Fareed Zakaria is one of the world’s leading journalists. Maybe you’ve seen him on CNN. Maybe you’ve read his books. Or maybe you’ve read his articles in the Washington Post.
This conversation is a university-level seminar in the craft of writing, which builds upon the thousands of articles Fareed’s written over his career. It’s a guidepost for anybody who wants to write non-fiction. How do you develop expertise? How should you structure your days? What kinds of deadlines should you set?
We also talked about how The Great Gatsby shaped his perspective on America, when to rely on anecdotes vs. data, and the skills that’ll remain scarce as AI breaks through the Turing Test and becomes a hyper-competent writer.
The through-line of Fareed’s work is a philosophy of purposeful practice: watching all his TV performances to see how he can improve, reading great writing to absorb what excellence looks like, and using the deadlines of TV and newspaper columns to write consistently.
P.S. This episode is brought to you by Basecamp, the world’s simplest, most effective project management platform (and friends of the show!). Check them out at basecamp.com and tell them David Perell sent you.
Transcript
David (00:00-00:30):
As you think about writing your books, Post American World, The Case for Liberal Education, how does that get into orbit? With an article, the cycles are faster. It’s a fast oscillation. But a book takes years, and that book becomes a part of who you are. You say you have three children, but books are the next thing in terms of importance.
Fareed (00:30-00:55):
They take an enormous amount of time and energy. I write books out of two forces. One is guilt. I feel like this is the part of me that got the PhD and thought I’d be an academic. If I’m not working on a book, I feel like I’m goofing off and wasting my life.
David (00:55-00:58):
Is it the rigor or an act of service to other people?
Fareed (00:58-02:50):
It’s some combination of those things. It’s the sense that it’s real. If you want to be a person of ideas, if you want to be thought of as an intellectual, that’s the real work. So, guilt is part of the motivation. The other part is learning. I learn more when I write a book than at any other time in my professional life. You have to make deep dives, and you have to know what you’re talking about.
In the last book, there’s a chapter on the French Revolution. To do that chapter, I must have read 20-odd books on or around the French Revolution, academic articles, excerpts translated from the French, and things like that. I’ve done all the work so you don’t have to. You can read my 40 or 50-page chapter on the French Revolution because I’ve tried to digest all that and give it to you in my analytic framework, which I think is the right way to look at it. That’s tremendously satisfying. There’s something amazing about that.
Bill Buckley, who was a friend of mine, used to say there are two kinds of people: people who like to write and people who like to have written. He loved to write. I’m someone who likes to have written. The actual act of writing is painful, arduous, and a struggle. But having written, particularly having written something where you feel like I have digested all that knowledge and was able to convey it, that’s a great feeling. It’s a thrilling feeling.
David (02:50-03:08):
How do you get yourself to write? What do you do on a week-to-week basis? There’s the reality of deadlines, but the books are another project. They’re in that Eisenhower matrix, the important but not urgent category.
Fareed (03:08-06:56):
I went into journalism largely because of this question: what could I write unprompted? My biggest mentor at Harvard was Sam Huntington, an amazing scholar and one of the most extraordinary social scientists of the 20th century. He lived a few blocks away from me in a townhouse. He would get up every morning at 6:00 and go down to the basement, where he had his study, and start working on the next big book project or article. He worked there until about 10:00, then took the subway into Boston.
He explained, “You’ve got to start the day doing the real work. Then you can teach the class, do the committee meeting, attend the faculty meeting, and have lunch with whoever. But you’ve got to start with the real work.”
I watched that and thought, “I can’t do this. I’m not motivated. I don’t have the self-discipline.” This was a chaired professor at Harvard. He didn’t need to write another word, but he was self-motivated and did it every day. I thought, “I can’t do that. I need some structure.”
The greatest thing about journalism for me is the deadlines. I’ve had to pull up and shoot pretty much every week for 25 years. I started writing my Newsweek column around 2000. That’s an amazing structure. Like anything in life, you get better at it as you go along. When I started, it took me half the week to write the column. Now, it’s still a lot of research and thinking, but I can sit down and write the column in two hours. That’s very different. The shorter stuff is easier because I’ve done it so much. I can pull up and shoot a lot, relatively easily.
The books are a different matter. They’re much harder. You have to plan. I’ve gotten good at using research assistants in the last two books, which has been helpful. When you have so many things going on, having stuff set up for you so you can read it and figure out what you want to say is important. I’ve had to put in place more of a structure and a plan for writing.
I used to do it more haphazardly. I would go into the archives and read stuff, then sit down and say, “Okay, chapter one,” and start writing, maybe going back and filling some holes. I can’t do that anymore. Now I have to say, “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?” I have to plan it out like that. Then I tell my research assistant, “Let’s try and find things on this subject.” That’s a very different way. There’s almost a teamwork element to it, which I’m learning and getting better at.
David (06:57-07:38):
The obvious question with research assistants is, how do you think about your AI morals and ethics? Watching how good Gemini has gotten in the past few months, I’m blown away by how well it cites its sources. It seems like the hallucinations have gone down.
There’s a certain kind of AI which does the writing for you, and that is a no. Then there’s another kind of AI which is basically a kind of glorified Google, Google on steroids. I mean, literally what Gemini is is made by the same people. How do you think about how AI is not allowed into your writing, into your research, and thinking process?
Fareed (07:38-11:07):
It’s a very good question, and I’m struggling with it right now myself. I try to use AI as much as I can because it’s unbelievable. I mean, it’s just extraordinary.
