Transcription
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 a with an article, with a take, the cycles are faster, right? It's kind of a fast oscillation. With a book takes years and also that book becomes almost like a part of who you are. It's you say you have three children, you also have the books are like 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 they take an enormous amount of time and energy and uh so I think I write the books out of two out of there two forces. One is guilt. There's a part of me that feels like, you know, this 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 I'm I'm wasting my life.
Is it the rigor? Is it like an act of service to other people? What is it?
It's some combination of those things that like 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 that's the real work. So I I I'm being honest like 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 uh that in my professional life. You have to make deep deep dives and you have to kind of be 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 that chapter I must have had to read I don't know you know 20 odd books uh on or around the French Revolution. A bunch of academic articles my research assistant found me other uh excerpts on 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 50page chapter on the French Revolution or 40page chapter on 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 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 uh provocator. 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. He he I'm somebody more who likes to have written. The actual act of writing I find painful and arduous and uh 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 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 projects. They're sort of in that Eisenhower matrix, important but not urgent category.
Yeah. So I I went into journalism largely because of the the because of this question which is what you know could I could I write um un unprompted. I I had so my my my biggest mentor at Harvard was this guy Sam Huntington who's an amazing scholar one of the most one of the most extraordinary uh social scientists of the 20th century and he lived as it turned out I I had a little tiny uh studio apartment in uh in Boston and he lived a few a few blocks away from me. He lived in a townhouse uh and he used to get up every morning at 6:00 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. It was mostly books and he would he would work there till about 10:00 for 4 hours and then he would take the subway uh the T into Boston. Um and his explanation to me was like you 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 you know have lunch with whoever you have. But you got to start with and I watched that and I thought to myself I can't do this. I am not motivated. I cannot 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 another sentence, another word, you know, 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 I need some structure. And the 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. Um, I started writing my Newsweek column about Yeah. 2000. So it's 25 years. Um, that's an amazing structure and it you know and like anything in life you get better at it as you go along. The you know when I started out it would take me half the week to write the column. You know at this point it's obviously I you know it's still a lot of research and thinking but I can sit down and I can in two hours write the column. You know that's that's very very different. So 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 assistants, 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 you know figure out what you want to say uh is it I I've had to put in place more of a structure um and a plan for writing where I used to do it a little bit more haphazardly. I would just go into the archives and you know re read stuff and then you know and then I would just sit down and say this okay chapter one and I would start writing and and then I maybe go back and fill some holes. I can't do that anymore now I have to say to myself you know what do what's the research I need for chapter 1 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 you know I tell my research assistant let's try and find things on this subject objecting that that's a very different way that's all there's almost a teamwork element to it which I'm 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 I'm struggling with it right right now myself. I try to use uh a AI uh 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 you know been dealing with the medical thing and just you know you you use Gemini and you ask it like these are my symptoms. This is that I fed it my blood test and it was like okay these are the three questions you should ask your doctor. It was just mind-blowing.
