← How I Write
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- [00:00]
A
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 takes years. And also that book becomes almost like a part of who you are. It's funny, 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.
- [00:31]
B
Yeah, yeah, they take. They take an enormous amount of time and energy. And so I think I write the books out of two, out of the two forces. One is guilt. There's a part of me that feels like, you know, this is 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.
- [00:56]
A
Is it the rigor? Is it like an act of service to other people? What is it?
- [00:59]
B
It's some combination of those things, like the sense that that's real. 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, 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, in a kind of both in my analytic framework, which obviously I think is the right way to look at it. And that's tremendously satisfying. There's something amazing about that. Bill Buckley, who was a friend of mine, used to say, 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 WR I find painful and arduous and, 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.
- [02:51]
A
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.
- [03:09]
B
Yeah. So I went into journalism largely because of this question, which is what could I write unprompted? So my biggest mentor at Harvard was this guy, Sam Huntington, who's an amazing scholar, one of the most wonderful, 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 6 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 till 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 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 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. 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 Newsweek column about 2000. So it's 25 years. 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 is just because I've done it so much, I can pull up and shoot a lot and relatively easily. The books are a different matter. The books are much harder, much more. You know, you have to plan. 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. 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 is, 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, 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, you know, I tell my research assistant, let's try and find things on this subject. 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.
- [06:58]
A
The obvious question with research assistants is, how do you think about your AI Morals and ethics? 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? It's not allowed into your writing, into your research and thinking process.
- [07:38]
B
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 use Gemini and you ask it like, these are my symptoms. I fed it my blood tests, and it was, okay. These are the three questions you should ask your doctor. It was just mind blowing. It is very good for almost. I mean, for particularly stuff like medical stuff, where there is an answer and it can scope all the sources in the world. It's incredible. But 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. 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. 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, 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. Part of your thinking process involves ingesting. In some ways, the AI can't do that for 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 it's almost like the difference between the AI is producing these extraordinary suits, like Ralph Lauren Purple Label, beautiful suits, but they are kind of off the rack. And what I'm trying to do is really customized, boutique handmade tailoring. And the final point is, in terms of the writing for you, the thing AI can do is have the political courage and the intellectual courage to make an argument, to put your name behind it. 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. Like 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.
- [11:07]
A
Right. Okay, so if we follow this and get to the answer of if we assume a kind of AI singularity type thing, 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.
- [11:29]
B
Judgment, you know, this, this kind of vague. The 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 mom. The AI can't tell you that 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 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, your courage behind. That's the question.
- [12:24]
A
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?
- [12:42]
B
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 analytics, analytic framework that I don't have in 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 2000 word essay. The Wall Street Journal used to run the lead op ed used to be about 1600 words. That's a different thing there. You can be discursive. You can bring up 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, it's an exclamation point that makes people think differently about some important subject.
- [14:11]
A
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?
- [14:39]
B
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, you know, in narrative form almost. So it's not as big a difference as you think you have to. There are some, there are some 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 list or things like that. So 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, like four very different people, and sell every week, 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 gonna tell my personal story or some series of anim. Anecdotes. So how do you tell us? How do you make an idea into a narrative in some ways, a chronological narrative, and how do you sustain it? But how do you then go on interesting side detours that will be of interest and anecdotes. 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. The written word and the spoken word are very different.
- [16:58]
A
Give me the case for tv. You know, it's funny because I. 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?
- [17:34]
B
So I very much approached it the way you did when I started out. I'm a sort of lapsed academic. So you look at my career trajectory, in some ways it's like dumb, Dumber, dumbest, if you want to think in those terms. I start out at Harvard getting a PhD then go to Foreign affairs, then I go to Newsweek, then I go to abc, then I go to basic cable. 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 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 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. You know, 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. 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. And so it's not an accident that politicians try so hard to get, because you're trying to get that emotional connection with the. Because people vote from here, from their gut, not from their brain. And that's. If, 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 got to be able to have it here as well as here.
- [20:11]
A
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, Fareed'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?