I’ve been dealing with a medical thing and you use Gemini and you ask it, these are my symptoms. This is that. I fed it my blood test and it was like, okay, these are the three questions you should ask your doctor. It was just mind-blowing. It is very good for particularly stuff like medical stuff, where there is an answer and it can scope all the sources in the world. It’s incredible.
But when you do want to do this sort of very deep dive, I’m finding it’s not quite as good for a variety of reasons. Part of it is the access to all the sources is still quite spotty. It can’t actually look at the 30 best books on the French Revolution because most of them it doesn’t have access to. So it can do, and then you get into a little bit of the feeling of this is a paper written by a sophomore where he’s kind of bullshitting.
It’s partly because the AI has only the ability to look at the reviews of those books, because those are an open source, or an excerpt of the book. It’s not the AI’s fault, because the AI is powerful enough to do an am, but there are these constraints.
The second piece of it is you’re not. Part of how you think and how you develop your thoughts is you read and you interact, you talk to people. So if I could tell Gemini or ChatGPT this is exactly what I want to argue now, make this argument and find me the sources, it would be able to do it.
But the way you come to your argument is partly by reading, by talking to smart people. Part of your thinking process involves ingesting. In some ways, the AI can’t do that for you because you are trying to come up with your distinctive, original idea.
So then you try to say to yourself, okay, can I use AI to be the best research assistant in the world? And it does pretty well. But it’s almost like the difference between the AI is producing these extraordinary suits, like Ralph Lauren Purple label, beautiful suits, but they are kind of off the rack. What I’m trying to do is really customized, boutique, the kind of handmade tailoring.
The final point is, in terms of the writing, the thing AI can do is have the political courage and the intellectual courage to make an argument, to put your name behind it, right? That is now becoming much, much more significant.
First of all, if you ask AI to write, most of the time it gives you kind of, on the one hand, because it doesn’t want to be controversial, but it’s also meaningless if AI thinks one thing. 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 I can never do.
David (11:07-11:24):
Right. Okay, so if we follow this and get to the answer, if we assume a kind of AI singularity type thing, what is the skill that will always be scarce?
Fareed (11:24-12:22):
Probably ultimately judgment, this kind of vague thing of what is the right thing to be weighing in on, and what are the right combination of moral, political values to be expressing on this subject at this moment?
The AI can’t tell you that because it can give you the best argument for one of the six different positions. But which is the right one at this moment in this climate? That to me feels, and maybe there’s a metaphor there about where human beings can add value.
The AI is at some point going to be able to write those six columns probably better than I can. But which of those is the right one to present to the world and advocate for and put your credibility and your courage behind? That’s the question.
David (12:23-12:40):
So what makes for a good take? You were doing takes long before the whole Twitter economy was based on them. As you’re thinking through your columns, especially Fareed’s take on GPS, what are the components that really matter there?
Fareed (12:41-14:10):
The most important thing is value add. It has to be value added. You can’t tell people what happened. I think you have to understand that, particularly when somebody’s coming to me.
These are smart, interesting, educated people. They know about the world. What they’re looking for is add value. Tell me something I don’t know. Make me think about this in a different way. Give me some context, give me some analytic framework that I haven’t thought of. Give me some history that I haven’t thought of.
So that’s the broader kind of mandate that you have to fulfill. On the other hand, a take or a column has to be an exclamation mark, by which I mean it has to have. It has to organize itself around an idea. Not an idea and a half, not two ideas, not three ideas. That’s too many and you lose the narrative structure. If you try to do that, you can do that in a 2000-word essay. The Wall Street Journal used to run the lead op ed used to be about 1600 words.
That’s a different thing there. You can be discursive, you can bring up when you’re writing a newspaper column or a take. These are all in the 500 to 800 word range. It’s an exclamation point that makes people think differently about some important subject.
David (14:10-14:38):
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.
I watched the GPS piece and then I read the Washington Post article and I could give you my own answers. But as you think of, I’m going to take the same idea, put it in two different places. What does an article demand? And then what does television demand?
Fareed (14:39-16:57):
For a long time, I would struggle with how the spoken word is different from the written word. But I realized that many of the attributes are the same, partly because my columns are very analytic, argumentative, and organized around an idea moving in narrative form. It’s not as big a difference as you think.
There are some mechanisms that don’t work right, like subordinate clauses. You can’t start with a subordinate clause on TV because people don’t know the main clause. You can then qualify it, whereas in writing, you can sometimes invert for effect. So there are certain things that just don’t work, like lists. You have to be conscious of those kinds of things, but in substantive terms, it’s actually not as dissimilar.
Now, when you go longer, then it’s very different. The most difficult talks I’ve given are these speaker series where they book a bunch of people and sell tickets for every week. There’s usually a hall of 3,000 people who have paid to come and hear you speak. It’s usually a 90-minute talk, no questions. You have to sustain the audience’s attention for 90 minutes.
Given what I do, I’m an ideas person. I’m not going to tell my personal story or some series of anecdotes. How do you make an idea into a narrative, into a chronological narrative? How do you sustain it? How do you go on interesting side detours with anecdotes?
That’s a much different beast where you’re trying to construct something more like a broad essay that one might have written for Harper’s or the Atlantic. The written word and the spoken word are very different in those cases.
