Full transcript: Thomas Friedman on London Real
5:34 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Thomas Friedman, the internationally renowned author, reporter and New York Times columnist. Your journalistic career has spanned four decades with extensive writings on foreign affairs, global trade, the Middle East, globalization and environmental issues. You’re the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes and the author of seven best-selling books, including From Beirut to Jerusalem, The World is Flat, A Brief History of the 21st Century, one of my favorites, and the recently released Thank You for Being Late, An Optimus Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations.
6:54 You’ve also interviewed, some say advised, President Barack Obama. Thomas, welcome to London Real.
6:59 Thomas Friedman: Great to be here, Brian. Thanks so much.
7:01 Brian Rose: It’s great to have you here.
7:02 Brian Rose: I’m curious, when you’re taking that plane and coming into Heathrow and you’re looking down at London, what are some of the memories that come back or the thoughts you have of being in this country or being back in this country?
7:15 Thomas Friedman: Well, I never forget my first night here. I was a Marshall Scholar, so I was educated here, my postgraduate education, at first the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and then at Oxford, where I ultimately got my Master’s degree, M. Phil degree in Middle East Studies from St. Anthony’s.
7:32 So I came here for the first time in the fall of 1975 as a Marshall Scholar and the first night I was here, went to a play with a group of other Marshall Scholars, a little night music. And so whenever I arrive in London, I think of, send in the clowns, they’ll always be clowns. I’ll never forget that, it was in the strand. And I was married here, met my wife here, although she’s from Des Moines, Iowa, so I had to come all the way over from Minnesota. Minnesota boy had to come all the way over from the States to meet a girl from Des Moines.
8:12 I started my career here on Fleet Street, got my graduate degree here, met so many friends here. I love London, I love the UK. I’m deeply grateful that my graduate education was paid for, courtesy of the British taxpayers, because of Marshall Scholar, which was establishing gratitude for the Marshall Plan. And this is a second home for me. Wow.
8:35 Brian Rose: And Fleet Street back then, what was that like?
8:39 Thomas Friedman: Well, you know, in those days I worked, I started at United Press International, and UPI really no longer exists, the other wire service, there was AP, UPI, Reuters basically. And started on one of those, that typewriter there, on Fleet Street, they were just getting computers in. So we did work on terminals, but I still worked a lot on a typewriter. You know, it was really, it had a very front page quality to it.
9:10 You had these guys who had liquor bottles under their desks, and you know, sort of old grizzled wire service veterans. I was this fresh eyed kid out of Oxford, you know. They hired me because I studied Arabic, and the Iranian Revolution just happened. And even though it was Persian, Arabic, they thought it was the same squiggles, I would be able to figure them out. And I got my start there, spent a year on Fleet Street at UPI.
9:33 And then the number two man in the Beirut Bureau of UPI got shot in the ear by a man robbing a jewelry store on Hommer Street in Beirut. And he said, I want to go home, I do not want to pass go, I do not want to collect $200, I want out of here. I was all of 26 at the time, and they came to me and said, would you like to be the number two man in the Beirut Bureau of UPI? It was the middle of the Civil War then, this was 1979. Civil War started in 1975, 1976.
10:01 And I never been to Beirut. And I turned to my wife and said, want to go to Beirut? She said yes, and suddenly my career as a Middle East correspondent as a real foreign correspondent began.
10:13 Brian Rose: You have this habit of being lucky, your own career, but I don’t believe it’s luck. It sounds like you’re prepared, and then you’re also willing to go for it and put yourself out there.
10:25 Thomas Friedman: I was tremendously lucky in that, and luck of course in inverted commas, but I spent two years in Beirut for UPI and it was wonderful preparation. And they taught me really the basics of journalism, because I had never been to a journalism school. So I actually got my journalism start in London, if I could just backtrack for a second. So I came over here in 1975. The only journalism course I’ve ever taken to this day was at St. Louis Park High School outside of Minneapolis, Room 313, when I was 15 years old and in 10th grade in high school.
11:00 I had an amazing journalism teacher. I had that teacher who changes your life in 10th grade, Hattie Steinberg. And her journalism course is the only course I’ve ever taken, not because I was that good, but because she was that good. And so I worked on my high school paper, did a little in college, and then I came over to London for graduate school. And in those days, actually to this day, the Evening Standard, they’d always have this blaring headline on their newsstand, Brad to Jen were finished or whatever it is.
11:34 And in 1975 I was walking down the street in London with my then girlfriend, now wife, Anne. And we went by an Evening Standard newsstand, and the blaring headline was, at the time, Jimmy Carter was running against Gerald Ford for president. And the blaring headline said, Carter to Jews, colon, if elected, I promise to fire Dr. K. So I stopped my then girlfriend, now wife, and said, look at that headline.
12:02 Isn’t that interesting? Jimmy Carter’s running for president, and to win Jewish votes, he’s promising to fire the first ever Jewish secretary of state. And I said, that’s really interesting. And I thought about it for a little bit, and I went back to my dorm room, Brian, and I have no idea what possessed me, but I wrote a column about it. And my then girlfriend, now wife, was a neighbor of Gilbert Cranberg, who was then the op-ed page editor of the Des Moines Register, a legendary Midwest paper.
12:33 And she took it home on vacation, and she gave it to Gil, who by the way just passed away last week. And he liked it, and he printed it on the half page of the Des Moines Register with an oath cartoon, and they paid me $50. And I thought that was the coolest thing in the whole world. I was walking down the street, I had an opinion, I went back and wrote it up, and someone paid me $50. And I was hooked ever after.
13:04 So during my time in London and at Oxford, I wrote about a dozen op-ed pieces for the Des Moines Register in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, my own hometown paper. So when I went to apply for a job after college, I applied at AP and UPI. AP looked at my clips and said, kid, you’ve never covered a fire. You’ve got all these op-ed pieces, but you’ve never covered a city hall meeting. And UPI looked at them and said, he’s never covered a fire, he’s never covered a city hall meeting, but he’s written these things, probably means we can teach him how to cover a fire in a city hall meeting.
13:36 And the Iranian Revolution just happened, and we just lost this person, and they had an opening at $200 a week, $10,500 a year. And Leon Daniel, then the Bureau Chief for UPI, offered me a job, gave me my start. And so that’s how it all happened. So I was lucky there. Then I went to Beirut for two years, 79 to 81 for UPI, and then the New York Times offered me a job, brought me back to New York for a year, and they sent me back to Beirut in April 1982.
14:04 And Israel invaded Lebanon six weeks later. And for the next two years, it became the biggest story in the world. The Israeli invasion, the Marines coming, the Marines going, the tragic sovereign Chitela massacre, the blowing up of the American embassy, the blowing up of the Marine compound. I covered every one of those stories.
14:21 Brian Rose: What was that like when that kind of explosion goes off and all of those Americans are dead?
14:26 Thomas Friedman: Well, I’ll never forget the day the embassy spoke when I was April 13th, I believe, April 18th, 1983. And I remember the day because the Pulitzer Prizes were going to be announced that night. So it was a Monday. It was the day they announced the Pulitzer. And I knew it had been nominated by my paper for my coverage of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
14:48 And it was 1.06 p.m. and I was in my apartment listening to the BBC one o’clock news. And I was listening to it on something that’s called a transistor radio. This was a small radio that you could actually put on your desk and get the world news. And I had it on my desk in Beirut, and there was an explosion so powerful it knocked the radio off my desk.
15:09 It shook the building that much. And I did what I always did back then. I ran downstairs and looked for, A, see if I see smoke anywhere, and B, listen for sirens. Because the Israelis often set off sonic booms over Beirut. So you never knew what was a sonic boom or what was an explosion.
