As you think about writing your books.
Post-American World The Case for Liberal Education.
How does that kind of get into orbit right?
Like with an article, with a take, the cycles are faster, right?
It's kind of a fast oscillation.
With a book, it takes years.
And also, that book becomes almost like a part of who you are.
You say you have three children.
You also have.
The books are probably the next thing in terms of importance.
Kind of a weird thing to say, but I think that there's something to it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They take an enormous amount of time and energy.
So I think I write the books out of two forces.
One is guilt.
There's a part of me that feels like, you know, there's the part of me that got the PhD and thought I'd be an academic, which is if I feel like if I'm not working on a book, I'm kind of goofing off.
I'm wasting my life.
Is it the rigor?
Is it like an act of service to other people?
It's some combination of those things.
The sense that that's real scholarship.
That's real.
If you want to be a person of ideas, if you want to be thought of as somebody who's intellectual, that's the real work.
So I'm being honest.
That guilt is part of the motivation.
And the other part of it is learning.
Because I find that I learn more when I write a book than at any other period in my professional life.
You have to make deep dives and you have to kind of know what you're talking about.
So in the last book, for example, there's a chapter on the French Revolution.
In order to do that chapter I must have had to read I don't know, you know 20 odd books on or around the French Revolution, a bunch of academic articles.
My research assistant found me other excerpts from other places translated from the French, and things like that.
I've done all the work, so you don't have to.
You can read my 50 page chapter on the french revolution, or 40 page chapter of the french revolution, because i've tried to digest all that and give it to you in a kind of both in my analytic framework, which obviously i think is the the right way to to look at it.
Um, and that's tremendously satisfying.
You know, there's something amazing about that.
There's um, Bill Buckley, who was a friend of mine, used to say you know the great conservative provocateur?
He used to say there are two kinds of people people who like to write and like to have written.
And he loved to write.
I'm somebody more who likes to have written.
The actual act of writing I find painful and arduous and a struggle.
But Having written, and particularly having written, something where you feel like I have digested all that knowledge and was able to convey it, that's a great feeling.
It's a thrilling feeling.
Given that, how do you get yourself to write?
What is it that you do on a week-to-week basis?
I mean, certainly there's... the reality of just deadlines.
But then the books are a whole other project.
They're sort of in that Eisenhower matrix, important but not urgent category.
Yeah.
So I went into journalism largely because of this question, which is could I write an unprompted?
So my biggest mentor at Harvard was this guy, Sam Huntington.
He was an amazing scholar, one of the most extraordinary social scientists of the 20th century.
And he lived.
As it turned out, I had a little tiny studio apartment in Boston and he lived a few blocks away from me.
He lived in a townhouse and he used to get up every morning at six and he would go down to the basement of his townhouse where he had his study and he would start working on the next big book project.
Big article he was writing was mostly books.
And he would work there until about 10 o'clock for four hours.
And then he would take the subway, the T, into Boston.
And his explanation to me was like, you've got to start the day doing the real work.
Ain't that right?
And then you can go and teach the class and do the committee meeting and attend the faculty meeting and have lunch with whoever you have.
But you've got to start with.
And I watched that and I thought to myself, I can't do this.
I am not motivated.
I don't have the self-discipline.
I mean, this is a guy who was a chaired professor at Harvard.
He didn't need to write another sentence, another word.
And he was just self-motivated.
And he was doing it every day.
And I thought to myself, you know what?
I can't do that.
I need some structure.
And so the greatest thing about journalism for me is the deadlines.
The fact that I have had to pull up and shoot pretty much every week now for 25 years.
I started writing my news column about 2000.
So it's 25 years.
That's an amazing structure.
And like anything in life, you get better at it as you go along.
When I started out, it would take me half the week to write the column.
At this point it's still a lot of research and thinking, but I can sit down and I can, in two hours, write the column.
That's very, very different.
The column, you know, and the and things like that, the shorter stuff um, it is just because I've done it so much I can pull up and shoot a lot and and relatively easily.
The books are a different matter.
The books are much harder, um much more.
You know you have to plan and and I've gotten in this last two books I've gotten good at using research assistance, which I was not so good at earlier.
Um, And that has been very helpful because when you've got so many things going on, to have stuff that is set up for you so that you can read it and figure out what you want to say.
I've had to put in place more of a structure and a plan for writing, where I used to do it a little bit more haphazardly.
I would just go into the archives and read stuff and then I would just sit down and say this okay, chapter one, and I would start writing.
And then I'd maybe go back and fill some holes.
I can't do that anymore.
Now I have to say to myself, you know, what's the research I need for chapter one?
What's chapter two?
What's the topic going to be?
What are the most important books on this?
You know, I have to kind of plan it out like that.
And then I tell my research assistant, let's try and find things on this subject.
That's a very different way.
There's almost a teamwork element to it, which I'm learning and getting better at.
The obvious question with research assistants is, how do you think about your AI morals and ethics?
Like watching how good Gemini has gotten in the past few months.
I'm just blown away by how well it cites its sources.
It seems like the hallucinations have gone down and there's a certain kind of AI, which is AI does the writing for you.
And obviously that is like no.
And then there's another kind of AI which is basically like a kind of glorified Google, which is Google on steroids.
I mean, literally what Gemini is, made by the same people.
How do you think about how AI is is not allowed into your writing, into your research and thinking process.
It's a very good question, and I'm struggling with it right now myself.
I try to use AI not as much as I can, but I try to use it actively.
Partly because it's unbelievable.
I mean, it's just extraordinary.
I've been dealing with the medical thing and just you know you use Gemini and you ask it like.
These are my symptoms.
This is that I fed it my blood tests.
And it was like, OK, these are the three questions you should ask your doctor.
And it's just mind blowing.
It is very good for almost I mean for particularly stuff like medical stuff, where there is an answer, you know, and it can scope all the sources in the world.
It's incredible.
But, you know, when you do want to do this sort of very deep dive.
I'm finding it's not quite as good for a variety of reasons.
Part of it is the access to all the sources is still quite spotty.
You know, it can't actually look at the 30 best books on the French Revolution.
Most of them it doesn't have access to.
So it can do.
You know, and then you get into a little bit of the feeling of this is a paper written by a sophomore, where he's kind of bullshitting.
