Fareed Zakaria: How to Write Consistently Well | How I Write

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 when you say you have three children, you also have the books are like probably the next thing in terms of importance. Kind of a weird thing to say, but I think that there's something to it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They take they take an enormous amount of time and energy and Uh so I think I write the books out of two f out of there are two forces. One is guilt. There's a part of me that feels like you know, this the part of me that got the PhD and thought I'd be an academic, which is if I feel like if I'm not working on a book, I'm kind of goofing off. I'm I'm I'm wasting my life. Is it the rigor? Is it like an act of service to other people? What is a

Some combination of those things. They're like the sense that that's real scholarship. That's real if you want to be a person of ideas, if you want to be thought of as somebody who's intellectual, that's the that's the real work. So I I I I I'm being honest, like that guilt is part of the motivation. And the other part of it is learning.

Because I find that I learn more when I write a book than at any other period uh that in my professional life. You have to make deep deep dives and you have to kind of be know what you're talking about. So in the last book, for example, there's a chapter on the French Revolution.

In order to do that that chapter, I must have had to read, I don't know, you know, twenty odd books uh on or around the French Revolution, a bunch of academic articles, my research assistant found me other uh excerpts on th from other places, translators from the French and things like that.

I've done all the work so you don't have to. You can read my fifty page chapter on the French Revolution or forty page chapter on the French Revolution because I've tried to digest all that and give it to you. in a kind of both in my analytic framework, which obviously I think is the the right way to to look at it, um, And that's tremendously satisfying. You know, there there's something amazing about that.

Um Bill Buckley, who was a friend of mine, used to say, you know, the great conservative uh uh 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. He he I'm somebody more who likes to have written. The actual act of writing I find painful and arduous and uh and a struggle. But Having written and particularly having written something where you feel like I have digested all that knowledge and was able to convey it.

That's a great feeling. It's a it's a thrilling feeling.

Given that, how do you get yourself to write? What is it that you do on a week-to-week basis? I mean, certainly there's the reality of just deadlines. But then the books are a whole other project. They're sort of in that Eisenhower matrix important but not urgent category. Yeah. So I I went into journalism largely because of the the uh because of this question, which is what you know, could I could I write um Un unprompted.

I I had m so my my my biggest mentor at Harvard was this guy, Sam Huntington, who was an amazing scholar, one of the most one of the most extraordinary uh social scientists of the twentieth century. And he lived as it turned out. I l I had a little tiny uh uh studio apartment in uh in Boston and he lived a few a few blocks away from me. He lived in a townhouse.

uh and he used to get up every morning at six and he would go down to the basement of his townhouse where he had his study and he would start working on the next big book, project, big article he was writing. It was mostly books. And he would r he would work there till about ten o'clock for four hours. And then he would take the subway, uh the T into Boston. Um, and his if his explanation to me was like, You gotta start the day doing the real work. That right.

And then you can go and teach the class and do the committee meeting and attend the faculty meeting and uh you know, have lunch with whoever you have, but you gotta start with and I watched that and I thought to myself I can't do this. I am not motivated. I cannot ha 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 book.

Another sentence, another word. You know. And he was just self motivated and he was doing it every day. And I thought to myself, you know what? I can't do that. I need I need some strength. And the f 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 sh twenty five years. Um I started writing my news week column about yeah, two thousand. So it's twenty five years. Um

That's an amazing structure. And it you know, and like anything in life, you get better at it as you go along. The f you know, when I started out, it would take me p half the week to write the column. You know, at this point it's obviously I s you know, it's still a lot of

research and thinking, but I can sit down and I can in two hours write the column. You know, that's that's very, very different. So The column, you know, and the and things like that, the shorter stuff, um i i i i is b just because I've done it so much, I can pull up and shoot a lot and and relatively easily.

The books are a different matter. The books are much harder. Um, much more you know, you have to plan. And and I've gotten in this last two books, I've gotten good at using research assistance, which I was not so good at earlier. Um, and that has been very helpful because when you've got so many things going on, to have stuff that is set up for you so that you can read it and, you know, figure out what you want to say.

uh is it I I've had to put in place more of a structure um and a plan for writing, where I I used to do it a little bit more haphazardly. I would just go into the archives and, you know, re or read stuff and then You know, and then I would just sit down and say this okay, chapter one, and I would start writing and and then I'd maybe go back and fill some holes. I can't do that anymore. Now I have to say to myself.

you know, what what 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 side? You know, I I have to kind of plan it out like that. And then, you know, m I tell my research assistant, let's try and find things on this subject and th tha that's a very different way. That's all there's almost a teamwork element to it, which I which I'm learning and getting better.

The obvious question with research assistance is How do you think about your AI morals and ethics? Like watching how good Gemini has gotten in the past few months, I'm just blown away by how well it cites its sources. It seems like the hallucinations have gone down. And there's a certain kind of AI, which is AI does the writing for you. And obviously that is like no.

And then there's another kind of AI, which is basically like a kind of glorified Google, which is Google on steroids. I mean, literally what Gemini is, made by the same people. How do you think about? how AI is, is not allowed into your writing, into your research and thinking It's a very good question and I'm I'm struggling with it right now myself. I try to use uh A AI uh not as much as I can, but I try to use it actively.