15:26 And then once you heard the sirens, you knew something was going on. And then I saw a mushroom cloud curling up in the distance. And so I just did that journalism thing. I chased it. And I ran toward it.
15:41 I got closer and closer. I said, I couldn’t be now. I couldn’t be. And then I rounded the corner, and there was the U.S. Embassy in Beirut where I’d spent time over the years seeing different diplomats.
15:52 It was cut in half like a doll’s house. Bodies were hanging from different floors. And there was obviously a smoldering ruin there where the embassy was. And I asked someone, I don’t remember who or exactly when, but in the reporting, because there was no perimeter or anything. You just went there.
16:14 And I said, what happened? And they said that a man drove a truck up the front steps of the embassy. Again, there was no perimeter back in those days. And into the lobby and blew it up. And I never forget what I said.
16:33 I said, you mean he blew himself up? He committed suicide? And that seemed to me just like the most unreal thing, that somebody in the 21st century, or 20th century was committing suicide like that, a kamikaze act. And little did I know that was the first of what would be a form of violence and terrorism that would plague this region and in many ways shape so much of my career in journalism. And so reported that story, the Marine bombing at the embassy, that was on a Sunday morning.
17:13 That was a little after 6 a.m. in the morning. I was at home sleeping with my wife in our apartment, which is in the heart of Beirut. And that blast was so powerful, it shook us out of bed. And it was miles away out at the airport.
17:24 And back then we had a driver, and his stay off was Sunday. And we had a stick shift car, and I didn’t know how to drive a stick shift. And so it was a Fiat, and my wife knew how to drive a stick. So I roused her out of bed, got in the car, and we followed a fire engine out to the Marine. Sorry, the French and British had a compound together.
17:48 People forget they also got hit and lost several soldiers. And we were there for a couple hours, and then somebody said, we heard the Marines also took a rocket. That’s what I remember them say, the Marines took a rocket. And I was with Terry Anderson from the AP, who was later abducted, and was one of the hostages for a long time, for five, six years. And Terry and I said, well, let’s go out and see to the airport, see what happened.
18:17 So we go out to the airport, and then we see the Marine compound, completely squashed. And that defined the story there ever after. Yeah.
18:26 Brian Rose: You mentioned journalism. You just said it about four or five times in the last five minutes.
18:32 What does it mean to be a journalist?
18:34 Thomas Friedman: Well, I mean… Usually in today’s age. You know, in today’s age, I’m not sure. You know, back then it was very meat and potatoes, you know?
18:42 Who, how, what, when, and where. Go with your notebook. Write it up. Get it first, but get it right. You know, it was pretty straightforward, you know, back then.
18:50 I didn’t have to tweet, I didn’t have to Facebook, I didn’t have to blog. I just wrote one story a night for the New York Times on deadline. Occasionally updated it, you know. Occasionally had to dictate stories over a telephone, you know, that were on deadline. But it was right out of the front page.
19:09 It was just the basic meat and potatoes stuff. But it was a different time, Brian. In the first week of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, my apartment was blown up. And my driver’s wife and two daughters were killed in my apartment. I had helped dig them out.
19:25 It was one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me in my life. And the New York Times wouldn’t let me write about it. They said, you’re not the story. There’s a million people whose apartments have been blown up or suffered casualties. You’re not the story.
19:38 We eventually wrote a small story about it because other people were writing about it. This was in the first week of the war. Today, if that happened, oh my… Today, if you get a little cut in your finger, you Instagram it and send it all over the world. My apartment was blown up.
19:52 And the New York Times wouldn’t let me write about it. This was a very different era of journalism. By the way, a better one. A better one.
20:01 Brian Rose: You mentioned Instagram there, you know, and we’ve seen the rise of social media and news on social media.
20:07 You’ve kind of seen that for the past year, five years, ten years. Can you tell me how the wave has come in and in a certain way, now we’re seeing people kind of coming back to a trusted source of opinion and news and maybe explain that for people that might not even understand that.
20:23 Thomas Friedman: Yeah, so I talk the talk of globalization. I actually don’t walk the walk, so I don’t have a Facebook page. I think we have one defensively because other people are creating phony Facebook pages, you know, for them.
20:35 I have 847,000 followers on Twitter, but I don’t tweet. So the New York Times tweets my column. If you come to me and say, would you tweet your link to the show, give it to my secretary, she’ll do it. I actually do not. If my life depended on putting out a tweet right now, I wouldn’t know how to do it.
20:50 Brian Rose: Okay, why do you choose to do or not do that?
20:53 Thomas Friedman: Because I… two reasons. One, first I have the luxury to do that. I have a column in the New York Times.
21:00 It goes to 20 million people. I don’t know how many people it goes to. So I recognize I have the luxury to do that. But there are other reasons. One is my philosophy of life is, and you shall know them by their books.
21:14 Not by their tweets, not by their blogs. You know, so I don’t… Is that a famous quote? That’s what I say. That’s my quote.
21:22 And you shall know them by their books. And so I don’t really want to waste my energy doing that. Not really that interested in what people say about me. In 142 characters anonymously, it doesn’t really interest me. So if you’re tweeting about me, you all have a good time.
21:39 I’m not there. I’m not going to react. And so I find it’s a real time suck from what I can see, because I don’t do it. So I… I mean, once every blue moon, if something occurs to me, I’ll give a tweet to my secretary and she’ll put it out.
21:58 You know, but it’s just not something I do. I really can’t. And one reason is it takes me a long time to figure out my opinion. So if Rex Tillerson is fired on Monday, I’m going to be fired. But my column isn’t until Wednesday.
22:12 And I tweet something on Monday, right when he’s fired. I may feel different about it by Wednesday. Then I’m in this situation where I tweeted this on Monday, but I’m writing my column on Wednesday. And people are going to say, which is you, you know? I mean, I did actually…
22:31 It’s probably the first tweet I’ve done in a year when Tillerson was fired. I did issue a tweet that said Rex Tillerson was the worst secretary of state ever and, God, I’m going to miss him, because of the… He was one of the sane voices there, even though he was so incompetent, really, in many ways, as a secretary of state. So anyways, I really focus on my column. That’s my currency.
22:55 And you never debase your currency. You know, that is my currency. That one column a week I have. It used to be two, and now I’m down to one. My choice.
23:04 And on my books. Because I think those are things that last. And spending a lot of time on sort of… I find, from what I see of Twitter, a little… And again, I don’t really look at it, but from what I see…
23:16 Because now when you read news stories, you see they embed tweets in them. It strikes me as a kind of a giant smart-alic machine where everyone’s competing to be the quippiest, smart-alicky person. I just don’t… I’d rather read a book. I’d rather interview someone, just how I prefer to use my time.
23:34 So, God bless you if it works for you. I’m not on any campaign against them, but this is what works for me. This is how I learn. This is what we’re doing right now. I happen to think talking to another person is data.
23:48 And so, that’s what I do. I’m kind of an old fart, and I kind of came in this way, and I’m going to go out this way. If it works for other people, I say, really, God bless you. For me, I really am very old-fashioned.
24:03 Brian Rose: And what about news, this concept of where we get our news from, whether it’s from Facebook, and whether that news is real or fake or just not researched versus what we can read in the New York Times.
24:17 How has the perception of that news changed in the last few years?
24:20 Thomas Friedman: Well, I think we’re a little at a moment now where it’s really changing. So, there’s this thing called the New York Times. Let’s talk about that for a second. On one side, we had editors.