And it's partly because the AI has only the ability to look at the reviews of those books, because those are in open source or an excerpt of the book.
So it's not the AI's fault, because the AI is powerful enough to do an amazing job, but there are these constraints.
And then the second piece of it is you're not Part of how you think and how you develop.
Your thoughts is you read and you interact.
You talk to people.
And so if I could tell Gemini or ChatGPT, this is exactly what I want to argue.
Now, make this argument and find me the sources, it would be able to do it.
But the way you come to your argument is partly by reading, by talking to smart people, by you know part of your thinking process involves ingesting.
And so in some ways, you can't, the AI can't do that for you, right?
So you, because you are trying to come up with your distinctive original idea.
So then you try to say to yourself okay, can I use AI to be the best research assistant in the world?
And it does pretty well.
But you know, it's still.
It's almost like the difference between the AI is producing these extraordinary suits.
Like you know, Ralph Lauren, purple label, beautiful suits, but they are, you know, kind of off the rack.
And what I'm trying to do is really customized boutique, right?
You know, the kind of handmade tailoring.
And the final point is you know, in terms of the writing for you, the thing AI can do is have the political courage and intellectual courage to make an argument, to put your name behind it, right?
That is now becoming much, much more significant in a way.
First of all, if you ask AI to write, most of the time it gives you kind of, on the one hand, because it doesn't want to be controversial.
But it's also, in a sense, meaningless if AI thinks one thing, right?
There has to be a human being who is advocating this thing and putting his or her reputation and credibility on the line for that thing.
And that AI can never do.
Right.
Okay.
So, if we follow this and get to the answer of, if we assume a kind of AI singularity type thing, what is the thing that somebody in your shoes, what is the skill that will always be scarce?
That's like focus on that.
Probably ultimately judgment, you know, this this kind of vague thing of what is the right what is the right thing to be to be weighing in on?
And what is the, what are the right combination of moral political values to be expressing on this subject at this moment?
The AI can't tell you that, right?
Because it can give you the best argument for one of six different positions.
But which is the right one at this moment in this climate, right?
That to me feels, and maybe there's a metaphor there about where human beings can add value.
Because the AI is at some point going to be able to write those six columns, probably better than I can.
But which of those is the right one to present to the world and advocate for, and put your credibility and your courage behind?
That's the question.
So what makes for a good take?
You were doing takes long before kind of the whole Twitter economy was based on them.
And, as you're thinking through your columns, as you're thinking through especially Fareed's, take on GPS.
What are the components that really matter there?
The most important thing is value add.
It has to be value added.
You can't tell people what happened.
I think you have to understand that, particularly when somebody's coming to me.
These are smart interesting, educated people.
They know about the world.
What they're looking for is add value.
Tell me something I don't know.
Make me think about this in a different way.
Give me some context.
Give me some analytic framework that I haven't thought of.
Give me some history that I haven't thought of.
Now, so that's the broader kind of mandate that you have to fulfill.
On the other hand, a take or a column has to be an exclamation mark, by which I mean it has to organize itself around an idea.
Not an idea and a half, not two ideas, not three ideas, that's too many.
And you lose the narrative structure if you try to do that.
You can do that in a 2,000-word essay.
The Wall Street Journal used to run, their lead op-ed used to be about 1,600 words.
That's a different thing.
There you can be discursive, you can bring up it.
When you're writing a newspaper column or a take, and these are all in the 500 to 800 word range.
It's an exclamation point that makes people think differently about some important subject.
And then, as you think about like you just wrote this piece on Trump and Venezuela and sort of the American order, and how we're going back to something that was actually more common throughout history, not less common
And I watched the GPS piece, and then I read the Washington Post article.
And I could give you my own answers.
But as you think of, I'm going to take the same idea, put it in two different places.
What does an article demand?
And then what does television demand?
So for a long time, I would struggle with this.
And I would think about how the spoken word is different from the written word.
But I came to realize that many of the attributes are the same, partly because my columns are very analytic, argumentative and again organized around an idea, moving in narrative form almost.
So it's not as big a difference as you think.
There are some differences. mechanisms that don't work right.
Subordinate clauses, for example, you can't start with a subordinate clause when you're on TV.
You know when you're telling the story, because people don't know right.
You have to have the main clause, you can then qualify it.
Whereas in writing, you can sometimes invert for effect.
So it's stuff like that, where you know there are certain things that just don't work when you you know list or things like that.
So you have to be You have to be conscious of those kinds of things.
But in substantive terms, it's actually not as dissimilar.
Now, when you go longer, then it's very different.
I found, you know, if I give a talk somewhere, the most difficult talks I've given are.
There are these speaker series where they sometimes will book a bunch of people you know like four very different people and sell every week, you know every Monday, or something like that.
And there's usually a hall of 3,000-odd people who have paid money to come and hear you speak.
It's usually a 90-minute talk, no questions.
And so you have to sustain the audience's attention for 90 minutes.
And given what I do, I'm kind of an ideas person.
I'm not going to tell my personal story or some series of anecdotes.
So how do you tell us, how do you make an idea into a narrative, into a, you know, in some ways a chronological narrative?
Yeah.
And how do you sustain it?
And how do you, but how do you then go on?
Interesting side detours that would be of interest, and anecdotes.
And those that's a much different beast, where you're trying to construct something and that's more like a broad essay that one might have written for Harper's or the Atlantic or something like that.
And those don't have those qualities.
And they're the written word and the spoken word are very different.
Give me the case for TV.
You know, it's funny because I haven't watched a lot of TV in my life.
We didn't have cable.
And then I always kind of had this idea that TV was like a feel weird saying this, but like a lesser form of media, like less rigorous or something like that.
And as I thought about my career and what I wanted to do, I very quickly moved away from TV.
But as I was thinking about your career, TV clearly has an impact and a reach.
What else has made you focus on TV as a medium?
So I very much approached it the way you did when I started out.
I'm a sort of lapsed academic, you know.
So you look at my, you look at my career trajectory in some ways.
It's like a dumb, dumb or dumbest if you want to think in those terms.
I start out at Harvard getting a Ph.D. and then go to foreign affairs.
Then I go to Newsweek.
Then I go to ABC.
