Theres a group of people called the aymara who have lived for time immemorial in what is now peru in theandes. And they are, its a tough life wherethey live and the part of the reason is that not a lot grows their. One of the things that does grow there is potatoes. But these are notyour Grocery Store potatoes. These are small, wild andtoxic potatoes. Toxic in the sense that not theyre going to kill you but they will make you vomit, give you diarrhea. Basically make you never want to eat another potato as long as you live. And you cant just boil them. That will destroy the toxins. And they are not environmental contaminants. The toxins are made by the potatoes themselves. Why would a potato or any other plant make a poison . Basically to protect itself. The potato is the plants Energy Storage thing. And it doesnt want humans or any other animals digging up its Energy Stores and eating them makes them toxic to protect itself they are the potato plants batteries. They are stealing the potato plants batteries and just like you dont want to eat a duracell. We have to do something to those toxic batteries before we eat and so the aymara came up with this incredibly ingenious way to both freezedried and detoxify the potatoes at the same time. So what they ended up with was perfectly safe to eat, detoxified potatoes that could fit in storage for up to 20 years. And they didnt taste good, but it doesnt really matter what it tastes like as long as you know youve got food for the winter. So the length to which ancient societies would go, and they are not unique. Theres all kinds of other societies inventing their own ingenious Processing Techniques. The length to which we would go to do that is cool to me. So processing, not new and not clearly defined. Can i ask a question . Since she is in honor of this ,. For those theflaming hot cheetos . The most important question, crunchy or classic crust . Its a tossup between flaming hot and classic. The pumps for me dont rate. I think if im feeling spicy its flaming hot all the way and today im feeling a bit spicy. This is my question. So this does not resemble anything that comes out of the ground or off a tree. But its delicious. Explain to me how do they change. Is it all just created inthe laboratory . What do they do . Tos are a great example of modernday ingenuity. What they do is basically you start with most of the chitos cornmeal. Which is corn. And corn mill if youveever had it by itself is really bland. And it doesnt resemble, its not crunchy. It doesnt resemble a cheeto at all and what they will do is they will take the cornmeal and combine it with flavorings which, and i emailed cheetos and said can you please tell me what your flavoringingredients are and they wrote me back with a very polite no. But they mix the flavorings andthe cornmeal and they will pass it through whats called an extruder. If you picture a wine corkscrew and then you picture all the negative space around a wine corkscrew , if that were also solid. So you would have a cylinder with a corkscrew shape worn out and an actualcorkscrew. They basically have a long tube thats like that and they feed the cornmeal into this thing which spins continuously. And the cornmeal makes its way through the corkscrew all the way to the end and as you can imagine, its winding its way between the corkscrew and the other part, the negative part of the corkscrew and during this part is creating, theres a lot of friction and a lot of heat because its spinning really fast. What that does is it boils the residual water in the cheeto slurry. And the water doesnt have a ton of places to go because youre in an constrained environment because it pops up the cornmeal and by the time it comes out the other end of the extruderyouve got these very puppy , crispy, sort of ask half crispy snacks and thenthey deepfried them. So everything is better deepfried. Even extruded cornmeal snacks and theextruder is used in all kinds of other stuff. Its like a passing Food Processing technique that is fairly recent. This is not something the aymara were doing in peru 2000 years ago. So this is highly processed. You would call this highly processed. Theres no question about that, just because were using upand doing the corkscrew type of thing. And you include it in your book. I did not try it but you included a recipe for homemade diy chitos. I did not invent this recipe. I was chatting with ken all, whos a professor of food history and the day after i chatted with him we were talking about what does it mean for food to be processed and he said i made some cheetos in my kitchen yesterday and i said what do you mean youmade cheetos . He said i basically took some noodles, dehydrated them, spray them with oil and put them in the microwave. And that kind of recreated this basically deep frying and popping up the water in the noodle at the same time and says i sprinkled them with so roger powder and i had homemade cheetos and it was an interesting point because what he was saying was does my doing that still count as making these foods processed . Is the cheeto version thati made at home does that count as processed food or is it only if it comes in a bag and was made in a factory . That was an interesting question. What do yousay, processed yes, sir no . Thats a tough one. My training in a ischemistry background , anyone else would probably say no but to me the cheeto made in a factory and the cheeto you made at home as long as youre using roughly the same ingredients and the same process they are