24:29 On the other side, we had regulators. In the middle, we had reporters. And those regulators said, if you want to take out a political ad in the New York Times, you have to identify who you are. I am Brian Rose. I work here.
24:43 I paid for this ad. And then I can say, Brian Rose, he’s left, right, or center, whatever it is. Then over here, we have these things called editors. And those editors made sure that what went into the paper was factual as best they could. And if it was incorrect, that it was corrected.
24:58 Okay, it ran a correction. Then along came something called Facebook, let’s say. And Facebook said, we’re actually not a newspaper. We’re a platform. We’re something different.
25:09 We’re a platform. And we actually don’t need any regulators. And we don’t need any editors. Oh, but by the way, you and Mr. New York Times, we’d like all your readers.
25:19 And we’d like all your advertisers. And by the way, they sucked a lot of our readers and a lot of our advertisers. And that created a real business problem for us and for everybody else. So we looked at Facebook and we said, so you’re not a newspaper. You’re a platform.
25:37 How do we actually regulate you? And they said, no, we don’t need regulation. Trust us. And because we did not regulate them, we trusted them. It turns out to have been a huge mistake.
25:48 They violated our trust. And they are now paying a huge price for it. And they deserve to pay that price because they let us down. Their platform was abused. And it was abused because they’re more interested in clicks than facts and the truth.
26:05 And because facts and the truth require editors and sometimes regulators. And they wanted to avoid both. And so they’re paying a price for that now. Now, I know that Facebook clearly provides something really valuable to people because you don’t have two billion customers around the world unless you’re providing something of value. So, again, it’s not for me, but I recognize that they provide something of real value to people.
26:30 Want to be connected to family, friends, political allies, or whatever. But they need to get their act together. And I hope they’re regulated myself. And I’m really counting on the European Union because too many people in our Congress get bought off by some of these tech companies. And I’m counting on the European Union.
26:53 Their privacy regulations and their, you know, sort of their responsibility regulations. I think they’re doing the Lord’s work for the world in insisting on calling these people to account and regulating them.
27:04 Brian Rose: Right. Front page on The New York Times last night on the internet at least was reporting on this kind of internal turmoil in Facebook and getting rid of someone who might have said or tried to control internally. Right.
27:16 The news and regulate the news and try to check it.
27:18 Thomas Friedman: Yeah. He’s out. He seems like his whole department’s been disbanded, which is quite funny. Yeah, from what I could read, yeah.
27:23 So, you know, again, it’s what I’ve really noticed was, you know, a couple years ago, you know, we were mainstream media. We were The New York Times. And we were supposedly dead and nearly buried. Not dead and buried, but dead and nearly buried. Okay.
27:39 Boy, two years later, The New York Times is as healthy as ever financially. Our stock price is up 30 percent, you know, in the last six months. And what I find… Electronic platform is successful. Yeah, electronic.
27:50 We have more digital subscribers than anybody in the world now. And it’s because it turns out a lot of people want trusted news, news they can trust. Not that we don’t make mistakes. We do, but when we do and it’s pointed out to us, we try to correct them. And I think people are looking for trusted navigators today more than ever, or at least a certain critical mass of people are, and they’re making a very healthy base for The Guardian, for The New York Times, for The Washington Post.
28:16 And we’re… I don’t want to say we’re cool now, but we’re no longer dismissed as some old mainstream media. And now Facebook is really under the gun. Their platform is really being challenged by their users. And how are you using my data?
28:35 You know, this notion is, oh, I get it. I’m actually your product, and the advertisers are your customers. You know, you’re not their customer. You’re their product. They’re actually selling you to that advertiser, your data, your habits, your likes and your dislikes.
28:51 And by the way, with Google, I’m ready to make that trade. Wow, what I get from Google, in terms of search, in terms of directions, you know, in terms of news, in terms of insight, I couldn’t live without Google. I could live without Facebook in a second. I could easily live without Twitter. But it’s like I’m ready to make that trade.
29:15 I know Google is… I can see from the ads, you know. I’m going to the UK, and suddenly I get UK ads. Okay, I get that. The computer’s following that.
29:24 I’m actually ready to make that trade. I really feel I’m getting something in return. But I think the others, you know, it’s really becoming questionable. You know, Facebook played a clear, the important role. How big, whether it was decisive, I don’t know in our last election the way it was abused.
29:39 And I don’t think we’ll know fully ever, but we certainly don’t know fully yet. First Mark Zuckerberg said it’s kind of crazy to think that Facebook was used that way. And then it was oops, 128 million people read, you know, some of these fake ads. You know, so they’ve been incredibly slow to identify how they were exploited and to share that with their users. And so I’m glad they’re being called to account by their users.
30:05 That’s really healthy. And we’ve been through those kind of things before as the New York Times. And readers keep you honest. And they’re going to be called for accounts. I think the cool kids, you know, is kind of worn off a little bit.
30:18 And maybe you hear a little of the resentment of an old, foggy, mainstream media guy watching them, you know, be put through this. And there’s a little of that. Again, I go back to where I started. Obviously, they provide a lot of value for people. You don’t get two billion customers without that.
30:33 So they’re going to be here. So let’s have the best version of Facebook we’re going to have. And they’re going to go through that. But they’re going to have to hire editors. Now, they’ve hired 3,000 editors.
30:41 But when you have two billion users, it’s a drop in the bucket. Yeah.
30:45 Brian Rose: Well said. It would be a shame if I didn’t get your opinion on some world affairs.
30:49 Thomas Friedman: Sure.
30:49 Brian Rose: So let me ask you, you know, you’ve come here into London in the last couple weeks. It’s been an interesting place to be here in the UK. Yeah. We’ve had some, you know, former Soviet nerve agent that we think has been unleashed on former double agent. We’ve got obviously the election happening in Russia, diplomats being thrown out on either country, et cetera.
31:11 What do you see, you know, from a distance and also someone that followed the Cold War for a long time with James Baker and saw maybe, you know, the old version of what Russia and the Soviet Union is? What’s your take so far on what’s happening?
31:25 Thomas Friedman: Well, you know, Vladimir Putin strikes me as a guy who is always looking for dignity in all the wrong places, you know, looking to restore Russia’s greatness by telling us he’s got a missile now that can penetrate our defenses and, you know, maybe who knows.
31:40 But kind of when you have to tell people that makes me suspicious, you know, if you really got it, you don’t talk about it. He’s a guy who’s tracking down, you know, old spies and seeking revenge. He’s a guy who’s saying, I will defend Mother Russia from the West, you know. Meanwhile, you know, the men are dying there at younger and younger ages all the time. A country that has enormous human talent is hemorrhaging it to America and Israel in particular, helping them both become incredible global high tech giants.
32:14 Thank you very much for sending us there, Gabe Brin. He co-founded Google. You know, so in the long run, Putin’s only running against Mother Nature, human nature, and Moore’s law, OK? He’s running against Mother Nature. He’s building his whole country basically on a resource, oil and gas, that the oil part, if we don’t keep it in the ground, we’re going to end up as a bad biological experiment.
32:36 He’s running against human nature. Europeans look out at the world and they really want what the EU has, much more than what some cockamamie Russia free trade zone has. And he’s running against Moore’s law. You know, the speed and power microchips will keep doubling and that’s going to empower individuals more and more and more to compete, connect, and collaborate globally, excuse me, as individuals. So I think he’s fighting a losing game.
32:58 But you can do it for a while. It’s good work if you can get it. But why did you just have to have an election where you won 72% and you really had no opponent? Like, why did you even bother, you know? So what does that say?