- [20:27]
B
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, you know, can kind of do the Oxford style debate very brilliantly and beautifully. I have some training 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. So if you'll notice, in my shows, I don't speak in those completely clipped, precise way that a television anchor usually does.
- [21:27]
A
There's also television voice, which is kind of like pilot voice.
- [21:30]
B
Exactly.
- [21:31]
A
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.
- [21:42]
B
Exactly. And. And what I've come to realize is it might have worked in the past when there was this idea of a disembod, you know, kind of an objective person, just giving you the bare facts. What people now want is a human being, somebody they can understand. They can. And so I've always tried to have this more, you know, let me tell you what I'm thinking about this subject 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 one liner.
- [22:18]
A
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 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?
- [22:59]
B
So there is no ordinary day, there is no average day. My, my, 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 of knowledge. So I spend a lot of time reading, reading books, calling up people, trying to understand 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. I'll try to figure that out, map out what the segment is going to look like. You know, we pre interview 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 you know, 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 Brad, 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, where you, you're actually doing, 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 have, I spent hours that I've scheduled just blank time for me to be able to do that.
- [25:08]
A
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.
- [25:28]
B
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, staying current and ask myself, what are the roots here? 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, 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.
- [25:55]
A
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?
- [26:05]
B
I can't remember if this was at Yale or Harvard, but at some point you start getting just crazy amounts of reading. I think particularly in grad school. And what I came to realize, and this is clear, you know, I'm talking about nonfiction books, obviously, not fiction. You figure out how to read the central argument of a book and to figure out what is the central argument of. And part of that is 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, 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 and like, 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 somebody, 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 use every research note that they ever made. And I don't, 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.
- [27:34]
A
What are those books?
- [27:36]
B
Sam Huntington wrote a book called Political Order in Changing Societies, which is one of the most seminal books in political science. I've probably read it three times. Kenneth Waltz wrote a book about international relations called man the State, and 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 Stephen Pincus on the glorious revolution in England called 1688, which is the year of the glorious Revolution. I read it twice. Its aim is 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 phenomena, 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.
- [28:56]
A
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's doing that. And you get a kind of X ray vision into how a body of work is crafted.
- [29:20]
B
Absolutely. And also you come to. You lose 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 my favorite book, and it was the Great Gatsby and 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 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 Kids. 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.
- [30:28]
A
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're 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, the. 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 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?
- [31:41]
B
It's a love of America, to be honest. I mean, it's. I read Gatsby in America, but, you know, 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 had never read Hemingway, Fitzgerald. When I got to Yale as an undergraduate, I had read Evil and War and Kipling and all those kinds of British writers. And so I wanted to educate myself in America. And I took a bunch of courses in American history 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, 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. 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 tragedy. But, you know, I kind of fell in love with America 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 are lots of attacks from the left saying, you have such a benign view of American power in America. Have you forgotten about Vietnam and Iraq and all the terrible things we did? And. And I have a serious analytic answer to it, which is compared to what America has been, in my opinion, the best superpower or great power in modern history. Because what I'm comparing it to is the Kaiser's Germany and Hitler's Germany and the Soviet Union and Mao's China and the French Empire and the British Empire. You can't compare. The United States added all its power to Costa Rica.
- [34:09]
A
That's right.
- [34:10]
B
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 other countries. And I'm very. And I feel a sort of an affection for it, a pull, you know, and a pride in that. You know, that's one of the reasons I was so, so sad when. When Musk, whatever, his minions, just completely dismantled the usaid, because I thought 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, I have this very strong sense of, of, of a sense that the United States is special.
- [35:17]
A
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 were 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?
- [35:37]
B
So the greatest American journalist of the 20th century is probably Walter Lippman.
- [35:41]
A
And there's a wonderful early 20th century, huh?
- [35:44]
B
He spent, he. So he's 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 that he. 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 this is, you know, extraordinary. And he wrote a bunch of books along the way after that book, A 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 Lippman and the American Century. And it's a great intellectual history of America from 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 mean, I really admired George Will because again, he had this quality of being both a Journalist and intellectual.
