Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Damien Cave: New York Times, America and Australia

Transcript

Damien Cave: New York Times, America and Australia · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, one of the most fascinating
• 0:07
  books that I've read about the experience of an American moving to Australia, comparing
• 0:13
  the two cultures, comparing the upsides and downsides of each and sort of taking some
• 0:17
  lessons from America to Australia and vice versa, is a book called Into the Rip.
• 0:23
  That's its name in Australia.
• 0:24
  The American publication is called Parenting Like an Australian, one family's quest to
• 0:30
  fight fear and dive into a better, braver life.
• 0:34
  You've got to love those subtitles that the publisher has made you put on your books.
• 0:38
  There you go.
• 0:39
  It's basically about what today's guest Damien Cave learned about the Australian culture
• 0:44
  by his involvement in what's called nippers, which is where we train young Australians
• 0:49
  to get good at beach sports and swimming and life-saving and so on.
• 0:53
  And Damien threw himself into this as well.
• 0:56
  He was coming to Australia as in order to set up the New York Times bureau in Australia.
• 1:01
  And he's been the bureau chief of the New York Times ever since.
• 1:04
  We touched a little bit about his thoughts on the fate of the mainstream legacy media and
• 1:10
  the sort of great awokening of 2020 and what went down at the grey lady, the great
• 1:15
  mast head during that period of time.
• 1:17
  But really Damien is most interesting in his cultural and political observations about what
• 1:21
  sustains good society and a happy thriving culture.
• 1:25
  Damien has been a bureau chief and global affairs correspondent for the New York Times from
• 1:29
  all over the world.
• 1:30
  He has a tremendous pedigree.
• 1:32
  He was a part of a team of finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, thanks to his work on
• 1:37
  the war in Iraq.
• 1:38
  I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one, the only Damien Cave.
• 1:42
  Now we both have connections to Worcester.
• 1:46
  How would you define Worcester for people who don't know Worcester, Massachusetts?
• 1:51
  You know, sometimes I describe Worcester as this industrial city that peaked more than
• 1:56
  a hundred years ago and has been struggling to reclaim its glory ever since.
• 2:00
  That sounds so romantic.
• 2:02
  Yeah, it's the like they should.
• 2:04
  The American comedian Dennis Leary who, you know, it swears a lot and is a bit bitter,
• 2:08
  but also very funny grew up in the same neighborhood as me.
• 2:10
  And so that's also what I tell people is that if you have, if you understand Dennis
• 2:14
  Leary's sensibility, you understand where I came from.
• 2:17
  And about, so we were just saying that, you know, in sort of 2012, I had just moved
• 2:22
  back to New York from Los Angeles and joined Huff Post when they were trying to do to television
• 2:29
  what they had done to newspapers, burn them, raise them to the ground, create some triumphant
• 2:35
  glorious new thousand year rife future where Arianna would preside over everything.
• 2:41
  And if you'd told us that in 2024 we would be sitting here and the thriving media institution
• 2:49
  would be the New York Times and the one that had died would be the Huffington Post.
• 2:54
  Yeah, no one would have guessed right?
• 2:55
  We both would have laughed, right?
• 2:56
  No, it's very true.
• 2:57
  What happened?
• 2:58
  You know, I mean, the New York Times just found a way to really connect with its readers
• 3:02
  and subscribers and get some money out of them at a time when advertising was really
• 3:08
  steeply declining.
• 3:09
  But it was touching go for a long time.
• 3:10
  I mean, there were points, you know, we found out later where it wasn't true the New York
• 3:13
  Times was going to make payroll around 2009.
• 3:15
  We took this huge loan from Carlos Slim, this Mexican billionaire at a time when I was
• 3:20
  the Mexico correspondent, which was at times a bit sensitive and, you know, just to survive
• 3:24
  basically.
• 3:25
  And so the times had to really transform itself to some degree, it hit a crisis point
• 3:31
  and pivoted pretty hard toward digital and toward changing how the news were operated.
• 3:36
  We never let go of the basic New York Times principles, but we tried to open the door to
• 3:40
  different ways of connecting with readers, being more creative and how we write and how
• 3:44
  we do headlines.
• 3:45
  We totally revamped the CMS, the content management system, basically how we publish to make
• 3:51
  it easier for reporters to take control of the whole story, you know, from top to bottom,
• 3:57
  design, headlines, summary, everything.
• 3:59
  And so, you know, the New York Times today is a very different organization in the back
• 4:04
  end than it was 10 or 12 years ago.
• 4:07
  And it's bigger.
• 4:08
  We've hired a ton of people.
• 4:09
  And so there are more journalists at the New York Times now than there have been at
• 4:13
  any point in my career at the paper.
• 4:15
  And when you say that we were doing this, who's making those decisions over the course
• 4:18
  of time?
• 4:19
  And, you know, what proximity do you have to them?
• 4:20
  You know, there was a lot of people making these decisions.