Partly because it's unbelievable. I mean, it's just extraordinary. I you know, been b dealing with the medical thing and just, you know, you you you use Gemini and you ask it like these are my symptoms, this is your that I fed it my blood tests and it was like, okay, these are the three questions you should ask your doctor or it's it was just mind blowing. Um

It is very good um for almost I mean for spicular stuff like medical stuff where there is an answer, you know, there is it and and it can scope all the sources sources in the world. It's it's incredible. But you know, when you do want to do this sort of very deep dive. I'm finding it's not it's not quite as good for a variety of reasons. Part of it is

the access to all the sources is still quite sp spot. You know, it can't it can't actually look at the thirty 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. Yeah. 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 i th 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. Um, you talk to people. And so

I if I could tell uh G Gemini or Chat GPT this is exactly what I want to argue, now make this argument and find me the the sources, it would be able to do it. But the way you come to your argument. is partly by reading, by talking to smart people, by you know, part of your thinking process involves ingesting. And so in some ways you can't the AI can't do that for you, right? So you'cause you are trying to come up with your distinctive uh 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. Uh you know, it's still it's almost like the difference between the AI is producing these extraordinary suits like uh well you know Ralph Loren purple label beautiful suits. But they are, you know, kind of off the rack. And what I'm trying to do is really

customized boutique, like b you know, with kind of handmade tailoring. And the and the final point is, you know, in terms of the the writing for you, the thing AI can do is have the political courage and the intel intellectual courage to make

an argument and to put your name behind it, right? That is now becoming much, much more significant in a way. First of all, if you ask AI to write, most of the time it gives you uh kind of on the one hand on the because it doesn't want to be controversial. But it's also In a sense meaningless if AI thinks one thing, right?

y y y you are uh y you are y there has to be a human being who is advocating this thing and putting his or her reputation and credibility on the line for that thing. And that AI can never do.

Right, okay, so if we follow this and get to the answer of if we assume a kind of AI singularity type thing. what is the thing that somebody in your shoes what is the skill that will always be scarce that's like focus on Probably ultimately judgment, you know, this this kind of vague qu 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 mo moral political values to be expressing on this subject at this moment?

The AI can't tell you that, right? Because it can give you the best argument for one of six different positions. But which is the right one at this moment in this climate, right? That's the That that to me feels and then maybe there's a metaphor there f about what hu what where human beings can add value, because the AI is at some point going to be able to write those six columns probably better than I can.

But which of those is the right one to present to the world and advocate for and put your credibility and your and your your courage behind that's the question.

So, what makes for a good take? You were doing takes long before kind of the whole Twitter economy was based on them. And as you're thinking through your columns, as you're thinking through especially Farid's take on GPS. What are the components that really matter there? Uh the most important thing is value add. It has to be value added. You can't tell people what happened. Uh I I think you have to understand that particularly when somebody's coming to me.

These are smart, interesting, educated people. They know about the world. Uh what they're looking for is Add value. Tell me something I don't know. Make me think about this in a different way. Give me some context. Give me some analytic framework that I haven't thought of. Give me some history that I haven't thought of.

Now, so that's the the the broader uh kind of mandate that you have to fulfill. On the other hand, a take or a column has to be an exclamation mark. By which I mean It has to have it sh 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 uh essay. The Wall Street Journal used to run uh the the lead op-ed was usually used to be about sixteen hundred words. That's a different thing. There you can be discursive, you can bring up When it's a when it's when you're writing a newspaper column or a take and these are all in the five hundred to eight eight hundred word range.

You gotta it's it's an exclam it's an exclamation point that makes people think differently about some important 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 gonna take the same idea, put it in two different places. What does an article demand? And then what does television demand?

So for a long time I would I would struggle with this and I would think about how the spoken word is different from the written word. But I came to realize that um many of the attributes are the same, partly because my columns are very analytic, argumentative, and again organized around an idea moving, you know, in in in narrative form almost. So it's not as big a difference as you think. You have to there are some there are some th um uh uh mechanisms that don't work right.

Subordinate clauses, for example, you can't start with a subordinate clause when you're on TV, you know, when you're telling the story. Because people don't know, right? You have to have the main clause, you can then qualify it. Whereas in writing you can sometimes invert for effect. So it's stuff like that where you know there are certain things that just don't work when you l you uh you know, a list or things like that. Uh so you have to be

Sure, you have to be conscious of those kinds of things, but in substantive terms, they're acting, it's actually not as dissimilar. Now, when you go longer, then it's very different. Um I've I found, you know, if I if I give a give a talk somewhere, the most difficult talks I've given are there are these speaker series where they sometimes will book

uh a bunch of people, you know, like if four very different people and sell every week, you know, m every Monday or something like that. And you there's usually a hall of three thousand odd people who have paid money to come and hear you speak. It's usually a ninety minute talk, no questions.

And so you have to sustain the audience's attention for ninety minutes. And given what I do, uh you know, I'm I'm an I kind of an ideas person. I'm not gonna tell my personal story or some series of anecdotes.

So how do you tell a us uh how do you t make an idea into a narrative, into a into into a cr uh you know, in some ways a chronological narrative? Yeah. And how do you sustain it and how do you but how do you then go on interesting side detours that would be of interest and anecdotes and that those that's a that's a much different beast where you're trying to construct something and that's more like a broad

essay that one might have written for Harper's or The Atlantic or something like that. And those don't have those qualities. And there the written word and the spoken word are very different.

Give me the case for TV. You know it's funny'cause I I haven't watched a lot of T V um in in my life. We didn't have cable. And then I always kinda 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 But... As I was thinking about your career, c TV clearly has an impact and a reach. What else has made you focus on TV as a media?