33:10 That you didn’t really dare put yourself out there to be truly judged in a free and fair way by your own people. So I think he has got feet of clay and he can play this game out for a while. It’s only oil and gas prices are high. But it’s a tragedy. He never really wants to drill his people, only the oil and gas.
33:31 So never really drill his people and unlock their creativity, energy, entrepreneurship, and innovative skills, both men and women. He’s always drilling the ground. So I find the whole thing rather pathetic, actually, but it’s a good gig for him and it seems to be working. And it will until it doesn’t.
33:48 Brian Rose: You had an extremely popular column where you used the word Code Red when you were talking about President Trump.
33:55 You were also on the news that evening. Can you talk about what you talked about there? And then can you talk about the Trump-Russia connection, if there is any, and what you’re seeing and what we might see play out?
34:09 Thomas Friedman: Our president’s a disturbed person. I don’t know what his exact psychological profile is, but he’s a disturbed man.
34:16 He’s also a disgusting human being. So let’s just start there. If you want to know what I really think, I’ll tell you afterwards. He’s a disgusting human being.
34:25 Brian Rose: These are strong words from you because you’ve never –
34:28 Thomas Friedman: I don’t go there usually, but he really merits them.
34:31 I mean, he’s a man that’s been found to have issued 2,000 lies and falsehoods in his first year in office by the Washington Post and by the New York Times. I mean, is there any other word than disgusting for that? Is there any other word than disturbed for that? So we need to call him by his real name. And the column I wrote about was in reaction to the fact that the head of the FBI, NSA, and CIA came out and said, Russia hacked our election in 2016.
35:02 It is continuing to intervene through social networks in our electoral process now, and it will do so in 2020 in our next big election. And his reaction was, no reaction. In fact, the head of the NSA said he has received no instructions to take any extraordinary actions in response to this revelation. So that tells you one of three things, right? It tells you Trump is either compromised, that Putin has leverage over him, maybe it’s sexual, maybe it’s financial, or he’s a towering fool, or he actually likes the fact Russia’s intervening because he knows they’re intervening on his behalf.
35:42 So it’s one of those three. There’s no other choice. And they’re all disturbing. And they’re all really disturbing. And that’s why I said, this is called red, folks.
35:50 The biggest threat to our democracy is sitting in the Oval Office. And what are our next steps? Well, there’s only one thing to do. I don’t need any more information about Donald Trump. I know just who he is.
36:03 My motto is just vote. That is, to all young people, get out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. And the way you do that is either run for office yourself, vote for someone who’s running for office, raise money for someone who’s running for office, drive someone in the polls to vote for someone who’s running for office against Trump, or canvas for someone running for office against Trump. What have we learned in the last six months? We’ve learned that the worst Democrat, in my view, is better than the best Republican.
36:33 Because the best Republicans, Lindsey Graham, the Rob Portmans, Susan Collins, the people you said, these are good, decent people. No, they’re all in on it now. They all signed on to it. And that tells you the worst Democrat is better than the best Republican. What that tells me is you’ve got to vote for a Democrat.
36:55 And by the way, I say this, I’m barely a Democrat. I’m a free market guy, very pro-business, very strong in social safety nets. But I’m a pro-business, you know, progressive, as it were. I say this as someone who believes that unless Democrats get a lever of power, the House, the Senate, the White House, or certainly the House or the Senate, while Trump has the White House, this will go on. So I believe in power, okay, that these guys have the power now, and they’re just driving it.
37:26 You know, you look what they’re doing on environmental regulations. They’re not looking around saying, gosh, I’m really worried what other people will say about that. You know, they just stick it right in your face, okay? So we need to get power. We, the people who oppose that.
37:41 And by the way, that includes many liberal, moderate Republicans, you know. And so I’m just focused on one thing, how we get power. I’m not interested in writing another op-ed piece. I don’t need any more information about Donald Trump. I know who he is.
37:55 He’s a disturbed person. He’s a man who absolutely should never have been elected president of the United States. We can tolerate him for four years, maybe, but we cannot tolerate eight years of him. He will destroy our institutions if we have eight years. So this is code red for me, and I have no hesitation about saying that.
38:16 He’s an awful human being.
38:18 Brian Rose: And you said, get out of Facebook, and you said, can’t go talk to people. This is a human versus human, human on human contact movement.
38:29 Thomas Friedman: Because the NRA, the National Rifle Association, they’re not in Facebook. They’re in your face.
38:36 They’re not in the chat room. They’re in the cloak room with the U.S. Congress with bags of money and every legislature. Bags of money in one hand and bags of votes in the other. So unless you’re there fighting them with the language and the resources, the currency of the day, votes and money, you’re going to lose.
38:56 And so we, you know, the people who oppose this Trump phenomenon, and there are many Republicans, I believe, and many Democrats, we need to get the votes and money that will crush him. I think it is really a national imperative that this version of the Republican Party be destroyed and be destroyed in the only way it can be destroyed at the polls. Because these people need to go into the corner and sit and look at a mirror and say, what happened to us?
39:27 How did our party become this sort of syndicate where all we did was rent ourselves out to Everett could energize our base? First it was Rush Limbaugh and talk show host, then it was the Tea Party, and then it was Trump. And think what happened in that time. This was a party that said, we are deficit hawks. They said, oh, no, now we’re deficit doves.
39:49 This is a party that said, we are free traders. They said, no, no, now we’re protectionists. I mean, there’s no core anymore. It’s, oh, that’s who will reenergize our base? Then fine, we’ll just be for you.
39:59 The whole thing is just become a rental party for whoever will energize our base. Because if you energize the base, then I get to keep my $175,000 a year job in the U.S. Congress and my free parking at Reagan National Airport. And that’s all these people are interested in. And so that version of the Republican Party needs to be destroyed.
40:27 The only way it can be destroyed effectively is at the polls. So they are forced to go back and say, what happened to us? We need to go back to being a conservative party. We cannot have a healthy democracy and a two-party system in America if we don’t have a proper conservative party. A conservative in terms of family values, not a conservative party that says, oh, you were screwing a porn star while your wife just delivered your second son?
40:57 I as an evangelical preacher, no problem. I’ll give you a pass on that. What the hell is that? What is that? You know, do they realize how corrupted they’ve become?
41:09 And so this, we need a healthy conservative party, but they aren’t conservative. They’re actually radical. Their people are telling us that, geez, I went to the doctor, and my son was sick. I took him to the doctor, and I took him to 100 doctors. And 99 of those doctors told me this is secure.
41:31 And one told me to go home and put tea leaves and witches’ brew and grass together and boil it for two hours and give it to your son, he’ll be fine. What am I talking about? Climate change. 99% of scientists, 99 out of 100 scientists say, this is real, this is coming. You can see it right before your eyes.
41:51 Water is coming up in Miami already. Glacier National Park is disappearing. And they’re saying, no, no, no, we’re going to go with the one who says it’s a hoax. That’s not conservative. That’s crazy radical.
42:03 There’s nothing prudent about that. And that’s what’s happened to this party. They are so off track. And I don’t say this because I’m some pro-liberal Democrat. Democrats have their own problems, but they haven’t been denying science.
42:15 They’ve been holding, making major legislation on health care without hearings. That’s not what Democrats are doing. They’ve been quite responsible in the pursuit of their left-of-center solutions. So these aren’t equal. These people have gone nuts.
42:32 And the Republican Party is like a disturbed ecosystem. And Donald Trump is an invasive species. Have you ever seen how many rats you get in a disturbed ecosystem? Some get really fat, too. And that’s what’s happening.
42:51 Brian Rose: And for a man that’s worked very hard on the climate change issue for many, many years, this must be very hard to watch.