• 4:22
  I mean, it started to some degree with A. G. Salzberger, who's now the publisher, who
• 4:27
  did this thing called an innovation report where he really dug into the New York Times
• 4:31
  pretty deeply to figure out what was going wrong and what could we learn from other outlets,
• 4:36
  what do we need to do for the future?
• 4:37
  And together, he and a bunch of people put together this report that really kind of cracked
• 4:41
  open the door to new ways of thinking.
• 4:43
  And then you had people like me and others who were kind of asked to kind of rush to the
• 4:48
  breach and try to make some of these things happen.
• 4:50
  I came from digital and it spent, you know, a good chunk of my career at the time sending
• 4:54
  the memos saying these are some things we might want to do differently.
• 4:58
  Where did you come from in digital?
• 5:00
  I had worked at Salon in San Francisco, which was the first digital magazine in San Francisco
• 5:05
  in that around 1999 to 2003 or 2004.
• 5:09
  And it was a great place to learn journalism.
• 5:11
  I mean, you know, we wrote, however we wanted, we had great editors.
• 5:15
  There was a sense of real freedom in internet possibility.
• 5:17
  There was this idea that maybe the internet would totally change how democracy works and
• 5:20
  make things better since learned otherwise, but there wasn't a really hopeful moment there.
• 5:26
  And a lot of what I learned there, you know, I did try to sort of apply to other places
• 5:30
  that I went afterwards, whether it was at Rolling Stone, which is a magazine I worked
• 5:33
  out for a little bit before that, also had its own struggles.
• 5:36
  And then at the times, you know, starting in New Jersey and then ending up in City Hall
• 5:41
  in New York and then covering the war in Iraq and then a whole bunch of other places
• 5:44
  after that.
• 5:45
  What was Salon's remit at the time of the century because of the sense become associated
• 5:49
  with a extraordinarily progressive kind of, you know, what's funny is Ariana Huffington
• 5:54
  used to write for us.
• 5:56
  And it was actually meant to be a place that brought people together with vastly different
• 6:00
  ideas.
• 6:01
  It was meant to be a salon where you could exchange ideas across partisan barriers, where
• 6:07
  it was okay to be provocative because the idea was to be civil and learn from each other.
• 6:11
  And there were people who were on the far left.
• 6:13
  There were people on the far right who were part of our group or the total meetings were
• 6:17
  full of crazy ideas.
• 6:18
  And then there was people like me in the middle who, you know, covered technology, did the
• 6:22
  nuts and bolts, wrote about movies once in a while, wrote about politics once in a while,
• 6:26
  and you know, felt like we could experiment and write long when we needed to and do silly
• 6:31
  things and do humor when we needed to.
• 6:34
  And so, yeah, it was a great place to learn to be a journalist.
• 6:36
  And what did you think if I'd asked you at the time, you know, 20, 25 years ago, what
• 6:41
  was going to become of the media and journalism and how digital, what sort of role digital might
• 6:46
  play in the way that we get our information and have our conversations?
• 6:50
  You know, I think at that point, we all thought that the digital publications would replace
• 6:54
  the old legacy media.
• 6:55
  I mean, I remember thinking, I don't ever want to work for a newspaper.
• 6:59
  Newspapers are dying.
• 7:00
  They're never going to be around.
• 7:02
  This is the future.
• 7:03
  And I think what surprised us is the degree to which a lot of legacy media organizations,
• 7:07
  including the New York Times, learned and adapted very quickly from what some of these digital
• 7:13
  innovators were doing, in part because they had to, in part because they were able to
• 7:18
  hire a bunch of people, you know, like me and others who came from that world and brought
• 7:23
  those ideas with them.
• 7:24
  And instead of rejecting them outright, they eventually adopted them with some resistance.
• 7:30
  But what do they do?
• 7:31
  I mean, why, David?
• 7:32
  I mean, that's interesting because, you know, I, as a New York Times subscriber, still really
• 7:38
  only use it for the things that it has always been good at.
• 7:42
  I don't, I mean, yeah, okay, there's word on like stuff like that, which I know people
• 7:46
  like.
• 7:47
  And I suppose there are, there are digital rich, digital forward, you know, video graphics
• 7:52
  and things like that, which are sometimes nice.
• 7:54
  But ultimately, it's because I want, you know, interesting columnists and well-researched
• 8:01
  investigative and hopefully none of that changes, right?
• 8:04
  Like the principles of the New York Times of independence, of in-depth reporting, of
• 8:07
  solid writing are all still there.
• 8:10
  But if you look at, for example, how we cover news, when I started the paper, the news story
• 8:14
  would become something called a lead-all.
• 8:16
  At the end of the day, it was the story that ran on the right side of the front page.
• 8:20
  It had a very particular format that was driven by the print edition.
• 8:24
  And this was the case throughout most of the stories we did.
• 8:26
  We did a lot of 800 word stories because that was the right size for print.
• 8:30
  Now look at how we covered news, which is live, dynamic, immediate, active, multimedia.
• 8:36
  It's a totally different world.
• 8:37
  And then now someone, at the very end of the day, whose job it is to not necessarily be
• 8:42
  in the place where the news is, pulls together that lead-all.
