← Smart Women, Smart Power
Smart Women, Smart Power
The Global Leadership Reset: AI, Allies, and a Transforming World
00:43:37
Emily Harding, sat down with Mishal Husain to explore major geopolitical trends that have emerged in 2025, from artificial intelligence to the shift in global leadership.
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- [00:00]
Michelle Hussain
Foreign.
- [00:14]
Emily Harding
Hussain has sat down with well known global figures from Meghan Markle and Prince Harry to Mark Carney and Elon Musk. She is known as one of Britain's best interviewers with a talent for blending curiosity and tenacity into every conversation. Today she's the editor at large for Bloomberg Weekend and the host of a new video podcast series called the Michelle Hussain Show. She commands the attention of powerhouse figures and she is a powerhouse herself. We are thrilled to have her at CSIS today. I'm Emily Harding, vice president of the Defense and Security Department here at csis and I'm your guest host. This is Smart Women. Smart Power. So first off, this must be strange for you for the roles to be reversed. I get to interview you instead of you interviewing someone. Are you ready for this? You good?
- [00:58]
Michelle Hussain
I am. But I have to say, say it always gives me that sort of little frisson of apprehension, which I think is a good thing for someone who's usually on the other side of the table and the other side of the camera or the microphone, because it does make you think about how it is to be the one answering the questions. And overall, I think answering the questions is harder than asking them.
- [01:22]
Emily Harding
Absolutely. This is why I'm in the privileged position today. Well, anytime you want to stop and ponder, you stop and ponder. I think we have a great lineup of questions to get into today. But first, congratulations on the success of your new show with Bloomberg named after you, the Michelle Hussein Show.
- [01:36]
Michelle Hussain
Yeah, thank you. Yes, it's been an extraordinary feeling to have a new project at this time in my life and to be much more in the international affairs zone because that's where I began my career. I spent a long time at the BBC on the international side. And then for the last 10 years plus, I've been working on one of the BBC's premier radio programs domestically. And so I was really immersed in, in the UK political scene. So now I'm kind of back out where I began and in a different organization and at an extraordinary time in international affairs.
- [02:12]
Emily Harding
Absolutely.
- [02:12]
Michelle Hussain
It's quite a moment.
- [02:13]
Emily Harding
You're going to bring a wonderful fresh perspective. I was struck by your recent Instagram post. You said that you have four different episodes on your mind at once, finishing touches on one. You've just done a bonus holiday one two kickoff 20, 26 episodes. That is quite, quite a lot. You regularly sit down with world leaders, business titans, cultural icons. Tell me about these characters. These are some big personalities that you get to sit down and swap stories with.
- [02:39]
Michelle Hussain
Yes. And each one is different and requires not just different preparation, but a different mindset in how am I going to really try and bring this person out? Let's take politicians earlier. I was talking to Keir Starmer a few months ago, as it happens, on a really extraordinary moment. The Israelis had started strikes on Iran that very day. And I was going into Downing street with that kind of atmosphere, hoping the Prime Minister would still fit us in. And he did. But then with the Michelle Hussein show, we launched with Mark Carney, and I'm always conscious of, most people will have something prepared that they want to tell you, and your job is to get under their skin and to bring out something different. And the beauty of the way that I work now is that you have time. You sit at the kind of time that we're going to spend together is also the kind of time that each episode of my podcast is. So that means that you want to get to the kind of zone that is far beyond what the day job is. You want to get to their hinterland. You want to get to something about their family, even their childhood. And I often think of it as the answer to the question that I've been asked so often over the years. When I interviewed someone for much shorter segments afterwards, people would say, but what were they like? You know, what were Prince Harry and Meghan Markle like? And I would fill in around the edges, or I would do the coloring in around the interview. Now I feel I get to do the coloring in as part of the conversation.
- [04:08]
Emily Harding
So what is your strategy to get into those real conversations as quickly as possible? I mean, humans, generally speaking, don't love confrontation. You've got to kind of ease into it. I've noticed with your show that you have a very gentle touch that seems to really get people to open up.
- [04:23]
Michelle Hussain
You definitely have to pick the ways that you're going to get things. Like, for example, when I talked to Elon Musk, he was still working with the administration. He was still in charge of DOGE at the time, and he'd been doing it for a few months. And there was lots of evidence about those who'd been affected by the cuts at Doge. And I thought, look, I could. I have to make a choice here. Which of these avenues am I going to pick to explore? And I thought, okay, he was brought up in South Africa. I'm going to choose AIDS funding and the cuts to pepfar set up under George W. Bush. And because he will have seen the impact of HIV AIDS in the country.