Then I go to basic cable.
Right.
But what I came to realize about TV was that it's actually an incredibly powerful medium because it reaches people both at a scale that print doesn't reach, but it also reaches them somewhere.
When you're on TV, and particularly if you're a regular presence, people think they know you.
People think they have a connection to you personally and they begin to trust you and they begin to view you as a kind of guide.
That's a very different relationship than somebody just reading an article and saying oh, that was interesting.
That's very analytic and brainy.
There's something more emotional and visceral about the connection between somebody on TV and the audience.
And I think that's a much more powerful connection.
It's a much broader number of people you can reach.
And I came to realize that TV actually in its own way is a very intelligent medium.
You know, the way I have come to think of it now is, TV is a little bit like Japanese haiku, which is you've got small, you know few words.
But you've got to get them right.
And if you get them right, those few words arranged right can have this very powerful effect.
And TV is the same thing.
If you took the transcript of my show, it would fit on one page of the New York Times.
But you have the ability, if you do it right, to convey ideas to people in a way that they receive them.
They're open to them.
There's something very different about the way in which people consume television than any other medium.
It's not an accident that politicians try so hard to get, because you're trying to get that emotional connection.
Because people vote from here, not from their brain.
And again, if you're trying to convince people and I view myself as sort of being in the business of public education then if you're really trying to have an impact, you've got to be able to have it here as well as here.
So when you say the mechanics of doing that, what came to mind for me was, oh, the one-liner.
And then I was like, no, Farid's not really like the one-liner guy.
So how do you think about public education and then reaching the gut?
What are the tools that you have at your disposal?
Yeah, it's a really good question.
One of the things that I have tried to do is to convey my authentic personality.
Because I think that what television does well and what people prize in video is authenticity.
And so one of the things I have tried not to do is put on a very polished persona of somebody who uh, you know, can kind of do the Oxford style debate very brilliantly and beautifully.
I, you know, I have some training in that, in that area.
I can do it fine, but I realized that what's more important is that you come across as the person you really are.
Uh.
So if you'll notice, in my uh, in my shows I don't I don't speak in those completely clipped precise way that a television anchor usually does.
There's also television voice, which is kind of like pilot voice.
Hey, everybody, we are now on our way to Chicago.
Donald Trump just did this.
It's actually the exact same voice that. you're subconsciously trained into.
Exactly.
And what I've come to realize is it might have worked in the past when there was this idea of a disembodied kind of an objective person.
Just giving you the bare facts.
Cronkite.
Right.
What people now want is a human being, somebody they can understand.
And so I've always tried to have this more You know.
Let me tell you what I'm thinking about this subject and do it more as if I'm one part of a conversation.
I think that creates a connection that creates trust more than just the brilliant one liner.
Tell me about your standard day with. there's the learning side of the consuming.
Like I saw a photo of you on the treadmill watching like a YouTube video or something like that.
And man to do what you do?
Just the range of things that you need to have knowledge in geopolitics economics, 74 other things.
And then there's the okay, now it's time to come up with a take, to write the column, to write whatever book I'm working on, whatever else it is that you're working on.
How are you structuring your life?
In order to maximize the quality of the craft and production.
So there is no ordinary day.
There is no average day.
My life is pretty chaotic in that sense.
You know, I've got travel.
I've got three kids.
Yeah.
But the central part of it is exactly what you were implying.
The consumption part.
You know so I spend a lot of time reading, reading books, calling up people trying to understand.
You know, how do you think about this issue of somebody who I know is an expert on some subject?
I view that as my greatest value add.
So with my show, for example, I've got an amazing team.
We talk a lot about who the guests are going to be.
You know, try to figure that out, map out what the segment is going to look like.
We pre-interview the guests so that I, you know, I want to really take that six minutes that I have for each segment.
And I want to make sure that we have the maximum signal to noise ratio that we can.
But at that point I will, once we've done the interview, have a few thoughts that I give the producer about what we should do.
And then I leave it to them to cut.
I leave it to them to produce.
I leave it to them.
And they're amazing at it.
So I view like my job is to just be thinking, reading, writing, and as much as I can do that.
I'm doing that.
And I love it.
I mean, to me, the best part about my job is that I get to do all this reading and thinking.
But you have to really be disciplined about making sure that you actually are doing the work.
It's very easy, particularly as you move up, to just have like lots of bullshit calls and meetings and somebody wants to have breakfast.
And it's like no, you know, you need to have time every day where you are reading, where you are thinking, where you're actually engaging in research actively.
And so that's probably...
I don't know how much of my time, but it's a lot of my time.
I spend hours that are scheduled, just blank time for me to be able to do that.
And then, how do you think of?
I need to keep track of what's happening now versus?
In order to understand the present, in order to understand the future, we need to understand the past.
And I'm going to really dive into the slower, deeper currents of history, of geopolitics, of the scholarship that's been done over the decades, the centuries.
I think what I would say to be honest is I do it backwards, by which I mean I look at what's going on in the world.
I think about what you What are the roots here?
And then, if I need to go back and read a book, if I need to call up, you know, a historian or something like that.
But it's not like I'm just off the top of my head reading.
You know, sometimes that happens.
You know, you're just reading the history of Iran or something like that.
And the events intersect.
I forgot exactly where I read this.
But you mentioned that when you're in university, you learn the skill of reading a book fast, while getting the main points.
How do you do that?
I can't remember if this was at Yale or Harvard, but at some point you start getting just crazy amounts of reading, but I think particularly in grad school.
And what I came to realize, and this is clear.
You know I'm talking about nonfiction books, you know, obviously not fiction you.
You figure out how to read, how to read the central argument of a book you know, and to figure out what is the central argument of and part of that is you know.
You read the introduction, the conclusion, you ask look at the chapters, figure out which are the ones that are most important.
Now that you've read the introduction conclusion, you understand what is the?
Where is the fulcrum of the argument lie?
How do you, you know, and so can you realistically, in two hours, crack a 600-page book?
And I think that's a very important look.
At the end of the day, the reason the person is writing the book is to convey some certain ideas.
If you have an efficient way of being able to access and absorb those ideas, that's great.
And frankly, most people write, there's too much detail in the books.
They're trying to They're trying to use every research note that they ever made.