So I very much approached it the way you did when I started out. I'm a sort of lapsed academic, you know. So you look at my you look at my my uh career trajec trajectory in some ways

It's like a dumb dumb or dumbest if you want to think in those terms. I start out at Harvard getting a PhD, then go to foreign affairs, then I go to Newsweek, then I go to A B C then I go to basic cable. Right. Um But I c what I came to realise about about uh T V was that it's actually an incredibly powerful medium because um it reaches people both at a scale that that print uh uh doesn't reach, but it also t reaches them somewhere.

Um, when when you're on TV and it particularly if you're a regular presence, people think they know you. People think they have a connection to you personally, and they begin to trust you, and they begin to view you as a kind of guy. That's a very different relationship than somebody just reading an article and saying, oh, that was interesting. That's all 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 broad a broader number of people you can reach. And I came to realize that TV actually in its own way is a very intelligent medium. You know, the the way the way I ca have come to r uh think of it now is T V is a little bit like Japanese haiku, you know the poetry, which is you've got small you know, few words.

But you gotta get them right. And if you get them right, those those few words arranged right can have this very powerful effect. And T V is the same thing. You know, if you took the transcript of my show, it fit would fit on one page of the New York Times. But you have you have the ability, if you do it right, to convey ideas to people in a way that they uh receive them, they're open to them, that they they you know, there's there's something very different about the way in which people

consume television uh than any other medium. And so it's not an accident that, you know, politicians try so hard to get because you're trying to get that emotional connection with the p you're'cause people vote from here, from their gut, not from their brain. Mm-hmm. And th that's if again if if If you're trying to convince people and I I view myself as sort of being in the R in the in the business of public education. Right. Right.

then if you're really trying to d have an impact, you gotta be able to have it here as well as here. So when you say mic 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? Yeah, it's a really good question. Um one of the things that I have tried to do is to uh is to con to convey my authentic personality. Because I think that what television uh does well and what people prize in video is authenticity. And so one of the things I have. tried not to do is

put on a very polished persona of somebody who, uh, you know, can kind of do the Oxford style debate very brilliantly and beautifully. I you know, I have some training in that in that area. I I ca I can do it fine. But I realize that what's more important is that you come across as the person you really are. Uh so if you'll notice in my uh in my shows, I don't Uh I don't speak in those completely clipped, precise way that a television anchor usually does.

Uh there's also television voice, which is kind of like pilot voice. Exactly Hey everybody, we are now on our way to Chicago. Exactly. Uh Donald Trump just did this. It's actually the exact same voice that you're subconsciously trained into. Exactly. And what I've come to realize is it might have worked in the past when there was this idea of a disembodied, you know, kind of an objective person just giving you the bare facts.

What right what people now want is a human being, somebody they can understand, they can and so I've always tried to have this more Uh you know, let me tell you what I'm thinking about uh this subject and to and to do it more as if I'm one part of a conversation. I think that creates a connection, that creates trust more than just the brilliant one line.

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 in production. So there is no ordinary day. There is no average day. My my li my life is pretty chaotic in that sense. You know, I mean I've got travel, I've got three kids. I but um

the the central part of it is exactly what you were im implying. The consumption of knowledge. You know, so I spend a lot of time reading, reading books, calling up people, trying to understand, you know, w how do you think about this issue of somebody who I know is an expert on some subject.

Um, I view that as my greatest value add. So with my show, for example, I've got an amazing team. We talk a lot about who the guests are gonna be, you know, uh try to figure that out, map out what the segment is gonna look like. um get you know that 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 wanna 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 p uh th uh uh 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, write writing, and you know, as much as I can do that. Um

I'm doing that and and I love it. I mean to me the best part about my job is that I get to to do all this reading and thinking and but you have to sc 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 bread. Somebody wants to have breakfast and it's like, no, you know, you need to have time every day where you are you are reading, where you are thinking.

uh where you you're actually doing engaging in in re research actively. And so that's probably I don't know how much of my time, but it's a lot of my time. I have I spend hours that are scheduled just blank time for me to be able to do that.

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 gonna really dive into the slower, deeper currents of history, of geopolitics, of the scholarship that's been done over the decades, the centuries.

I think what I would say uh to be honest is I do it backwards, by which I mean I look at what's going on in the world. I l think about what you stay in carnivan and ask myself What are the roots here? Where do what do I need? And then if I need to go back and read a book, if I need to call up, you know, a historian or something like that.

Um, but it's not like I'm just off off the top of my head reading you know, sometimes that happens. Uh, you know, you're just reading uh the history of Iran or something like that and the events intersect. 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 point.

Yeah, I can't remember if this was at Yale or Harvard, but at some point you start getting just crazy amounts of reading, parti I think particularly in grad school. And what I came to realize, and this is clear, you know, I'm talking about nonfiction books, you know, my my you know, obviously not fiction, um, you you you figure out how to read, how to read the central argument of a book.

You know, and to figure out what is the central argument of and part of that is you know, you you read the introduction, the conclusion, you ask, look at the chapters. figure out which are the ones that are most important. Now that you've read the introduction and conclusion, you understand what is the where does the fulcrum of the argument lie? How do you you know and so can you realistically in two hours Crack a six hundred page book.

Um, and like you know, and I think that's a very important look. W at the end of the day, the ri reason the person is writing the book is to convey some certain ideas. If you have an efficient way of being able to access and absorb those ideas, that's great. And you know, frankly, most people write there's too much detail in the books. They're they're, you know, trying to

They're trying to use every research note that they ever made. And we d I don't as the reader I don't need to to do that. There are some books, you know, the thing the other thing I do do. So it's a like a twofold strategy. One is speed read or you know a bit f find a way to extract information from lots of books and then the ones you think are really really good. Uh I read many, many times. What are those both?

