think this also true of, you know, people in QAnon, they find a sense of community based on some really wacky ideas. Larry, as you know, I love your book 13 days in September in which you describe the 1978 Camp David negotiations between US President Jimmy Carter, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. All of these topics, Scientology and Al Qaeda, Middle East peace, they're wonderful topics, but they're very different from each other. How do you decide what you're going to write on? Well, you know, Michael the hardest problem for any writer I think is deciding what to write. I mean the world is full of possibilities and you know what is it that you're willing to surrender months or years of your life to. I made a resolution years ago that I would would only do things that were important or fun. I wanted to have a consequential career, but I didn't want to miss out on the fun. So if you could that's one way of understanding the, you know, like I'm writing a musical podcast now so I about Texas politics so it's far far from Camp David. But I find that, you know, I'm in that spot right now where I'm looking for a new project. And it's always for me, really a difficult time. It's like losing your job. And, you know, now what job do I want. It has to be something that awakens my curiosity. Usually there's a question out there. As with Scientology, you know, why would people believe that, especially, you know, why do people with significant careers, lend their their identities to such a stigmatized religion. That's an interesting question to me. And I thought it was worth exploring. You know, the camp David, you know, Middle East peace has always been this mirage on the horizon never, you know, always approached and never actually reached. And yet, in one instance, Jimmy Carter, you know, failed one term president. Menachem Begin, former terrorist and and more so that a former assassin closed the gates for 13 days on the rest of the world and came away with the first and longest lasting agreement for peace. There's never been violated a single bit since 1979 when it was signed. So those questions, you know, how did that happen? How did those men achieve peace when so few others have been able to do it? That question was very interesting to me. All right, so in late 2019, you submitted a book to your publishers called the end of October, and it was a novel about a deadly pandemic that spreads around the world. So my first question is, how did you know Larry? I did not know. And I want to put the rest the idea that I'm a prophet or anything like that as it been said, I, here's how I went about this. I had the idea that if civilization is, you know, if we think of civilization being in danger. And I do believe civilization is constantly in peril. But what, what could cause it to come to an end? And nuclear war would do the trick, but it would be hard to find a hero in such a conflict. I had written as a young reporter some stories out of the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. And back then I just was so impressed by that organization and the people who work for it's been heartbreaking to see what's happened to it in this particular challenge. But so I decided I would write a cautionary tale. And it, I thought about the 1918 influenza epidemic, which killed between 50 and 100 million people. And then was probably forgotten, you know, buried in the tomb of her human history. And if it came back, it was just a question, you know, how, how would we behave? And I was I researched it as I would a New Yorker story or a nonfiction book, and I asked my sources. Would we be any better prepared than our ancestors? And the answer was, without a cure or treatment or a vaccine would be in exactly the same spot only with modern travel and so on, it would spread so much faster. And it would be perhaps even more dangerous. And so that, that set me into really, you know, reading all the studies about viruses and talking to more experts and anxiety is what I picked up on and I transferred it into fiction. That's where the prophecy comes from. It wasn't from me. It was from talking to public health experts and and and reading tabletop exercises and things like that. And, you know, they all knew something was going to happen. And so that gave me a certain amount of courage to go ahead and forecast it. And so you published this novel. It came out in the middle of the pandemic and you've now published the plague year, a detailed account of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, which, which grew out of that terrific long article in the New Yorker. So let's begin with the origins of the virus, if I can. There are two leading theories on this matter. First of all, that it was spread by animal to human contact, or second that it was leaked out of a lab in Wuhan. Larry, which theory do you think is more plausible? Well, they're both plausible. They wouldn't be such a contest between them if one was so much more plausible than the other. And advocates for both, you know, either side say, you know, that the other side has it wrong. There's not any evidence for either. You know, the, the, the, the idea that it arose from nature is based upon that's what happened with SARS in 2002 and three that epidemic came from bats probably went into a civet cat and they became an intermediate animal and then that animal went to one of the wet markets in Dongdong and that's where the virus arose. So, initially, the Chinese authorities thought there was a wet market in Wuhan. And I bet the same thing happened. You know, bats infected maybe a pangolin or some other exotic animal sold in the market. And, and maybe somebody who worked at the market got infected and spread it that way. It was entirely plausible. But then it turned out there, you know, there weren't any animals in the market that were infected with, with COVID. There was a COV to which is the virus that causes COVID 19. And