David (16:58-17:33):
Give me the case for TV. I haven’t watched a lot of TV in my life. We didn’t have cable, and I always kind of had this idea that TV was a lesser form of media, like less rigorous. As I thought about my career, I very quickly moved away from TV. But as I was thinking about your career, TV clearly has an impact and a reach. What else has made you focus on TV as a medium?
Fareed (17:33-20:10):
I very much approached it the way you did when I started out. Remember, I’m a lapsed academic. My career trajectory is like dumb, dumber, dumbest. I started at Harvard getting a PhD, then went to Foreign Affairs, then Newsweek, then ABC, then basic cable.
But I realized that TV is an incredibly powerful medium because it reaches people both at a scale that print doesn’t reach, but it also reaches them somewhere else. When you’re on TV, and particularly if you’re a regular presence, people think they know you. They think they have a connection to you personally, and they begin to trust you and view you as a kind of guide. That’s a very different relationship than somebody just reading an article.
There’s something more emotional and visceral about the connection between somebody on TV and the audience. It’s a much broader number of people you can reach.
I came to realize that TV, in its own way, is a very intelligent medium. TV is a little bit like Japanese haiku poetry, which has few words, but you have to get them right. If you arrange them right, those few words can have a very powerful effect.
TV is the same thing. If you took the transcript of my show, it would fit on one page of the New York Times. But you have the ability, if you do it right, to convey ideas to people in a way that they receive them and are open to them.
There’s something very different about the way in which people consume television than any other medium. It’s not an accident that politicians try so hard to get on TV because you’re trying to get that emotional connection. People vote from the gut, not from their brain. If you’re trying to convince people, and I view myself as being in the business of public education, then if you’re really trying to have an impact, you got to be able to have it here as well as here.
David (20:11-20:27):
So when you say the mechanics of doing that, what came to mind for me was, oh, the one-liner. Then I was like, no, it’s not really like the one-liner guy. How do you think about public education and then reaching the gut? What are the tools that you have at your disposal?
Fareed (20:27-21:26):
One of the things that I have tried to do is convey my authentic personality because I think that what television does well and what people prize in video is authenticity. One of the things I have tried not to do is put on a very polished persona of somebody who can do the Oxford-style debate very brilliantly and beautifully. I have some training in that area. I can do it fine, but I realized that what’s more important is that you come across as the person you really are.
You’ll notice that, in my shows, I don’t speak in the completely clipped, precise way that a television anchor usually does.
David (21:27-21:41):
There’s also television voice, which is kind of like pilot voice. Hey, everybody, we are now on our way to Chicago. Donald Trump just did this. It’s actually the exact same voice that you’re subconsciously trained into.
Fareed (21:41-22:17):
Exactly. I’ve come to realize that it might have worked in the past when there was this idea of a disembodied, objective person just giving you the bare facts. What people now want is a human being, somebody they can understand.
I’ve always tried to be more conversational, to say, “Let me tell you what I’m thinking about this subject” and to do it more as if I’m one part of a conversation. I think that creates a connection, that creates trust more than just the brilliant one-liner.
David (22:18-22:58):
Tell me about your standard day. I saw a photo of you on the treadmill watching a YouTube video. To do what you do, you need knowledge in geopolitics, economics, and many other things. Then there’s coming up with the take, writing the column or a book, or whatever else you’re working on. How do you structure your life to maximize the quality of your craft and production?
Fareed (22:59-25:07):
There is no ordinary day, no average day. My life is pretty chaotic. I travel, and I have three kids.
The central part of it is the consumption of knowledge. I spend a lot of time reading books and calling people to understand how they think about issues. I view that as my greatest value add.
With my show, for example, I have an amazing team. We talk about who the guests will be and map out what the segment will look like. We pre-interview the guests to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio in the six minutes I have for each segment. After the interview, I give the producer a few thoughts and leave the cutting and production to them. They’re amazing at it.
My job is to think, read, and write as much as I can. The best part about my job is that I get to do all this reading and thinking. But you have to be disciplined about making sure you’re doing the work. It’s easy to get caught up in calls and meetings. You need time every day to read, think, and actively engage in research. I spend hours scheduled as blank time to do that.
David (25:07-25:27):
How do you decide what to keep track of in the present versus diving into the slower, deeper currents of history, geopolitics, and scholarship to understand the present and the future?
Fareed (25:27-25:54):
I do it backward. I look at what’s going on in the world, think about what’s staying current, and ask myself what the roots are. Then, if I need to go back and read a book or call a historian, I do. It’s not like I’m just reading off the top of my head. Sometimes that happens when you’re reading the history of Iran, and the events intersect.
David (25:55-26:04):
I forgot where I read this, but you mentioned that when you were in university, you learned the skill of reading a book fast while getting the main points. How do you do that?
Fareed (26:05-27:33):
At some point, you start getting crazy amounts of reading, particularly in grad school. I’m talking about nonfiction books, obviously, not fiction. You figure out how to read the central argument of a book. You read the introduction and conclusion, look at the chapters, and figure out which are the most important. Now that you’ve read the introduction and conclusion, you understand where the fulcrum of the argument lies.
Can you realistically crack a 600-page book in two hours? I think that’s important. The reason the person is writing the book is to convey certain ideas. If you have an efficient way of accessing and absorbing those ideas, that’s great. Frankly, most people write too much detail in books. They’re trying to use every research note they ever made. As the reader, I don’t need to do that.
There are some books. So it’s a twofold strategy. One is to speed read or find a way to extract information from many books. Then, I read the ones you think are really good many times.