- [05:04]
Emily Harding
Absolutely.
- [05:05]
Michelle Hussain
That he grew up in and so I chose to pursue that avenue for the reason that I thought it would resonate with him in a way that if I bring up environmental protection or air traffic control, it might not necessarily in the same way. And of course, it was also a very human example. So there are some choices to make ahead of time, but you also need to retain the spontaneity.
- [05:26]
Emily Harding
Right.
- [05:27]
Michelle Hussain
How am I going to respond to something unexpected? The person says. So somewhere between the preparation and the spontaneous moment is the sweet spot.
- [05:36]
Emily Harding
Elon Musk has never done anything unexpected at all. So I'm sure that didn't happen there either. So as you've had these wide ranging conversations with all of these world leaders, what has emerged for you as the big themes of the last year?
- [05:50]
Michelle Hussain
Well, what, what a time it is. And, you know, largely that's because of what's been happening in the city that we're talking. The Trump administration's interactions and attitudes to allies as well as adversaries has been really difficult for countries around the world. And I felt that most strongly when I was talking to Mark Carney, who was absolutely explicit when he didn't just say, this is a, you know, this is an interesting time, or this is a challenging time. He said, we are in the midst of a rupture in the world order. And he said Canada did well out of the last world order. And he was explicit about how much has been upended. Canada having to think really hard about how it trades east and west rather than south. Right. That means infrastructure, that means ports, it means your supply lines, all of these things which are long term projects. You end up having to think about them as fast as possible. But I have to say, Emily, look, my own background, my family came to the UK from Pakistan. My family was deeply affected a generation back by the end of the British Empire in India, the partition of India, the birth of the independent nation states of India and Pakistan. So I think I've always grown up, I lived in the Middle east as a child. I've always grown up knowing that that world order that suited so many Western countries so well didn't necessarily suit other parts of the world. And it's quite easy to say for some of America's allies to say, you know, this is all, this is a really hard time. And we'd like the old order back. But, you know, that was not a place of universal peace and security where everyone felt heard. And we're never going to have a world order where everyone felt heard. But perhaps this year, this past year has done something Valuable in causing a lot of much needed reassessment of relationships and values and what matters and who your friends are and maybe not friends who you have common interests with at a given moment in time and how much you can make out of that. Because all nations have interests and are entitled to pursue those interests through lawful and fair means, which gets us into.
- [08:08]
Emily Harding
A. Lawful and fair means.
- [08:10]
Michelle Hussain
Which gets us into a question of subjectivity and perception. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, it's an extraordinary and fascinating time in international affairs, to be sure.
- [08:20]
Emily Harding
I think that idea of creative destruction has won the Nobel Prize. Right. There is a moment where you have an opportunity to build something new which can be really exciting, but while you're living through it, it feels very unstable. And, you know, I myself consider myself a staunch internationalist and I believe that America can play a leadership role in the world. We also have to listen to our allies and work with our allies. It has been really interesting to have interactions with European colleagues and talk to them about this current moment and how they are thinking about a world where the US is absent, where the US is not actually leading, and what that looks like for them. One of them joked to me that they think that Canada has relocated itself somewhere between France and the uk, as opposed to in the north of the United States.
- [09:09]
Michelle Hussain
Yeah, but, you know, Richard Moore gave me his first broadcast interview soon after stepping down as. As the UK spy chief. And I thought there was a really interesting note of realism in part of what he said, which was that it's quite easy to be really worked up about countries like Russia and China spying on countries like the UK and the United States. But the note of realism that he gave is he said, I tell politicians all the time we are engaged in espionage too, therefore we can't be too evangelical about what's allowed and what's not allowed, because we are also engaged in the pursuit of information through lots of means that we can't necessarily talk about, but are going on.
- [09:59]
Emily Harding
Oh, absolutely. Whenever I grew up in the world of intelligence, right. And whenever something would leak out into the press, we would always make the joke of, oh, I'm shocked, shocked to see there's gambling going on here, you know, but. But of course, you know, all countries are gonna. Are gonna spy against each other all the time. I wanted to ask you, though, where in the Middle east did you grow up?