the no animal has been found to have it in nature. So, it's a plausible theory, but it just hasn't any proof behind it. And then same thing with the, you know, the lab leak theory. The lab leak, I think that people should understand that lab leaks are not uncommon. You know, just think, well, if smallpox is leaked out of labs in the UK on three occasions people died because of it. Ebola has leaked, anthrax leaked out of CDC and defense departments mistakenly sent live anthrax to about 18 labs, thinking it had been inactivated. Marburg and other diseases have leaked out of labs. I read recently that between about a five year span in the 2000s, more than 800 people in American labs have been treated for infections incurred in the labs. They may not have gone out of the lab with the infection, but they probably did. And so, you know, this is that's a lot of leakage. So it's plausible. The other thing that is in support of the lab leak theory is that with SARS one. It took a while for that disease to adapt to the human host. There were several instances where people got SARS and it didn't travel very far than you see the genetic evolution of that disease as it becomes increasingly human. With COVID-19. It just jumped into the human population almost perfectly and became one of the most contagious viruses. Instantly, that is odd. And that's what makes people think that maybe it was manipulated in the lab, and the lab. She's Zing Lee, the, the woman who is done so much. Her work with corona viruses stands above so many other researchers in her knowledge, but she was doing what are called gain of function experiments where you, you, she called them infectivity experiments, what you see where you see what would take to make a virus more contagious. Those things are suspicious, incriminating, but they're not proof. Neither, neither of these theories has any proof behind it. One of the other factors that proponents of the lab leak theory say makes them suspicious is the vehemence with which China has jumped on any suggestions that it may be true. It's reluctance to allow access to investigators from the WHO and elsewhere. The sanctions indeed that it's applied to countries like Australia who've called for an investigation into the origins of the virus. Let me ask you, how much would it change China's culpability if it turned out that this was an act in a way of human negligence rather than an act of nature? How much would it change things? Well, accidents happen, as I was saying, so you know had in Chinese behavior is the probably the most incriminating piece of evidence in the lab leak theory. Had they been open, had they been transparent? Had they conducted early investigations themselves and for instance taken antibody tests of the researchers in the Wuhan Institute of Virology to see if they had been infected? Had they done any of those things? I think the world would be understanding that, you know, once again, a virus has leaped out of a lab as SARS did on three occasions previously. But it's the cover up. If this is a, if this is something that happened in a lab and if the Chinese authorities have done everything they can to cover it up, that's a crime of historic scale. And so no wonder at this point, you know, in our relationship with this disease, it's unlikely I think that the Chinese are going to come forward and say, you know, sober reflection we've discovered in the lab books that there was, you know, infection in the inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology and we should have admitted it earlier. I think the only way we'll ever find out where this virus comes from is if we find it in nature and then the Chinese can say, aha, we told you so. I noticed that President Biden's National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, who's a friend of the Lowy Institute, told Fox News this week that China will risk international isolation if it doesn't allow real investigation into the origins of the virus. And he said there needs to be accountability for the virus. What did you think of that? Well, I think it's a bold statement, but I, you know, I don't think the world is going to turn us back on China. You know, it's, I would like to have accountability. You know, I think that it's likely that the Chinese will once again give the appearance of cooperation and eventually this will die down, but you know the truth is you've got, you know, millions of people dead. And, you know, if it's if it's something that came out and we're probably going to be living with this virus forever. So we have to, it's very important to understand how this came about. You know, dangerous diseases come out of nature all the time. You know, we've had Ebola and Zika and West Nile and SARS and NEPA, you know, just since the turn of the century. So there is a cascade of novel diseases pouring into the human population and we have to be aware of that. But I think it's also something to consider that having these labs experimenting on dangerous viruses inside that huge cities like Wuhan, 11 million people. And there are two virology labs right in the middle of Wuhan, where either one of them could have been the source of this. That's a really dangerous model. Larry, in the aftermath of 9-11, the veracity of U.S. intelligence assessments of Saddam Hussein's WMD capacity became a global story. Now President Biden has requested a U.S. intelligence assessment into the origins of the pandemic. Do you think the U.S. intelligence community can find an answer to this problem? And if they do, do you think they'll be believed? I don't think so. I mean, for one thing, several years ago all of our best sources in China were rounded up. And I don't know what became of them, but you know, essentially the CIA became blinded into what was going on in China. And CIA, the FBI, all of our intelligence agencies, we have 17 of them. They missed 9-11. They misunderstood what was going on in Iraq. And only