Uh, Sam Huntington wrote a book called Political Order in Changing Societies, which is one of the most seminal books in in political science. I've probably read it three times. Kenneth Waltz wrote a book about uh international relations called Man, the State and War. He wrote two books, Man, the State and War and Theory of International Relations, which I both read at least three times. You know, it's it's stuff like that. Like, um

Even for this last book, Age of Revolutions, th to me the most interesting book that I was reading historically was a book by Stephen Pincus on the glorious revolution in England called sixteen eighty eight, which is the year of the glorious revolution. I I read it twice. It's aim as a seven hundred pages I recall, dense academic book. And if you look at my book, it's like every page is marked up. So, you know, I and I think that that's very important because

Y 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. Uh every now and then you need to do those deep dives. Part of it is is I think your brain analytically

begins to understand much, much more deeply any phenom any subject, any phenomena. It's a little bit like the scientific method. It's like it doesn't matter what you're studying, but how you study it. So I try to do those two things at the same time. The other thing with those deep reads as writers is when you do that, you begin to see the underlying structure and the mechanics of how an argument is made.

You begin to see, okay, this is a good book. It resonated with me. And on the second and third time of reading the book, you begin to see, oh, okay. This is how the writer is doing that. And you get a kind of x-ray vision into how a body of work is crafted. Absolutely.

first im your first impression of the book gives way to a to a much more kind of analytic or study. And this is true in fiction as well. I just did a uh a podcast about you know my favorite uh uh book and it was The Great Gatsby. And you know what I'm struck by is the first time you read Gatsby you have one reaction. And then when you read it

ten years later or five years later. And and it for me it took several readings to begin to just realize how beautiful the writing was, how the craft of the writing because you th You know, maybe it's just me, but I it took me a while to get to the point where I was just thinking to myself, how did this guy at twenty eight write like that? He was twenty eight when he wrote Cats. Wow. Um you know you think about when you think about it in those terms.

And you think about the maturity of the emotional ex expression there. You know, th and that for some reason is not what I thought of when I first encountered it. I you know, it was a completely different thing. It's like you're it's like the new thing and you're trying to figure out what's the plot? What's going to happen to Daisy? What's you know? Right.

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How do you think your love for Gatsby and has ended up in your work. It's a love of America, to be honest. I mean it's I read Gatsby in America. But you know I came to uh America from India where I grew up and the The reading I had done, I had a I had a good education in India, but it was mostly British, um, because of India was a former colony of the British Empire. So I had never read Hemingway Fitzgerald when I got to when I got to Yale as an undergraduate.

uh I had read, you know, Evil and War and and uh you know uh Kipling and all the you know all those kind of British writers. And so I was I wanted to educate myself in in in America and I took a bunch of courses in American history and I and I r read a lot of American literature. And what I found about Gatsby was I thought it was really a story of the about the American dream. It was the story about the extraordinary aspirations of of this young of this guy. The

the the you know, the complicated reality of his past that he wanted to leave behind. And, you know, in in a way, Gatsby's journey is an immigrant's journey. It's like you're leaving the past, you're coming to the big city, you're trying to remake yourself. Um and ultimately there's a tragic element to it, of course. Nothing, you know, no dream is ever completely fulfilled. And of course in his one ends in in tragedy. But

You know, I kind of fell in love with America when I was at when I was an underg undergraduate. And I think Godspeed is very much part of that. And that love of America. I think does inform my work. I mean I find when I r when I re iterate in fact the column you mentioned that I just did.

I got lots of if you look at the comments and there are lots of attacks from the left saying you have such a benign view of American power and America, you know, w don't you f have you forgotten about V Vietnam and Iraq and all the terrible things we did then?

you know, and my I have a serious analytic answer to it is which is compared to what? You know, America has been a i a in my opinion, the the best gr superpower or gr you know, gr great power uh in in modern history, because what I'm comparing it to is, you know, the Kaiser's Germany and Hitler's Germany and the Soviet Union and Mao's China. and, you know, the the the the French Empire and the British Empire. Uh you you can't compare you know, the United States added all its power to Costa Rica.

That's right. But there's some piece of it which is You know, I'm an immigrant who fell in love with America and I do think America is has done has done better on the world stage than most most uh other countries and I'm very I and I feel a sort of uh an affection for it, a pull for you know, and a pride in that. Mm-hmm. You know, that's one of the reasons I was so

uh as so sad when when musk or you're no whatever his minions just completely dismantled uh the USAID. Because I th I thought, you know It's a matter of great pride that the United States is the richest country in the history of the world and also the most generous country in the history of the world, that it was saving tens of millions of lives of

it's the poorest people in the world in A in Africa, saving them from AIDS, saving them from T B. Um at very, very low cost uh to us. Um and so I you know, I I have this um very strong sense of uh of of a sense that the United States is special.

Who are the journalists as you thought about who you wanted to be as a writer, as a leader, as an intellectual, all those sorts of things? Who are the people who you really look to? And I'm curious to hear, who were they and What is the thing that you took from them that you've kind of incorporated into your work? So the greatest American journalist of the twentieth century is probably Walter Lippmann. He's early twentieth century, huh?

He spent he so he's an extraordinary career as an undergraduate at Harvard, he studies with George Santayana, the the philosopher. By the time he's in his twenties he founds the new republic. And writes Woodrow Wilson's fourteen points, the the the four the famous fourteen points that he Wow and and goes on to become the most influential columnist in America.

through the sixties. Um, you know, what uh uh Jim Johnson used to call him in to dis to get his advice on the Vietnam War. Um and and in those days, you know, when you were a a newspaper columnist, you were writing between three to four times a week. So it was you know extraordinary and he wrote a bunch of books along the way. Book a preface to morals?