- [10:16]
Michelle Hussain
I grew up in the uae. My father was a doctor and he had left medical school in Lahore in Pakistan. And at that time the UK was recruiting doctors. The UK's had a desperate need for doctors from overseas for quite, you know, for decades, since it's something that it's trying to change and now have more homegrown doctors. But he came to the UK to, as a, you know, two years out of medical school and he thought he'd work in the National Health Service for a few years. And then, in fact the. Then the Gulf states and that region was opening up in the early 70s, so we moved there. And I had an expatriate childhood, but one I think that's really linked to ending up in international journalism, because when you're part of a diaspora community, you do have a real need for news. News is part of what connects you in the age before social media and before very much before cable TV. Right. I'm talking about the 70s and early 80s, so, you know, the thirst for information. I saw my parents live with that. I remember overhearing their conversations. They were talking about the assassination of indira Gandhi in 1984 or of Anversadat, the Egyptian leader. And so I knew that these things were important. And I think somewhere I went to university to do law, as you can do law as an undergraduate in the uk. But when I thought, okay, I don't want to be a lawyer. What else can I do with my life? I think there was a natural instinct of like I'd grown up with news and therefore maybe this was an area in which I could make my own professional life. And so it proved.
- [11:48]
Emily Harding
And the UAE has changed dramatically since your childhood. I'm sure you watch that whole arc.
- [11:52]
Michelle Hussain
Yes, but also like physically like the reclaiming of land, the actual physical expansion of the, of the country and of course, incredibly, you know, glossy architecture and, you know, we used to go on camping trips into, into the desert both in the UAE and in Saudi Arabia, where I, where my parents subsequently moved. And of course that's still possible today, but it's. We had a much simpler life than life in that part of the world has now become. For sure.
- [12:20]
Emily Harding
Yep, for sure. So I also wanted to ask you about AI as one of these big trends that we've seen emerge. Several of your guests on the show have talked about it. It's a lot of the work that we do here at CSIS as well. There's no question that one of the big themes of 2025 was AI and I suspect 2026 is going to be just a rising trend that way. Time magazine crowning the architects of AI is the 20 the year. So what do you think about this emerging AI trend, especially for people in the field of journalism and in creative passions like yours.
- [12:51]
Michelle Hussain
Well, two of the guests on my podcast so far are in this field. One of them, Fei Fei Li, the so called godmother of AI is, is in that time group as the only woman in the group. And I also have spoken to Mustafa Suleiman, Microsoft's AI chief. And I think in those conversations with Faith Ali, I was so interested in the development, that question of how we got here, because her work, her organizational work, trying to figure out how do you teach computers? You need to organize the world in some way to help computers learn. And she figured out that she took from linguistics and from psychologists and figured out that you, that objects, you organize objects into categories. And she started training computers in that way and that led to so much of what we see now, especially because she put her work into the public domain, which she didn't have to do, and that enabled other developments. So I'm fascinated with the journey of how we got here, but also fascinated with how people like Fei Fei Li and Mustafa Suleiman see the world and what they are working on that we are going to be able to use. Right. So when Mustafa Suleiman talked to me about autonomous agents, and he believes that an autonomous AI agent will soon be able to make purchases on our behalf, probably checking with us just before it presses the button on our credit card. I'm really interested in all of that because I have a family, I'm the mother of, you know, three now pretty much grown up young men. But anything that makes my life easier in that kind of administrative way, I'm here for it. So I'm, I'm always doing the kind of, I want the personal takeaways from this as well as how are we going to regulate this? Do our politicians even understand that? I mean, the question I've asked both of them, but both those two guests, and I didn't really get an answer, is what do politicians ask you? Because I suspect when they sit like this and they're talking to politicians, they're probably speaking a language the politicians don't get at all, which for the most part suits them because they're in the driving seat.
- [14:52]
Emily Harding
Yep. In my previous job I was a staffer on Capitol hill in the U.S. senate. And one of our critical roles was sitting down with, you know, senators who are very smart but are a mile wide and an inch deep and few of them have a technical background.
- [15:08]
Michelle Hussain
And you had to brief them.
- [15:09]
Emily Harding
Yeah. And you have to talk them through, what does this mean? What are the implications of this trend. If you're going to sit down with a witness, this is how you should be thinking about the questions that you need to ask and just, you know, ask, ask me all your stupid questions right now so that we can figure out the baseline of what you need to know and then take that forward into a really hard hitting hearing. Because that's their job. They need to ask those really hard questions and get real answers, much like your job. Yeah, I, I hear you, I hear you on the convenience. I had to cook dinner for 20 people recently and what did I do? I went to chat and I said, I want a menu, I want a timetable, I want an ingredient list. And I mean, it's helpful in the little things and the big things.
- [15:48]
Michelle Hussain
I wanted to ask you though, was it really useful, like menu? You wouldn't have otherwise thought of timings that worked well.
- [15:55]
Emily Harding
So I am totally spoiled in that I don't cook and my husband cooks in the family and he's really good at it. So it's very rare that I have to do this. And I guarantee I would have been standing there at the stove with four things burning at the same time. So, yes, I love it.