roughly the same in terms of processing. The factory is just a much more gigantic version of your kitchen. Now if the ingredients are really different. If theres things that are added to the cheetos made in a factory that would never use at home we could be talking aboutdifferent levels of processing. Im glad to say that because there are so many chemicals. If i were to do this at home with cornmeal and sriracha sauce, there is sulfate, monosodium glutamate. So this all must be bad for you, right . This is what i think of as processed food. This has none of the ingredients. This is an interesting one. You will get people onboth sides of this debate. Especially folks who are trying to sell you Natural Organic quote unquote healthier foodswill say things like what you just said. Make sure you can pronounce the ingredients. Make sure there arent that many of them on thelabel. If its something your grandmother wouldnt recognize as food to eat. That kind of thing. And i have a little bit of a skeptical view of that kind of thing. One of the things i did in the book is i was like okay, let me just invent processing scale and the way im going to do this is count the number of ingredients in everything and count the number of syllables in every single ingredient and add those twonumbers up. And if you do that for skittles you get like 109 i think or Something Like that. And i thought okay, what if you do that for coffee or an apple or lettuce or anything that you considerto be natural . And i was like well, copy, 2 syllables and i was like well, theres lots of stuff in copy that just doesnt have an ingredientslabel. Theres all kinds of aromatic acids and different compounds so i looked up how many different chemicals are there in a cup of coffee . And it looks like pushing 1000. In copy. Yes. Thats only the ones weve been able to recognize and isolate and determine what they are. If you think about it coffee is a living thing. Its a cell. It has dna, it has proteins, it has a cell wall and all kinds of stuff that is chemically very complex and then you start roasting it and pouring oiland water on it , youregoing to add a whole layer of chemical complexity. If i did my made up processed food scale on coffee you might get a number like 5000 if you add up all the syllables of everything in their. So thats when i kind of came down onthe side of look , yes it can be intimidating to read these ingredients labels. Yes it does seem overwhelming but if i think about the true ingredients of what are in all the stuff thats considered natural, that would be off thecharts. So thats when i was like okay, im not going to view it as this framework of if i cant pronounce it then it must be bad for you. There must be Something Else that will tell you about the health of these things. If theyre not chemicals, youre saying number of chemicals or readability of the ingredients list does not necessarily correlate with being bad for us or being unhealthy. Or the source of mechanical or artificial things that were doing to it because the peruvians that are doing the fancy potato thing, is that much different then shooting a bunch of cornmeal through thecorkscrew. So how do you figure out, what do you do then . Does that mean i can eat cheetos all day long . Ive certainly increased my cheeto and all processed Food Consumption since doing thebook. Thats a good question. Figuring out is something, how healthy or unhealthy is something for you is a hard thing to do and i think most people, certainly i when i first started this not realize how difficult it is to dothis. If you really want to get accurate picture of how good or bad something is for you, ideally in an ideal world you would take a large group of people. You would split them upinto two groups. You would banish each groupto their own desert island. You would feed one group this thing that you think is good or bad and you would make sure that the other group doesnt have any of that same thing. And then you would follow them for like 30 years to see does one group have more Heart Disease, cancer, diabetes, etc. No big deal. Obviously that is not doable. Thats not something were going to spend taxpayer dollars on and itshighly unethical. So you have to resort to other measures that are debatable. And these other measures basically are okay, if you cant banish people to desert islands and force them to eat a specific diet, if youre only allowed to just track what people are eating normally and then correlate or associate the longterm consumption of a particular food with a bad health outcome, then you start getting into what i learned were your waters in terms of being able to pin a bad Health Effect or good Health Effect on a particular food. And theres the last third of the book is really where i delveddeeply into that. More deeply than i ever thought i was going to. But yes, bottom line is it can be tricky and it makes me. Whenever you read a headline on the news about eggs linked to 27 percent increase in Heart Disease risk i read those headlines and i go well, maybe but also maybe not. Im going to follow up with a few questions but getting back to the book, one thing that struck me is how funny it was. And it was. I did not expect to be laughing out loud when youre teaching me chemistry and reading chemistry in college that was not my thing and yet here i was laughing about it. So im curious, did you have to work hard to make all of this chemistry and all this scientific stuff funny or did you haveto work hard . You know its funny, someone