[snorts]
Um it is very good um for almost I mean for particularly stuff like medical stuff where there is an answer you know there's and and it can scope all the source sources in the world it's it's incredible but you know when you do want to do this sort of very deep dive I'm finding it's not it's not quite as good for a variety of reasons part of it is the access to all the sources is still quite spotted you know it can't 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 the feeling of this is a paper written by a sophomore where he's kind of bullshitting, you know, and it's partly because the because the AI has only the ability to look at the reviews of those books because those are in open source, you know, or an excerpt of the book or so so it's not the AI's fault because the AI is powerful enough to do an amazing job, but there are these constraints. Uh and then the second piece of it is, you know, you're not part of how you think and how you develop your thoughts is you read and you interact. Um you talk to people and so I if I could tell uh Gemini or Chat GPT, this is exactly what I want to argue. Now make this argument and find me the 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 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 um 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 like you know the kind of handmade tailoring and the and the final point is you know in terms of the the writing for you the thing AI can do is have the political courage and the intellectual courage to make an argument and 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 on the because it doesn't want to be controversial but it's also in a sense meaningless if AI thinks one thing right like you you are you are 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 qu 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's the that that to me feels and maybe there's a metaphor there about what 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 and your 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 Fared'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. Uh I 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. Uh what they're looking for is add value. Tell me something I don't know. Make me think about this in a different way. Uh give me some context. Give me a give me give give me some analytic framework that I don't haven't thought of. Give me some history that I haven't thought of now. So that's the the the broader uh 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 have 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 uh the the lead op-ed was us used to be about 1,600 words. That's a different thing there. You can be discursive. You can bring up. When it's when you're writing a newspaper column or a take and these are all in the 500 to 800 word range, you got to it's 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 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 um many of the attributes are the same partly because my columns are very analytic argumentative and again organized around an idea moving you know in in narrative form almost. So it's not as big a difference as you think. You have to there are some there are some um uh 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, a list or things like that. So, you have to be you have to be conscious of those kinds of things. But in substantive terms they it's actually not as dissimilar. Now when you go longer then it's very different. Um I I found you know if I if I give a give a talk somewhere the most difficult talks I've given are there are these speaker series where they sometimes will book uh a bunch of people you know like four very different people and sell every week you know every Monday or something like that. And you 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, you know, I'm an I kind of an ideas person. I'm not going to tell my personal story or some series of anecdotes. So how do you tell a a how do you make an idea into a narrative into a 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 will be of interest and anecdotes and that those that's a 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 and there the written word and the spoken word are very different.
Give me the case for TV. You know, it's funny cuz I I haven't watched a lot of TV um in in 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 my career trajectory in some ways it's like dumb dumb dumbst if you want to think in those terms. I start out at Harvard getting a PhD. I then go to Foreign Affairs. then I go to Newsweek, then I go to ABC, then I go to basic cable.
Um, but I what I came to realize about about uh TV was that it's actually an incredibly powerful medium because um it reaches people both at a scale that that print doesn't reach, but it also reaches them somewhere. um when when you're on TV and in particular 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 a 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 the way I have come to think of it now is TV is a little bit like Japanese haiku the poetry which is you've got small you know few words but you got to get them right and if you get them right those those few words arranged right can have this very powerful effect and TV is the same thing you know if you took the transcript of my show it would fit on one page of the New York Times but you have 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, that they they, you know, there's there's something very different about the way in which people consume television uh than any other medium. And so it's not an accident that, you know, politicians try so hard to get because you're trying to get that emotional connection with the you because people vote from here, from their gut, not from their brain. And that's if again if if you're trying to convince people and I I view myself as sort of being in the in the in the business of public education.
Right?
Then if you're really trying to have an impact, you 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 oneliner and then I was like no Fared's not really like the oneliner 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. Um, one of the things that I have tried to do is to uh is to con to convey my authentic personality because I think that what television uh 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 I c 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 uh 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.
Exactly.
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 and what I've come to realize is it might have worked in the past when there was this idea of a dis, you know, kind of an objective uh person just giving you the the the bare facts.
What right? What people now want is a human being, somebody they can understand, they can and so I've always tried to have this more
Uh, you know, let me tell you what I'm thinking about uh this subject and to and to 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 oneliner.