And as the reader, I don't need to do that.
There are some books.
The other thing I do do, so it's like a twofold strategy.
One is speed read or find a way to extract information from lots of books.
And then the ones you think are really, really good, I read many, many times.
What are those books?
Sam Huntington wrote a book called Political Order in Changing Societies, which is one of the most seminal books in political science.
I probably read it three times.
Kenneth Waltz wrote a book about international relations called Man, the State, and War.
He wrote two books, Man the State and War, and Theory of International Relations, which I both read at least three times.
You know, it's stuff like that, like...
Even for this last book, Age of Revolutions.
To me, the most interesting book that I was reading historically was a book by Steven Pincus on the Glorious Revolution in England called 1688, which is the year of the Glorious Revolution.
I read it twice.
It's a 700 pages, I recall, dense academic book.
And if you look at my book, it's like every page is marked up.
So you know, and I think that that's very important, because There's something about like, a deep understanding of something that's very different from a shallow understanding.
It's a good example.
It would be the difference between reading a few articles in The Economist and The Atlantic and you understand an issue.
Every now and then you need to do those deep dives.
Part of it is, I think, your brain analytically begins to understand much, much more deeply any phenomenon, any subject, any phenomenon.
It's a little bit like the scientific method.
It's like it doesn't matter what you're studying, but how you study it.
So I try to do those two things at the same time.
The other thing with those deep reads as writers is when you do that, you begin to see the underlying structure and the mechanics of how an argument is made.
You begin to see, okay, this is a good book.
It resonated with me.
And on the second and third time of reading the book, you begin to see, oh, okay.
This is how the writer is doing that.
And you get a kind of X-ray vision into how a body of work is crafted.
Absolutely.
And also you come to, you lose your first, your first impression of the book gives way to a much more kind of analytic or study.
And this is true in fiction as well.
I just did a podcast about, you know, my favorite book and it was The Great Gatsby.
And, you know, what I'm struck by is the first time you read Gatsby, you have one reaction.
And then when you read it 10 years later or five years later and for me it took several readings to begin to just realize how beautiful the writing was, how the craft of the writing.
Because you know, maybe it's just me, but it took me a while to get to the point where I was just thinking to myself how did this guy at 28 write like this?
He was 28 when he wrote Gatsby.
Wow.
You know, you think about when, you think about it in those terms and you think about the maturity of the emotional expression.
There, you know, and that, for some reason, is not what I thought of when I first encountered it.
You know, it was a completely different thing.
It's like, it's like the new thing and you're trying to figure out.
What's the plot, what's going to happen to Daisy, what's you know?
Right.
Okay, so we're talking about how do you get your writing done, and if you're thinking about work and how you can be more productive there well, I recommend a tool called Basecamp.
Basecamp is a project management tool and it's different from the other ones which are loud and noisy and cluttered.
They have feature bloat.
Basecamp says, no, no, no, no, no.
We're gonna keep things simple so that you can focus on what actually matters, which is just getting the work done, you know.
Now, for us, Basecamp is a place where we can track what we're doing with how I write, when episodes are being recorded, where we're recording them, the publishing day, all those sorts of things in one place for our entire team to look at.
And I had the founder of Basecamp, Jason Freed.
He came on the show and I noticed that he really cares about writing.
He cares about manifestos, he cares about great copy, he cares about telling a great story.
And him and his co-founder, they've written five books.
And I can tell you that they bring the same care and attention to detail to their books as they do their software.
So if you're thinking about work and you're asking, hey, how can I be more productive?
How can I make my team more cohesive?
Well, then I recommend Basecamp.
All right, back to the episode.
How do you think your love for Gatsby has ended up in your work?
It's a love of America, to be honest.
I read Gatsby in America.
I came to America from India where I grew up.
And the reading I had done.
I had a good education in India, but it was mostly British because India was a former colony of the British Empire.
So I'd never read Hemingway Fitzgerald when I got to when I got to Yale as an undergraduate.
I had read you know Evil in War and and you know Kipling and all the, you know all those kind of British writers.
And so I was I wanted to educate myself in in in America.
And I took a bunch of courses in American history.
And I and I read a lot of American literature.
And What I found about Gatsby was I thought it was really a story about the American dream.
It was the story about the extraordinary aspirations of this guy, the complicated reality of his past that he wanted to leave behind.
And in a way, Gatsby's journey is an immigrant's journey.
It's like you're leaving the past.
You're coming to the big city.
You're trying to remake history. yourself.
And ultimately, there's a tragic element to it.
Of course nothing, no dream is ever completely fulfilled.
And of course, in his one ends in tragedy.
But you know, I kind of fell in love with America when I was at when I was an undergraduate.
I think Gatsby is very much part of that.
And that love of America, I think, does inform my work.
I mean, I find when I write, in fact, the column you mentioned that I just did, I got lots of.
If you look at the comments, there's lots of attacks from the left saying you have such a benign view of American power in America.
You know, have you forgotten about Vietnam and Iraq and all the terrible things we did?
And you know, and I have a serious analytic answer to it, which is compared to what you know, America has been a, in my opinion, the best superpower.
You know, great power in modern history, because what I'm comparing it to is you know the Kaiser's Germany and Hitler's Germany and the Soviet Union and Mao's China, and you know the French Empire and the British Empire.
You can't compare, you know, the United States added all its power to Costa Rica.
That's right.
But there's some piece of it which is You know, I'm an immigrant who fell in love with America.
And I do think America has done better on the world stage than most other countries.
And I feel a sort of an affection for it, a pride in that.
You know, that's one of the reasons I was so sad when Musk, or whatever his minions, just completely dismantled USAID, because I thought, you know, it's a matter of great pride that the United States is the richest country in the history of the world and also the most generous country in the history of the world, that it was saving tens of millions of lives of the poorest people in the world, in Africa, saving them from AIDS, saving them from TB, at very, very low cost to us.
And so I, you know, I have this very strong sense of a sense that the United States is special.
Who were the journalists?
As you thought about who you wanted to be as a writer, as a leader, as an intellectual, all those sorts of things.
Who are the people who you really look to?
And I'm curious to hear who were they and what is the thing that you took from them that you've kind of incorporated into your work.