once told me if you stop trying to be funny you will be a lot funnier. Which was a funny thing to say ironically. But yes, some of the stuff , some of the stuff in the book just is objectively funny and doesnt need my help. One of the Processing Techniques was used in olden days and might still be used today is theres a native american group, peoples in what is now Northern California who are ingeniously would make candy out of the. [bleep] of an insect called in a bid. And aphids are these days agricultural pests. Little guys, super small. You would hardly noticethem if you werent looking for them. You can gather their. [bleep] you can gather their poop, not fresh. It has to dry on the plants first but once it does dry and by the way, what theyre eating is plant sent and plant sap is very sweet so what theyre pooping is also very sweet. So you can gather their. [bleep] and make it into candy. That kind of thing is both ingenious and also funny and it doesnt need my help to make it any funnier. But there were some parts where ive thrown in a joke and then id have my partner julia read and then if she liked half chuckled id be like okay thats good. And if she rolled her eyes i would say im putting this joke. The julia and ex. Did your editor ever come back and say george, no. Yes actually. The book had a lot of your letter words it when my first draft and he cut 99percent of those. Four letter words can be funny, that was in the book of humor. Sometimes humor and also sometimes just to be oh my god, this is incredible. Sometimes in the serviceof that. You also illustrated your own book. And i have to say, that was kind of brave. I dont think youre going to quit your day job and become an illustrator. Did you consider farming it out . What was the thought process there . I did consider farming it out. So actually the show on the National Geographic that was illustrated by someone whos super talented and my first thought was im just going to have brett do the illustrations for the book and every time you do an illustration you have to that it for accuracy and make sure that its right and it fits well with the narrative. And i think there were Something Like 50 or so odd illustrations in the book that was going to be a lot. And i would sketch out versions of them just so i could see them in the flow of the manuscript and i am a terrible artist. But it ended up just working because the style of the book is very informal and the style of theillustrations are also very informal. Im not getting paid any money from apple for saying this but i actually did most of the illustrations in keynotewhich is their powerpoint alternative. Very nice, okay. It did have a bit of a homegrown look to it. Thats a kind way of saying they were terrible. Mabel was my favorite. Mabel was i think the little insect that we were talking about. I love that you gave her a name as well. What was your book writing process then . Kind of regimented sitdown, eight hours a day, words come pouring forth . I sat down on a monday and then wrote continuously until that friday. My editor didnt change a single word. Everything was pure gold start to finish. No, i think theres not one single thing in the book that survived from my first draft. In terms of the process, it really was quite regimented and i think stephen king has good advice on this. He says i sit down at my computer and i dont stop until i have whatever my goal is for the day and your goal can start low and progress as you become more practiced. And it doesnt matter how good or bad the words are, youre going to have days where everything you write is terrible and youre going to have days where you overshoot your goal and its pretty good. I think the key is consistency. So i would get up at 5 30 or six and write for a couple of hours before going to my day job and i would write for a couple of hours in the evening and then weekends, i would write eight hours a day both days on the weekends and that got to be as you can imagine kind of crazy. So. That explains a lot about the style of the book. Feverish, exactly as i was working on deadline and trying to get it out on time. And then my employer finally was like you can take some time off and focus on this if you want and your job will still be here when you get back which was very generous so i did take a sixmonth sabbatical to finish up the book. And during that period it really was like a 10 hour day but only monday through friday. Its important to give yourself that time off and stop, recharge, do other things, relax so that was helpful. Soundtrack . Did youlisten to music . Actually, Porter Robinson as some great writing out. Its very electronic dance type style. And also ran attack as some great writing music. Its not something now i listen to it and i associated with work so i dont ever listen to it when im not writing or working in some way but basically things without lyrics or with subtle lyrics. Do you have a playlist . I can make it public. Thats a good idea. Put it in the comments on this because that sounds fascinating. When you read it now areyou excited about it . I have two reactions. One is like i cannot believe that i actually wrote a book. Thats my main reaction. And by the way, i should shout out i interviewed a lot of people for this book. You being one of them. And i there are probably areas in their that we try to make things as factually accurate as possible but there would be 100 times as many errors without the 80 or so people who i interviewed and sent excerpts of the book