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 the take to write the column to write whatever book I'm working on whoever whatever ever 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 there is no average day. My my my life is pretty chaotic in that sense. You know I I've got travel. I've got three kids. Yeah. But um the the central part of it is exactly what you were implying the consumption of knowledge 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. Um 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, I try to figure that out, map out what the segment is going to look like. Um, get, you know, we pre-in the guests so that I, you know, we I want to really take that six minutes that I have for each segment. And I want to make sure that we have 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 and you know as much as I can do that um I'm doing that and and I love it. I mean to me the best part about my job is that I get to to do all this reading and thinking and but you have to sk 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 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 you are reading where you are thinking uh where you you're actually doing engaging in in re 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 have 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 stay in current and ask myself what are the roots here where what do I 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 um but it's not like I'm just off the top of my head reading you know sometimes that happens uh you know you're just reading the history of Iran or something like that and the events intersect for 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 partic I think particularly in grad school. And what I came to realize and this is clear, you know, I'm talking about non-fiction books. My my you know obviously not fiction. Um 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 a book. And part of that is you know you you read the introduction the conclusion you ask look at the chapters figure out which are the ones that are the most important. Now that you've read the introduction conclusion you understand what is the where does the fulcrum of the argument lie how do you you know and so can you realistically in two hours crack a 600-page book um and I you know 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 you know, frankly, most people write there's too much detail in the books. They're they're, you know, trying to they're trying to use every research note that they ever made. And we I don't as the reader, I don't need to to do that. There are some books, you know, the thing the other thing I do do. So, it's like a two-fold strategy. One is speed-read or, you know, find a way to extract information from lots of books. And then the ones you think are really really good I I read many many times.
What are those books?
Uh Sam Huntington wrote a book called Political Order in Changing Societies which is one of the most seminal books in in political science. I've probably read it three times. Kenneth Waltz wrote a book about uh 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 it's stuff like that. like um even for this last book Age of Revolutions the to me the most interesting book that I was reading historically was a book by Steven Pinker on the Glorious Revolution in England called 1688 which is the year of the Glorious Revolution. I I read it twice. It is a 700-page as I recall dense academic book and if you look at my book it's like every page is marked up so you know I 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 is I think your brain analytically begins to understand much much more deeply any phenom any subject any. 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. uh and also you come to you lose your first your first impression of the book gives way through a to a much more kind of analytic or study and this is true in fiction as well. I just did a a podcast about you know my favorite uh 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 5 years later and and it for me it took several readings to begin to just realize how beautiful the writing was, how the craft of the writing because you 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.
Wow.
Um, 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 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 [music] 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 going to 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 Fried, 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 [music] 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 mean, it's I read Gatsby in America but you know I came to uh America from India where I grew up. And the the reading I had done I had a good education in India but it was mostly British u because of India was a former colony of the British Empire. So I had never read Hemingway Fitzgerald when I got to when I got to Yale as an undergraduate. uh I had read you know Ewell and War and and uh you know uh 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 of the about the American dream. It was the story about the extraordinary aspirations of of this young of this guy. The the you know the complicated reality of his past that he wanted to leave behind and you know 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 yourself. Um and ultimately there's a tragic element to it. Of course, nothing, you know, no dream is ever completely fulfilled. And of course, in his one ends in 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 when I write write in fact the column you mentioned that I just did I got lots of if you look at the comments and the lots of attacks from the left saying you have such a benign view of American power and America you know don't you have you forgotten about Vietnam and Iraq and all the terrible things we did and you know and my I have a serious analytic answer to it which is compared to what you know America has been a in my opinion the the best superpower or you know great power uh in 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 the the the French Empire and the British Empire. You you can't compare. You know, the United States added all its power to Costa Rica. That's right. But 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 is has done has done better on the world stage than most most uh other countries and I'm very and I feel a sort of an affection for it a pull for you know a pride in that.
You know that's one of the reasons I was so uh so sad when when Musk you know whatever his minions just completely dismantled uh USAID because I 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 in Africa, saving them from AIDS, saving them from TB.
Um, at very very low cost to us. Um, and so I, you know, I I have this um very strong sense of uh of of a sense that the United States is special.
Mhm. Who are 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 were the people who you really looked 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. And there's a wonderful early 20th century. Huh. He spanned he so he's an extraordinary career as an undergraduate at Harvard. He studies with George Santayana this the philosopher by the time he's in his 20s. He founds The New Republic and writes Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points. the the the famous 14-point city. Wow. And and goes on to become the most influential columnist in America through the 60s. Um, you know what Jim Johnson used to call him in to get his advice on the Vietnam War. Um, and in those days you know when you were a newspaper columnist you were writing between three to four times a week. So this you know extraordinary book A Preface to Morals. Preface to Morals is 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 in that in that world um and what I got from him was the idea that to 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 and writing books and thinking about it in these broader terms. Um, and I think he was probably in many there's a wonderful biography of his by a guy named Ronald Steel. It's called Walter Lippmann and the American Century and it's a great intellectual history of America from the from the you know basically the 20s to the 60s or 70s told through the life of this this uh 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 an intellectual. I went to a talk that he gave about five years ago and I think it was Lippmann 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 never in my life had I heard somebody who so clearly had thought in writing and was now giving me the 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 an 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.