- [16:09]
Michelle Hussain
So ChatGPT gave you the menu and the timetable and you handed it to your husband to do that. I need to learn from you, Emily.
- [16:15]
Emily Harding
I wish it were quite that easy. Yeah. I wanted to ask you about a moment though with Mustafa Suleiman where he was talking about how he uses AI in his daily life and he said that he does a debrief with copilot in his car on the way home from work and how he, anything that's on his mind, he just has a five minute conversation where he dumps it with the AI and the AI learns how to respond, learns the patterns and can ask you questions and he feels better after it's over. And he said something along the lines of almost like talking to a friend. And when he said that, I paused. A little red flag went up in my head and you could, you could almost hear in your voice a pause as well where you said, you know, hmm, do you, do you see a potential problem there? Is there anything wrong with that? And I was just curious, you know, what was going through your head at the moment. And then what do you think of that potential to lean on AI for an interpersonal relationship that we clearly really all craze?
- [17:09]
Michelle Hussain
It's. I, at the time I was taken aback when he said that. And he, he did also use the words emotional support and something close to emotional support, I think, was the way he expressed it. And it was startling at the time. But when I thought about it afterwards, I thought, so many people require an interaction that they are just not going to get in any form. It's not like there is someone else they can talk to in any way. Right. Young person, older person, perhaps very elderly person, actually. And so therefore I feel like it's not for us to knock it actually if you are in need of. In the same way that, you know, you and I might think aloud. I mean, there are times when you look in the mirror and you're trying to like, I don't know, prepare for a job interview. Ever done a job interview looking in the mirror and trying to. I have, sure, yeah. And, and so I think these are the tools of our age and I think it's really important not to be sniffy about them, which sometimes that is my instinct. And I'm not saying healthy skepticism is not, is not important. It's really well placed. It's also how technology develops and how and how we test technology. But I think there is so much loneliness and lack of companionship and lack of being able to sense check anything. Right. And I think if people are smart enough to turn to AI to talk some things through, good luck to them because it may not be a case of it replacing something they could get somewhere else that may be entirely absent in their lives. And if so, this is a valuable service.
- [18:47]
Emily Harding
I like the idea of it being a practice friendship as well. Some people, I think, have a hard time having a human interaction without feeling awkward about it. And if you could practice with an AI agent, that's great. What I worry about is that so many of the systems in place today are designed first to agree with you and not challenge you. So you'd almost have to program a companion that is going to be agreeable, but then also still occasionally disagree with you and not just tell you that everything you think is right. Otherwise you kind of fall into the same social media hole where it's the algorithm just showing you things you already agree with totally.
- [19:27]
Michelle Hussain
But aren't these the problems that we've had forever? Aren't these aversions of exactly what human beings have lived with? You know, the kind of rubbish lines that we've all had in breakups, you know, it's not you, it's me. I mean, today you hear a version of that and you're like, oh, rubbish line came from ChatGPT. But humans have come up with rubbish lines forever.
- [19:47]
Emily Harding
Well, for ChatGPT got it from the humans with the rubbish.
- [19:49]
Michelle Hussain
Yes, absolutely. So I think that, yeah, I mean, I mean, I think the really interesting frontier of all of this, that either people are really sanguine about the question of what happens when AI gets more intelligent than us. That is, I think, a really interesting divide within the AI world because Mustafa Suleiman would take the view that we need very strict controls around that and Fei, Fei Li's view is different, that essentially we are a long way from that and we will get the AI that we create. So I think, you know, we are on the cusp of this extraordinary frontier which is also now going to. Going to grow exponentially quicker than what we've seen so far. So. Yeah. And also the financial side.
- [20:41]
Emily Harding
Oh yeah.
- [20:42]
Michelle Hussain
What it's demanding in computing power, to what extent those financial investments pay off. We're looking at numbers so we can start tracking that big numbers.
- [20:54]
Emily Harding
We're looking at the economic impacts too. So if you, if you do have this system that potentially could displace a whole generation of workers, what do you do with those people? How do you keep them engaged in a democracy?
- [21:07]
Michelle Hussain
Totally. But most of us version of that or view on that would be that AI is going to make our economies so much more productive. AI has found, you know, savings in energy usage that human beings could never have spotted. So it makes us all so much more productive that he uses the word abundance, which is a very interesting and, you know, compelling political concept to many people that perhaps it means not so much that loads of us will be out of work, but human beings will not need to work as much. If you are in the lucky category of being the ones who benefit from this. And I do worry about inequality in the world because AI is a US China story right now. That is pretty much it. The uk, India, numerous other countries are not really part of this game.