• 8:45
  So we still do that for the small group of print subscribers that we have.
• 8:50
  But the vast majority of our readers get news from the New York Times in a completely
• 8:54
  different way than they ever did before on their phone as it happens with more voice
• 8:59
  and more of a sense of both place and personal input from the reporters than they ever did
• 9:04
  before.
• 9:05
  Right.
• 9:06
  And how do you juggle the sense of place and personal input with the need for objectivity?
• 9:10
  Well, I think that it's all, it's often a struggle.
• 9:14
  But I think that, you know, for many of us who have been trained in this, it becomes
• 9:17
  second nature to at least suppress your own initial views and to aspire to objectivity.
• 9:24
  Right.
• 9:25
  It's not something that you necessarily get right all the time.
• 9:28
  Any more than a lawyer who represents, you know, a defendant is entirely objective
• 9:32
  all the time.
• 9:33
  But it is something that we do through training and we focus a lot on independence.
• 9:36
  You know, I think that the New York Times has tried to make sure that those of us who
• 9:40
  come through this system are trained in the idea of being neutral and looking at something
• 9:45
  from 360 degrees and in some ways reporting against your bias to make sure you're not
• 9:50
  missing something.
• 9:51
  Right.
• 9:52
  But why doesn't the request for objectivity or for fairness leech the personality out of
• 9:56
  the story?
• 9:57
  I mean, I'm asking from the perspective of someone who has recently been in a major media
• 10:02
  organization that is trying to grapple with how do you reconcile a younger generation
• 10:07
  of journalists desire to bring their whole selves to work and to bring their own truths
• 10:13
  to reporting and to bring alternative, you know, so it's a question.
• 10:15
  I mean, it's a challenge and it's I think when it works, it's a healthy back and forth
• 10:20
  where you want newsrooms to be diverse in every way, to have different points of views,
• 10:25
  different experiences and you want that to be part of story conception, story assignment
• 10:30
  and story production.
• 10:31
  But at some point, that needs to only be one piece of the puzzle and the job, what matters,
• 10:38
  I often tell young journalists is what matters is the story.
• 10:41
  You matter less in the story, how you help produce the story and how you get it to the
• 10:44
  place that's is is important, but what matters is the reader.
• 10:48
  And so clarity and neutrality, you know, can be hard to accomplish.
• 10:53
  It doesn't mean you don't have feelings.
• 10:55
  It doesn't mean you don't inject emotion into your stories, but you have to be fair,
• 10:59
  accurate and independent.
• 11:00
  And that's something that I think we've tried to hold on to.
• 11:03
  It's difficult.
• 11:04
  You know, there are generational differences.
• 11:05
  I mean, I've had so many stories where I've had things crossed out by editors that say
• 11:09
  editorializing, I don't think they're editorializing.
• 11:11
  I think I'm just describing what I've experienced in a reporting trip.
• 11:15
  But you know, working through how to use that language in a way that is neutral, but doesn't
• 11:20
  totally take away the person's perspective and insights in reporting is a challenge.
• 11:27
  But I think it's a fun challenge, frankly.
• 11:28
  I mean, it's a fun challenge, but it's also a challenge that's susceptible to bias
• 11:32
  without even noticing it on the editors part.
• 11:34
  I mean, so when the editor strikes out something in your copy and says, you're sort of editorializing
• 11:39
  here, it's very difficult for, I mean, obviously a great editor can do this.
• 11:44
  But it's very difficult for a merely human editor to check themselves and go, am I being
• 11:51
  even handed in all of the examples of editorializing or am I sort of interpreting some instances
• 11:56
  of editorializing as not being editorializing, because I tacitly agree with their point
• 12:00
  of view.
• 12:01
  And only when there's a point of view that I don't agree with doing not just that it's editorializing.
• 12:04
  Or because it's like this is the form of bias that the institution has maintained in
• 12:09
  prior stories for decades and centuries, right?
• 12:11
  And so, you know, I did a project at some point of the New York Times called Unseen Black
• 12:14
  History, which was a whole series of photos, there's a multimedia project that turned into
• 12:18
  a book that basically dug into the archives about the things that the Times hadn't published
• 12:23
  about Black history in America.
• 12:25
  And so, we know we have blind spots, we know we don't get it right all the time.
• 12:29
  But you know, all you can do is keep trying to get it right and keep trying to do a harder
• 12:32
  and sometimes go back to the past and revisit those things.
• 12:35
  And so, I do think the Times has gotten better about having these conversations.
• 12:38
  I think sometimes we fail just like any media institution.
• 12:42
  But we sincerely try and, you know, as someone who's been in the room in a lot of sort of
• 12:46
  heated discussions about global affairs over many years, you know, I think there's a good
• 12:50
  faith effort for the most part to try and find the right balance.
• 12:54
  I mean, the charge from conservatives would be that, you know, that striving is all
• 12:58
  taking place within a fairly group thinking sort of echo chamber where, you know, Donald
• 13:03
  Trump wins and everybody, all of a sudden, runs around like their pants are on fire going,
• 13:08
  oh my God, we have to read our JD events and learn about Appalachia because we don't
• 13:12
  know what just happened.