to read and made sure that thescience did actually represent well. So that was a huge, huge help so officiallyregina thank you. But now i completely forgot your question. When you read it you laugh now and mark. Im one of those people who read it and i like oh, i should have written this differently i should have changed this sentence. And it was my editor who said he actually sat me down not physically over email he said george, i know when writers are tweaking things to the point of like past, hes basically like youre ready to give birth to yourbook now. Its been theright amount of time. I think its ready. Stop tweaking it. Just its time. And i think thats a really important thing because you could be writing the same book your entire life and tweaking it until it was perfect, every single word was right but at some point you have to put it out into the world and see what happens. How many scientists, 80 . Thats a lot of people. I was impressed how well you got the statistics part right which is what you and i talked about so there was a lot of attention to detail and that terrifying to put a book about science out there what if there are errors . This is something i thought a lot about. Theres two types of error. Theres a one plus one equals three error and theres a one plus one equals tomatoes ever. One plus one equals three is your gardenvariety typo. You Say Something is six millimeters when you mean its six nanometers. Is that wrong . Yes. Is it a huge deal in the history of science and mark know. Then there are other errors where if you make them, you could risk having someone the wrong impression about something in a way that would make themchange their behavior. There i think thats a much more seriouserror. So for example if you only focus on one perspective and dont take a moment to think wait a second, what if this could be wrong. Let me talk to some people on the other side of the fence and think what they think. If you dont do that i think you risk your book being very onesided and like painting too rosy a picture or two negative of a picture. And there you could, there i think its much more dangerous, even though those arent really, theyre not so much errors in a clear unequivocal thisis wrong type way. But yes, i was careful to try and not just go with the first thing i heard but always investigate the other side. You and i talked about statistics which is a little uncontroversial but i got the feeling from the book 80 scientists that there were a couple of different camps. Some people with strong opinions and okay, tell me about that,what was that like . So this gets back to the how you figure out if something is good or bad for you question. There is a group of people which ill call the traditionalists who have been practicing something called nutritional epidemiology for roughly five decades or so. And basically what they do is they mail surveys out to a group of people and ask them what did you eat this year and they take those answers and correlate consumption of specific foods with usually negative Health Outcomes and that generates headlines like eggs are linked to 27 percent increase in Heart Disease risk. Thats one. The other the other camp are the skeptics or methodologist and those and those people have a fundamental issue with the like underlying science of the traditionalists camp. And if you, when i was going intothis i had no idea there were two camps. I would just like started down the road and then i think i discovered this by reading a rebuttal in a scientific journal that someone else had written and i was like oh my god, theres actually a debatehere. So it was interesting and the different camps may not talk to you in the same, the traditionalists dont really have a vested interest in talking to journalists. The methodologist have a much more, they want to say listen to me. I think all that stuff over there is wrong so they have a vested interest so you have to, i had to work hard at getting an interview withsome folks in thetraditionalists camp. But it was , these were fundamental disagreements that i think were also emotional and not just oh, we disagree on the science but when the day is done were going to both go have a beer at a bar. People got really vehement in their disagreement and some people called each other names which i cant repeat here. I mean, i could repeat some of them. But like steaming dog turd was used. Outrageous buffoon wasused. Like take off my white glove and smack you in the face level of insults were hurled back and forth. So people are getting this emotional about basically junk food, how bad is it for you or apples or potatoes or coffee or all of that. Okay. That makes the whole thing a lot more interesting knowing that theres this big lord behind whats going on. The nutritional epidemiology war, at least i called it that. No onesdying. How did this change your view about science and so i think about science a lot lately because weve been in week seven of the lockdown here from the pandemic. So you finish the book for the pandemic it i was struck in reading it how many eerie parallels there were area and and i think you said something once about finding uncertainty, actually comforting. So i can use a little comfort with uncertainty right now. So do you feel like what you learned from researching and writing this book and going through all this changed how you approach the pandemic . Totally. So i as you mentioned i did, i wrapped up the book months before any of this. And i have actually been adding an