- [21:52]
Emily Harding
Historically, we have not been traditionally very good at redistributions of wealth. So it's going to be a moment where there could be huge concentrations of wealth. And how do you keep a society moving forward when you've got these big divisions? I think it's going to be the question of the next generation. So on that note, you have this wonderful curiosity about individuals and clearly you're very good at working with people. To really get to the heart of the story, I want to ask you a sort of a provocative question, which is that do you believe in the great man? And for the purposes of this podcast, we'll say great woman theory of history. Do you think that people shape history? Or that history shapes events and shapes the people around them. Given the folks that you've interacted with throughout your career, do you see people who are really driving events forward?
- [22:42]
Michelle Hussain
For the most part, I feel that. People respond and grow when they're faced with extreme situations. Not everyone will respond positively or grow in that setting, but I think most of the great men or women we look at in history were faced with extreme times. Winston Churchill is probably a prime example and rose to the occasion. And I think that, you know, in a. In a microcosm of that, we can probably trace that in our own lives. I. I can as well that the. The instances in my professional life which I found the hardest were also ultimately the most rewarding when I became the presenter of. Of the BBC's Today program, which is incredibly scrutinized program, where almost everyone in power in the UK will wake up in the morning, turn on the radio and will listen to that program. You make a mistake on that program, you are incredibly professionally exposed. It's potentially career ending on any given shift, and it was an absolutely terrifying place to step into. But I feel like it made me into a much better journalist because I had to grapple with things at a much higher level than I was used to. And I thought I was a pretty decent journalist before, but the level at which the intellectual level and the external scrutiny, that combination just like lifted my game. And I think I'm an okay person intellectually, but I wouldn't be the journalist I am today had I not had that. I mean, we're not talking like a war zone situation, but in journalistic terms, it was very exacting. So I think that's really the theory of people which I would ultimately espouse.
- [24:31]
Emily Harding
Yeah, people do rise to the occasion. It's absolutely true. I can say the same thing about lots of moments in my career as well, where it's a crucible and it really does spit out a better version.
- [24:42]
Michelle Hussain
The crises made you, do you think?
- [24:43]
Emily Harding
Oh, yeah. I mean, I have a. I've had a real talent in my career for being in the right place at the wrong time. And I have learned that I am a very good stormy sea captain. When everything's going insane around me, I can cut to the heart of the matter and I can lead a team through a really challenging moment. And that's not something you learn any other way. I think there are lots of people who think that they're going to be good in a crisis, and then the crisis hits and it turns out maybe not.
- [25:10]
Michelle Hussain
Will you forgive Me, if I turn the tables.
- [25:12]
Emily Harding
Oh, here we go.
- [25:13]
Michelle Hussain
Okay, I'll ask you which was the most challenging.
- [25:16]
Emily Harding
Oh, man. I mean, that's, it's a hard, it's a hard thing to pick the one that I'm going to talk about though. So when I. My last tour at CIA was 2014-2015, when ISIS tried to take over Iraq. And I had gotten the job that I had leading a big group of people in the Iraq group because at the moment that group felt like they were marginalized, that nobody was paying attention to their issues anymore. You know, they, they wanted me to go and help turn around morale. They wanted to make the team feel loved again and that they could produce well again. So I showed up thinking this was going to be kind of a sleepy account. And then a month later, Mosul fell to isis and we went from being a backwater account. All of a sudden being in the crucible again.
- [26:01]
Michelle Hussain
Yeah, but the thing you were sent to do still really mattered. Right? Because how could that team perform really well if they, if there wasn't a bedrock of community, of description, support, appreciation? How could they do their best work without it?
- [26:19]
Emily Harding
Exactly. And so what you do is you try to make them feel like, first of all, they're listened to, they're heard, they're taken care of. We switched from, you know, not having a lot to do, to all of a sudden being on a 24 hour schedule. So you have to be sure that everybody's going home sleeping, everybody's getting enough to eat, that they're getting a moment to step away from their desks and just, you know, get a minute to breathe. And then you really have to be balancing the workload. You always have a few real superstars who know everything and can do everything well, but if you just use them and use them and use them, then the other people don't get a chance to step up and prove themselves and those people burn out. So you try to find a way to really appreciate everybody's talents and plug them in as a team.
- [27:00]
Michelle Hussain
It's kind of interesting that you were asked to do, to, to do that job, because I wonder, I wonder if they did instinctively turn to a, a woman to lead the team at that moment. I wonder if would a man, I mean, I don't know how many of your male colleagues, would they have been as intuitive or solicitous or as thoughtful of all these? You could regard them as peripheral to the day job, but you know, they're not.