So the greatest American journalist of the 20th century is probably Walter Lippmann.
He's early 20th century, huh?
So he has an extraordinary career.
As an undergraduate at Harvard, he studies with George Santayana, the philosopher.
By the time he's in his 20s, he founds the New Republic.
And writes Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points, the famous 14 Points.
Wow.
And goes on to become the most influential columnist in America through the 60s.
You know, Jim Johnson used to call him in to get his advice on the Vietnam War.
And in those days, you know, when you were a newspaper columnist, you were writing between three to four times a week.
So it's extraordinary.
And he wrote a bunch of books along the way.
That's that book, Preface to Morals.
Preface to Morals, an amazing book written in the 20s during the Jazz Age.
And it's about what do you?
The central dilemma, he said, in the modern world is that we have lost the certainty of faith, of tradition, of community.
And we are unmoored by that.
And we haven't found something to replace it.
And think about the world we're living in today, right?
Like we are still in that world.
And what I got from him was the idea that you could be a journalist and you could be an intellectual as well.
That there was a way to be addressing day-to-day issues, but you could also be looking over the horizon and writing books and thinking about it in these broader terms.
And I think he was probably in many.
There's a wonderful biography of his by a guy named Ronald Steele.
It's called Walter Lippmann and the American Century.
And it's a great intellectual history of America from the you know, basically the 20s to the 60s or 70s, told through the life of this one guy.
And then, more recently, I would say, the people who I.
I mean, I really admired George Will because again, he had this quality of being both a journalist and intellectual.
I went to a talk that he gave about five years ago.
And I think it was Lipman who said I don't know what I think on that subject because I haven't written about it yet.
Right.
Okay.
So, so I'm at this talk.
It's at the L, it's at the LBJ library in Austin, and And never in my life had I heard somebody who so clearly had thought in writing and was now giving me the things that he had written.
And I don't mean that in a negative way.
It was the clarity.
It was the polish.
It was just a economy of language that you cannot get if you're thinking of something for the first time.
And it was art.
It was art.
And he's talking about politics.
American conservatism.
I was blown away.
And you have his skill exactly right.
He has taught deeply about these subjects and he's condensed them to this very crisp, linear prose that he delivers in this very punchy way.
He's very skilled at what he does.
And I used to read his collections of his columns when I was in college and grad school.
There was an English columnist, British columnist named Bernard Levin, who was also amazing.
He wrote a very different style, a much more personal style.
And he would write columns about his enthusiasm for operas and for walking in the countryside and things like that.
But somehow he was able to make it all really interesting.
Because again, there was a kind of authenticity.
You could feel his passion.
He once wrote a book called Enthusiasms.
And it was just a collection of all the things he's super enthusiastic about.
I love that.
I want to ask you, how do you walk through a museum?
Because I'm interested in, okay, let's say that you want to do the work that you do.
I mean, obviously the table stakes is the scholarship, the journalism, the interviews, whatever else.
But what are the other things that you would kind of cultivate?
I look at someone like Tyler Cowen, who I've known for so many years.
And for him, you know, it's spending time in a Mexican village with the artists.
And then somehow that gives him a window into the economics of culture, right?
Like, what are the things that you've done in order to get such a fancy word?
I'm sorry, an orthogonal way of looking at the world and teaching public education.
I remember once being on a plane and I was sitting next to the, the deputy managing director of the IMF, who at the time was a guy named Stan Fisher, very famous MIT economist.
And I said to him, and he said, why are you making this trip?
I said, I find that if I don't go places, I don't feel like I can read a lot about them.
But there's something different.
100%.
And I said to him, but it must be different for you as an economist.
You've got all the data.
And he said, Fareed, I 1,000% agree with you.
I find that actually every time I go on one of these trips that I make within 24 hours, I realize that my previous assumptions about this place are wrong.
There's something that I learned on the ground about why the policies we were thinking about won't work.
Or there's some cultural issue or some political issue, And he was saying I don't know why it is.
Maybe it's partly that when you go to a place, your 100 of your mind is now fully attentive to that.
But I think the other part is you're interacting with people for whom this is their life.
Right that the stakes are totally different from when you're sitting at your in your university reading about some.
You know something going on in, you know in Brazil, and then you go there and this is their lives and figuring out what it looks like for them.
And it's it often I find the single most important thing you could do.
That's why I still travel a lot.
And I try to and I when I travel, Particularly when I travel for work, I basically just meet people.
I can do a three-day trip and meet 100 people because I'll set up a breakfast with six people and a coffee with two people.
Because my feeling is I'll get another chance to see the pyramids.
At this point, what I'm trying to figure out is who are these people?
How are they thinking?
How are they dealing with the world?
And then you build up a network of contacts through that.
So now what I do is, if something happens somewhere, I'll email or text or call this guy who I met in.
In Chile who's really interesting about about Latin America and you know, what are you thinking?
What do you is there something you've read that I should be paying attention?
Ain't that right?
So I've spent a lot of time in London last year and a half and I've just been.
I've been very surprised by a certain kind of pessimism that is there.
And, you know, you could read about it, whatever, but there's two things that stand out.
The first was I stayed at a hotel, and I just got to know the bouncer.
He'd been a bouncer at this hotel for 25 years.
He was from— It's a very cool hotel if it has a bouncer.
Yeah, it was like a—it was Kettner's in Soho.
And so he was there at this restaurant.
He was from—I want to say it was Algeria.
And he just said the simplest line to me.
He said, when I showed up in London 25 years ago, it seemed like people were generally happy to be here, and now people are generally unhappy to be here.
And, you know, what do you make of that, right?
Maybe he's aged.
Maybe the—whatever, right?
And the next night.
I love Guinness, and so I always go out for a pint of Guinness and went out to do some reading.
And you know how in London they, like, ring the bell at the end of the night?
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
And so—
When they did that, the music stopped, and there was kind of this aggressive, intense conversation.
And the guy is shouting goes and our second biggest city just went bankrupt and at least in America they have jobs.
And it had just gone completely silent.
The whole bar went silent.
And I don't know what to make of it.
Maybe I'm exaggerating the importance of those moments and intuitions.
But those two experiences gave me a window into what I do feel like is the truth, the on the ground truth of how people are feeling in London, that I could have never gotten in another way.