- [37:38]
A
I went to a talk that he gave about five years ago, and I think it was Lippman 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 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.
- [38:27]
B
Yes. Yeah.
- [38:28]
A
Based, you know, American conservatism. I was blown away.
- [38:31]
B
And you have his skill exactly right. He has taught deeply about these subjects, and he's condensed them to these, you know, to this very crisp, linear prose that he could. That he delivers in this very, you know, very punchy way. He's, you know, 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 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 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.
- [39:30]
A
I love that, you know. So 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.
- [40:14]
B
I remember once being on a plane, and I was sitting next to 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 thousand percent agree with you. I find that actually every time I go to Earth on one of these trips that I make within 24 hours, I realized 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. But I think the other part is you're interacting with people for whom this is their life. The stakes are totally different from when you're sitting in your university reading about something going on in Brazil and then you go there and this is their lives and figuring out what it looks like for them. Often I find the single most important thing you could do. That's why I still travel a lot and I try to. And 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 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 what, how, who are these people? How are they thinking? How are 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 is 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?
- [42:39]
A
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.
- [42:59]
B
It's a very cool hotel if it has a bouncer.
- [43:01]
A
Yeah, it was like. It was. It was Kettner's in Soho. And. And so he was. He was there. The trend of 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, 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?
- [43:38]
B
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
- [43:39]
A
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.
- [44:20]
B
And to do it right, you're gonna 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. But I think if you don't have that. The Germans called it fingerspiel. The sound of knowledge. I love that word of your finger. You're missing something very important. And I think 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. And he was. I mean, 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 J.D. vance's Hillbilly Elegy.
- [45:27]
A
Right.
- [45:27]
B
But it's that power of just going there and talking to people.
- [45:33]
A
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 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.
- [46:39]
B
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. The US 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 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, you know, they were heritage Americans, as JD Vance likes to call it. Right. Like. And so it's very interesting to look at some of these, the 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 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 are Able to pick up more by this actual, you know, the act of actually just going someplace and talking to people.
- [48:04]
A
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. 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.
- [48:47]
B
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 70,000ft above the sky and all you're looking at is the Earth and you can't see it, it doesn't work either, right? It doesn't work either, or it works if you're trying to point out that the Earth is a planet among many. So the question is, what are you trying to. The question you have to ask yourself is, what am I trying to answer? What phenomenon am I trying to. And what is the level of generalization that is appropriate for that question? Where should I be in the map? Should I be at. 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? And that's sort of like. 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's 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?
- [50:10]
A
Can you tell me about your study? Your study? The photos are cool. You got that Brooklyn woodworker to make, it seems.
- [50:17]
B
I'll tell you exactly what happened. So I live in a townhouse, and we didn't have a lot of money when we got it and couldn't afford to really renovate it. And then over time, as I did better, we did the kitchen and things like that. And then the Post American World. Most of the time, most of my books have been translated, but to be honest, most translations, it's like up to a point of pride. You get the Hungarian edition and you get the French edition. They don't sell that much. They sell 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, 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 got this. Found this woodworker 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 he was a real. I mean, he was a craftsman and really loved what he did. And he sat and we designed it. And then my favorite feature in it is I am a messy writer. And so my desk is always very messy. And it has lots of. 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. 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 the shelf. Because ever since I've watched the My Fair, My Fair Lady, I've seen. I saw Rex Harrison going to get books. 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. But I. You know, it has high ceilings, and so it just. It looks great and it's so much fun to be there. It's like 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. 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, it just. It can be. It's magic.
- [53:20]
A
It's so true. And an environment that pulls you to the person that you want to be.
- [53:24]
B
Yeah, that's a good. That's a good way of. 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. For me, too, it's the. It's. It's what man can do to shape cities.
- [53:45]
A
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 that.
- [53:53]
B
I totally agree. I like it as. Escape is a good word because it implies you come back.
- [53:57]
A
Yes, yes, exactly. Can you tell me about the journalist who worked with your mother in India and what you learned from him? I guess you met him when you were 10.