- [27:25]
Emily Harding
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, the. So the agency has gone through a whole evolution from being a very male dominated organization to now being far more balanced. And I think that you see a change inside the organization, frankly. And all these women doing phenomenal things. When the first woman was named the head of CIA, it was a big moment, but it was definitely a crucible for me. And I came out the other end knowing that I could do a very hard thing under a lot of scrutiny with, you know, in really difficult circumstances.
- [27:57]
Michelle Hussain
The UK just has its first female head. Yeah, 6m i6 yeah.
- [28:02]
Emily Harding
She was a Q branch, right?
- [28:04]
Michelle Hussain
Yes. Yeah, I think so. The technology side of it. Yeah, wicked cool.
- [28:08]
Emily Harding
Very excited. All right, so we have to. We have a few more minutes. I want to get to our two sort of normal segments in this podcast. Number one is what's on your desk. So, for example, I just got back from a whirlwind trip to Paris, which was lovely, and I have on my desk now sitting a huge stack of business cards. But two in particular that I wanted to pull out because these were particularly inspiring. The CEO of a company called 3 you0 mind, it's a German company that's looking at fixing supply chains and trying to anticipate potential disruptions for better war fighting. Really interesting stuff. And then Professor Robert Jeek Graff, who I think I probably butchered his name, but he's the president of the International Science Council and he gave a tremendous talk about how this is such a positive, hopeful moment for science. He said that in the 20th century, we spent all our time finding the building blocks and now we have them and we can really build. And I love that as an image. So that's what's sitting on my desk. What's sitting on your desk?
- [29:07]
Michelle Hussain
I'm curious to know whether you, whether you organize your business. I bet you I come back from a business trip or a day and I have all these business cards and then invariably they sit in a pile and I don't go through them in a systematic way.
- [29:19]
Emily Harding
But I think you're trying to get better about that. I'm trying.
- [29:22]
Michelle Hussain
I think you've cracked it. So I brought with me a book, which I think it's not so much because it's this book, but this book is emblematic of the way I prepare for interviews. So this is a very early book by Nigel Farage, who was guest two on my. On my podcast back in October. And as you can see, it's like covered in post itself. And this is. I mean, I have a very wonderful, small and absolutely stellar team. And we tend to often try and track down the book the person might have written a long time ago, for example, because often you can see the way that they've changed.
- [30:00]
Emily Harding
I do love an origin story too.
- [30:02]
Michelle Hussain
Well, not only is it fascinating, it's often really important.
- [30:05]
Emily Harding
Right.
- [30:06]
Michelle Hussain
The person who inspired them or the grudge that they have because of something that happened early in their career can all be relevant. But, but this is a classic way. This, this book really shows exactly the way I prepare because I've gone through it and then I put on these post its and they're all things that I might well get to in the interview. So, you know, canceling people or his father and grandfather worked in the city of London in the heart of the financial district. Or he talks about going out for boozy lunches and he calls them a typical Farage lunch or the plane crash and that in which he nearly lost his life. And so like it's my. And I often put it on the desk when the interview is actually happening so that the person knows that it's a token of my respect and appreciation for their time because it shows that I've done my homework. But it is definitely more than a prop for me. It is, it's a method, it's a way of organizing my brain. And it is also an aide memoir because when you're doing a long interview like I do for the podcast, like 30 to 40 minutes, you're going to cover so much ground you can't work in a shopping list kind of way. But you do need to have something in your mind which is like these are the main bases I need to hit. And so quite often I'll also have a piece of paper in front of me which is a mind map, you know, the person's initials in the middle and then lots of spikes coming off it. You know, Brexit in the case of Nigel Farage, UK Politics, Russia, because he was really under fire at the time because one of his former associates had been accused of and subsequently convicted of, of ask. Of have of having a financial relationship with someone who's regarded as a pawn of Vladimir Putin's. So. So yeah, it's a real. I think it's also probably the kind of we all need our method and to hone our method over time. And my method has changed since. I've moved into a more in depth format because I was previously in Daily News and you'd like you do short interviews and move on to the next thing. But now I'm in more of an immersive World, which is a wonderful place to be. But you need to be able, you need to have some form of organization to remember how that person's story is going to knit together in the final product.
- [32:31]
Emily Harding
So this is a great opportunity for me to say you can in fact watch this podcast on YouTube if you're not already, and if you're only listening, then it is in fact the Purple Revolution by Nigel Farage and it is covered with sticky notes, hence it is.
- [32:44]
Michelle Hussain
Clearly well loved for anyone who's just listening. It's like, yeah, it's about a dozen yellow post, its sticking out of it.