And to do it right, you're going to get, you know, 20, 30, 40 of those kind of impressions.
And then they collect, you know, they come to form some sort of understanding.
And then you always still have to look at data and you look at other things.
But I think if you don't have that you know, the Germans call it a fingerspiel, the sort of knowledge from the tips of your finger you're missing something very important.
And I think you know, if you look at some of the best stuff, that people who anticipated Trump I think about Ed Luce, who's a wonderful FT columnist.
He wrote a book where he just traveled around America.
I can't remember the name of the book now, but it was pre-Trump.
And he traveled around America and he just said the thing he was most struck by was how there were parts of the country that had completely been left behind these great waves of prosperity and technological innovation.
It's a, And you could tell he was just genuinely surprised by what he was discovering in Appalachia and places like that, you know, which we then later learned through JD.
Vance's hillbilly elegy.
Right.
Just going there and talking to people.
Did you see Chris Arnaud?
Have you come across his work?
So I really like this guy.
He kind of rose into the spotlight in 2016.
And basically what he did is he went to McDonald's in Forgotten Cities and basically started interviewing them.
And his whole thing is he just walks through cities.
So he'll go to El Paso, he'll go to Los Angeles, and he'll just go on these very long walking tours.
And his articles are about what he picks up, and then it's photojournalism.
And there's something about the walking, especially with how America is, because it isn't like America isn't really gradients.
New York is such an exception, but America isn't really gradients.
It's like stuff happening here, nothing happening, poverty, stuff happening here.
But when you walk, you have to walk through that nothing happening.
And, just like what you're saying with Edward Luce, he was able to pick up on something that the more intelligentsia had completely missed.
It's a good example of like, I often say to myself, the plural of anecdote is not data.
You've got to look at the data and two stories does not make a trend.
But it's also true that the data can sometimes hide some very important things.
Because, if you look at the data, the US has done better than any advanced industrial country in the world.
You know, the U.S. is, I mean, compared to Europe, our lead has gone greater.
Our wages are much higher than Europe's were when they were once the same.
So what's going on?
But there was, you know, there was a discontent because of the geographical nature of this and partly the demographic nature of this.
The people who were being left behind were people who felt that they, They were heritage Americans.
As JD,
Vance liked to call it.
So it's very interesting to look at some of the sense of dissatisfaction by race in America.
Blacks and Hispanics, even when they haven't done so well economically, are much less dissatisfied because they've come up in terms of dignity and status over the last 30 or 40 years, even if they may not have come up economically as much.
Whereas with whites, it's almost the inverse.
Right.
So it's so it's a very interesting.
And sometimes those kinds of things you you're able to pick up more by this actual, you know, the act of actually just going someplace and talking to people.
Yeah.
The idea that's coming into my mind is the map territory distinction.
Right.
Like in order to write good nonfiction, what you're doing is you're creating a map.
All maps are wrong.
Some are useful.
But then what you need to do is you need to dive dive into the territory.
OK, wow.
There's all these things about the territory that aren't included in the map.
But the whole point of that original story is that if you have a map that is the size of the territory, it's completely useless.
So you need this kind of constant compression to bring into the map.
But then acknowledging that the map is imperfect, and then a decompression, and it's like some kind of knowledge generation is about the oscillation between those two things.
Part of it is what question are you trying to answer?
So a map, as you say, is a representation of reality.
If you go to the point where the map is the same size as the city, as you say, it's completely useless.
But if you go up to the point where the map is 70000 feet above the sky and all you're looking at is the earth and you can't see it, it doesn't work either.
Right?
Or it works if you're trying to point out that the Earth is a planet, you know, among many.
So the question is what are you trying to?
You know, the question you have to ask yourself is what am I trying to answer?
What phenomenon am I trying to uncover?
What is the level of generalization that is appropriate for that question?
Where should I be in the map?
Should I be at the granular street level?
Should I be at the level where I can see how each city in America compares to the others?
Do I need to be a little higher and see how American cities compare to European cities?
That's what I spend a lot of time thinking about. which is what is the right comparison?
That's what I mean when I say America has been a terrible world empire, except for all the others.
That comparative perspective is very important, because when other nations have had this much power, how have they done?
Can you tell me about your study, your study, the?
The photos are cool.
You got that brooklyn woodworker to make it.
I'll tell you exactly what happened.
So so i live in a townhouse and i, you know, we didn't have a lot of money when we did, but got it and didn't, couldn't afford to really renovate it.
And then, over time, as i did better, you know, we did the kitchen and things like that.
And then the post-american world.
Um, Most of the time, most of my books have been translated but, to be honest, most translations.
It's like a point of pride.
You get the Hungarian edition and you get the French edition.
They don't sell that much.
They sell, you know, a few thousand copies.
You get an occasional royalty check for $500.
The post-American world was a bestseller in several other countries like Italy, India.
You know a few others.
And so I ended up getting a fair amount of foreign royalties.
So it was really like found money.
Free money, everyone.
I had no idea this was going to come.
And so I thought to myself let me do something with it.
That's just fun and that I've always wanted to do.
And so I had this study, which had pretty just normal shelves.
And I found this woodwork in Brooklyn who was willing to help sit with me, and we designed this study.
And he found, he bought English pine from England.
And, you know, he was a real, I mean, he was a craftsman and really loved what he did.
And we, you know, he sat and we designed it.
And then my favorite feature in it is I am a messy craftsman.
And so my desk is always very messy and it has lots of desert.
There is a logic to it, but only I understand the logic of what heaps of paper are where.
So we found a way to let me have that.
But then there are these two doors I can pull out and close, so that if you walked into my study it would just look like there was a beautiful mirrored.
You know kind of there's one cupboard which has mirrors on it, but the cupboard actually when it opens and those doors slide in, they become pocket doors.
That's my desk.
So, Like I was very important to me to do that.
And then we had a ladder with a shelf, because ever since I've watched the My Fair Lady, I've seen I saw Rex Harrison going to get books.
I had to have that.
Now, it's a tight room.
It's a small room.
It's smaller than the room we're in right now.
But, you know, it has high ceilings.
And so it just it looks great.
And it's so much fun to be there.
It's the room I spend most of my time in.