• 13:13
  We missed that one.
• 13:15
  And then, you know, on through George Floyd and the racial reckoning, you develop these
• 13:19
  kind of group thinking thought problems where there are moral panics, everyone's afraid
• 13:25
  of the mob.
• 13:26
  Everyone, you know, is suddenly on the same page about the urgent importance of, yeah,
• 13:30
  but I think there's a tendency to oversimplify the kind of degree to which the New York Times
• 13:37
  is monolithic, you know, I've got Trump voters all over my family.
• 13:42
  I grew up working class.
• 13:43
  I may look like a middle-aged white dude like everybody else, but my background is significantly
• 13:47
  different from many of my colleagues at the New York Times.
• 13:49
  And you wouldn't know that by looking at me.
• 13:51
  And that's the case throughout the paper.
• 13:52
  I think that there are a lot of people who have much more mixed backgrounds than the conservative
• 13:57
  right would like to believe.
• 13:59
  And maybe you don't hear about it because we do try to suppress, you know, sometimes
• 14:02
  our own personal viewpoints.
• 14:03
  And I don't think that's a bad thing.
• 14:05
  Sometimes it's not about you as a journalist.
• 14:06
  Sometimes it's about the people you're writing about.
• 14:09
  But I also do think that there, if there are biases, what I often tell people is the
• 14:12
  biases are toward, you know, getting attention, journalism biases, breaking a story, get
• 14:17
  it, you know, like that.
• 14:19
  journalism is rampant, right?
• 14:21
  And so, you know, what it takes to do well at the New York Times may vary now from what
• 14:25
  it did 10 or 20 years ago, but you can bet no matter what people's political views are,
• 14:29
  they're trying to get the next great job and trying to get to the big story.
• 14:32
  And sometimes seeking only that best biggest story leads to mistakes.
• 14:36
  I mean, the biggest mistake the New York Times made in my career was, you know, the effort
• 14:40
  before the Iraq war that eventually helped contribute to the United States going to
• 14:43
  the Iraq war, at least according to many critics.
• 14:45
  Now, I was in Baghdad during the worst violent years of the war, and we were constantly being
• 14:51
  attacked and criticized for having contributed to the misinformation about weapons of mass
• 14:56
  destruction.
• 14:58
  And internally, what that debate led to or what concluded was, well, we had some reporters
• 15:02
  who got a little too big for their, their ego's got too big.
• 15:06
  They weren't sort of, you know, forced to serve the institution as much as themselves.
• 15:10
  And that led us to trouble.
• 15:11
  When New York Times gets in trouble often, it will tell itself when it lets reporters
• 15:16
  get too famous and get more famous than the institution to some degree.
• 15:20
  So there's a, it's almost an Australian system of, you know, tall poppy syndrome where
• 15:24
  you can't get too big.
• 15:25
  And that's something that many of us subscribe to and think, well, you know, it's okay.
• 15:29
  We all get a lot of benefits from the New York Times and, you know, if we can do what we
• 15:33
  can to keep the institution in mind as opposed to our own careers, that's not a terrible
• 15:37
  thing.
• 15:38
  Speaking of Australians and not wanting people to get too big for that, but it's your
• 15:41
  reminding me that Tucker Carlson was fired last year by Australia for being, for the
• 15:45
  same problem.
• 15:46
  Essentially.
• 15:47
  Right.
• 15:48
  You know, being larger than the institution of Fox News.
• 15:50
  Yeah.
• 15:51
  That's true.
• 15:52
  I mean, yes.
• 15:53
  So personal aspiration drive the desire to be the center of the story can lead an institution
• 15:59
  array, but also the fear of not being fired can lead an institution array.
• 16:04
  I mean, just, I don't want to dwell on this for too long, but like to reflect on what
• 16:09
  went down in 2020, you know, the, the issue of James Bennett being fired for publishing
• 16:17
  a Senator's, you know, op-ed about whether or not the government should take a harsher
• 16:23
  attitude towards the protests, the race protests that were taking place.
• 16:29
  What was going on there and sure, presumably that had a chilling effect on people where
• 16:33
  everyone is puckered up and sort of terrified to, you know, this one, this one, I really don't
• 16:38
  have anything to say on.
• 16:39
  I was here in Australia at that point, covered the pandemic and, um, you know, I was watching
• 16:44
  from afar like everyone else.
• 16:45
  Like I just, I don't have any insight on that case.
• 16:47
  Right.
• 16:48
  You were on the slacks, presumably.
• 16:49
  I wasn't actually like, honestly, I was doing my job like I totally was not a part of
• 16:54
  that discussion, you know, and I, and all I did was watch from afar and like everyone
• 16:59
  just wondered like, gosh, what's going on in the United States?
• 17:01
  I mean, I do think that United States was had a, had a much more traumatic experience
• 17:06
  of the pandemic than they did in Australia.
• 17:09
  I can definitely say that.
• 17:10
  I wrote a lot of stories about that.