- [32:52]
Emily Harding
So during that interview, there was a viral moment that I wanted to ask you about where he looked at you and he said, listen, love, you're trying ever so hard. You know, as, as, as women of a certain age. I think we've all had those moments, right, where somebody says something like that to you that is both condescending, slightly gendered, and how did you react? What did you do with that?
- [33:13]
Michelle Hussain
Well, it, it came up at a, at exactly the moment when I was asking you about Russia. And he really, really didn't like these questions. And so he was trying to shut it down. But also, whether it's instinctive or designed, he was also throwing in. Yeah, I mean, I could have responded to it and regarded it as inflammatory. I just thought if I, for the sake of argument, if I was to turn around and say, you know, come off it, don't, don't talk to me that way, or we would have stopped talking about Russia and we would have.
- [33:42]
Emily Harding
Probably what he wanted and.
- [33:44]
Michelle Hussain
Which is not what I wanted.
- [33:45]
Emily Harding
Yeah, exactly.
- [33:46]
Michelle Hussain
Because I wanted to carry on talking about Russia. So I've learned over the years, it's not the only time that I've had an honor, you know, either something verging on, you know, something difficult, something verging sometimes on insults or abuse, and you have to, you have to make a split second decision. And for the most part, I've chosen to ignore it and carry on with, you know, with, with my actual train of thought. But when I talked to Elon Musk, it was, you know, that was an example of a, of a difficult moment when I was asking him about South Africa and it was in relation to Starlink. And at that moment, the South African president had been to the White House and there was talk of Elon Musk getting a workaround to South Africa's black ownership laws, which are designed for better representation of black South Africans in commerce and business and in the economy, in the country and, and Elon Musk chose to turn it on me and take me to task and say, those laws are racist. Do you like racist laws? And of course I was, of course I was taken aback. But again, similarly, I thought, it's not about what I think about something. It's just my effort to ask a question that's pertinent. But sometimes you look back in those moments and you think, yeah, maybe I should have paused and said, let's just take a moment and do you really want to ask. Answer the question in that way. But, you know, it's such a deflection.
- [35:22]
Emily Harding
I mean, usually it's the person who's doing this is trying to throw you off so that you don't get what you want, which is the real answer. And I mean, it makes sense to me to just keep hammering at the point and not let them get away with it.
- [35:34]
Michelle Hussain
Yeah, that's, that's mostly the way I've thought of it. And I, and I do think often women probably get more of that than, than men. I can't say that in a scientific.
- [35:45]
Emily Harding
Way for sure, but certainly in a different way. I mean, the condescending bit is what always drives me nuts. The bit about like, oh, you know, sort of the pat on the head, like, oh, look at you asking hard questions.
- [35:56]
Michelle Hussain
Aren't you cute?
- [35:57]
Emily Harding
And it's like, no, this is my job.
- [35:58]
Michelle Hussain
You know, I think I've been very fortunate in my career to have lots of, like, wonderful editors who believed in me. But even then I had one who did believe in me and gave me loads of opportunities. But I do remember as a young business anchor, after I had been anchoring for probably only a few months or years, I was really new to that game. I'd been a producer before, but I remember saying to him, some of our on screen graphics with the markets, you know, maybe we could increase the size of the arrow so it's just more clear, markets up, markets down, and maybe like increase the contrast in the colors. And he said to me, stick to what you're good at, which is presenting, you know, stay in your lane. And I remember being really shocked. But looking back now, he was a, he was cranky, he'd had a bad day. I know he wasn't a bad person. And, you know, I carried on doing what I'm doing and I'm still doing a version of what I was doing then. So it didn't hold me back, but it did. I do remember clocking it and thinking, wow, that's quite something to say yeah.
- [37:10]
Emily Harding
Well, so on that note, people who have sort of helped you along in your career, we always end with a segment on who came before and those who will come after this idea of paying it forward. You recently released a memoir which is sitting over there next to you. Broken My Family From Empire to Independence, which frankly, I came. I cannot wait to dig into it. I'm really looking forward to that. Details your grandparents lives through the end of British rule in India and the 1947 partition. As you mentioned, your father was a physician, your mother was a teacher and a producer. And by the age of 18 you were already reporting in Pakistan, which is an amazing, amazing. I mean, your global story is really fascinating to me.
- [37:48]
Michelle Hussain
Well, yeah, that was my first taste of journalism. Although if I look back even further in time, as a child I was lucky to have intrepid parents or certainly parents who were interested in history. And therefore ever we went, we could never go on a beach holiday. We always had to go and look at ruins and do, you know, character forming things. And when I was eight and we were living in the uae, my, my father was really driven by him. He said, okay, we're going to go on this long car journey. We're going to drive all the way to the UK and we went on this epic journey through countries like Yugoslavia, which no longer exists, but also through.