And after I was able to do it, it just gave me that really profound sense of how the shape, the shaped environments we create have such an effect on us.
You know, it has it's such an there's something it's aesthetic, but it's also almost emotional.
Yeah.
If you if you can create the right environment for you, it just it can be it's magic.
That's so true.
And an environment that pulls you to the person that you want to be.
Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.
Yeah, yeah.
No, that's right.
And I see that where there are some people for whom, for example, interacting with nature has that effect,
Putting yourself in that environment has that effect.
I'm sort of like an urban guy.
Me too.
It's what man can do to shape you.
I love cities.
I love cities.
For me, nature is a nice escape and I love being in nature.
I mean, I just love it, but I can't.
I could never live in.
I totally agree.
I like it as escape is a good word because it implies you come back.
Yes.
Yes, exactly.
Can you tell me about the journalist who worked with your mother in India and what you learned from from from him?
I guess you met him when you were 10.
Last name Singh, right?
Yeah, so Khushwant Singh.
He was probably the best known, became certainly the best known journalist in India.
He was a novelist initially wrote what is still the best novel about the partition of India, India-Pakistan partition, called Train to Pakistan.
It won a big, in those days, a very big award called the Grove Press Award.
And he became quite famous in India and then became the editor of this magazine.
And my mother was working for him.
And what he taught me, probably more than anybody else, was the love of words, the love of the language.
He loved nature and he would go on these walks and he could identify birds, which I still have absolutely no capacity to do.
Actually, good chat, GBT thing.
I saw a beautiful falcon outside this morning.
I was like, whoa, what kind of bird is that?
So I took photos and I just got the full chat GPT.
Here's why it's in New York at this time.
Migration pattern.
Now, here's the question.
So he would do it by by bird call.
Could you do you think if you recorded and gave it a chat GPT and said, what is this?
The call of a humming of, you know, I don't know what.
That's what he would do.
Who knows?
That's impressive, though.
And and he would he would just recite poetry.
Wow.
And we were going and then he would say to me, now you should learn this.
I still remember.
I mean, it's it's stunning.
I can remember.
He made me learn Wordsworth's daffodils when I was, you know, 10 years old.
What does that one sound like?
I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high over vales and hills, and all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils besides the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze, continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle on the Milky Way.
They stretched in never-ending line along the margin of the bay.
I gazed and gazed, but little thought what wealth the show to me had brought.
And oft, when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood, they flash upon that inward eye.
That is the bliss of solitude.
And then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils.
Wow.
Oh Byron, she walks in beauty, like the light of cloudless climes and starry skies and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes thus melodious.
I mean I wish I could do more, but what's stunning to me is the ones I remember best are the ones I learned when I was 10 11, 12.
You know it's funny, because I was always kind of amazed at how people would tell me that the Greeks would memorize Homer.
And I was like, there's no way.
But what stuck with me is one, poetry, my ability to memorize it, And also just music.
I mean, there are songs that I heard when I was in fourth grade.
And I'll just haven't heard it in 20 years.
And boom, it pops on and out every single word.
And it's amazing how the tune helps you remember the words, right?
No, and the Greeks?
You know part of what.
In a truly oral culture, the memorization was important, not just to have the cadences of the language in your head, but also it was practical.
So there's a part of the Odyssey, I think, where there is a section where he tells you how to build a raft right.
And people – one of the reasons you memorized this was a way – remember there were no – You've got to know this.
There was no how-to manual.
There was nothing you could look at.
There were no YouTube videos.
So how did you remember how to build a raft?
You would recall the lines in the Odyssey that told you how to build a raft.
And if it was in iambic pentameter and it was in some way rhythmic, you could remember it better.
Yep.
Walks, nature, poetry, language.
Take me back to that.
So, you know, my father was a very impressive guy, very busy.
And for some reason was not such a.
You know, he was very good father, but he was not a mentor in that way.
And Khushwant Singh was this guy who enjoyed, you know, hanging out with me and my brother and he would tell us about poetry and about birds.
He taught me how to play tennis.
He taught me how to swim.
And It also gave me a feeling for like what a rich life can look like.
My father was very driven.
You know, he was an orphan who, you know, and he was not driven.
You know, he was not trying to get rich.
He wanted to be politically active in India and make an impact and all that.
He was a politician, lawyer type.
But Khushwant Singh, you know, was somebody who wanted to do well professionally, wanted to write important things, but also wanted to have his time for nature.
Also wanted to get his tennis game in.
You know, he had a kind of wonderfully rounded life that I've always kept in mind.
I've always, you know, try to make sure that I don't get so off track in one area that I lose that ability to have a rich life.
To me, the important thing is not maximizing on any one metric.
It's actually having that balance.
It's very Aristotelian in a sense.
I want to ask you about kind of do a fire round type thing with the core lesson that you've learned from different mediums.
So let's start with books, then we'll do articles, and then we'll do TV.
So books.
Depth of thinking, depth of understanding.
Because with a book, what you realize is particularly a great book, that to understand a phenomenon really well, you really need to go get deeper.
You need to understand there's layers and layers of uncovering.
No simple answer is usually the full answer.
And it gets back to that question about the map we were talking about.
Does that mean you still have to be able to Provide some simple construct or brief construct if somebody asks you why did the French Revolution happen?
But when you read a really great book, you realize this was a really complicated phenomenon.
And it happened for a variety of reasons that happened to come together in this one moment.
Articles.
Articles.
Articles.
I think, as I said, if you think about the really short article, it's an exclamation point.
You are making one point.
And the reason I say an exclamation point rather than a period is you are asserting something.
It has to be something unsettling.
It has to be something that's disturbing or that tells people something they don't know.
It has to have that, let me grab you by the lapels and tell you this one thing.
And if you're not doing that with an article, I think you're mostly failing.
Now there is a different kind of article, you know the longer literary essay that maybe the New Yorker publishes.
And that's in its own category.
But I mean analytic argumentative, polemical writing of the kind that you know, for example, now vastly populates the Internet.
TV?
TV, it's the connection.
The most important thing about TV is the connection you make with the viewer and how you make that connection and how they feel about you.
Maya Angelou once said this when she was at an event or something.
She said just remember.
Nobody will ever remember what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel.
And I think that's very true about television.