Based, you know, American conservatism. I was blown away.
And you have his skill exactly right. He has thought deeply about these subjects and he's condensed them to these, you know, to this very crisp linear prose that he that he delivers in this very, you know, very punchy way. He's, you know, he's he's very skilled at what he does. And and uh I used to read his collections of his columns uh when I was in college and grad school. Um there was an English columnist, British columnist named Bernard Levin who was also amazing. He wrote a very different style, much more personal style. And he wrote he would write columns about you know 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 you could feel his passion. He once wrote a a book called Enthusiasms and it was just a collection of all the things he's super enthusiastic about.
[laughter]
I love that. You know, um 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? Right? 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 uh the the deputy managing director of the IMF who at the time was a guy named Stan Fischer, very famous uh MIT economist and I said to him and he said why do you why are you making this trip? I said I find that you know I if I don't go places I don't feel like I can read a lot about them but there's something different. And I said to him but it must be different for you as an economist you know you've got all the data. And he said, "Fed um I h I thousand% agree with you. I find that actually every time I go to a to a 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, you know, 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 when you go to a place your your 100% of your mind is now fully attentive to to 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 this is their lives and figuring out what it looks like for them. And 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, you know, particularly when I travel for work, I basically just meet people. I can meet I can do a three-day trip and meet 100 people because I'll set up a breakfast with six people and a you know coffee with two people and because my feeling is you know I'll get another chance to see the pyramids.
At this point what I'm trying to figure out is how who are these people how are they thinking how they dealing with the world how they and that is probably 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. You know, 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 the 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 uh it was Chilner's in Soho. And um and so he was he 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 when I showed up in London 25 years ago, 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 I 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 um 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 those 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 and to do it right you 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 finger spiel the sort of knowledge of your finger >> you 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 Loose who's a wonderful FT columnist. He wrote a book um where he just traveled around America. I can't remember the name of the book now, but it was 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 he was desri I mean and and he 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 but it's that it's that power of just going there and talking to people.
>> Did you see Chris Arnod? Have you have you come across this work? So I really like this guy. he um 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 >> 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 Loose, he was able to pick up on something >> that the more intelligencia had completely missed.
>> It's a good example of like I often say to myself, you know, the plural of anecdote is not data. You've got to you've got to look at the data and you know, 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 US is I mean compared to Europe, our you know, our lead has gone greater. Our wages are much higher than Europe's were when we they were once the same. So what's going on? But there was you know there was a discontent because of the the geographical nature of this and partly the demographic nature of this that the people who were being left behind >> were people who felt that they >> you know this so they were heritage Americans as JD Vance likes to call it right like and so so it's very interesting to look at some of these the um sense of dissatisfaction by race in America you know blacks and Hispanics even when they haven't done so well economically are much less dissatisfied because 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.