David (27:34-27:35):
What are those books?
Fareed (27:35-28:56):
Samuel Huntington wrote a book called Political Order in Changing Societies, which is one of the most seminal books in political science. I probably read it three times. Kenneth Waltz wrote books about international relations called Man, the State, and War and Theory of International Relations, which I both read at least three times.
Even for this last book, Age of Revolutions, the most interesting book I was reading historically was a book by Stephen Pincus on the Glorious Revolution in England called 1688, which is the year of the Glorious Revolution. I read it twice. It’s a 700-page dense academic book. If you look at my book, every page is marked up.
There’s something about a deep understanding that’s very different from a shallow understanding. It would be the difference between reading a few articles in The Economist and The Atlantic. You understand an issue every now and then, but you need to do those deep dives. I think your brain analytically begins to understand any phenomena, any subject, much more deeply. It’s a little like the scientific method. 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.
David (28:56-29:20):
The other thing about deep reads for writers is that you begin to see the underlying structure and mechanics of how an argument is made. You start to see, “Okay, this is a good book; it resonated with me.”
Then, on the second and third reading, you begin to see, “Oh, okay, this is how the writer is doing that.” You get a kind of X-ray vision into how a body of work is crafted.
Fareed (29:20-30:27):
Absolutely. You lose your first impression of the book and it gives way to a more analytic study. This is true in fiction as well.
I just did a podcast about my favorite book, The Great Gatsby. The first time you read “Gatsby,” you have one reaction. Then, when you read it five or ten years later, you have another reaction. For me, it took several readings to realize how beautiful the writing was, how strong the craft of the writing was.
Maybe it’s just me, but it took me a while to think to myself, “How did this guy at 28 write like this?” He was 28 when he wrote it. When you think about it in those terms, and you think about the maturity of the emotional expression there, that’s not what I thought of when I first encountered it. It was a completely different thing, like the first time you’re trying to figure out what the plot is, what’s going to happen to Daisy.
David (30:27-31:39):
So, we’re talking about how to get your writing done. If you’re thinking about work and how you can be more productive there, I recommend a tool called Basecamp.
Basecamp is a project management tool that’s different from the other ones, which are loud, noisy, and cluttered with feature bloat. Basecamp keeps things simple so you can focus on what actually matters: getting the work done. For us, Basecamp is a place where we can track what we’re doing with “How I Write,” when episodes are being recorded, where we’re recording them, the publishing day, all those things in one place for our entire team to look at.
I had the founder of Basecamp, Jason Fried, on the show, and I noticed that he really cares about writing. He cares about manifestos, great copy, and telling a great story. He and his co-founder have written five books, and they bring the same care and attention to detail to their books as they do to their software.
If you’re thinking about work and asking how to be more productive and make your team more cohesive, I recommend Basecamp. All right, back to the episode. How do you think your love for “Gatsby” has ended up in your work?
Fareed (31:41-34:08):
It’s a love of America, to be honest. I read “Gatsby” in America. I came to America from India, where I grew up. My reading was mostly British because India was a former colony of the British Empire. I had never read Hemingway or Fitzgerald.
When I got to Yale as an undergraduate, I had read Evelyn Waugh, Kipling, and all those kinds of British writers. I wanted to educate myself in America. I took a bunch of courses in American history and read a lot of American literature. I thought “Gatsby” was a story about the American dream.
It was the story about the extraordinary aspirations of this guy and the complicated reality of his past that he wanted to leave behind. In a way, Gatsby’s journey is an immigrant’s journey. You’re leaving the past, coming to the big city, and trying to remake yourself. Ultimately, there’s a tragic element to it. No dream is ever completely fulfilled. In his case, it ends in tragedy.
I fell in love with America when I was an undergraduate. “Gatsby” is very much a part of that. I think that love of America does inform my work. In fact, in the column I just did, I got lots of attacks from the left saying I have a benign view of American power. “Have you forgotten about Vietnam and Iraq and all the terrible things we did?”
I have a serious analytic answer, which is that, compared to what, America has been the best superpower or great power in modern history. I’m comparing it to the Kaiser’s Germany, Hitler’s Germany, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, the French Empire, and the British Empire. You can’t compare. The United States allied all its power to Costa Rica.
David (34:09-34:09):
Right?
Fareed (34:09-35:15):
But there’s a piece of it that is that I’m an immigrant who fell in love with America. I think America has done better on the world stage than most other countries. I feel an affection for it, a pull for it, a pride in it.
That’s one of the reasons I was so sad when Musk and his minions dismantled USAID. It’s a matter of great pride that the United States is the richest and most generous country in the history of the world, that it was saving tens of millions of lives of the poorest people in the world, in Africa, saving them from AIDS, saving them from TB, at very, very low cost to us. I have a strong sense that the United States is special.
David (35:16-35:35):
Who were the journalists you looked to as you thought about who you wanted to be as a writer, as a leader, as an intellectual? Who were the people you really looked to, and what did you take from them that you’ve incorporated into your work?
Fareed (35:37-35:41):
The greatest American journalist of the 20th century is probably Walter Lippmann.
David (35:41-35:43):
He’s from the early 20th century, right?
Fareed (35:43-36:22):
He had an extraordinary career. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he studied with George Santayana, the philosopher. By the time he was in his 20s, he founded the New Republic and wrote Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points, the famous 14 points. He went on to become the most influential columnist in America through the 60s. Jim Johnson used to call him to get his advice on the Vietnam War. In those days, when you were a newspaper columnist, you were writing between three to four times a week. This is extraordinary. He wrote a bunch of books along the way.
