With lawrence right wright and Nicholas Kris staff. Kristof. Want to thank you for being here and supporting us through these everchanging times. Were happy to keep in touch with you and keep wang what we said. Want to welcome Lawrence Wright, staff write are for the knockerrer, and the author of ten books including the looming tower, going clear and god save texas and one previous novel, gods favorite. His books have received many honors including a Pulitzer Prize for looming power. He is and if wore longtime residents of austin, texas. Nicholas kristof has coauthored several books with his wife, including a path of here and half the sky. Together they were awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for the coverage of china. They also received the literary peace prize for the Lifetime Achievement in 2009. Now a column nist for the New York Times bureau chief in beijing, tokyo, won a second pull litter in 2006 and with that id like to welcome Lawrence Wright and Nicholas Kristof. Thank you, kristina. Thank you, kristina, and i should say im a longtime fan of larry and his work, and also a fan of this book, and youre in for a treat when you read it, but larry, let me start off by saying, its strange obviously to begin a book tour as you are with this remote but its incredibly in keeping with this book. How else do we get to pin talking bow but book beaut pandemics except in the middle of a pandemic. Its really weird. People ask me about it and i say its very strange but it is really strange. Its not anything i ever anticipated. I did think that we would be facing a big pandemic one day. I didnt know what day. And the fact it is today is a total coincidence. So when this when did you begin to talk to publisher and say, you know, ive done a Little Research about this situation that were headed for, when did you realize you were going to be publishing in the middle of a pandemic . Well, the chinese made their announcement new years eve if you remember and i was i was alert because i remember sars and howed began in china and they hid the information for some time, and its a miracle of Public Health they were able to stop that contagion within 100 days but here was another one, and i thought, this could be a problem. And as it got close to february, i began to get nervous because i thought we wont be able to contain this, got into europe. It was definitely going to come to america despite what some of our authorities were saying. Viruses just dont respect National Boundaries and i knew it would wine up here and soon. And so over the last months or two, as you have been watching politics and watching stores sell out of toilet paper, watching the took market dip for a while, have you been nodding with familiarity . Obviously enormous echos witness what i haveout wrote about. Sometime it feel like im i pick up the paper im reading the next chapter in my book, and its honestly id like for the coincidences to stop because the book is pretty dark, and i dont want it to go as far as i took it but it is really spooky, the thing that were just lucky guesses but for the most part, the reason that things in real life are playing out as they did very much in the novel is i talked to experts, and they told me what would happen, and not only did i they had done table top exercise every year. Johns hopkins and elsewhere, gaming, what would happen if, the same question that i asked. And so its not just my novel. Its in all of those studies. Its in the briefing books handed off to the administration. All the details that are gleaned from that, that are so resonant with what is happening right now, people knew. People knew. The experts knew. And as you say the novel is indeed pretty dark, and now there are plenty of american politics who say that, well, the light is at the end of the thumb, were almost there, Vice President pence says that by memorial day well be mostly through this, have this mostly behind us. In your book you actually there is this respite. It comes and then theres this period of calm. Are you how do you feel beaut the road ahead . My flu, the one i invented, was built on the 1918 flu. I actually made a calendar on my computer, and it happened to be the year 2020. Just a coincidence. But i decided to take the events that took place in the year 1918 and put them that was a temp plat underneath all evented in novel where thing that actually happened 100 years ago so the question i had for these experts was, what would happen if it happened now . Will we be any better prepared than our ancestors and so this the 1918 flu manifest evidence nit february and march 1918. It was a killer but it wasnt. It wasnt a savage as it became. Part of the reason it was so dangerous, is took root among the soldiers and their camps and on the troop ships going to war and so it was very dangerous and it but over the summer it mutated. Ed died down and when it came back in the fall, october was the deadliest month in american history. Now, im not forecasting that would happen, what the 1918 contagion was an influenza. Influenza is still a great killer but this is coronavirus. Its different. Experts are looking at the influenza thinking that this could easily happen with coronavirus. Or it could just simply linger here until it infected enough people it stops. We dont really know. It could with like the flu it could recure every year. They each have different situations and even the cities are different and you take that up to the next level and then you the federal response which has been extremely weak and confused and i think dangerous follow the sense that many lives have been lost that might not had been had the government taken control early on, and then at the international level, theres also a great deal of confusion. Every state, every country, every state, every city seems to be improvising and we are all trying to come up with a solution, but the absence