- [54:09]
B
Yeah.
- [54:10]
A
Last name Singh, right?
- [54:11]
B
Yeah. So Khushwant Singh, he was probably the best known. He 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, 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. You know, 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.
- [54:56]
A
Good chatgpt 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 chatgpt. Here's why it's in New York at this time. Migration patterns.
- [55:08]
B
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. That's what he would do.
- [55:22]
A
Who knows? That's impressive, though.
- [55:24]
B
And 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 stunning. I can tell. He made me learn Wordsworth's Daffodils. When I was, you know, 10 years old.
- [55:40]
A
What does that one sound like?
- [55:41]
B
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 beside 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 the solitude. And then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils. Wow, 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 mellow to. I mean, you know, 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.
- [56:48]
A
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. Just haven't heard it in 20 years. And boom, it pops on and out, every single word.
- [57:13]
B
And it's amazing how the tune helps you remember the words, right?
- [57:16]
A
Yes.
- [57:17]
B
No. And the Greeks, you know, part of what? 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. Raft. And people, one of the reasons you memorized this was it 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 in iambic pentameter and it was in some way rhythmic, you could remember it better.
- [58:00]
A
Yep. Walks, nature, poetry, language. Take me back to that.
- [58:04]
B
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, it also gave me 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 driven, 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. But, 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. He had a kind of wonderfully rounded life that I've always kept in mind. I've always 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. To me, the important thing is not maximizing on any one, on any, on any one metric. It's actually having that balance. It's very Aristotelian in a sense.
- [59:34]
A
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.
- [59:45]
B
So books, depth of thinking, depth of understanding, you know, because with the 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.
- [60:38]
A
Articles, Articles.
- [60:40]
B
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 exclamation point rather than a period is you are asserting something. It has to be something unsettling. It has to be something that disturbing or that tells people something they don't 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, I think you're mostly failing. Now, there is a different kind of article, 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, 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?
- [61:56]
A
Do you watch your television performances back?
- [62:01]
B
So it's interesting you ask. When I started out, I started out, my first TV was on ABC with 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 could not. I never watched myself. I literally couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. I think that, you know 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 it recorded, you record, you say to yourself, that's on me. What am I hearing? I had that same reaction to looking at myself and think, oh, my God, this is terrible. I'm not sitting straight, whatever. And I just found it very awkward and difficult, and it would sort of. 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 should do better. Because in my whole life, I've never had a single 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?
- [63:29]
A
Right.
- [63:30]
B
And so it meant I had to kind of do it myself. So I started to watch myself and it's. 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 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 the same slump slightly, maybe a product of aging. So I've got to be more careful about that. And, you know, things like that. 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 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 kind of make mental notes if you feel like you did that also with the substance, I will watch and say to myself, no, the question, the real follow up I should have asked at that point is this one rather than that one. My brothers, 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 chord 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 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 put into my head when I'm doing it next?
- [65:27]
A
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.
- [65:43]
B
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 looking at it. I don't believe that there's a set of 20 rules. Some of them are useful if you look at Strunk and White. And I actually prefer this, this guy William Zim. Zim Zinser, yeah. 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 in 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 news, a magazine in school. I, I was writing when I was in college. I wrote my first op ed for the New York Times when I was in graduate school at Harvard. I was, I think, 24 years old. 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.
- [67:37]
A
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 Zakari who was going to be there and my mother was like, oh, you got to meet Fareed and all that. That 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, 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 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.
- [68:52]
B
Well, first of all, thank you. You made my day, my week. I mean, it's so gratifying that you say that. I mean, I'm touched and I'm thrilled, but part of it is that I can see you have this, like, human beings are amazing. They're great. They're interesting. 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 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. 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 gives them something that they can impart to you. The question is, can you bring it out of them?
- [69:45]
A
Yeah, I mean, I really felt that. So thank you for that. Also, thanks for doing this. This was great fun. But that really touched me.
- [69:54]
B
Well, what a pleasure.
- [69:56]
A
Yeah. Great to meet you.