43:01 Thomas Friedman: It’s very hard to watch because, you know, we should, the way I approach it is very hard to watch because this is good business. I mean, you know, basically, this isn’t very complicated, all right? This is real. This is coming. It’s already here.
43:20 And it means that the next great global industry is going to be built around clean air, clean water, clean energy, and energy efficiency. It has to be. Otherwise, we’re going to be a bad biological experiment again. So if that’s the case, who thinks America can have the world’s leading economy? If we don’t lead in the next great global industry, please raise your hand, okay?
43:42 Well, I don’t believe that, you know. So, you know, what I always say to climate change opponents is that, I believe climate change is real. You don’t, okay? Well, this is very simple. If climate change comes, and I’m right, we’re really positioned well.
44:02 And if I’m wrong, all we have are stronger industries, cleaner industries, which in a world of growing population will matter, will be hugely relevant and important. So if I’m wrong, that we prepare for climate change and it comes, then we’re like a guy who prepares for the Olympic marathon, and the Olympics don’t come. You’re fitter, healthier, trimmer, stronger, and you can really run. If we don’t prepare, and I’m right, and it comes, we’re a bad biological experiment.
44:33 So saying, I’m going to go that route, that’s not conservative. That’s crazy radical. And so, you know, the whole thing is nuts, but this is a party that’s given up on science. Trump has no science advisor. First president to have no science advisor.
44:50 I guess because there’s no one talking about science on Fox TV, because that seems to be where he gets all his news. So we have no, let me repeat, our president has no science advisor. The Office of Technology and Science in the White House is basically an empty shell.
45:07 Brian Rose: You spent time with President Obama. You interviewed him.
45:11 They said he used you as the sounding board. I don’t know what that means. What was that experience like, and how does he contrast and?
45:20 Thomas Friedman: Well, Obama, you know, it was fun talking to Obama, because he’s a very thoughtful, well-read person. So it’s fun sparring with him, fun interviewing him, fun talking to him, because there’s a real mind, you know, at work there.
45:35 And so, and we hit each other with our purses plenty. There were things he did I didn’t agree with, you know. Things that had to do with Syria, things that had to do with Simpson-Bowles, you know, whatnot. There were that economic package that I disagreed with. But Donald Trump had more scandals this week, and I think it’s only Tuesday, than Obama had in eight years, okay?
46:01 And so he represented America in a dignified way. His family behaved with the greatest decorum. His wife was an enormously decent and popular first lady. And the president, this guy is just an indecent human being, Trump. And he can’t, you know, finish a sentence properly, so talking to him isn’t particularly satisfying, you know.
46:27 And the only scoop news he makes when people interview him, you may have noticed, is he says something outrageous. You know, it’s not because he comes up with something really brilliant and interesting. It’s like… It’s clickbait news. It’s just clickbait. That’s all it is, you know.
46:43 I have no sources in this administration. They don’t talk to me. I’m not banging the door to talk to them. I just want to survive them. We got, you know, sort of two and a half more years to go.
46:57 Brian Rose: Okay. Let me ask you about a couple other places around the world. North Korea, what’s your take on what’s happening there now?
47:06 Thomas Friedman: You know, well, the thing I always say about North Korea is that it’s a dynasty, a three-generational dynasty. Kim Jong-un is the third of the Kim dynasty.
47:18 And what does that tell you? It tells you they’re not suicidal. They’re homicidal. But they’re not suicidal because you don’t survive three generations. So that means we have something to talk about.
47:30 These nuclear bombs are developing. They’re all health insurance for them, for the regime, you know. And I don’t think they’re going to go to zero under any conditions. And maybe Trump can get them down, stop their long-range testing so they can’t hit us. I mean, there’s a lot of things that he can do.
47:47 I’m happy if he sits down with them. I think that’s a bad idea. I think actually Trump has done a pretty good job of scaring him a little bit, you know, because it takes being a little crazy sometimes to penetrate a guy like that. And Trump can do crazy really well. And so I doubt much is going to come from it.
48:06 But at the end of the day what Trump, I think, doesn’t fully realize is that you got three choices with the North Korea, just as Obama had three choices with Iran. You can acquiesce, don’t want to do that. You can bomb, wow, really don’t want to do that. Or you can negotiate, yes, we got to do that, you know. So Obama did it with Iran.
48:23 And what Trump will discover very soon is that the best he can get out of North Korea is to duplicate what Obama did with Iran. That’s the best he’s going to get, because they’re not going to go to zero. And that’s going to be interesting to watch as he comes up against that reality.
48:40 Brian Rose: You said recently that there’s nothing but butter between Tehran and Tel Aviv. First of all, how do you come up with these amazing phrases?
48:49 And then second of all, what does that mean? How do you come up with those? Because everyone stops, tries to think about what Thomas just said. I mean, in a weird way, in a nice way, it’s a quick make-your-self, because it gets people to maybe pay attention to something that a long-winded expression wouldn’t get.
49:04 Thomas Friedman: Well, you know, I do say myself as my job is being a translator from English to English.
49:08 That’s really what I try to do. I try to take complex situations, the geopolitics of Iran and the Arab world, and explain it first of all to myself in a way I can understand. And then share it with readers. Because my form of idealism, of my journalism, is I believe in something Marie Curie once said, which is, now is the time to understand more so we may fear less. And in an age of real complexity, like helping people understand the world so they fear less and are less vulnerable to people like a Trump or a Putin or an Erdogan, you know, I mean, who will try to take them places because they can’t understand, I think, is really important for all of us in this business.
49:53 So that’s really my form of journalism. Where these phrases… Where they come from, they come from inside. No, it’s chemical. And God bless me with this, and that’s on my mind.
50:09 It comes from Minnesota somewhere. It comes from somewhere, I don’t know. And what I was trying to say is that basically the collapse of the Sunni Arab world, which we’ve witnessed over the last 15 years, has meant that there’s really no power between Tehran and Tel Aviv, and it’s all just fragmented power. And therefore, even if the Shah of Iran were empowered today, he’d probably be projecting himself to the west because there’s nothing there. And so Iran and Syria are just getting closer and closer together.
50:40 Iran and Israel are getting closer and closer together, and that’s going to be a real challenge.
50:45 Brian Rose: Okay, closer and closer to having a conflict. Right, exactly, yeah. And you talked about that conflict could be something we’re not expecting, as in, you know, submarines and…
50:55 Thomas Friedman: Yeah, I mean, I think that…
50:57 I think both sides really want to avoid a war. Iran does not need a war with Israel right now. It would be very devastating because the Israelis would hit the Iranian state. They’re not going to make… The Israelis would make sure that war just isn’t confined to the Galahites.
51:10 And the Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Hezbollah, don’t want there to be a war because the Israelis have made it clear, you will not out-crazy us. Do not think you’re going to out-crazy us. So we will actually devastate your civilian areas, of your civilian supporters, as we did in 2006, the last time we ran around. Oh, this time it’ll be much worse. Right.
51:33 And don’t tell me about Geneva, the Hague, war crimes. Not interested, you know? Just telling you, you will not out-crazy us. So this will be a devastating war. When and if it happens, and hopefully it’s if not when.
51:47 Brian Rose: Right, and that’s bad for business for Hezbollah because, you know, they’re in the business. They’re in the business of power and control, and they don’t want to be devastated by the Israelis, but the Israelis are in the business of high-tech. And between Haifa and Tel Aviv, you know, you have one high-tech company after another on that highway. So it wouldn’t take but half a dozen rockets to do great damage, you know, to Israel’s high-tech industry. OK.