David (36:22-36:24):
Seth mentioned the book A Preface to Morals.
Fareed (36:24-37:37):
A Preface to Morals is an amazing book written in the 20s, during the Jazz Age. 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. We haven’t found something to replace it. Think about the world we’re living in today. We are still in that world.
What I got from him was the idea that you could be a journalist and you could be an intellectual as well. There was a way to address day-to-day issues, but you could also look over the horizon, write books, and think about it in broader terms.
There’s a wonderful biography of him by a guy named Ronald Steele called Walter Lippmann and the American Century. It’s a great intellectual history of America from the 20s to the 60s or 70s told through the life of this one guy. More recently, I really admired George Will because he also had this quality of being both a journalist and an intellectual.
David (37:37-37:49):
I went to a talk that he gave about five years ago. I think it was Lippmann who said, “I don’t know what I think on that subject because I haven’t written about it yet.”
Fareed (37:49-37:49):
Right.
David (37:50-38:27):
I was at this talk at the LBJ Library in Austin. Never in my life had I heard somebody who so clearly had thought in writing and was now giving me the things that he had written. I don’t mean that in a negative way. It was the clarity, the polish, and the economy of language that you cannot get if you’re thinking of something for the first time. It was art. He was talking about politics.
Fareed (38:27-38:27):
Yes.
David (38:27-38:30):
Basically, American conservatism. I was blown away.
Fareed (38:30-39:28):
Exactly. He has thought deeply about these subjects and he’s condensed them to this very crisp, linear prose that he delivers in this very punchy way. He’s very skilled at what he does. I used to read his collections of his columns when I was in college and grad school.
There was an English columnist, British columnist, named Bernard Levin, who was also amazing. He wrote a very different style, a much more personal style. He would write columns about his enthusiasm for operas and for walking in the countryside and things like that. He was able to make it all really interesting because there was a kind of authenticity. You could feel his passion. He once wrote a book called Enthusiasms, and it was just a collection of all the things he was super enthusiastic about.
David (39:30-40:13):
I love that. How do you walk through a museum?
I’m interested in what you cultivate to do the work that you do. Obviously, the table stakes are the scholarship, the journalism, the interviews. But what are the other things that you cultivate?
I look at someone like Tyler Cowen, who I’ve known for so many years. For him, it’s spending time in a Mexican village with the artists, and then somehow that gives him a window into the economics of culture. What are the things that you’ve done in order to get such an orthogonal way of looking at the world and teaching public education?
Fareed (40:14-42:38):
I remember once being on a plane, and I was sitting next to the deputy managing director of the IMF, Stan Fisherman, a very famous MIT economist. I asked him why I was making the trip. I said, “I find that if I don’t go places, I don’t feel like I can read a lot about them. There’s something different.”
I said to him, “But it must be different for you as an economist. You’ve got all the data.”
He said, “Fareed, I thousand percent agree with you. I find that every time I go on one of these trips, within 24 hours, I realize that my previous assumptions about this place are wrong. There’s something that I learned on the ground about why the policies we were thinking about won’t work, or there’s some cultural issue or some political issue.”
He was saying, “I don’t know why it is. Maybe it’s partly that when you go to a place, 100% of your mind is now fully attentive.” I think the other part is you’re interacting with people for whom this is their life. The stakes are totally different from when you’re sitting in your university reading about something going on in Brazil. When you go there, this is their lives and figuring out what it looks like for them is the single most important thing you could do.
That’s why I still travel a lot, and when I travel, particularly when I travel for work, I just meet people I can meet. I can do a three-day trip and meet 100 people because I’ll set up a breakfast with six people and coffee with two people.
My feeling is, I’ll get another chance to see the pyramids. At this point, I’m trying to figure out who these people are, how are they thinking, how are they dealing with the world. That is probably the key.
Then you build up a network of contacts through that. Now, if something happens somewhere, I’ll email, text, or call this guy who I met in Chile who is really interesting about Latin America and ask, “What are you thinking? Is there something you’ve read that I should be paying attention to?”
David (42:38-42:58):
I’ve spent a lot of time in London the last year and a half, and I’ve been very surprised by a certain kind of pessimism there. There are two things that stand out. The first was, I stayed at a hotel, and I got to know the bouncer. He’d been a bouncer at this hotel for 25 years. He was from...
Fareed (42:58-43:01):
It’s a very cool hotel if it has a bouncer.
David (43:01-44:19):
It was Kettner’s in Soho. He was there, and he was from Algeria. He just said the simplest thing to me. He said, “When I showed up in London 25 years ago, it seemed like people were generally happy to be here, and now people are generally unhappy to be here.” What do you make of that?
Maybe he’s aged.
The next night, I went out for a pint of Guinness and some reading. They ring the bell at the end of the night in London. When they did that, the music stopped, and there was this aggressive, intense conversation. The guy was shouting, “Our second biggest city just went bankrupt. At least in America, they have jobs.”
The whole bar went silent. I don’t know what to make of it. Maybe I’m exaggerating the importance of those moments and intuitions, but those two experiences gave me a window into what I feel is the on-the-ground truth of how people are feeling in London that I could have never gotten any other way.