lately, you know, we have the coronavirus, which I don't think that they took seriously enough as a national security threat. And then, of course, they missed the January 6 insurrection. So the record of the American intelligence community lately has been really dismal. And it's sickening as an American to see how much peril that has placed our nation. Let me come to America, but let me ask you one more question on China. When you were writing this book, were you impressed or unimpressed by China's management of the pandemic once they realized what was happening? And you note in your book that 650 million Chinese people were quarantined, which is nearly half the population. And you write something to the effect that the virus was smothered, but so was dissent. How do you feel about the way China dealt with the pandemic? Well, you know, it's an autocratic society, and it has levers to pull that democratic societies can't. So they certainly shut down their society, and they did an effective job of blocking the transmission of the virus. But so did Taiwan. You know, there's a democratic society very similar in culture, but Taiwan did an exemplary job of containing the virus. So I don't think that it's a victory of tyranny over democracy. The democratic societies can do well if they have engendered the civic spirit that you see in Taiwan, but not so much in the US. So let's come to the US, which did not have an exemplary response to COVID. And your book is really a sad tale of how the richest, most powerful country in the world fumbled this problem. And in your book, you describe President Trump as a saboteur of efforts to fight the pandemic. Of course, we recall American states were left to fight amongst themselves and with the federal government for PPE and other supplies. On the issue of mask hesitancy, you point out that President Trump actually visited a mask factory without wearing a mask. So at the end of writing this book, how much responsibility for America's poor COVID response do you sheet back to Donald Trump? Well, you know, every country was bound to suffer, Michael. You know, it was a novel disease with no cure and no vaccine. And I think that we were bound in the US to lose tens of thousands of people, but maybe not hundreds of thousands. And I think the Trump administration did something very important that I credit them with, which was Operation Warp Speed, which was essentially the decision to reimburse pharmaceutical companies for any expenses they might incur in the development of a vaccine, even if that vaccine is a failure never is used. You know, unprecedented. It was in it. You know, it really jumpstarted the production. They were talking at the beginning of this pandemic in the US of getting a vaccine in the fall of this year. Well, imagine what we would be like, you know, if we didn't have vaccines still, it might be like the condition of India, you know, it's certainly conceivable. That's an alternative experiment, you know, what would we be like, but the Trump administration does deserve some credit in that regard. On the other hand, when, you know, there was a federal plan, there was one that the Obama administration passed off to the Trump administration. It was a playbook to be pulled off the shelf when anything like this happened. Who do you call in this case and who do you call in this case it's voluminous and it's a paint by numbers easy to follow playbook about how to handle a pandemic. The Trump administration threw it away, and they had their own tabletop exercise. So, it was called crimson contagion. And this was the scenario. And it returns from China to Chicago, and he's got a dry cough. The next day his son goes to a rock concert. Six months later, 586,000 Americans are dead. We just are, it's almost exactly the number of Americans who've died to this point we just crossed over 600,000. So what did the tabletop exercise show the Trump administration's own exercise. The agencies were at war with each other they didn't know who was in charge the states were looking for guidance they had no experience with any of this supply lines were clogged up the, the storehouse of emergency medical equipment was sadly depleted. Employers were going to have a really difficult time trying to keep in business with their business either their employees at home. Public health institutions had been depleted by years of budget cuts and hollowed out by 60,000 lost jobs in the last decade. One thing after another, it demonstrated that we were not ready for this. And these are the things that are going to happen. So that was the exercise and every single thing that the Trump administration envisioned for itself came true. So they drew no lessons from their own experiment and in that sense. It's impossible to tote up the whole body count, but it's massive Michael, you know, leadership makes a difference. And just, it's an interesting experiment within the United States to see since each state became it became an epidemic for each state. And there were successes and failures within the United States and it's not just a red blue divide. For instance, Vermont and South Dakota are both, you know, they have Republican governors, they're small states, they have very low unemployment. And in Vermont, the governor made sure to lock down and mask up when it was appropriate. And in South Dakota, the Republican governor just let it roll. And they had very similar outcomes in terms of unemployment, but there were 12 times as many fatalities in South Dakota. One of my favorite examples is West Virginia. West Virginia is the governor is a six foot seven billionaire coal baron. He's not a Republican, but he's not your immediate image of you know this open hearted liberal, and he's not. But when this, this outbreak took place in West Virginia, he leveled with his constituents, he said, we are the oldest state in the Union, and we're the sickest. This is going to kill us. We have to be you