appendix for the uk edition about Hand Sanitizer but other than that nothing in the book is directly related to coronavirus or Infectious Diseases or anything like that. But in order to answer the question of how, is processed food bad for you, i had to answer the question of how do we know anything is true in science . And if youre only reading the news, you might think that science doesnt know what the hell its doing because youre reading headlines that change every six months. Its like first coffee isgood for you and then its bad for you and then it doesnt matter one way or the other. And weve been through this with transfats and coffee and eggs. Alcohol, yes. So you might get the impression that cant these scientists figure out whether something is goodor bad . Why is this complicated and what i learned basically was that this process is science doing its job. Youve got people who run experiments, do them slightly differently, disagree, argue with each other in the literature and throughout that process which its not something that takes a few months your and there, this takesyears and sometimes decades. Eventually you reach a consensus view. That happened for example with smoking. We started out in the 1930s and before that basically not knowing that smoking was bad for us and we ended up at mid 1964 with the government saying yes, smoking is definitely badfor you. Three decades, about 30 years. And the research on smoking didnt stop in 1964. It kept going. Now we have a better chemical understanding of what happens when you smoke a cigarette , all that kind of stuff so weve been building evidence for something that is related to Public Health for 100 years. And processed foods, these studies about the Health Effects of processedfoods are relatively new. We certainly have not been doing this for 100 years. Its only natural to expect that at least for now, results are going to be conflicting. Going to have differentways of doing experiments. People will disagree more but eventually hopefully sooner rather than later but you cant rush these things too much. We will come to a consensus about eggs or coffee or whatever it is that we are putting into our bodies on a daily basis. So youre trusting the process of science and youre saying until then im just going to do the best that i can do. How do you make decisions then about how many cheetos to eat in a day . Basically yes. The only other thing that i would caution here is for take into account is some of these foods, this is a personal belief and i dont have any evidence to back this up but really are addictive. Yesterday i ate an illegal amount of peanut m ms. And did i want to eat i dont know, 75 peanut m ms . Number could i stop myself west and mark know. And part of that is stress. Were all in thisglobal pandemic. We are all locked down. Food is i think for everybody or for a lot of people modulating your food intake is a natural response to being in such stressful conditions. Or me if eating more. For other people it might be eating less but part of it is that some of these foodsare engineered to be i think addictive. And so being conscious of that and saying like a bag of cheetos every now and then is not going to kill me but i shouldnt make it a habit to the point where im ordering a pallet of cheetos. Dont knock my have a choice. Are you going to turn your camera sideways and reveal a pallet of chinos . Oh man. One of the things that i liked late in the book was science just a lot of random factoids about plants that are trying to kill you, that was one of my chapters. Microbes are trying to your food. I dont know, its such a, chill out about this. And one of the things that i really liked that helped get me there was putting processed food in the whole Historical Perspective of what weve done and i felt like that helped. Its more mechanics than doing it now but weve been tinkering with food for a long time. But the way you talk about the death tables or life tables iguess is a better way of putting it. Like give me a factoid. I feel like my chance of dying right now if i ate cheetos all the timewould be huge. But you say having the life table is Something Else. So to answer the central question of this book i had to dabble in a lot of fields that i am not an expert in and i relied on you for help with statistics and help from demographers for these type of things so thank you for that. But one of the interesting things was a lot of things you see are such and such food will increase your risk of deathby 14 percent. And a study cannot relatively recently about processed food that said if you increase, sorry. An increase of 10 percent by weight of processed food is correlated with a 14 percent increase in risk of death read at a complicated sentence the parts but if you want to focus on the 14th since risk of death heart, what i wanted to know was what does that mean exactly . What is a 14 percent risk of death was in mark is that mean that i take my lifespan i expect to be about 80 years and i subtract 14 percent of that . That would be a huge impact on my Life Expectancy. And actually this gets backto how many people i interviewed. I think i interviewed Something Like 12 people on this one thing because people kept saying youre wrong, this is wrong and i kept going to an expert who was more deeply ingrained in the subject until i finally got an answer. You did your homework. Was so frustrating, id have scientists tell me the other scientist was wrong and i was like well, what am i supposed to believe . So