Fareed (44:19-45:32):
You’re going to get 20, 30, 40 of those kinds of impressions, and then they collect and form some sort of understanding. You still have to look at data and other things, but if you don’t have that—the Germans call it fingerspiel, the knowledge of your finger—you’re missing something very important.
If you look at some of the best stuff that people who anticipated Trump, I think about Ed Luce, who’s a wonderful FT columnist. He wrote a book where he just traveled around America before Trump’s election. He said the thing he was most struck by was how there were parts of the country that had completely been left behind from great waves of prosperity and technological innovation. You could tell he was genuinely surprised by what he was discovering in Appalachia and places like that, which we then later learned through J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. It’s the power of just going there and talking to people.
David (45:32-46:38):
Have you seen Chris Arnade’s work? I really like this guy. He kind of rose into the spotlight in 2016. He went to McDonald’s in forgotten cities and started interviewing people. He just walks through cities. He’ll go to El Paso, he’ll go to Los Angeles, and he’ll go on these very long walking tours. His articles are about what he picks up. Then there’s photojournalism.
There’s something about the walking, especially with how America is. America isn’t really gradients. New York is such an exception, but America isn’t really gradients. It’s stuff happening here, nothing happening, poverty, stuff happening here. When you walk, you have to walk through that nothing happening. Just like what you’re saying with Edward Luce, he was able to pick up on something that the intelligentsia had missed completely.
Fareed (46:38-48:03):
It’s a good example. I often say to myself, “The plural of anecdote is not data.” You have to look at the data. Two stories do not make a trend. But the data can sometimes hide some very important things, because if you look at the data, the US has done better than any advanced industrial country in the world. Compared to Europe, our lead has grown. Our wages are much higher than Europe’s were when they were once the same.
What’s going on?
There was a discontent because of the geographical and demographic nature of this, that the people who were being left behind were people who felt that they were heritage Americans, as J.D. Vance likes to call it. So it’s very interesting to look at some of the sense of dissatisfaction by race in America. Blacks and Hispanics, even when they haven’t done so well economically, are much less dissatisfied because they’ve come up in terms of dignity and status over the last 30 or 40 years, even if they may not have come up economically as much. Whereas with whites, it’s almost the inverse.
Sometimes those kinds of things, you are able to pick up more by actually just going someplace and talking to people.
David (48:03-48:46):
The idea that’s coming into my mind is the map territory distinction. In order to write good nonfiction, you’re creating a map. All maps are wrong, but some are useful. Then you need to dive into the territory. Wow, there are 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.
You need this kind of constant compression to bring into the map, but then acknowledge that the map is imperfect, and then a decompression. Knowledge generation is about the oscillation between those two things.
Fareed (48:47-50:08):
Part of it is, what question are you trying to answer? So a map, as you say, is a representation of reality. If you go to the point where the map is the same size as the city, it’s completely useless. But if you go up to the point where the map is 70,000 feet above the sky and all you’re looking at is the Earth, it doesn’t work either.
It works if you’re trying to point out that the Earth is a planet among many. So the question is, what are you trying to answer? What phenomenon are you trying to understand? What is the level of generalization that is appropriate for that question?
Where should I be on the map? Should I be at the granular street level? Should I be at the level where I can see how each city in America compares to the others? Do I need to be a little higher and see how American cities compare to European cities? That’s what I spend a lot of time thinking about, which is what is the right comparison?
That’s what I mean when I say America’s been a terrible world empire, except for all the others. That comparative perspective is very important because when other nations have had this much power, how have they done?
David (50:09-50:15):
Can you tell me about your study? The photos are cool. You got a Brooklyn woodworker to make it.
Fareed (50:16-53:19):
I’ll tell you exactly what happened. I live in a townhouse, and we didn’t have a lot of money when we got it and couldn’t afford to really renovate it. Over time, as I did better, we did the kitchen and things like that.
Then the “Post-American World” came out. Most of my books have been translated, but most translations are like, up to a point, a source of pride. You get the Hungarian edition, the French edition. They don’t sell that much, just a few thousand copies. You get an occasional royalty check for $500.
“The Post-American World” was a bestseller in several other countries, like Italy, India, and a few others. I ended up getting a fair amount of foreign royalties. It was really like found money. I had no idea this was going to come.
I thought to myself, let me do something with it that’s just fun and that I’ve always wanted to do. I had this study which had pretty normal shelves. I found this woodworker in Brooklyn who was willing to sit with me, and we designed the study. He bought English pine from England. He was a real craftsman and really loved what he did.
He sat, and we designed it. My favorite feature is that I am a messy writer. My desk is always very messy. There is a logic to it, but only I understand the logic of what heaps of paper are where.
We found a way to let me have that, but then there are these two doors I can pull out and close so that if you walked into my study, it would just look like there was a beautiful mirrored cupboard. Actually, when it opens and those doors slide in, they become pocket doors. That’s my desk. It was very important to me to do that.
Then we had a ladder with the shelf, because ever since I watched “My Fair Lady,” and saw Rex Harrison going to get books, I had to have that. It’s a tight, small room, smaller than the room we’re in right now. It has high ceilings, and it looks great, and it’s so much fun to be there. It’s the room I spend most of my time in.
After I was able to do it, it gave me that really profound sense of how the shaped environments we create have such an effect on us. There’s something aesthetic, but also almost emotional, that if you can create the right environment for you, it’s magic.
David (53:20-53:23):
That’s so true—an environment that pulls you to the person that you want to be.
Fareed (53:23-53:45):
That’s a good way of putting it. That’s right.