take care of each other. He got all the people in nursing homes tested as soon as he possibly could. And, you know, develop coding for schools and so on. This is a state with very few resources of its own. But the thing I think that made the difference. He said, West Virginia is a love thy neighbor state. And at night he would read out the names of the people who died and talk a little bit about them. It was not his politics but his compassion and his competence that made the difference in West Virginia. It wasn't as if it was at the top of the list, but it's in the middle and it was supposed to be at the bottom. Well, one of the key characters in your book and indeed I think one of the heroes of the plague years is Matt Pottinger, who was President Trump's Deputy National Security Advisor. And as it happens, Matt Pottinger is my next guest on my own podcast, the director's chair. What was it that was so compelling about Matt Pottinger's role in the US response to COVID? Why do you spend so long talking about his experiences in the book? You know, Michael, I was so lucky in terms of some of the people I was able to talk to. And Matt, I had no idea really about him, but I saw his name somewhere and I thought Pottinger, I had met his father, and his father was a friend of a friend. And so I went through with a friend of a friend and asked, would Matt talk to me? And I didn't realize at the time that he spoke fluent Mandarin, that he had been a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in China during the SARS epidemic. That his wife was an epidemiologist at CDC and his brother was a virologist at the University of Washington where the first case was detected in the US. He was like a one stop shop for me. And then on top of that, he was the having been a reporter. And this really, I cherish this because instead of relying on the intelligence community, he picked up the phone, he began calling sources in China and asking them, what were they seeing? And you know, how were they handling it and what worked? And it was, you know, he's the one that got Trump to bar flights from China and then later from Europe. And he has also became the advocate for wearing masks. It was a solo mission on his part. And this, you know, we owe him a lot, but what's striking is how singular his effort was. He was pretty much working alone. I have a question, Larry, from an audience member Eugene Tan who asks, how has the pandemic changed how people look at governments and science? I think that's a really interesting question is going to be the answer will be unfolding. I have to say, you know, we, we don't know how what kind of societies we're going to be we're in the process of remaking them. But in the United States, government has been disparaged really since the Reagan administration where, you know, the Reagan had said famously that government is not the solution is the problem. And that was an axiom in the in Democrat in Republican politics all along to the point that government was so enfeebled by the time that the coronavirus came along that it was scarcely able to act. This new administration is showing that sometimes you have to have government that you can't do things at scale without a powerful government action. And I don't know, it's going to be easy. It's going to be interesting to see if this contrast in using the powers of government versus at advocating the responsibilities is going to make a difference in people's opinion towards government as for science. Yeah, I think people in the United States. Many of them I think most of them now recognize that we owe our we've we talk about freedom a lot, but there's nothing like being free and fully vaccinated. It makes a huge difference. And, and science gave us that we would be in a entirely different spot right now if we didn't have the vaccines. Let me ask you about Australia, if I can Australia's had a good pandemic, as you note in your book actually part of the reason for that was that Australia along with a few other countries acted very quickly last year. We closed the borders. We pulled up the drawbridge. We introduced mandatory hotel quarantine for returning Australians. And I think last year, everyone in Australia was very happy that we were here. But this year, the calculus is changing a little bit. We're seeing the United States and Europe opening up. We're seeing excellent vaccine rollouts in your country. And we're seeing normal life starting to resume in the United States and Europe. In Australia, we're fine. We're very healthy, but it's very hard to leave the country. It's hard to return. And we're seeing a lot of vaccine hesitancy, which is very unusual for Australia, which means that the only response when we have cases of COVID as we do in Sydney this week, actually, is to lock down, which interrupt or to reintroduce regulations, which reinterrupts everybody's lives. I must say, although I'm pleased and proud with how Australia has managed the pandemic, I am concerned about the long-term effects of this sort of Fortress Australia policy, what it means for our international engagement, its effect on immigrants to Australia, on Australian expats. What would your advice to Australia be about how we break out of this gilded cage that we've locked ourselves in? There's only one door out of that room, Michael, and that's vaccination. You know, it's incredibly important. And also, you should take note of what's happened to other societies that were doing well, but have now begun to run into real problems because they don't have the vaccines or because they haven't administered them. You know, there were a lot of countries that seem to do very well in 2020. But, you know, the restraint has, you know, defrayed over time. But the other thing that these variants are, especially the Delta variants, it's 60% more contagious than the original one. That was a very contagious virus that came out of Wuhan. And this one is 60% more contagious