this 14 percent can be scary and in order to figure out well, it turns out youre not just multiplying your Life Expectancy by a decrease of 14 percent. That is not the right way to do it. What you have to do is look at a table that tells you your risk of dying throughout your life at every given age. And its a fascinating table just in and of itself. I learned for example that your risk of death in any given year only has 10 percent when youturn 87. I thought if i turned 50 my risk of death is going to be 10percent in any given year. But weve made such incredible strides with medicine and hygiene and Public Health over the last 500 years that we really have reduced our risk of death a lot, especially in the early phases of life. Orwell, early mid and the early part of the late phase of life. So the way to take this 14 percent increase in risk of death that associated with processed food and translate into some number we can all understand is how does that impact your Life Expectancy, you have to sprinkle it on a life table and see what happens. And when you do that, it turns out youre looking at a roughly oneyear reduction in Life Expectancy. Which iscounterintuitive. You think working percent, thats a lot but it turns out one year is less. I did talk to a demographer about this and i ran this by her and she said a year for you might seem like not that long because your 34. A year for my 75yearold dad , thats a long time. Especially if youve got grandchildren who want to see them alive over the next year. So it did bring home the point of like, Life Expectancy changes can be different depending on where you are. Im going to argue that some processed food is just so delicious that its a quality of life issue area that maybe i have an extra year and im enjoying that extra year but would i i have enjoyed lots of peanut m ms for the past 70 years . Perhaps im just going to put that out there as a conjecture. I totally agree and quality of life is not something i got into super indepth in the book. But its totally important and i think the quote i heard on that was were here for a good time,not a long time. I came away from it feeling much more like things matter but the little decisions that im making about eating my bag of cheetos i dont feel a huge amount of guilt about that now so as long as im balancing out and doing other healthythings , okay. How can this not be, look at it. Its florescent. So i appreciate that. I feel like coming out of the book are we reassured . When you meant uncertainty is reassuring, youre right. I dont have the answers but its okay. Enjoy yourself. Exactly. Is that what you were saying . Yes and also knowing that temporary uncertainty is an early part of the scientific process as well. Maybe this stuff will not get figured out in my lifetime, maybe it will. Who knows but at least i know that its not just that scientists are abumbling bunch of bozos who cant get it right. No, this is supposed to happen. Theres supposed to be disagreement, theres supposed to be debates on these things. Theres supposed to be this back and forth, all of that i found. This is a more grownup book than books that claim to have all theanswers. Just live forever, youre going to be healthy. We know this and this is a very grownup approach where youre not claiming to have all the answers. And its funny a say dont read the reviews of your books which i cant not read the reviews but some people have explicitly said it was disappointing that he doesnt give clear, advice or solid answers. And im like im not going to invent stuff that i didnt actually find just tell you. But it was frustrating for me as a researcher to because i didnt know any of this at the beginning and i was like is the answer . But i think we all nowadays we all dont have a choice. We have to live with a lot of uncertainty. And so if we know that hopefully if we know that thats okay and that things are at least in science happening as they aresupposed to then great. I feel like you gave us perspective rather than advice. That would be my dream. My hope for this book is that its not just something that someone would read and bethat interesting and put it aside. My hope is it would be wellformed and like a sickly a tool that they can use to help evaluate information that comes at them especially now every single day. I like that. Given that i felt so so much more comfortable with my junk food intake i thought for our final question if youre up for something, for people that are going to buy the book and read it for the first time what would be a good parent . What should you sit down and eat while your, the cheetos may be an appetizer, what else . I think you want to start salty and work your way to the sweet. I think cheetos is a great place to start. I would start with flaming hot. Just start strong and work your way overto some chips. I like the kettle cooked variety. Thats a palate cleanser and i follow that up with lets see here. Goldfish. Goldfish is really the main course for me. Im thinking main course. Im going to put it out there. Circus peanuts. The kind you have toundo yourself . Or something. Something wholly unnatural. Not real peanuts, circus peanuts. I feel like maybe a hotdog kind of version of the circus peanuts. Speaking of hotdogs, thats a great processed food right there. You could have two chili dogs. And then polish it off with some starburst. Maybe some skittles if youre into that. And then finish it off with a few peanut m ms. About 76 of them. Everything in moderation. I feel like