Preface to Morals, a amazing book written in the twenties, during the jazz age, and it's about Wha w 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. Yeah. And think about the world we're living in today, right? Like we are still in that in that in that world. Um And and what I got from him was the idea that to you you could be a journalist and you could be an intellectual as well. that there was a way to be addressing day to day issues, but you could also be looking over the horizon and and writing books and thinking about it in these broader terms. Um

And I think he was probably in many there's a wonderful biography of his by uh a guy I couldn't name Ronald Steele. It's called Walter Lippmann and the American Century. And it's a great

intellectual history of America from the from the, you know, basically the twenties to the sixties or seventies, told through the life of this this uh one guy. And then more recently I would say The people who I I mean, I really admired George Will, because again he had this quality of being both a journalist and int intellectual. I went to a

talk that he gave about five years ago. And I think it was Littman who said, I don't know what I think on that subject'cause I haven't written about it yet. Right? Okay. So so I'm at this talk, it's at the L B it's at the L B J 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. Yeah. I was blown away. Okay. And you have his skill exactly right. He has thought deeply about these subjects and he's condensed them. to these you know, to this very crisp linear prose that he ca he that he delivers in this very you know, very punchy way. He's in a he's he's very skilled at what he does. And and uh I used to read his collections of his columns.

uh when I was in college and grad school. Um, there was an English columnist, British columnist named Bernard Levin, who was all also amazing. He wrote in a very different style, a much more personal style and he wrote he would write columns about d you know, i his enthusiasm for operas and for walking in the countryside and things like that. But somehow he was able to make it all really interesting.

Because again, there was a kind of authenticity. You you could feel his passion. He once wrote a cab uh a book called Enthusiasms, and it was just a collection of all the things he super enthusiastic about it.

I love that. You know, um, I want to ask you, how do you walk through a museum? Because I'm interested in, okay, let's say that you wanna 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 Cowan, 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 It's such a fancy word. I'm sorry. An orthogonal way of looking at the world and teaching public education.

I remember once being on a plane and I was sitting next to the deputy managing director of the IMF, who at the time was a guy named Stan Fisher, very famous uh MIT economist. And I said to him, And he said, Why do you why why are you making this trip? I said, I find that you know I if I don't go places, I don't feel like I can read a lot about them, but there's something different.

And I said to him, But it must be different for you as an economist. You know, you've got all the data. And he said, Farid, um I h I thousand percent agree with you. I find that actually every time I go to a to a p 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 col you know, it'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 when you go to a place, your your hundred percent of your mind is now fully attentive to to to that. But I think the other part is you're interacting with people for whom this is their life.

Right? The the the stakes are totally different from when you're sitting at your uh in your university of reading about some you know something going on in you know in Brazil and then you go there and this this is their life. Figuring out what it looks like for them and w and it's it often I find the single most important thing you could do. That's why I still travel a lot and I try to and I when I travel, you know, particularly when I travel for work. I basically just meek the- Yeah.

I can meet I can do a three day trip and meet a hundred people because I'll set up a breakfast with six people and a you know, coffee with two people and because my feeling is, you know, I'll get another chance to see the pyramid. At this point what I'm trying to figure out is how who are these people, how are they thinking, how they're dealing with the world, how they

And uh that is probably the and then you build up a network of contacts through that. So now what I do is if something happens somewhere, I'll email or text or call, you know, this guy who I met in In Chile, who's really interesting about about Latin America and you know, what are you thinking? What do you is there something you've read that I should be paying paying attention?

Ain't that right? So I've spent a lot of time in London the last year and a half, and I've just been I've been very surprised by a certain kind of pessimism that is there. And, you know, you could read about it, whatever, but there's two things that stand out. The first was I stayed at a hotel and I just got to know the bouncer. He'd been a bouncer at this hotel for twenty five years. He was from Yeah.

It was like uh it it was uh it was Kettner's in Soho. And um and so he was he he was there at the front 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 when I showed up in London twenty five years ago, seemed like people were generally happy to be here and now people are generally unhappy to be

And, you know, what do you make of that? Right? Maybe he's aged, maybe the whatever, right? And the next night I I I love Guinness and so I always go out for a pint of Guinness and Went out to do some reading, and you know how in London they like ring the bell at the end of the night, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And so when they did that, the music stopped. And there was kind of this aggressive, intense conversation.

And um the guy is shouting, goes, and our second biggest city just went bankrupt. And at least in America, they have jobs. And it had just gone completely silent, the whole bar went silent. And I don't know what to make of it. Maybe I'm exaggerating the importance of those those those moments and intuitions. But those two experiences gave me a window into what I do feel like is the truth, the on-the-ground truth of how people are feeling in London that I could have never gotten in another one.

And and to do it right you 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 I think if you don't have that.

Uh f you know, the Germans called it fingerspiel, the sort of knowledge. I love that word. You you're missing something very important. And I think if you know if you look at some of the best stuff that people who anticipated

Trump, I think about Ed Luce, who's a wonderful F F T columnist. He wrote a book um where he just traveled around America. I can't remember the name of the book now, but it was it was pre-Trump and he traveled around America and he just said the thing he was most struck by was how there were parts of the country that had completely been left behind these great waves of prosperity and technological innovation, etc.