• 17:12
  And I, you know, I think there were a lot of impacts that kind of course through a lot
• 17:15
  of institutions and, you know, the New York Times is a function of history and is within
• 17:20
  its own historical context, just like any other institution.
• 17:22
  And so, uh, I think it's hard to kind of single out the times and say, oh, well, this was
• 17:27
  something that was, you know, particular to the New York Times.
• 17:30
  It seemed like this was the kind of thing that was happening throughout the country.
• 17:32
  And, you know, no media institution is immune.
• 17:35
  I really, I, that one I got, I don't really don't have anything more to add.
• 17:37
  I don't really, I really wasn't around for that one.
• 17:39
  Um, what did you want to do as a journalist?
• 17:41
  What was your main sort of interest when you were at salon and then rolling a stone and
• 17:44
  then you're in, in rock, did you want to be a frontline reporter or do you want to analyze
• 17:50
  the news and try to contextualize it?
• 17:51
  You know, when I started in this career, I thought I was going to be a movie critic because
• 17:55
  I thought I was going to be too shy to interview people and, uh, the idea of just being
• 17:59
  able to like share my thoughts on culture was my initial dream job.
• 18:03
  And then pretty quickly, I talked to a movie critic who said, you know, I got to be honest,
• 18:06
  it's kind of boring sitting in movie theaters all the time.
• 18:08
  I'm not so sure this is what you want to do.
• 18:10
  And he was right.
• 18:11
  And I just wanted to hang onto his job.
• 18:14
  I didn't have a competition, I was a movie critic for my university, for my college
• 18:18
  newspaper.
• 18:19
  It was fabulous.
• 18:20
  Yeah.
• 18:21
  A little music criticism early on my career too.
• 18:22
  But, um, no, but then at some point, pretty early on, I realized I wanted to be a foreign
• 18:26
  correspondent.
• 18:27
  I mean, I knew that I wanted to go overseas, I wanted to explore the world, you know,
• 18:31
  I didn't get on a plane, uh, to go to another country until my junior year in college.
• 18:36
  That was about 20.
• 18:37
  And, you know, I came from a world where that wasn't something that many people did.
• 18:41
  And so you stay in Worcester, exactly Worcester, Massachusetts is not a place where everybody
• 18:45
  gets out of.
• 18:46
  But I knew that I wanted to see the world and explore the world.
• 18:50
  And I didn't really care who it would be for.
• 18:52
  Um, I ended up first getting started in Cuba, actually, with a fellowship and, um, spent
• 18:59
  a bunch of time writing about capitalism and socialism there.
• 19:02
  Well, and that eventually led to the rest of my career.
• 19:06
  At some point, what was Cuba like in the, the, the, this would have been like late night,
• 19:10
  well, I started going in 1999 and then I had a fellowship in 2002, 2004 and 2003, I guess.
• 19:17
  And, uh, yeah, it was interesting.
• 19:19
  I mean, Cuba's gone through a lot of ups and downs.
• 19:20
  My wife's family is from Cuba.
• 19:21
  And so we had kind of personal connections and knowledge through that, but exploring it
• 19:26
  over the past 20 years, including, you know, when Fidel died when I happened to be there
• 19:30
  on vacation was really an education in the socialism and living close to a superpower
• 19:37
  in the resilience of people in a place that, uh, often is either part of history or forgotten
• 19:45
  in history.
• 19:46
  And, you know, it was just a great place to learn kind of how to explore a new world.
• 19:50
  And, um, and so that was sort of the beginning of my foreign career.
• 19:54
  And eventually the time has kind of felt like, oh, this is somebody who could be a correspondent.
• 19:59
  And after I was able to build enough trust with my editors, um, they sent me to Iraq.
• 20:05
  And, and then after that, I was in Miami for a bit and then Mexico City and Central America.
• 20:11
  And then in New York as an editor and then they asked me to come to Australia and open
• 20:13
  a bureau here, uh, just to pose on Iraq for a moment.
• 20:16
  How long we had air and what, what stage of the war was it?
• 20:19
  I was started going in 2006.
• 20:21
  So it was right as it was kind of becoming what was called a civil war at that point.
• 20:26
  And, and through the end of 2007, which is when the surge, uh, under David Petraeus
• 20:32
  started to turn things around.
• 20:33
  So it was really probably the most interesting 18 months period you could possibly get.
• 20:37
  I think in Iraq and, um, yeah, it was fascinating.
• 20:41
  It was, it was, there was a lot of great journalists coming through the New York Times
• 20:44
  spirit at that time.
• 20:45
  Um, we were finalists for the Pulitzer, the year that I was there.
• 20:49
  And it was scary and frightening and enthralling and invigorating and a huge education that
• 20:54
  I, you know, if I often said a year in Baghdad, it was like five or 10 years in any other
• 20:58
  time.
• 20:59
  Yeah.
• 21:00
  But was there any glimmer of ISIS, the Arab Spring, the kind of events of eight, nine,
• 21:07
  10 beginning in six, seven remind me, you know, I'm not, not yet.