when you up your playlist and maybe you should have a little bit of the food pairings to go with it. Like a menu for the book. This has been so much fun. I hope everyone goes out to get it right away and maybe while theyre online they order some starburst and peanut m ms. This has been great, thank you for having me. I declare these sprouts to be delicious. George, ive got a question. How much is an illegal amount of m ms . I bought the largest possible size available at costco is three pounds 14 ounces and i think i reasonably eight like a good 14 ounces of that. And i did feel sick after doing that. So disclaimer. It would not recommend trying that at home. That it was delicious in the moment. This is just a ton of fun and super educational. I cannot thank you both enough for being with us tonight. Thank you for having us. I like to thank all of you for being with us for this premier. Im certain youd enjoy your own copy of the ingredients, and you can do it right now by visiting our partners, independent bookstore politics and prose. Justclick on the link you have below to order your copy. In conclusion we got 4 fantastic author presentations coming up as we close out our featured programming. Be sure to join us right at 5 34 a live discussion bestselling authors wade clayton, author of the last train to london and Howard George author of the pears hours and on saturday at seven we are featuring an interview with Washington Post syndicated columnist cj young, author of code red how progressives and moderates can unite to save our country and on sunday kids of all ages can tune in at 11 am for a fun presentation by one of medina off author of one and lucas. Finally parents at 3 pm next sunday our closings program is designed just for you. Join us for an important conversation featuring maria russo and her book how to raise a reader which has been hailed as an indispensable guide to welcoming children to a lifelong love of reading and all presentations will be acceptable here on the Youtube Channel read friends, that wraps it up for tonight. Ive been your host, please have a great evening and as always keep reading. During a Virtual Event council on Foreign Relations president richard haas talks about the state of the world and the Foreign Policychanges facing the United States. Heres a portion of that discussion. I think the pandemic tells us first and foremost that the world matters thats perhaps an obvious thing for the member of the council on forest Foreign Relations but itsnot obvious for everybody. What happens around the world doesnt stay there and in this case it was a small city in china in wuhan where a virus broke out. Ultimately spread through china and through the United States and elsewhere around the world. On the 9 11 it wasterrorists trained in afghanistan. At other various times it was what weve seen with Climate Change coming from everywhere, financial contagion from this country so what they should tell us is these two oceans, the atlantic and pacific are not moats read theres no drawbridge to paula. Sovereignty whatever else it is is notthe same thing as security. We are affected by what happens in the world and Foreign Policy intern is out what we do affects the world and i think theres a but the most Important Message to take his world matters and isolationism, denial, sticking our head in the sand, whatever else you want to call it is not a serious or viable strategy. You talk at length about the interconnectednessof the globe and the interdependence. How has the american response to this Global Crisis reflected some of the things that you bring up, the notable absence of the us in the european convening to tackle the vaccine . This is not been a good experience shall we say or demonstration of us connectedness to the world but it begins with the fact that we are connected like it or not. Globalization is not a choice. How we respond to it is a choice but globalization is a reality. We chose not to participate in the european resources, intellectual and financial to work towards avaccine. Seems to me that reduces the chance that effort will succeed quickly and it also means were to succeed we be very hardpressed to make the argument that we ought to be towards the front of the queue. A lot of europeans would say you werent there when we needed you. Now suddenly you needthis, why should we favor you over others . I also think even more was probably heard us has been the example weve set. Its an important part of what foreignpolicy is about is not what diplomats say or do, its not what soldiers say or do, if the example we set. The functioning and vibrancy of our democracy when we have a quality for all americans, when our economy rose at a healthy clip or in this case how we respond to a foreign challenge and no one around the world i thinkits up in the morning and says i want to do this justlike america. I respect howthey are doing it. Its inconceivable. That that sentiment is being expressed. Watch the rest of this Program Visit our website and search richard haas for the title of his book the world. Good evening and welcome to pmp. Im liz hottel, thank you for joining us in this space where we continue to bring vital conversations to our politics and prose community. At anytime you can click on this green button to purchase books by either of tonights authors. Every single book thats purchased will come with a signed bookplate and we urge you to support us , barbara and jia by buying books. Many of you have copies but im sure thats someone in