And he was describ I mean and and he you could tell he was just genuinely surprised by what he was discovering in Appalachia and places like that, you know, which we that then later learned through uh JD Vance's Hillbilly allergy. Right. But it's that it's that power of g just going there and talking to people. Did you see Chris Arnod? Uh have you have you come across this work? So I really like this guy. He

um kind of rose into the spotlight in 2016. And basically what he did is he went to McDonald's in Forgotten Cities and basically started interviewing them. And his whole thing is he just walks through cities. So he'll go to El Paso, he'll go to Los Angeles, and he'll just go on these very long walking tours. And his articles are about what he picks up and then it's photojournalism. And there's something about the walking, especially with how America is, because it

It isn't like America isn't really gradients. New York is such an exception, but America isn't really gradients. It's like stuff happening here, nothing happening, poverty, stuff happening here. But when you walk, you have to walk through that nothing happening. And Just like what you're saying with Edward Luce, he was able to pick up on something that the more intelligentsia had completely

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 f look at the data and 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. So because if you look at the data, the US has done better than any in advanced industrial country in the world. You know, the US is

I mean, b compared to Europe our you know, our lead has gone f uh uh greater. Our wages are much higher than Europe's were when we they were once the same. So what's going on? But there was you know, there was a discontent because of the the geographical nature of this and partly the demographic nature of this. So the people who were being left behind were people who felt that they you know, the so they were

Heritage Americans, as uh J D Vance likes to call it, right? Like and so so it's very interesting to look at some of these the um sense of dissatisfaction. by race in America. You know, blacks and Hispanics, even when they haven't done so well economically, are much less dissatisfied because because they've come up in terms of dignity and status over the last thirty or forty years. Right. Even if they may not have come up

economically as much. Uh whereas with whites it's almost the inverse. Right. So it's so it's a very interesting and sometimes those kinds of things you you're able to pick up. more by this act of you know, the act of actually just going someplace and talking to people. Yeah, the idea that's coming into my mind is the map territory distinction, right? Like in order to write good nonfiction, what you're doing is you're creating a map.

All maps are wrong, some are useful, but then what you need to do is you need to dive dive into the territory. Okay, wow, there's all these things about the territory that aren't included in the map. But the whole point of that original story is that if you have a map that is the size of the territory, it's completely useless.

So you need this kind of constant compression to bring into the map, but then acknowledging that the map is imperfect and then a decompression and it's like some kind of knowledge generation is about the oscillation between those two things. Part of the part of it is what question are you trying to answer? So a map as you say is a representation of reality. It's not a r if you go if you g 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 you know, s seventy thousand feet above the sky and all you're looking at is the earth, uh and you can't see and then it doesn't work either. So b or it or it works if you're trying to point out that the earth is a planet amo you know, among many. So the question is what are you trying to

You know, the the the question you have to ask yourself is what am I trying to answer? What phenomenon am I trying to unc and what is the level of generalization that is appropriate for that? you know, for that question, where should I be in the map? Should I be at the granular street level? Should I be at the level where I can see the v the how each city in America compares to e the others?

Do I need to be a little higher and see how do American cities compare to European cities? Uh you know, that and that's sort of like that's what I spend a lot of time thinking about. Which is what is the right co compare and that's what I mean when I say America's been a b a a terrible uh a world empire except for all the other. Right. That comparative perspective is very important because, you know, when other nations have had this much power, how have they done? Hmm.

Can you tell me about your study? Your study that the photos are cool. Brooklyn. Woodworker to make it. I'll tell you exactly what happened. So so I l I live in a townhouse and I, you know, d we didn't have a lot of money when we did but uh b got it and

c didn't couldn't afford to really renovate it. And then over time as I did better, you know, we did the kitchen and things like that. And then the post American world, um Most of the time um m most of my books have been translated, but To be honest with you.

m most translations, it's like a up to point of pride, you get the Hungarian edition and you get the Fr French edition. They don't sell that much. They sell, you know, a few thousand copies. You get an e you occasion you know, you get an occasional royalty check for a Five hundred dollars. The post American world was a bestseller in several other countries, like Italy, um India, you know a few others. And so I ended up getting a fair amount of f foreign royalties.

So it was really like found money. I had free money, everyone. I had I had no idea this was gonna come. And so I thought to myself, let me do something with it that's just fun and that I've always wanted to do. And so I I had this study which had pretty just normal shelves and I got this found this woodwork in in in Brooklyn. who was willing to help w sit with me and we design this uh this study.

And he found he he b he bought English pine from England. Uh and uh, you know, he but he was a real what I mean, he was a craftsman and really loved what he did. And we s you know, he sat and we designed it and then my favorite feature in it is Um, I am a messy uh r uh r writer and so my desk is always very messy and it has lots of there's a there is a logic to it, but only I understand the logic of what heaps of paper are where

So we found a way to let me have that. But then there are these two doors I can pull out and close so that w if you walked into my study, it would just look like there was a beautiful mirrored uh, you know, kind of uh uh there's one one cupboard which has mirrors on it, but the cupboard actually when it opens and those doors slide slide in, they become pocket doors. That's my desk. Hm. So

And like I was very important to me to do that. And then we had a ladder with a shelf because ever since I've watched the My Fail uh My Fail Lady. I've seen I saw Rex Harrison w going to get books, uh I had to have that. Now it's a tight room, it's a small room. It's smaller than the room we're in right now. Um but I you know, it has high ceilings and so it it just

it looks great and it's so much fun to be there. It's not the room I spend the m most uh of my time in. Um and after I was able to do it, it just gave me that really profound sense of how the the shape the the shaped environments we create have such an effect on us. You know it has it's such an there's something it's aesthetic but it's also almost emotional. Yeah. That if you if you can create the right environment for you. Um, it just it can be it's magic.