- [38:24]
Emily Harding
What you were driving from where?
- [38:26]
Michelle Hussain
From the UAE to London.
- [38:27]
Emily Harding
Oh my God.
- [38:28]
Michelle Hussain
Across into Saudi Arabia, up into Jordan, Syria. I remember I saw a man with a machine gun in aleppo. Like an 8 year old doesn't forget seeing a man with a machine gun. Right. Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia. And my father said every night I had to write a logbook. He didn't call it a diary, it was a logbook, like a ship's logbook. He was quite eccentric and often difficult, God rest him. But you know, I think writing this every, every night, and I mean, I loathed it at the time, but I look at it now because obviously I still have this. It's a treasured family possession and I feel it taught me so much. It taught me discipline, my handwriting improved.
- [39:09]
Emily Harding
It's.
- [39:10]
Michelle Hussain
But I, it's also my first journalism.
- [39:12]
Emily Harding
Yeah, right.
- [39:13]
Michelle Hussain
I feel like that was, that was my first journalism. But in answer to your question about people, people of the past and you know, and I love the fact that you, you do that on this podcast when, when I was a teenager and I looked at people on British television, I did clock those who were not white because there weren't many of them. And I remember seeing Trevor McDonald, who's who was then the main anchor for one of the main anchors on British television, who has Caribbean heritage. And then I remember seeing Zainabadawi, who is later became one of my colleagues at the BBC whose heritage is Sudanese and who also had a Muslim name like mine. And somewhere, somewhere in my mind the seed was planted that someone who looks like me and with a name like mine could still grow up to be on tv. And that it stayed in the back of my mind. But I think without them being visible in the, in my growing up years, I don't think I would have had any kind of pattern for what I ended up doing. So that really mattered to me. And then when I joined the BBC, there was a wonderful interview program called Hard Talk, which was an in depth interview program. And I went to shadow the, the presenter of Hard Talk, Tim Sebastian, one day. And you know, anchors, let's face it, aren't really known for being massively collaborative or sharing. I mean, it's generally a fact in the industry, there are exceptions. But he showed me his notes and he said, this is how I prepare and I ask a question, but then I always think if they say yes, I'm going to follow up with this and if they say no, then this is where I'm going to go. And it just let me into his mind. And how you have to anticipate, not over prepare, but you have to go somewhere down the route of anticipating what someone is going to say. And it really, really helped literally to be able to look over his shoulder and look at his notes and demystify.
- [41:11]
Emily Harding
If nothing else, and be like, so this is the path.
- [41:13]
Michelle Hussain
The path is the path because you see the final product, but what's the process behind.
- [41:18]
Emily Harding
Yeah, those moments are so important. So then looking ahead, you have people I'm sure that you're helping along the way too. What kinds of questions do they ask you? What advice do you give them?
- [41:29]
Michelle Hussain
Well, for people in the media, I have on occasion been asked only a couple of times. But the question that really makes my heart sink is where I've been asked. I really want to be an on air person one day. I want to be in front of the camera, I want to be a presenter or an anchor, how should I do it? And the reason it makes my heart sink is I think if you haven't got a bedrock as being a really good journalist or producer or content person before that, then I feel like you just won't have the solid ground that you build the rest of your career on. So yes, someone could put you in front of the camera because of the way you look or sort of a one hit that you had one day, but that's probably going to be built on sand and it's something stage. That house will crumble. So if you haven't built the house properly, I think your chances of having that long term career are limited and you might be very lucky and that that foundation won't crumble for a really long time. But you know, one day that storm will come and so I, I just, I feel like having come up the old fashioned way is really important because you'll have a solid bedrock. So journalism, content, production, that's the best foundation for going on to be in front of the camera or in front of the microphone.
- [42:49]
Emily Harding
Yeah, I mean it's great advice. I think in, in a world of social media, it is tempting to think that everybody can have a shortcut, that you just get to the success, but you don't see all of the hard work that goes into it ahead of time in somebody's Instagram feed. You just see the final. Yeah, I think it's absolutely true. Well, thank you so much. This has been wonderful. That's all the time we have for. I can't wait to dig into your book, Broken Threads. Look for it. Happy New Year listeners. Go forth into 2026 with resolve to conquer all that stands in your way. Thank you so much for being here today.
- [43:21]
Michelle Hussain
Thank you. Emily, it's been a pleasure. Good luck to you.
- [43:23]
Emily Harding
Thank you. Thanks for listening to smart women, smart power. Please subscribe wherever you listen. For more information, head to www.csis.org until next time.