52:08 Saudi Arabia, and why should we care about what’s happening there? You talked recently about saying that pictures from the 50s in Saudi Arabia, there’s women in skirts and movie theaters. And can you talk about what’s happening now and why Saudi Arabia is not only relevant in the Middle East, but to the rest of the world, because I think most people don’t see the connection.
52:28 Thomas Friedman: Yeah, so it goes back to when I started Beirut on that little typewriter there.
52:32 And I came to Beirut in 1979. And the first two stories I covered were the Iranian Revolution, Islamic Revolution in Iran, and the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by puritanical extremist Muslims. The one that is now filled with hotels and high-end pieces and run by the Saudi family. I’ve never been to Mecca. That I couldn’t tell you.
52:56 You know what I mean? But basically, what happened after 1979 is the Saudi royal family was so shocked by the takeover of the Mecca Mosque for two weeks by real radical extremists who broadcast every day that the Saudi rulers were womanizers, secularizers, westernizers, drunkards, people who had perverted Islam. They freaked out so much from that that they basically took Saudi Islam on this real right-wing path. They banned fun. They banned music, all cinema.
53:29 And they really closed up the kingdom. And then they exported the most puritanical version of Islam across the Arab Muslim world from Morocco to Indonesia. They changed the face of Islam in reaction to what happened in 1979. And because oil prices rose, they had more money than ever to do it. They had the funds to do it.
53:47 And meanwhile, the Iranians were doing the same thing with Shia Islam. What Saudi were doing was Sunni Islam. And so Islam lost its brakes in 1979 to this giant right turn. And it ended up in 9-11. It ended up in some people really fed by an extremist ideology funded with books and teachers and mosques and mudresses from Saudi Arabia.
54:10 And so people like me had a real problem with that. I mean, after 9-11, I put Saudi Arabia in the dock. You guys did this. You did this. You created the ideas industry around this.
54:24 Well, what Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, represents is, avowedly, from his point of view, a desire to reverse what happened in 1979. He talks specifically about it. And to reclaim Islam, and in his interviews with me, he said, you know, do not say I’m restoring Islam. Do not say I’m reforming Islam. I’m restoring Islam.
54:45 I have the original Islam, not those guys. And we’ve actually never seen a Saudi leader fight the war of ideas within Islam that way. Now, when you think how much money we spend countering Muslim extremism in the West, is it $2 trillion, $3 trillion? Now we have a Saudi leader who’s ready to do that from the only place where it matters, from inside Saudi Arabia, where it can then be spread all across the Arab Muslim world. That is huge.
55:11 So that’s what interests me personally in MBS. And so this is a guy with enormous strategic upside and enormous downside. Because he’s the same guy who also went out and bought a $450 million painting, a $500 million mansion in France, a $500 million he got. And threw a bunch of rich guys in jail. And fighting an anti-corruption campaign at the same time.
55:36 And putting his mother probably under house arrest. So, yeah, I mean, there’s a good MBS and there’s a bad MBS. And I think the job of the West is to get the best out of him and cushion the worst.
55:47 Brian Rose: You have a fascinating relationship with Saudi Arabia. How does a Jewish-American kid from Minnesota end up giving advice to a Saudi guy that affects Middle East talks?
55:57 Thomas Friedman: Well, you know, it really started, my real relationship with them started after 9-11. So I used to do columns in the form of letters from the American president to world leaders, which I would just make up. But based on facts, you know. And it was a fun device. I wrote letters from Bill Clinton to different world leaders.
56:20 And they were sure it came from Clinton. I used to have a riot doing it. And it was I couldn’t really get George W. Bush’s voice. It didn’t quite work, you know, the way he worked with Clinton.
56:29 And so, but I tried. And it was after 9-11 I wrote one from George W. Bush to the Arab League, all the leaders of the Arab League. Suggesting that they offer Israel a whole new approach to peace, full peace in return for full withdrawal. Trade, tourism, normalization of relations in return from full withdrawal back to the 67 boundaries.
56:52 So I wrote that as an op-ed column from Bush to the leaders of the Arab League. And in between, when I wrote that, the Saudis had come to me, because after 9-11 I was just hammering them. You know what I mean? And in part to shut me up, they invited me to come to Saudi Arabia just to sort of see it from the inside. You know, I mean, not so much to shut me up, but to say, hey, come listen to our point of view.
57:18 So I said, okay. And I wrote that column from Bush to leaders of the Arab League a little bit before I came there. And so I got to Saudi Arabia, and I toured around the country. And then King Abdullah, then it asked to see me, then Crown Prince Abdullah. And we met at his house at midnight in Riyadh at his horse farm.
57:41 And myself, Adelal Jubeir, who’s now the foreign minister, was the translator. And Crown Prince Abdullah, just three of us. And I sat down, and he began the meeting by saying…
57:50 Brian Rose: Is that a strange situation when you’re there?
57:53 Thomas Friedman: Yeah, but I’m used to it. That’s what I do.
57:55 You know what I mean? So I sat down, and he said… First thing he said was, you broke into my drawer. And I said, what, Jair Ennis? You broke into my drawer.
58:06 That column you wrote about a peace plan, that was my idea. I said, really? Tell me about it. And so he basically echoed the same thing that I’d written. He believed in full peace for full withdrawal.
58:20 And we talked about it for three hours when he got done, and I said, this is so important when you said this. No Arab leader has said this. No Saudi leader has said this. I was just making it up when I wrote my column. I said, you know you say this on the record.
58:34 And he said, no, no, you say it. I said, no, no, you say it. He said, no, no, you say it. I said, no, no, you say it. He said, no, no, you say it.
58:41 I said, no, no, you say it. We’re actually standing in his house and having this back and forth. And finally, he said, well, write your column up, you know, using my quotes. And I’ll look at it. And I did.
58:54 And the next day he said, yeah, I said that. Go with it. And that was the base of the Saudi Peace Initiative. And then that turned into the Arab Peace Initiative.
59:02 Brian Rose: Did that feel good when he told you that that day?
59:05 Thomas Friedman: Absolutely felt good. I felt it. And by the way, I knew what he was doing. He was changing the subject from 9-11, but that’s okay, because he was paying for it with real currency, putting down what became the first Arab Peace Initiative. Right.
59:17 But it all started with my little column, you know, that I just invented out of my head, you know.
59:23 Brian Rose: You were for the invasion of Iraq. Yes. Can you explain that? I think it’s really interesting to hear why and what you were hoping that would accomplish.
59:32 Yeah.
59:32 Brian Rose: And because you, 9-11 really affected you.
59:36 Thomas Friedman: Yeah, 9-11 really affected me. And I believe then and I believe now that we needed to find a way to partner with the Arab world to create consensual government. That what ailed that part of the world was a complex set of things that was producing this kind of rage in post 9-11.
59:58 It was certainly there was antipathy toward America and Israel. But there’s also how much they hated their own leaders and also how much Islam needed to be reformed. That had been captured really by this, again, with this extremist puritanical cult. And the religion had become very anti-modern, anti-pluralistic, you know, and anti-women. And so for all those reasons I believe that we had to open a space in the heart of the Arab Muslim world where Arabs could have a free debate about the future of their faith.
1:00:33 That was the main logic I was arguing and why I favored the war. Why I favored if we could, and again, I hate to put it there, I didn’t favor war. But it was the idea that could we partner with Iraqis, you know, to go in there and in the heart of the Arab world, Baghdad, build a coalition, Sunnishites, Kurds, Turkmen, Christians, I mean to kind of open this space. Because without pluralism, they’re going to die. They were going to die.
1:01:05 And I don’t regret that attitude, that feeling. I never believed it was about WMD. My view is if you’re going for WMD, that’s not the problem. I don’t know whether it was WMD or not. So I was making the liberal argument for the war.