• 21:12
  There were the seeds of it.
• 21:13
  Like you could, there were a couple of these kind of local, kind of volunteer civilian militia
• 21:18
  groups that, that the United States was starting to work with that felt like a ground up organic
• 21:23
  thing that was generally seen as a positive.
• 21:25
  And to some degree, you could argue that that those were kind of the seeds of what appeared
• 21:29
  in a whole bunch of other countries like that.
• 21:31
  But it was still, it was still at that point, it was just trying to suppress the violence
• 21:35
  and trying to keep, you know, IDs from blowing people up.
• 21:37
  Of course.
• 21:38
  And if I told you that like Gaddafi would be killed and like Bashar al-Assad would almost
• 21:44
  lose power with the next few years, would that have been surprising to you?
• 21:50
  You know, I don't know that anything would be surprising.
• 21:54
  That part of the world is filled with surprises.
• 21:56
  And like within a few months of getting there, you start to realize that, you know, it's
• 21:59
  not worth speculating or trying to guess where things are going.
• 22:02
  I mean, I was in Israel earlier this year and it's just, you know, an early reminder.
• 22:06
  That part of the world is volatile.
• 22:09
  Yeah.
• 22:10
  It's very hard to feel like you can ever predict these times of all the times.
• 22:15
  You know, I don't know.
• 22:16
  I really, you know, the left will say, and the Taka Karlsman right will say, well,
• 22:23
  we've been meddling there for way too long.
• 22:25
  We had the Shah and, you know, the this and the that and oil and, you know, then there's
• 22:28
  Israel going in and stomping and doing its thing and setting up a whole bunch of Jews
• 22:32
  and the, you know, if we'd left the whole thing alone, it would probably be trampled.
• 22:35
  I mean, you have to go a lot further back than that.
• 22:36
  I mean, you look at those straight lines through the landscape in the Middle East and you
• 22:40
  think about the British Empire.
• 22:41
  Yeah.
• 22:42
  Yeah.
• 22:43
  And the legacy of the Brits is something that we talked a lot a lot when I was there.
• 22:47
  And you know, I do think it's sort of an underappreciated element of the issues that are
• 22:53
  still playing out there.
• 22:54
  But you know, it's there.
• 22:55
  There are kinds of lines on a map and with no understanding of like these, these are
• 22:59
  not trouble necessarily.
• 23:00
  For organic nation states to sort of grew up with their own idea of things and the ways
• 23:05
  that the society of an organized have been so different for hundreds and hundreds and
• 23:08
  hundreds of years.
• 23:09
  Well, and maybe the end of the Ottoman Empire, I mean, as well, like, yeah, that's a true
• 23:12
  two.
• 23:13
  Yeah.
• 23:14
  Yeah.
• 23:15
  But it is and it's always been, you know, a way station between different parts of the
• 23:18
  world.
• 23:19
  It's always been, you know, a heavily transactional place because of where it's located.
• 23:24
  And so, you know, it's hard to sort of figure out why it's so volatile.
• 23:28
  All we know is that it is volatile and it's something that the world seems to have to
• 23:32
  deal with even when, if you're Joe Biden or Barack Obama, you don't want to have to deal
• 23:36
  with him, at least anymore, it's still hard to avoid that.
• 23:39
  And before we get to Australia and to your great book, Mexico, Central America, what do
• 23:44
  we misunderstand about that part of the world?
• 23:48
  That's a good question too.
• 23:49
  I mean, when I was in Mexico, one of the things that I did, I was one of the first people
• 23:52
  to report about how immigration from Mexico was in decline, in part because the birth rates
• 23:57
  had seriously declined.
• 23:59
  So immigration from Mexico to the United States.
• 24:01
  From Mexico to the United States.
• 24:02
  And even if you look at, so the huge border crossings that followed, a lot of these people
• 24:07
  are not Mexican.
• 24:08
  And so one of the things that sort of misunderstood is the role of Mexico itself within a lot
• 24:12
  of these things.
• 24:13
  There's a perception, I think, outside of the region that, you know, millions of people
• 24:17
  are streaming across the Mexican border.
• 24:18
  They must all be Mexican.
• 24:19
  It's Mexico's fault.
• 24:20
  And the truth is, for more than a decade, Mexican migration has been in decline.
• 24:24
  And when I was there, there was a point where people, there were more Mexicans going
• 24:27
  back to Mexico for economic opportunities than staying in the United States.
• 24:31
  So that's the first thing.
• 24:32
  I mean, the other thing is that, you know, for me being in Latin America was a lesson
• 24:36
  in the degree to which foreign policy is driven by fear as opposed to opportunity.
• 24:41
  You know, Latin America was often not a priority in Washington because it wasn't as big of a problem
• 24:46
  or as scary as ISIS or the Middle East or China.
• 24:50
  And so, you know, there were enormous opportunities that the United States and that the region
• 24:54
  have never fully realized or developed, like what?
• 24:57
  Just economically, culturally, you know, there are a whole bunch of things that would suggest
• 25:03
  the Latin America should be further along than it is and that Washington couldn't should
• 25:06
  pay more attention to that part of the world if it saw the world through the lens of opportunity.