>> Uh 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 non-fiction, 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. Okay. 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 the part of it is what question are you trying to answer? Right. So a map as you say is a representation of reality. It's not if you go if you go to the point where the map is the same size as the city as you say it's completely useless because but if you go up to the point where the map is you know 70,000 ft above the sky and all you're looking at is the earth uh and you can't see and then right it doesn't work either. So or or it works if you're trying to point out that the earth is a planet among you know among many. So the question is what are you trying to you know the the the question you have to ask yourself is what am I trying to answer? What phenomena am I trying to and what is the level of generalization that is appropriate for that you know 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 the the 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? you know, that and that's sort of like that's what I spend a lot of time thinking about which is what is the right compar and that's what I mean when I say America's been a a terrible world empire except for all the others right that comparative perspective is very important because you know 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 seems >> I'll tell you exactly what happened So, so I I live in a townhouse and I you know we didn't have a lot of money when we did put got it and didn't couldn't afford to really renovated 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 up to 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 occas, you know, you get an occasional royalty check for $500. The Post American World was a bestseller in several other countries like Italy, um, 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. I free money everyone. I had 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 I had this study which had pretty just normal shelves. And I got this found this woodworker in in in Brooklyn who was willing to help sit with me and we designed this uh this study and he found he he he bought English pine from England. uh and uh you know he he was a real what 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 um I am a messy writer and so my desk is always very messy and it has lots of there's a 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 closed so that if you walked into my study, it would just look like there was a beautiful mirrored uh you know kind of a uh there's one one cupboard which has mirrors on it, but the cupboard actually when it opens and those doors slide 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'd watched the My Fail My Fail Lady I've seen I saw Rex Harrison going to get books. Uh, I had to have that. Now, it's a tight, it's a small room. It's smaller than the room we're in right now. Um, but I, you know, it has high ceilings and so it it just it looks great and it's so much fun to be there. It's like the room I spend the most of my time in. Um, and after I was able to do it, it just gave me that really profound sense of how the the shape the 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 that if you if you can create the right environment for you, um it just it can be it's magic.
>> It's so true. And an environment that pulls you to the person that you want to be.
>> Yeah, that's a good that's a good way 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 uh has that effect. I'm sort of like an urban guy for me. Me too. It's the it's it's >> what man can do to shape the environment.
>> 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 nature.
>> I totally agree. I I like it as escape is a good word because it implies you come back.
>> Yes. You know.
>> 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.
>> Yeah.
>> Last name Singh, right?
>> Yeah. Kushwan Singh. He's probably the best known uh became certainly the best known journalist in India. He was a novelist initially. Wrote what is still the best novel about the the partition of India. You know, India Pakistan uh called Train to Pakistan. It won a big um uh in those days a very big award called the Grove Press Award. Um and be he became quite famous in India and then became the editor of this magazine and 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. You know, he would he would loved nature and he we'd go on these walks and he could identify birds and 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 GBT. Here's why it's in New York at this time. Migration patterns.
>> 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 of a I don't know what."
>> That's that's what he would do.
>> Who knows? That's impressive though. And and he would he would just recite poetry. Wow.
>> Uh 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 Yeah. He made me uh learn Wsworth's daffodil 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 veils 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 neverending line along the margin of the bay. I gazed and gazed but little thought what wealth the show to me had brought. And often on my couch I lie in vacant or impensive mood. They flash upon that inward eye that is the bliss of solitude. And then my heart with pleasure sing with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils. Wow. And then oh Byron she walks in beauty like the light of cloudless climbs and starry skies and all that's best of broad dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes thus mellow to I mean you know I mean I I wish I could do more but what's stunning to me is the ones I remember best are the ones I 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 the 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 know 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 part of what uh in a truly oral culture, the 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 uh the Odyssey, I think, where there is a section where um he tells you how to build a raft and people, you know, one of the reasons you memorize this was was a way remember there were no >> you 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 iniamic pentameter and it was in some way rhythmic, you could remember it better.
>> Yeah. Walks, nature, poetry, language. Take me back to that.
>> So, you know, my father was a very impressive Mai, very busy. um and for some reason was not such a you know he he he was very good father but he was not a mentor in that way and Kushwan Singh uh was this guy who enjoyed you know hanging out with 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. Um and it it also gave me a a feeling for like what a 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 not driven econ you know he was not trying to get rich he was he wanted to be politically active in India and make an impact and all that he was a politician lawyer type um but but Kushwan Singh you know was somebody who wanted to do well professionally wanted to write important things but also wanted to have his time for for nature also wanted to get his tennis game in you know he had a kind of wonderfully rounded life um that I've always kept in mind. I've I've always, you know, tried to make sure that I don't get so off track in one area that I lose that ability to have a rich life. I to me the important thing is not maximizing on any one uh on any on any one metric. It's actually having that balance. It's very Aristotilian 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 you know because with a book what you realize is um particularly a great book that to understand a phenomenon really well you you know you really need to go get get deeper. you need to understand there's layers and layers of uncovering. Um it no no simple answer is usually the 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 some or or or or brief construct if somebody asks you why why did the French Revolution happen? But you but 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.