So true. And an environment that pulls you to the person that you want to be. Yeah. That's a good that's a good way 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. Yeah. What man can do to shape the

Cities. I love cities. For me, nature's a nice escape and I love being in nature. I mean I just love it, but I can't I could never live in I totally agree. I I like it as a escape is a good word because it implies you come back.

Yes. Yes, exactly. Can you tell me about the journalist who worked with your mother in India and what you learned from from from him? I guess you met him when you were ten. Yeah. Last name Singh, right? Yeah, so Kushwan Singh, he's probably the best known uh he became certainly the best known journalist in India. He was a novelist initially.

wrote what is still the best novel about the the partition of India, you know, India Pakistan, uh called Train to Pakistan. It won a big um uh in those days a very big award called the Grove Press Award. um and bec he became quite famous in India and then became the editor of this magazine. Um and and my mother was working for him.

And what he taught me probably more than anybody else was the love of words, the love of the language. You know, he would he would w he loved nature and he would we'd go on these walks and he could identify birds and which I still have absolutely no capacity to do. Actually good chat GBT thing I saw a beautiful falcon outside this morning and I was like wheat. Wow.

What kind of bird is that? So I took photos and I just got the full chat GBT. Here's why it's in New York at this time, migration pattern. Now here's the question. So he would do it by by bird call. Could you do you think if you recorded and gave it a Chad GPT and said what is this the call of a humming of you know of a mu I don't know what? That's that's what he would do. Who knows? That's impressive though. And he would just recite poetry.

Wow. Uh and we were going then he would say to me, Now you should learn this. And I still remember. I mean it's it's stunning. I can remember. Yeah. He made me uh learn Wordsworth's daffodils when I was, you know, must ten years old. What is that one? I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills, and all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils.

Besides the lake beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze, Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never ending line along the margin of the bay, I gazed and gazed, but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought, And oft when on my couch I lie, In vacant or in pensive mood, they flash upon that inward eye that is the bliss of solitude, and then my heart with pleasure sing uh with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils.

How and then O Byron, she walks in beauty like the light of cloudless climbs and starry skies, and all that's best of broad dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes. Thus mellow t I mean you know, the I I mean I I wish I could do more, but what's stunning to me is the ones I remember best. are the ones I r I learned when I was ten, eleven, twelve. It's funny because I was always kind of amazed at how people would tell me that the

the the Greeks would memorize Homer. And I was like, there's no way. But what stuck with me is one poetry, my ability to memorize it. And also just music. I mean, there are songs that I heard when I was in fourth grade. And I'll just haven't heard it in 20 years. And boom, it pops on and out every single word. And it's amazing how the tune helps you remember the words. Yes, right. Yes, yes. No, and the Greeks, you know, part of what part of what uh in an truly oral culture.

the the memorization was important not just to have the cadences of the language in your head, but also it was practical. So there's a part of uh the Odyssey I think where there is a section where um he tells you how to build a rap.

And people w you know, one of the three reasons you memorized this was y was a way remember there were no You gotta 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 in the Odyssey that told you how to build a ref. And if it was in Iambic pentameter and it was d in some way rhythmic, you could remember it better. Yeah.

walks, nature, poetry, language. Take me back to that. So, you know, my father was a very impressive Maggie, very busy, um and for some reason was not such a you know, d he he he was very good father, but he was not a mentor in that way. And Kushwan Singh uh was this guy who enjoyed, you know, hanging out with with me and my brother and he would tell us about poetry and about birds. He taught me how to play tennis. He taught me how to swim. Um and It it also gave me a a feeling for like what are

What a rich life can look like. My father was very driven. You know, he was an orphan who m you know, and he was not not driven econ you know, he was not trying to get rich. He was he wanted to be politically active in India and make an impact and all that. He was a politician, lawyer type. Um but but Kushwan Singh, you know, was somebody who wanted to do well professionally, wanted to write important things. But also wanted to have his time for for nature, also wanted to get his tennis game in.

um that I've always kept in mind. I've I've always, you know, tried to make sure that I don't get so off track in one area that I lose that ability to have a rich life. I to me, the important thing is not maximizing on any one uh on any on any one metric. It's actually ha having that balance. It's very Aristotelian in a sense.

I wanna ask you about kind of do a fire round type thing with the core lesson that you've learned from different mediums. So let's start with books, then we'll do articles and then we'll do TV. So but depth of thinking, depth of understanding. You know, w because with the book what you realize is um It particularly a great book that to understand a phenomenon really well, you you ha you know, you really need to go get get deeper. You need to understand there's layers and layers of uncovering. Um

th it no no simple answer is usually the uh the the f 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

pr provide some simple construct, some or or or or brief construct if somebody asks you why why did the French Revolution happen? But you But but when you read a 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. Article.

Articles I think uh as I said, you know, if you think about the really short article, it's an exclamation point. You are you are making one point and the reason I say an exclamation point rather than a period is you are asserting something. You are as you are you it has to be something unsettling. It has it has to be something that disturbing or that that tells people something they don't know. That you know, there has to have that. Let me grab you by the lapels and tell you this one thing.

And if you're not doing that with an article, uh I I think you're mostly failing. Now there is a different kind of article, you know, the longer literary essay that maybe the New Yorker publishes. And th those are that's a diff that's in its own category, but I mean analytic, argumentative, polemical writing uh of of the kind that, you know, for example, now vastly populates the internet.