1:01:24 And unfortunately it failed. And I learned a lot of lessons from that. I learned that you can have your own war in your own mind, but if the people who are fighting that war don’t share that view or don’t know how to execute it, you’re hostage to their behavior and their actions. And so I feel nothing but regret for the loss of life of Iraqis, of Americans. I feel nothing but regret for the loss of treasure.
1:01:59 But I still believe that unless they come to some form of consensual politics and pluralism, you’re going to have what you have in Syria today. You’re going to have what you had post-ISIS. So I was a consenting adult. This is what I believed. I believe it to this day, but nothing but regret, obviously, for how it happened.
1:02:27 And I just take full responsibility for my position. It’s there. But I’m not going to apologize for believing what I believe. You know what I mean? I’m so regretful of the human cost of it.
1:02:42 But look at the cost of Syria without us intervening. You know what I mean? What I mean by that, unless they get to some form of power sharing, they’re going to destroy themselves. Look at the pictures of Syria today. Whatever happened in Iraq, whatever has happened in Iraq, we’ve overpaid for it so far.
1:03:07 Again, first of all, in human life, second of all, in treasure. But go ask the Kurds if they regret the war. They’ve been able to build up a polity, a pretty decent place, with all its problems, not truly democratic, but pretty decent. Ask the Shia of Basra if they feel better today than they did under Saddam. Ask the Sunnis of Baghdad.
1:03:35 Most of them will tell you, please bring back Saddam. So I think the outcome for them has been a very at best mixed picture. But for us, obviously, the cost has been enormous, both the actual cost of the war in human lives and in treasure, and in the exhaustion it instilled in us. That has really made people sour now on everything, like even in any way getting involved in Syria. So I have enormous regrets over that, but I take full responsibility.
1:04:12 I was a consenting adult. I knew why I supported it. It was for these reasons of pluralism and democracy, and those reasons have not gone away. So for me, it was never about Bush, for or against Bush or whatever. Unless you find a plural, unless a form of pluralism takes root there politically, and unless a form of Islam that can embrace and live with the modern world takes root there, that area is going to become a giant human disaster area.
1:04:45 And that’s what it was about for me. So it’ll be in every story anyone ever writes about my career, but that’s where I was coming from, and I take full responsibility. Write whatever you want about me, but just don’t write that I wasn’t thinking about it.
1:05:03 Brian Rose: What can you tell the people watching or listening to us about writing their opinion? I know you teach students a lot of times the nine different types of columns that they write, but you’re a man with three Pulitzer Prizes.
1:05:19 You obviously think about things differently when you go to create. You write weekly. For all those, I think you joked one time saying that the man you took over, his office at the New York Times had literally seven competitors. You can name the person off in the Washington Post. And when you go to create a column like you will this week, you’ve got 70 million competitors.
1:05:39 But that doesn’t phase you. How do you think you think differently when it comes to that writing process?
1:05:47 Thomas Friedman: I don’t really know. The way I work is I tend to talk my columns out first. So that is, I’ll be talking to you and I’ll just sort of get cranking.
1:05:58 And then I’ll say something and say, that’s a column. I’ll pluck it out of the air and I’ll put it in my pocket.
1:06:05 Brian Rose: Get cranky, which means get passionate.
1:06:07 Thomas Friedman: Exactly, I’ll get excited. So that column that I did on Code Red, that was me talking to myself.
1:06:13 I was actually driving to Baltimore. That day was President’s Day holiday, so it was off. By the way, it’s also not the day for my column. I write on Wednesdays, so it was a Monday. And I was driving to Baltimore and I actually had a golf lesson from my golf teacher.
1:06:28 And I read the paper that morning, and was thinking about what these three intelligence chiefs had said a few days earlier. And I just got cranking with myself. I was in the car and I was literally talking to myself.
1:06:43 Brian Rose: Talking to yourself?
1:06:45 Thomas Friedman: For an hour, yeah.
1:06:46 Brian Rose: Do you record it?
1:06:47 Thomas Friedman: No, just in my head. Just in your head? Yeah, I mean. And I got to Baltimore, to my teacher.
1:06:53 And his name was Bernie Nager. And I said, Bernie, I need a few minutes. And I pulled out my cell phone from his golf studio. And I emailed James Bennett and Jim Dow. James is the editorial page editor and Jim is his deputy.
1:07:10 And I do this every once in a while. It’s not my day, but I want to write a column just online. There’s no limit online. So I gave him a graph. I said, it’s going to be about this.
1:07:23 And this is a holiday, so they’re both home. And they said, go for it. So I cut my lesson short. I got back in my car. I drove home.
1:07:33 Then I was constructing the column in my head. First graph, second graph, whatnot. Got a little traffic jam around my house. Started to get really nervous. Do you want to get it?
1:07:44 I got home at 1.30. Took some notes down. At 1.45, I sat down at my terminal. I finished it by 3.30. And my wife was my editor.
1:08:01 She has other career, but she edits all my columns. So I really trust her. I gave it to her around 3.30.
1:08:06 Brian Rose: How many words was it?
1:08:08 Thomas Friedman: It was about 1,100 words.
1:08:09 I wrote them a little over an hour. I just started at the top, and it just came out of me. The best columns take you only 45. The best columns only take you as long as it takes your fingers to hit the keys because they come out of a deep place.
1:08:21 Brian Rose: Do you rewrite them?
1:08:22 Thomas Friedman: This one I really started at the top, and I went straight through it. I didn’t want to say it. It didn’t go bad, but I basically started at the top and came out. My wife read it and liked it. That for me is always a good sign.
1:08:34 And she’ll be straight with you. Oh, yeah, my God. She’ll tell me sometimes you just got to start over. What were you thinking? So everyone needs a good editor like that.
1:08:45 And I sent it in a little before 4. So it was roughly two hours since I’d gotten home. They had sent an editor in a little early to edit it, and he edited it. It was on the wire. It was up on NewYorkTimes.com around 5.
1:09:03 And at 5.15, I got an email from a friend of mine in Israel saying, wow, that was a really powerful column. And so in 15 minutes, I got an email from Israel.
1:09:12 Brian Rose: How does that feel?
1:09:13 Thomas Friedman: That’s the world we’re in now. That’s flat.
1:09:16 And then it was the most emailed column for the next four days. It’s actually just incredibly satisfying. It’s the real buzz that keeps me going, that I felt something. I wrote it up in a way that others found compelling, and I got to share it with the whole world. And that is something I rue the day when I don’t get that opportunity anymore, feel something, write it up, and share it with the world.
1:09:48 I mean, that’s the true joy of this job, that when you feel something, other people are going to hear about it. And there are seasons in this business of being a columnist. I’ve been, as I say, 20, well, since 1995, 23 years. And sometimes your voice is the voice that people want to hear. Sometimes it’s not.
1:10:13 And then in 2011, however I was looking at that, was something people really resonated with. Iraq War, my voice was not the voice people wanted to hear. And now I think is a time where my, and other voices, I think all our columnists now are really doing wonderful work. And just sometimes it’s your season and sometimes it’s not. And just the nature of your voice, the way you look at the world and what’s going on in the zeitgeist, not that people hate my column and attack it and criticize it all the time.
1:10:48 So I mean, I don’t want to suggest that everyone’s sending back and saying, thank you for your column. It’s not like that. But you’re relevant to the moment. And sometimes you’re really jarring to the moment. It’s just the way it works.