of leadership at every level is very striking. Well, one of the things that i admire about you and that im jealous of is your versatility and, you know, you do nonfiction, you do fiction, you do books and magazine articles and tv, film, plays, this actually started not as a novel, it started it has unusual origin, can you talk a little bit about that . Yeah, 10 years ago sot, fill maker, he had read the novel the road, a novel about father and son wandering through the ruins of a civilization. And what happened, what force or event caused civilization to crumble and i was interested in that idea and i thought maybe a nuclear war or Something Like that, but honestly i had done some stories about diseases when i was a young reporter living in atlanta and the center for Disease Control was there and i got very intrigued by Public Health. This is long ago but it was i remember being so entrenched and the epidemiologist and there were so many interesting people and it occurred to me there was an opportunity to visit that world and i think up with other thing, and the novelists, its hard to find heros today. We are not living in a particularly heroic era but in the world of Public Health theyre everywhere and i felt no scruples about making a hero. And you could have addressed this issue obviously in nonfiction, you do more nonfiction than fiction, why did you decide to make this a novel . I dont know. I think as a reporter formally what we do is we go out and ask what happened and, but in this case, the question was what could happen and its not that big a leap, nick, using the same techniques going out and talking to experts, during research, reading books and stuff like that is the same process but it allowed me to imagine the world, one very similar to the one we are in, but i did feel some sense of alarm when i talked to the experts about what might happen and they had spent their entire career thinking about what would happen if 1918 came back and so it hadnt yet, but i thought a novel would be a great way to express the the sense of for voting that i found out when i talked to my experts. One of those our audience who we cant see, kim, asks about october, why why october and actually i wondered whether that was a reference in some way to the cuban to the threat from the cuban missile crisis to the world and conjure that to some degree. I guess the highlights has more resonance than i get the credit for. For me the reference to october is october is when it all goes to hell, the second wave arise. There are things that we dont see that happened in october, but we know that october marks the moment when it all comes to a climax. And kim also asks that as you were doing your research did you find yourself getting more germ conscious and washing your hands more often . Honestly, no. I i you know, im not a germaphobe, at the time i was not thinking exactly i was still locked up and this was a world in my imagination, not one outside of my house. I dont want to exact i will go through the plot of the book, but it it begins in indonesia or early crucial scene is indonesia where the epidemic is seen and then it theres a chance to contain it and then one of the characters goes on the hodge to mecca and as it happens theres now a discussion about whether the hodge this year should be canceled to prevent the spread of the coronavirus and i, you know, your book certainly illuminates that. Do you have any thoughts about where this isnt ideal year for the hodge . After 911 when i was working on the looming tower, i lived in saudi arabia. They wouldnt let me in as a reporter but i became a an expat worker and my job was to mentoring which is bin ladens hometown. I couldnt go to mecca myself but i was in constantly in contact with my reporters and one thing i learned that every year there are epidemics, often times very serious diseases and you have two or three Million People gathered in a spotlight and they all get on planes and fly home, i thought, this is this is a disaster in the making and so that thought always lingered in my mind, what if what if one of these diseases took root in mecca or religious pilgrimage or in india, many other instances where you have pilgrims gather and closely pressed together coming from many parts of the world from a Public Health point of view its a pretty dangerous situation. You and i both have spent a fair part of our careers writing about International Security threats in a more conventional sense about terrorism, for example, and i know that over the years my own conception of International Security threats has changed and become broader to include things like drug trafficking, Climate Change and pandemics and i wondered, if indeed, you see a Common Thread from your writing about the threat from alqaeda to the threat from pandemics today . I sure do, nick, thank you for asking me that. The you know, first of all, the effects, the attempt by some terrorist groups to kill as many people as possible, pandemics do a wonderful job of that. There are groups like alqaeda, for instance, the japanese cult, they were definitely seeking weapons of mass destruction and they experimented with biological weapons. There are White Supremacists groups that are doing the same right now, so, yes, terrorism and and warfare have a Common Ground and, you know, as all those things you cited Climate Change, you know, houston from Hurricane Harvey suffered far more damage than an ordinary terrorist could do but those kinds of things, the problem is similar, vast destructions of society and, you know, and the death of a lot of people. Terrorism aspires to that, nature sometimes responds that way to our own behavior and, yeah, theyre all very similar forms of experience and we have to adjust to the fact especially that i think pandemics will be coming our way increasingly, the pace has picked up since the turn of the century weve had sars, mers, zika, west