Fareed Zakaria on Planet Money at NPR

Fareed Zakaria is on a book tour for the re-release of The Post American World and he stopped by the Planet Money podcast recently. The podcast features an interesting conversation between Zakaria and the hosts Adam Davidson and Alex Blumberg. I've never really thought Zakaria is a remarkable scholar or thinker but he is certainly one of the more impressive voices in the media (although that doesn't seem to be a difficult task to accomplish given our abysmal media landscape).

A short excerpt about the future for the U.S. I found interesting. This is something people have been saying for a while but as California's position worsens considerably and as the U.S. runs up against challenge after challenge, these words move from mere prognostication to reality -

Think of California as a metaphor. California has the most dazzling private sector in the world, really. If you think about Silicon Valley, plus Hollywood, plus all these things that spawn from it. It's amazing. And yet when the state is collapsing, when the infrastructure is collapsing, when you build more prisons than you do college campuses ... after a while it becomes very difficult to be a viable economy.