1:11:00 And can’t tell you how or why it’s the chemistry of this job. So I feel like right now is a moment where people are looking more than ever for navigators they can trust. I hope I’m one of them. I hope the New York Times is one of them. I think as a newspaper we really are more than ever because there’s so much noise out there.
1:11:19 There are people looking for that edge too. They’re in the left or the right and they want someone to really reconfirm them, you know, but there’s a lot of other people in the middle who are really looking for navigators they can trust. And so that’s why I’m trying to be a trusted navigator. And it’s hard because Trump is a brain-eating disease. So as a columnist, you know, he says or does something almost every single day that is so bloody outrageous.
1:11:46 If you don’t write about it, it feels like you’re normalizing it. But if you do write about it, you didn’t learn anything that week. Now you do that twice a week for 52 weeks. You can go a whole year not learning anything. So I’m very conscious of being on a Trump diet and making sure because I’m just once a week that I’m not writing about him all the time, that I’m learning also because I can’t really serve my readers if I’m not doing that as well.
1:12:14 Brian Rose: What scares you?
1:12:15 Thomas Friedman: What scares me is the prospect of eight years of Donald Trump. We can survive four years. I think our institutions will hold eight years and we will not be the America you knew. This man will destroy our institutions.
1:12:31 Brian Rose: Okay. Most influential person in your life.
1:12:34 Thomas Friedman: Oh, you know, I mean, certainly my wife is, Ann is my best friend, my teacher, my partner. We’re building a museum in Washington right now. Museum to promote reading, literacy and love of language.
1:12:48 It’s the world’s first language museum. It’s called Planet Word. And it’s my wife’s project. I’m the good for nothing spouse. But I’m very proud of what she’s doing and helping in every way.
1:12:59 The mayor’s awarded her the Franklin School, which is a historic building on 13th and K, right in the heart of D.C. And she’s putting her resources and raising funds for what will be the world’s first language museum in 2019. So certainly my wife, far and away, and my wife, parents, you know, all of that. But my journalism teacher, Hattie Steinberg, certainly had the most lasting impact on me. Hattie was 62 when I had her at St. Louis Park High School in room 313.
1:13:28 And she was a never married, 62-year-old, really bedrock values kind of person, really tough on us. But we hung around her classroom like it was the mall shop and she was Wolfman Jack. She was the opposite of cool. But she was a pillar of certainty in an age of uncertainty. And she taught us real bedrock values about reporting, facts, the truth, what it means to be a journalist.
1:14:06 Never forgotten.
1:14:07 Brian Rose: Can you pass on one of those one-liner lessons that she would tell you about one of those early things about Thomas always do this, I’ll never do that.
1:14:15 Thomas Friedman: You know, it’s hard to remember a single one, but get it first but get it right.
1:14:19 Brian Rose: That’s a good one. Thomas, I always ask everyone here a few questions that you have, and I’m going to ask you if I could give you a magic phone and you could ring up the 20-year-old Thomas Friedman, give that young man a bit of advice.
1:14:32 Knowing what you know now, what would you tell him?
1:14:37 Thomas Friedman: You know, I would tell him what I’ve learned, the most important lesson, I think, to be a successful journalist. Because young people come to me all the time and say, hey, I want to do what you do, what do you need to know? And I say, look, can you know to type fast? I can type really fast.
1:15:02 I actually went to London Secretary of Night School to learn how to type fast. But the most, I think the key to being a good journalist is being a good listener for two reasons, and the second reason is more important than the first. The first reason is because what you learn when you listen. When I listen to you, you listen to me, we were talking before the show, I’m learning all the time, and I’m on all the time. But much more importantly is what you say when you listen, because listening is a sign of respect.
1:15:36 And it’s amazing what people will say to you, and it’s amazing what they will let you say to them if they think you respect them. And if they don’t think you respect them, you cannot tell them the sun is shining. So I really try to be a good listener, and I don’t mean just waiting for people to stop talking, I mean deep listening, because it’s a sign of respect. So I’m a little Jewish guy, I spent 40 years covering the Arab world, and by the way, I’m not out there saying, you’re all great, it’s all wonderful, it’s all Israel’s fault.
1:16:06 I’m actually often in their face, but they know one thing about me. I am a good listener, I will listen to them, and I respect them, and I want them to succeed. I’m not there to put people down. And so before I retire, and I’m going to do this actually very soon, keep talking about it, I’m going to change my business card. It now says Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times Foreign Affairs columnist, and I’m going to change that card to say Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times humiliation and dignity correspondent.
1:16:35 Because that’s really what I tell the 20-year-old Tom Friedman, that I spent really these last 40 years covering people acting out in their humiliation and questing for dignity. Those are the two most powerful human emotions, whether it’s Putin acting out in the humiliation of losing the Cold War, whether it’s China acting out in its humiliation of a century of occupation, whether it’s Muslim young men in Europe feeling humiliated, Palestinians vis-a-vis Israelis, Sephardic Jews vis-a-vis Ashkenazi Jews. I spent a lot of time covering people acting out in their humiliation and questing for dignity.
1:17:11 It’s the single most powerful human emotion. I am the New York Times humiliation and dignity correspondent.
1:17:17 Brian Rose: That is a great lesson. I’m glad I’m listening to you. And finally, to that 20-year-old that’s listening, watching to us right now from around the world, growing up in a whole new generation, might not know what the New York Times is, never didn’t grow up on it, grew up on digital media, etc.
1:17:34 What lesson can you give to them? What should they do to become better citizens, to prepare themselves for the future?
1:17:41 Thomas Friedman: Well, it gets back to why I called my last book, Thank You for Being Late, An Optimus Guide to Thriving in the Age of Acceleration. It’s because I think the faster the world gets, Brian, the more everything that is old and slow matters more than ever. All the stuff you cannot download, all the stuff you have to upload the old-fashioned way.
1:18:01 Good parenting to good child, good teacher to good student, good boss to good employee, good bureaucrat to good citizen, good pastor to good flock. It’s all that old stuff, starting with the golden rule. It all matters more than ever. It’s all the stuff you can’t download. There’s very human, basic issues of ethics and integrity, friendship and honesty, all those things.
1:18:26 The faster the world gets, if you’re not anchored in those sustainable values, you just get blown around like one more tumbleweed. That’s why I say thank you for being late. I’m actually celebrating everything old and slow.
1:18:39 Brian Rose: Well, it’s an amazing book. I know it’s been number one on the charts now for many, many months.
1:18:44 Thomas Friedman: Well, just one week, but it did make it to number one. It was one of the best settlers for a long time.
1:18:50 Brian Rose: Thomas, been a huge fan of your work for a long time. I remember at London Real Studios five years ago when there wasn’t really a studio. It was me and some webcams.
1:18:59 Reading the world is flat in my bathroom. My dad was telling me about it, and he was a big fan. I watched you interview Obama. You’re a great, wise man, but more importantly, I think you’re a great communicator.
1:19:11 Thomas Friedman: I appreciate that.
1:19:12 Brian Rose: That’s really important. I sat down with 500 people in the last seven years. It’s one thing to have great ideas, but if you can communicate them, that’s what it’s all about. Funny enough, you don’t sound like an old man when you’re saying we got to get back to these old-school ways, because this whole thing we do here is I call it, I’m teaching the art of listening.
1:19:30 Thomas Friedman: Yes, well, God bless your food.
1:19:32 Brian Rose: If I do my job right, I don’t say anything, and we just listen to these great ideas. Thank you so much for giving us your time.
1:19:38 Thomas Friedman: My pleasure. Really looking forward to what you come out with next. Of course, you call them every week.
1:19:43 Brian Rose: As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey, and I wish you well on yours.
1:20:01 Thomas Friedman: Really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