and deadlier. Moreover, new variants are constantly being created. So, so far, at least the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been invulnerable against these variants. Some of the other vaccines are less effective, but still worth using. So, you know, if you want to escape the box that you're in, I can't see any other alternative. How is the different states in the United States encourage people to take their vaccines? Well, this is a good example of what a diverse country we're in. Some of them, like in Massachusetts, they're, you know, scholarships and a lot of states are offering, you know, money. Some are offering million dollars and some, you know, far, far less than that. In Washington state, they're offering marijuana. And in West Virginia, the place that I am so fond of, Governor Jim Justice is promising pickup trucks and guns in the lottery. And so I think he knows his constituency. In Ohio, they had a million dollar, you know, cash winner recently and it's not been transformative, I have to say. There have been bumps in vaccination rates, but the president wants to get to 70% vaccination this summer, especially July 4 would be a target date. And honestly, we're not going to make it, I don't think unless something transformative happens. What are they offering in Texas if you get vaccinated as a matter of interest? Well, a good luck in a wave. The idea that they would offer anything to people get vaccinated is there are some cities that are trying to do something, but the state is not going to show that kind of level of compassion. I mean, we're almost out of time, but let me ask you, you called your book the plague year, but as you mentioned, the virus is going to be around with us for a long time. We're seeing all these variants pop up from time to time. So how long do you think the COVID-19 will be with humanity? Well, it's a coronavirus and the common cold is caused by many different kinds of viruses, but four of them are coronaviruses. And it's thought that in history, you know, those viruses that now only cause colds may have been as severe as COVID-19. But you know that this virus is so complicated. It has so many different manifestations and different people. It can have no symptoms. It can have symptoms that last for months or even more than a year already. It has, you know, it can be devastating or it can be negligible. And the other thing about it is constantly changing. So, you know, I'm glad that we have this period of immunity because of the vaccines. Honestly, that may change. So if you want to have freedom to move about and enjoy yourself, it might not last, but you've got the opportunity to do it now. Even if it's not a coronavirus, a new virus will come along. And, you know, if we haven't been schooled by the experience of COVID-19, then I'm afraid that we're going to be in for a worse virus one day down the road. Finally, I want to come back to your country, the United States and COVID, Larry. Many America files like me were frankly shocked by America's COVID performance last year and the generally shambolic nature of the way the Trump administration responded. You have a much more professional team in the White House. The United States is roaring back in many ways. Overall, at the end of the plague year, has your faith in America really been shaken or are you optimistic about America's resilience? What have you learned about your country from the plague year? I think, Michael, that we're in a tipping point one way or the other. And, you know, the civil disorder that we've been experiencing in this past year, it's been a kind of climactic experience. It's not clear yet which way the country is going to turn. I'm hopeful that, you know, having been through the pandemic and been through the incompetence of the previous administration and dealing with it, that, you know, the majority of Americans will come to their senses and also try to reach some kind of a chord with each other. This reminds me of, you know, the late 60s when, you know, America was just ripping itself apart. We're in danger of becoming something like that. But the other thing that gives me a little bit of hope is that I think of pandemics as being like X-rays so that you can see into your society at the broken places. And the picture in America is pretty shocking. There's a lot of broken bones in our society, but we now have a chance to mend them. And in previous pandemics, there have been excellent examples of how societies reform themselves. And a good example is the Black Death, the plague in Italy in the 14th century, is the Middle Ages. I think the Italians at the time realized what they were doing wasn't working. I mean, a lot of their medicine was based on horoscopes and so on. And so it allowed fresh thinking. And that fresh thinking is what opened the door to the Renaissance. We may not have a Renaissance, but I think societies are changing and we have an opportunity, I think COVID in some ways has given us an opportunity to change our societies and make them stronger, more resilient and more compassionate. Well, thank you, Larry Wright, for joining me today and for finishing on that note. I've really enjoyed our conversation. The plague year has just been published. I recommend it to everyone who's watching. I'm also intrigued to hear about your new musical podcast on Texas politics, Larry. So I personally will be watching out for that. Speaking of podcasts, as I mentioned, the next guest on my own fortnightly podcast, the director's chair is Matt Pottinger, one of the stars of Larry's book. So if you want to hear more about Matt and how he fought a one-man war against COVID from the heart of the Trump administration, please tune in to the director's chair next week. In the meantime, thank you again, Larry Wright, for joining me from Austin, Texas. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for joining me today for another Lowy Institute live event.