nile, asian flu, just one thing after another, ebola. All these novel viruses and any one of them can be a real killer and we have been in some ways fortunate but there will be more theyll be a bigger challenge in our future i fear. The the hero of of the book is somebody who goes around trying to put out these global these global disease fires and they are, indeed, as you know a lot of such people around in the world, most recently a lot of them have been wrestling with ebola in congo, for example, and i wonder if they are if you do see them as kind of heros in real life. Oh, yeah, i sure do. I admire these people so much. But one thing, you know, theres a big swath of experts that we can talk about, you know, just the people in the labs, you know, that kind of, you know, the ingenuity required to try to understand a virus like this one that we are facing right now thats so complicated and tricky, but i guess im particularly drawn to the epidemiologist who actually go out in the field and face Something Like ebola, brandnew virus that kills people in the most awful ways and to me its totally terrifying, far more terrifying than going to a war, for instance, just the idea that theres some presence around you that, some germs in the air or Something Like that and you have no idea if youre infected until youre sick and healthcare workers are always the first people to get sick and theyre the ones that die the most frequently just in current situation. Yes, my admiration is unbounded for those people. We have a question from john who, hes he listened to the first hour of audio book and says totally engrossing, hes learning tons, he notes that in the beginning to have book the indonesians are trying to cover it up or trying to cover up what happens and notes the you know, the similarity with what china was initially doing in the first 3 weeks of january in wuhan. Can you talk a little bit more about the Global Cooperation that is required to address this kind of challenge . Well, thats a good question. You know, this disease is not something that can be solved at a national level. Its an International Problem because it just literally slides across the borders and you need to have an international response. Unfortunately there are some countries that have in the past withheld cooperation from international authorities. China was particularly guilty of that in the sars for sars outbreak, but indonesia has had a problem with that too and thats why i chose indonesia for the local, origin of this and there was an odd reaction in indonesia during one of the outbreaks which was they felt that scientists were exploiting a virus that belonged to indonesia. In other words, it was like a National Resource and that they should be they should gain part of the patent money and stuff like that. It really led to an interesting argument, but, you know that kind of infighting while scientists are trying to figure out how to stop a killer virus is very damaging. We need i for one would be much more if favor of courting some authority to the world Health Organization. It has no authority at all, when china said you cant go come, they have no way of going without permission. Im totally with you on that point. I thought i did frankly think that they were a little bit too too complementary of china, but the idea of defunding them at this juncture just strikes me as as completely crazy. World Health Organization is not a perfect organization, but its the only one, you know, its what we have and, you know, when the administration complains about it. We had our own eyes on the ground. Cdc had surveillance teams in dozens of countries around the world and the funding cuts to withdraw them. We lost the eyes on the ground that we had in china as well as many other countries. Thats right, yeah. Magnifies Foreign Relations challenge and the conflict for iran and saudi arabia and like wise between russia and the u. S. And the people see through prisms and paranoia and national ism, i wonder if you have concerns about that happening this time. I mean, there are chinau. S. Relations are clearly more strain and now i wonder if you worry about how this may affect International Relations today. I do. I feel like the geopolitical fallout hasnt happened entirely yet but the accusations, the blame thats going around, every great disease carries with it a lot of stigma, blame and shame, but this business of making accusations that the chinese cooked it up in a lab, vice versa, the chinese, russians, north koreans, iranians are saying that it was a vile weapon made by the u. S. These are very dangerous charges because they incite hatred and one hatred gets rolling it develops its own momentum and begins to Shape International responses and yes, im very worried about it. I would like to see the ned lease conflict diminish in the face of a real challenge to humanity. And jerry says asks, how do you think we should handle china . They do have some culpability, but dont we need their help and cooperation to get out of this . Yes, i totally agree on both of the statements. I think what we should do is fund the cdc so that we put our own surveillance teams back there and cooperate with the chinese scientists and we might learn something from them and we at least may have some people on the ground to tell us what is going on and we didnt in this instance. There are some people in this country who whenever you ask them whats on their mind, then they bill gates, for example, for years hes talking about his nightmare about a big pandemic. Is that something that if i had run into you at Cocktail Party a couple of years ago, would you have been event my year of preparedness or was that just one of many things that that you were sort of thinking about . Well, i do worry about other things, but had you caught me at a party and like scott posed the question, what do you think is the biggest threa