• 25:11
  But foreign policy and not to change things.
• 25:12
  Of course, for whom though?
• 25:13
  You're saying that they should be more investment in Latin America because there's untapped potential
• 25:16
  for development there or that that would then-
• 25:19
  In the United States.
• 25:20
  In the United States.
• 25:21
  You know, you just look at, I mean, now it's starting to happen where you have a whole bunch of
• 25:25
  companies setting up in Mexico to export to the United States.
• 25:29
  But, you know, there's no reason that Mexico couldn't have looked like South Korea.
• 25:33
  And, you know, there's- what stopped it?
• 25:36
  I mean, a lot of it was the internal politics.
• 25:38
  I mean, it's had a long, one-party dictatorship for a long time.
• 25:42
  There's an old saying in Mexico is something like, you know, so far from God,
• 25:49
  so close to the United States.
• 25:50
  It's basically this joke that like, you're just stuck next to America, which makes things
• 25:53
  really difficult in some ways where you've got, you know, weapons coming in,
• 25:56
  the incentive to sell drugs.
• 25:58
  This market is huge.
• 25:59
  And so there's a whole lot of things that are the product of kind of location too.
• 26:03
  And that's just Mexico.
• 26:04
  And the rest of Latin America, you know, I mean, Brazil is a really interesting place
• 26:07
  and it's been growing and playing a bigger role in the world.
• 26:10
  That will continue.
• 26:11
  I don't know.
• 26:12
  I have a real love for Latin America as the first part of the world I fell in love with.
• 26:15
  And, you know, I just wish that there are other parts of the world would pay more attention
• 26:19
  to figuring out how to work with Latin America.
• 26:21
  There's enormous resources.
• 26:23
  There's, you know, great culture.
• 26:25
  People are, you know, smart and creative.
• 26:28
  The food's amazing.
• 26:29
  The beaches are great.
• 26:30
  Like, it's just one of these places that I wish people loved as much as I do.
• 26:33
  What's the most underrated country in Latin America?
• 26:36
  Maybe Uruguay.
• 26:38
  I was just talking to someone about Uruguay the other day.
• 26:40
  Like, I went to Montevideo to write a story about their initial plan to legalize marijuana,
• 26:46
  which was like this first sort of country to do so.
• 26:48
  And it was this old revolutionary leader who was doing it.
• 26:51
  And it's a great, small, fantastic country.
• 26:54
  Awesome.
• 26:55
  What do you make of the way Australians think about Latin America, Central America,
• 26:59
  South America, if at all?
• 27:01
  I mean, I'm amazed at how much moving back from the States to Australia,
• 27:07
  what really struck me was how much a part of Asia we are here
• 27:11
  and how completely ignorant we are.
• 27:13
  Not ignorant, just in a bad way.
• 27:15
  I mean, just, I'm not for any of the Mexican people here.
• 27:17
  I can tell you.
• 27:17
  There's no, there's no reason that's confused.
• 27:20
  But, you know, there's a fair number of people from Latin America.
• 27:23
  In Colombia, Chile, like, the southern con countries, there's a strong presence.
• 27:27
  And in the country, in the community, there is.
• 27:29
  But in the way that we talk about the world and the way that we report on the world.
• 27:33
  I mean, you know, at the public broadcaster here,
• 27:35
  I would quite often pitch stories about, you know, some quirky little thing
• 27:40
  that happened to be going on in Uruguay or something like that.
• 27:43
  And people would just be as eyes would just glaze.
• 27:45
  I have a slightly saying that we should report on what's happening on the dark side of the moon.
• 27:48
  But now it's, I mean, Australia's had this habit of perceiving itself
• 27:54
  to be disconnected from the world or certain parts of the world
• 27:57
  for a very long time in ways that are just deeply ingrained.
• 28:00
  And part of it, yes, is geography.
• 28:02
  But, you know, we do have planes and the internet and a whole bunch of other things.
• 28:05
  Well, yeah, I'm not sure.
• 28:06
  I think you're being too generous to us.
• 28:08
  I mean, to science geography, because we're feeling deeply intertwined with Europe and,
• 28:13
  yeah, it's so slightly less to say for the United States.
• 28:16
  Which is further away than many of the places that we,
• 28:19
  like, I went to Africa last year and I hadn't really done a proper trip to West
• 28:23
  it to anywhere in Africa.
• 28:24
  I'm, you know, traveling around the most random places in West Africa
• 28:28
  and came back being like, we need to pay more attention to this content.
• 28:31
  I mean, the future is going to be like South America and Africa are really massive
• 28:39
  and have huge populations with a massive potential.
• 28:42
  And more English speakers in Africa than anywhere else.
• 28:45
  Right.
• 28:46
  Nigeria, you've got dynamic young populations
• 28:49
  which are either well-educated or have the potential to be well-educated
• 28:53
  that are not highly ideological and stymied by corruption and ideology
• 28:58
  the way that you might think of China or India or other parts of the world as being.