>> Mhm. Articles
>> Articles I think as I said you know if you think about the really short article it's an exclamation point. You are you are making one point and the reason I say an exclamation point rather than a period is you are asserting something. You are you it has to be something unsettling. in your lives. It has to be something that disturbing or that that tells people something they don't know that, you know, that 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, uh 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 th those that's a diff that's in its own category but I mean analytic argumentative pmical writing uh of of the kind that you know for example now vastly populates the internet
>> TV
>> TV is I 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 what what how they feel about you. Maya Angelou once said this um when she was at a 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 performances back?
>> So, it's interesting you ask. When I started out, I started out my first TV was on ABC with the George Stephanopoulos round table. I used to do it every other week. Um, and I got to know George Will in person in in in those days cuz I would sort of argue with him on on that show.
>> Um, and I think for three years I could not I never watched myself. I literally couldn't do I couldn't do it. I think that you know that what people say about when you listen to yourself there's something about your internal ear hears a different voice and so when you hear recorded you record you say to yourself that's on me what am I hearing
>> uh 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 um it would depress my confidence level. And so I thought to myself, this is not I'm not going to do this. And then I started to realize somebody told me, you know, you're only going to get better if you watch yourself and ask yourself what you what you're not doing right, what you [clears throat] should do better. Because in my whole life, I've never had a single uh minute of television coaching of of any kind from anyone. and and it's mostly because I just have always thought of myself as just like I'm I'm an expert. I'm a journalist. I'm I'm not a I don't want to be a TV personality, you know,
>> right?
>> Um and so it meant I had to kind of do it myself. So I started to watch myself and it's and it was painful.
>> Um and then I started to say to myself, okay, how do I watch myself and how do I actually learn? What do I what am I, 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 and I watch and I watch and I with that in mind like what what am I doing right? What am I doing wrong? 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. here. 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 a's and things like that, which I don't tend to have anyway, but you you so 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, no, the question, the real followup I should have asked at that point is this one rather than that one.
>> Um my brother who's used to be a great tennis player used to say this about 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 or two hours and you say why am I not getting better?
>> Right?
>> 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 crosscourt backand. 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 it's 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 pillars of emphasis that you're trying to give the students?
>> It's a great question because I 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 you have to absorb uh 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 white and I actually prefer there's guy William Zim Zim >> called on writing which I think is is better.
>> Um what I give most almost everybody who works for me um is a copy of George Orwell's politics and the English language >> which is a wonderful essay on 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 uh 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 in in high school for sure. I started a little uh news 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 a 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 uh line and I still remember when I was in college, I would go to this thing called the Global Action Summit in in 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 Fared Zakari was going to be there and my mother was like, "Oh, you got to meet Fared and all that." And I remember sort of waiting. and I was going to talk to you and uh 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 you know, 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 cuz that stuck with me. And whenever I meet someone, I always think about how I try um 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 my week. I mean, it's so gratifying that you say that. I mean, I'm I'm touched and I'm I'm thrilled, but I'm part of it is that and I can see you have this like human beings are amazing. They're great. They're interesting. Like, you know, um don't again have that sense of humility of realizing like the person you're talking to is a really interesting person. And I've always had this feeling people, you know, you can learn from anyone. You can learn from a peasant in in in rural India from a taxi ride. Everybody has something that they can teach you with. The question is can you can you bring it out? Can you bring it out of that person? Because that person is an expert on something. There's they have 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 at them?
>> Yeah. I mean I really felt that. So thank you for that. Um also thanks for doing this. This was this was great fun. But um that that that really touched me.
>> Well, what a pleasure.
>> Yeah.