I see that some people find that interacting with nature has that effect, putting yourself in that environment. I’m sort of an urban guy. For me, it’s what man can do to shape cities.
David (53:45-53:52):
I love cities. For me, nature is a nice escape, and I love being in nature, but I could never live there.
Fareed (53:52-53:56):
I totally agree. “Escape” is a good word because it implies you come back.
David (53:56-53:57):
Yes.
Fareed (53:57-54:08):
You know?
David (53:58-54:08):
Yes, exactly. Can you tell me about the journalist who worked with your mother in India and what you learned from him? I guess you met him when you were 10. His last name was Singh, right?
Fareed (54:10-54:55):
Yes. Khushwant Singh was probably the best known. He certainly became the best-known journalist in India. He was a novelist, initially wrote what is still the best novel about the partition of India, India, Pakistan, called “Train to Pakistan.”
It won a very big award in those days called the Grove Press Award. He became quite famous in India and then became the editor of this magazine, and my mother was working for him.
What he taught me, probably more than anybody else, was the love of words, the love of the language. He loved nature. We’d go on these walks, and he could identify birds, which I still have absolutely no capacity to do.
David (54:55-55:08):
Good ChatGPT thing. I saw a beautiful falcon outside this morning. I was like, whoa, what kind of bird is that? So I took photos, and I just got the full ChatGPT. Here’s why it’s in New York at this time, migration patterns, etc.
Fareed (55:08-55:22):
Here’s the question: he would do it by bird call. Could you record a bird call, give it to ChatGPT, and say, what is this? I don’t know. That’s what he would do.
David (55:22-55:23):
That’s impressive, though.
Fareed (55:24-55:27):
He would just recite poetry.
David (55:27-55:28):
Wow.
Fareed (55:28-55:39):
He would say to me, now you should learn this. I still remember poems. He made me learn Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” when I was 10 years old.
David (55:39-55:40):
What does that one sound like?
Fareed (55:41-56:25):
I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the Milky Way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: I gazed—and gazed—but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought.
For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.
David (56:25-56:26):
Wow.
Fareed (56:26-56:48):
She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes; Thus mellowed to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
I wish I could do more, but what’s stunning to me is the ones I remember best are the ones I learned when I was 10, 11, 12.
David (56:48-57:12):
It’s funny because I was always amazed at how people would tell me that the Greeks would memorize Homer. I was like, there’s no way. But what stuck with me is poetry, my ability to memorize it, and music. There are songs that I heard when I was in fourth grade, and if I haven’t heard them in 20 years, boom, every single word pops out.
Fareed (57:12-57:16):
The tune helps you remember the words, right?
David (57:16-57:16):
Yes.
Fareed (57:16-57:59):
In a truly oral culture, memorization was important, not just to have the cadences of the language in your head, but also it was practical. There’s a part of the Odyssey where there is a section that tells you how to build a raft.
People memorized this as a way to remember things. There was no how-to manual, nothing you could look at, no YouTube videos. How did you remember how to build a raft? You would recall the lines in the Odyssey that told you how to build a raft. If it was in iambic pentameter and rhythmic, you could remember it better.
David (57:59-58:03):
Yep. Walks, nature, poetry, language. Take me back to that.
Fareed (58:04-59:33):
My father was a very impressive guy and a very good father, but he wasn’t a mentor in that way. Khushwant Singh enjoyed hanging out with me and my brother. He would tell us about poetry and birds. He taught me how to play tennis and how to swim. It also gave me a feeling for what a rich life can look like.
My father was very driven. He was an orphan. He wasn’t trying to get rich. He wanted to be politically active in India and make an impact. He was a politician, lawyer type. Khushwant Singh wanted to do well professionally and write important things, but also wanted to have time for nature and his tennis game.
He had a wonderfully rounded life that I’ve always kept in mind. I’ve always tried to make sure that I don’t get so off track in one area that I lose that ability to have a rich life. To me, the important thing is not maximizing any one metric, but having that balance. It’s very Aristotelian.
David (59:33-59:45):
I want to ask you about the core lesson you’ve learned from different mediums in a kind of fire round. Let’s start with books, then articles, then TV.
Fareed (59:45-60:36):
Books provide depth of thinking and understanding. With a book, particularly a great book, you realize that to understand a phenomenon well, you need to go deeper. There are layers and layers of uncovering. No simple answer is usually the full answer.
It gets back to the question about the map we were talking about. You still have to be able to provide some simple construct or brief construct if somebody asks you why the French Revolution happened. But when you read a great book, you realize this was a complicated phenomenon that happened for a variety of reasons that came together in this one moment.
David (60:37-60:40):
Articles.
Fareed (60:40-61:26):
A short article is an exclamation point. You are making one point. The reason I say an exclamation point rather than a period is that you are asserting something. It has to be unsettling, disturbing, or telling people something they don’t know. It has to grab you by the lapels and tell you this one thing. If you’re not doing that with an article, you’re mostly failing.
There is a different kind of article, though: the longer literary essay that the New Yorker publishes. That’s in its own category, but I mean analytic, argumentative, polemical writing of the kind that vastly populates the Internet.
David (61:27-61:27):
TV.
Fareed (61:28-61:55):
TV is about connection. The most important thing about TV is the connection you make with the viewer, how you make that connection, and how they feel about you.
Maya Angelou once said, “Nobody will ever remember what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel.” I think that’s very true about television when you can do it right.