There's something when you can do it right.
Do you watch your television shows? performances back?
So it's interesting you ask.
When I started out, my first TV was on ABC, the George Stephanopoulos Roundtable.
I used to do it every other week.
And I got to know George Will in person in those days because I would sort of argue with him on that show.
And I think for three years, I never watched myself.
I literally couldn't do it.
I think that you know the what people say about when you listen to yourself.
There's something about your internal year.
Here's a different voice.
And so when you hear recorded, you record, you say to yourself, that's on me.
Yeah.
What am I hearing?
I had that same reaction to, to looking at myself and think, Oh my God, I'm, this is terrible.
I'm not, you know, I'm not sitting straight.
I'm whatever.
And I just found it very awkward and difficult.
And it would, it would sort of, it would, depress my confidence level.
And so I thought to myself, I'm not going to do this.
And then I started to realize somebody told me you're only going to get better if you watch yourself and ask yourself what you're not doing right, what you should do better.
Because in my whole life I've never had a single minute of television coaching of any kind from anyone.
And it's mostly because I just I've always thought of myself as just like, I'm an expert.
I'm a journalist.
I don't want to be a TV personality.
And so it meant I had to kind of do it myself.
So I started to watch myself and it was painful.
And then i started saying myself okay, how do i watch myself and how do i actually learn?
What do i?
What am you know?
What am i doing?
That's wrong, how do i do it better?
And so now i do yeah, i watch every show oh, and i watch and i watch and i, with that in mind, like what am, what am i doing right?
What am i doing why?
I've noticed, for example, i've started to slump slightly, maybe a product of aging, so i've got to be more careful about that.
And you know things like that i i you, as I said, I don't.
I try not to be totally clipped and clean, but you also don't want to, you don't want to have too many verbal props like ums and ahs and things like that, which I don't tend to have anyway, but you you, so you get.
You kind of make mental notes if you feel like you did that.
Uh, also with the substance.
I will watch and say to myself nah, the question, the real followup I should have asked at that point is this one rather than that one?
Um, My brother, who used to be a great tennis player, used to say this about practicing.
He said, you have to have purposeful practicing.
You can't just go out onto a tennis court and you're just knocking with somebody for an hour, two hours, and you say, why am I not getting better?
What you have to say to yourself is, my backhand is weak.
My strategy to do something about that backhand is going to be, I'm going to focus on the backhand.
I'm going to start by forcing myself to do Only cross-court backhand.
Then I'm going to do backhand down the line.
Then I'm going to see if I can switch back and forth.
Then I'm going to try and see if I can get it back deeper than I'm Like.
If you do all that play for two hours three times, then your backhand will have gotten better.
But not if you just get on there.
So I sort of approach you know, writing and TV like that, saying to yourself if you're watching yourself, you're watching with the purpose of saying what did I do wrong.
How do I do it better?
What should I, you know, what should I put in, put into my head when I'm doing it next?
Yeah.
It's a great answer.
If I invited you back to Yale and I said, okay, you're going to do one semester writing seminar.
The people are going to learn to do what you do.
How do you structure that curriculum?
What are the core curriculum? pillars of emphasis that you're trying to give the students?
It's a great question because I have thought about it.
And I think that, at the end of the day, I would probably assign a lot of very good writing, more than anything else.
I think that writing is one of those things that you have to absorb an understanding of what good writing is By by looking at it.
I don't believe that there's a set of 20 rules.
Some of them are useful.
Like if you look at Strunk and White, and I actually prefer this guy.
William Zimzer called On Writing, which I think is better.
What I give most almost everybody who works for me is a copy of George Orwell's Politics and the English Language, which is a wonderful essay on language and politics and how to write about politics, but it's also beautifully written.
And so it's both giving you some important lessons, but it's actually showing you in the writing itself how to write.
I think that helps more than anything else.
You know, I think about my, my career, and I started to write when I was in in school and in high school, for sure.
I started a little, uh, news, uh, a magazine, uh, in school.
Um I I was writing when I was in college.
I wrote my first op-ed for the New York times when I was um in graduate school at Harvard, I was, I think, 24 years old.
Um, And it was just.
You know, it's just like a lot of writing and you know there are things you learn only by doing them yourself and making the mistakes and then doing it a little bit better and learning from that.
You can't theoretically learn everything.
A lot of it is trial and error.
And I think you can't short circuit that trial and error.
So you have to do it and you have to do it again and again and again.
Well, I'll close here.
I told you about this before, but I want to share with everyone.
So you were talking about the Maya Angelou line.
And I still remember when I was in college, I would go to this thing called the Global Action Summit in Nashville.
And I was, you know, did sports journalism and whatnot.
I didn't know what was going to happen.
I remember there's this guy named Fareed Zakaria who was going to be there.
And my mother was like, oh, you got to meet Fareed and all that.
And I remember sort of waiting.
I was going to talk to you.
And You had no reason to give me the time of day.
And, you know, I had here's two photos from it.
And what I remember so, so much, I have no idea what I asked you.
I have no idea what you said, but I will never forget the. the attentiveness of your gaze.
It was like Tiger Woods looking at a putt.
And we probably spoke for 90 seconds, but for those 90 seconds, I just had your entire world.
And I was so excited to do this because that stuck with me.
And whenever I meet someone, I always think about how I try to be as attentive with people as you were as attentive with me.
And if I can do that, I will have done something very right in my life.
Well, first of all, thank you.
You made my day, my week.
I mean, it's so gratifying that you say that.
I'm touched and I'm thrilled.
But part of it is that I can see you have this.
Human beings are amazing.
They're great.
They're interesting.
Don't, again, have that sense of humility of realizing the person you're talking to is a really interesting person.
And I've always had this feeling.
You can learn from anyone.
You can learn from a peasant in rural India, from a taxi driver.
Everybody has something that they can teach you.
The question is, can you bring it out?
Can you bring it out of that person?
Because that person is an expert on something.
They have a lived experience that that gives them something that they can impart to you.
The question is, can you bring, can you bring it out of them?
Yeah.
I mean, I really felt that.
So thank you for that.
Also, thanks for doing this.
This was, this was great fun, but that, that, that really touched me.
Well, what a pleasure.
Yeah.
Great to meet you.