TV is I say 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 w what how they feel about you. Maya Angelou once said this when she was at a an event or something, she said, just remember, nobody will ever remember what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel. And I think that's very true about television. There's something when you can do it right.

Do you watch your television performances back? So it's interesting you ask. When I started out I started out The my first T V was on A B C but the George Stephanopoulos round table. I used to do it every other week. Um and I got to know George Will in person in in in in those days'cause I would sort of argue with him on on on that show. Um and I think for three years I could not I never watched myself. I literally I couldn't do it. I think that

You know that what people say about when you listen to yourself, there's something about your internal ear hears a different voice and the so when you hear it recorded, you record you say to yourself, That's on me. Yeah, what am I hearing? Uh I had that same reaction to to looking at myself and think, Oh my God, I'm this is terrible. I'm not you know, I'm not sitting straight, I whatever and I just found it very awkward and difficult and it would it would sort of

um it would depress my confidence level. And so I thought to myself, this is not this I'm not gonna do this. And then I started to realize somebody told me You know, you y 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.'Cause in my whole life I've never had a single uh minute of television coaching of of any kind from anyone.

And and it's mostly because I just have always thought of myself as just like I'm a I'm an expert. I'm a journalist. I don't want to be a TV personality, you know. Right. Um, and so it meant I had to kind of do it myself. So I started to watch myself and it's and it was painful. Um and

Then I started saying to myself, okay, how do I watch myself and how do I actually learn? What do I what am I you know what am I doing that's wrong? How do I do it better? And so now I do yeah, I watch every show. Oh, and I watch and I watch And I with that in mind, like what am what am I doing right? What am I doing? Why I've noticed for example I've started to slump slightly, maybe a product of aging. So I've got to be more careful about that and you know, things like that. Yeah, I I

y you I I as I said, I don't I try not to be totally clipped and clean, but you also don't want to Uh, 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 ca you kinda make mental notes if you feel like you did that. Uh also with the substance I will watch and say to myself, Nah, the question, the real follow up I should have asked at that point is this one rather than that one. Um

My brothers who used to be a great tennis player used to say this about about practicing. He said you have to have purposeful practicing. You can't just go out onto a tennis court and you're just knocking with somebody. For an hour, two hours, and you say, Why am I not getting better? Right. What you have to say to yourself is, My backhand is weak. My strategy to do something about that backhand is going to be I'm going to focus on the backhand. I'm going to start by forcing myself to do

only cross court backhand. Then I'm gonna do da backhand down the line. Then I'm gonna see if I can switch back and forth. Then I'm gonna try and see if I can get it back deeper than I'm like if you do all that, play for two hours, three times. then your backhand will have gotten better. But not if you just get on there. So it's so I sort of approach

You th th you know, but writing N T V like that, saying to yourself, if you're wa watching yourself, you're watching with the purpose of saying, What did I do wrong? How do I do it better? What should I you know, what should I put in Put into my head when I'm doing it next.

Yeah. It's a great answer. If I invited you back to Yale and I said, Okay, you're gonna do one semester writing seminar, the people are gonna learn to do what you do, how do you structure that curriculum? What are the core Pillars of emphasis that you're trying to give the students. It's a great question because I've 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's the same. you have to you have to absorb uh an understanding of what good writing is. by by looking at it. I don't believe that there's a set of twenty rules. Some of them are useful. Like if you look at Strunken White, and I actually prefer this guy William Zim Zib Zim. Vincent, yeah.

called on writing, which I think is is better. Um what I give most almost everybody who works for me um uh is a copy of George Orwell's Pot Politics and the English language. Which is a wonderful essay on on language and politics and how to write about politics, but it's also beautifully written. And so it's both giving you some important lessons, but it's actually showing you in the writing itself. Uh how to write.

I think that helps more than anything else. You know, I think about my my career and I started to write when I was in uh in school, in in high school for sure. I started a little uh news uh a a magazine. uh in school. Um, I s I was writing when I was in college. I wrote my first op ed for the New York Times when I was um i in graduate school at Harvard. I was I think twenty four years old. Um

And it was just a l you know, it's just like a lot of writing and y you know, there are things you w learn only by doing them yourself and making the mistakes and then doing it a little bit better and le 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.

I'll close here. I told you about this before, but I wanna share with everyone. So you were talking about the Maya Angelou uh line. And I still remember when I was in college, I would go to this thing called the Global Action Summit in in in Nashville. And I was, you know,

did sports journalism and whatnot, I didn't know what was gonna happen. I remember there's this guy named Farid Zakar, who was gonna be there and my mother was like, Oh, you gotta meet Farid and all that and I remember sort of waiting, I was gonna talk to you and uh you had no reason to give me the time of day. And uh 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 ninety seconds, but for those ninety 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, um, to be as attentive with people as you were as attentive with me. And if I can do that, I will have done something very right in my life.

Well, first of all, thank you. You made my day, my my week. I mean it's so gratifying that you say that. I mean, I'm touched and I'm I'm thrilled. But I'm part of it is that and I can see you have this. Like human beings are amazing. They're great. They're interesting. Like, you know, um, don't again have that sense of humility of realizing, like, the person you're talking to is a really interesting person. And I've always had this feeling. People you know, you can learn from anyone.

You can learn from a peasant in in in uh rural India, from a taxi rider. 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. There's they have they have a lived experience that that gives them something that they can impart to you. The question is can you bring can you bring it out at them?

Yeah, I mean, I really felt that. So thank you for that. Um, also thanks for doing this. This was this was great fun. But um That that that really touched me. Well What a pleasure. Yeah. Okay.