David (61:55-62:00):
Do you watch your television performances back?
Fareed (62:00-65:26):
It’s interesting you ask. When I started out, my first TV experience was on ABC with the George Stephanopoulos Roundtable. I did it every other week, and I got to know George Will in person in those days because I would argue with him on that show.
For three years, I literally could not watch myself. I think there’s something to what people say about how your internal ear hears a different voice. So, when you hear yourself recorded, you say, “That’s me? What am I hearing?”
I had that same reaction looking at myself, thinking, “Oh my God, this is terrible. I’m not sitting straight,” whatever. I found it very awkward and difficult, and it would depress my confidence. I thought, “I’m not going to do this.”
Then I started to realize somebody told me that I would only get better if I watched myself and asked myself what I wasn’t doing right, what I should do better. In my whole life, I have never had a single minute of television coaching of any kind from anyone. I always thought of myself as just an expert, a journalist. I didn’t want to be a TV personality, so I had to do it myself.
So, I started to watch myself, and it was painful. Then I started to ask myself how to watch myself and actually learn. What am I doing wrong? How do I do it better? Now I watch every show, keeping in mind what I am doing right and what I am doing wrong.
I’ve noticed, for example, that I’ve started to slump slightly, maybe a product of aging, so I’ve got to be more careful about that. I try not to be totally clipped and clean, but you also don’t want too many verbal props. I don’t tend to have many anyway. You have to make mental notes if you feel like you did.
Also, with the substance, I will watch and say to myself, “No, the real follow-up I should have asked at that point is this one rather than that one.”
My brother, who used to be a great tennis player, used to say this about practicing. He said you have to have purposeful practice. You can’t just go out onto a tennis court and knock with somebody for an hour or two and then ask why you’re not getting better. You have to say to yourself, “My backhand is weak. My strategy to do something about that backhand is to focus on it.”
I’m going to start by forcing myself to do only cross-court backhands, then backhand down the line. Then I’m going to see if I can switch back and forth. Then I’m going to try and see if I can get it back deeper. If you do all that, play for two hours three times, your backhand will have gotten better, but not if you just get on there and knock the ball around.
I approach writing and TV like that, saying to yourself, if you’re watching yourself, you’re watching with the purpose of saying, “What did I do wrong? How do I do it better? What should I put into my head when I’m doing it next?”
David (65:26-65:42):
Yeah, it’s a great answer. If I invited you back to Yale and asked you to do a one-semester writing seminar, and the people are going to learn to do what you do, how would you structure that curriculum? What are the core pillars of emphasis that you’re trying to give the students?
Fareed (65:43-66:13):
That’s a great question because I have thought about it. At the end of the day, I would probably assign a lot of very good writing, more than anything else. I think you have to absorb an understanding of what good writing is by looking at it. I don’t believe that there’s a set of 20 rules. Some of them are useful, like if you look at Strunk and White. I actually prefer William Zinsser.
David (66:13-66:15):
Zinsser, yeah.
Fareed (66:15-67:35):
On Writing Well, which I think is better. What I give almost everybody who works for me is a copy of George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, which is a wonderful essay on language and politics and how to write about politics.
It’s also beautifully written, so it’s giving you some important lessons and showing you in the writing itself how to write. I think that helps more than anything else.
I think about my career, and I started to write when I was in school, in high school for sure. I started a little news magazine in school. I was writing when I was in college. I wrote my first op-ed for The New York Times when I was in graduate school at Harvard. I was 24 years old.
It’s just like a lot of writing. There are things you learn only by doing them yourself, making the mistakes, then doing it a little bit better and learning from that. You can’t theoretically learn everything. A lot of it is trial and error, and 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.
David (67:36-68:51):
Well, I’ll close here. I told you about this before, but I want to share it with everyone. You were talking about the Maya Angelou line, and I still remember when I was in college, I would go to this thing called the Global Action Summit in Nashville. I did sports journalism and didn’t know what was going to happen.
I remember there was this guy named Fareed Zakaria who was going to be there, and my mother was like, “Oh, you have to meet Fareed.” I remember waiting to talk to you, and you had no reason to give me the time of day.
Here are two photos from it, and what I remember so much is that I have no idea what I asked you, and I have no idea what you said, but I will never forget the attentiveness of your gaze. It was like Tiger Woods looking at a putt. We probably spoke for 90 seconds, but for those 90 seconds, I had your entire world.
I was so excited to do this, because that stuck with me. Whenever I meet someone, I always think about how I try to be as attentive with people as you were attentive with me. If I can do that, I will have done something very right in my life.
Fareed (68:51-69:44):
Well, first of all, thank you. You made my day, my week. It’s so gratifying to hear you say that. I’m touched and thrilled.
Part of it is that I can see you have this feeling that human beings are amazing, great, and interesting. Have that sense of humility and realize that the person you’re talking to is a really interesting person.
I’ve always had this feeling that you can learn from anyone. You can learn from a peasant in rural India or from a taxi ride. Everybody has something they can teach you. The question is, can you bring it out? Can you bring it out of that person?
That person is an expert on something. They have a lived experience that gives them something they can impart to you. The question is, can you bring it out of them?
David (69:44-69:49):
I really felt that, so thank you. Also, thanks for doing this.
Fareed (69:49-69:50):
This was.
David (69:50-69:54):
This was great fun, and that really touched me.
Fareed (69:54-69:55):
Well, what a pleasure.
David (69:55-69:56):
Great to meet you.