• 29:03
  And so, yeah, anyway, I just thought that totally agree.
• 29:06
  There's a lot of parts of the world that are not as much on the radar as they could or should be.
• 29:10
  Yeah. So Australia, let's talk about us.
• 29:13
  It's rare that I read a memoir and love it as much as I loved your book.
• 29:16
  I think it's really insightful.
• 29:18
  It's both personal and kind of, you know, it's beautiful and also really interesting
• 29:23
  as an Australian to read and outside as perspective on it.
• 29:26
  What's the, just sell us on the central faces?
• 29:29
  Well, I think the central thesis kind of starts with me
• 29:32
  grappling with my Americanness in ways that I didn't anticipate
• 29:36
  in coming to Australia in terms of the degree to which I just trusted that individualism,
• 29:42
  individuality was a good thing.
• 29:44
  And the sense that I thought I had a pretty clear idea of what risk was and what I was
• 29:48
  scared of and what I was not.
• 29:51
  And what I found in Australia was this culture that was able to sort of push you into nature
• 29:58
  in a way that was dangerous and that scared me and that required a loss of individuality
• 30:05
  that I think was initially confronting, but ultimately quite comforting.
• 30:10
  That there is still a sense of community in Australia, a sense of doing things together,
• 30:16
  regardless of background, regardless of partisanship, that I found really remarkable coming
• 30:22
  from the United States, which felt so divided and so unable to work across these dividing lines.
• 30:28
  And sometimes I would tell Americans when they say, oh, what's Australia like?
• 30:32
  I'm like, well, it's kind of like the United States except things generally work.
• 30:35
  And that's a little bit of what I found.
• 30:39
  I mean, I was forced to do things like work, you know, the sausage sizzle,
• 30:45
  in ways that Americans would never impose on me to make me do anything.
• 30:48
  And so, you know, the United States is this place that I felt had so much choice
• 30:53
  and so much protection for individual sort of choice and rights that it made for a society
• 30:59
  that wasn't great at holding together.
• 31:01
  And, you know, I wrote this book mostly during the pandemic and I think it was really visible then.
• 31:06
  And for me, I just came to Australia and kind of rediscovered the kind of person
• 31:10
  and the kind of society that I wanted to be a part of.
• 31:12
  When you say that it wouldn't have been imposed on you to work,
• 31:15
  the sausage sizzle, is that a term that Americans will know?
• 31:17
  By the way, what a sausage sizzling is.
• 31:18
  What would you call a sausage sizzle?
• 31:19
  That would be a barbecue or that would be, yeah, I suppose just grilling.
• 31:23
  Yeah, grilling, grilling meat, and it's usually bacon and egg and rice.
• 31:27
  Well, no, but the sizzle component implies that it's had a community event.
• 31:31
  So it would be at a junior sports league or it would be at some,
• 31:34
  you know, or maybe even we have it at elections here.
• 31:37
  When you go to vote, you have a sausage sizzle and you have a...
• 31:40
  I mean, one of the most stressful things I did in Australia early on
• 31:43
  was like go to my like public school kid sausages and a bunch of these parents saying,
• 31:48
  you get behind there and you cook the eggs and the bacon and hand it to these parents
• 31:52
  and me not knowing what I was doing and I'm getting frustrated with me and me being totally foolish.
• 31:57
  And so that idea of like not knowing how to do things...
• 31:59
  Wait, you didn't know how to fry an egg on a...
• 32:01
  Well, no, but they had a particular expectation of like, you know,
• 32:06
  how the whole thing worked, like there needed to be a napkin underneath
• 32:09
  and a roll had to be cut a certain way and I didn't even know how much it was
• 32:13
  and I was exchanging money.
• 32:14
  But that like novelty and that complete desire...
• 32:17
  Oh, that just that comfort with being totally uncomfortable
• 32:22
  is something that I think Australians are a little bit better at.
• 32:25
  Right, yes. I mean, it's an anti-Snowflake sort of culture in a way, right?
• 32:31
  Like we're all just going to jump in and do this.
• 32:33
  But I think of America as having an actually stronger, certainly rural and regional America,
• 32:40
  of which comprises a much larger proportion of Americans than Australia does
• 32:45
  where one of the most urbanised countries in the world.
• 32:48
  There's quite a strong sense of community and an expectation that you're going to show up
• 32:54
  at the little league or, you know, the Saka mom is going to do drop off for the other kids.
• 32:59
  And like, I find that maybe even more of that in the States than there was in Australia.
• 33:03
  I think statistically that was true a generation or two ago and is not true anymore.
• 33:08
  Small number from the American version of my book, volunteer firefighters started in
• 33:13
  Pennsylvania with Benjamin Franklin in like 1736. At its peak in the 70s, they had 360,000
• 33:20
  volunteer firefighters. Everyone in their community was volunteering to help each other
• 33:23
  now. It's down to like 30,000. And to some degree, that's a marker of how Americans
• 33:30
  have struggled to participate with each other in ways that are, you know, mission-driven, I guess.
• 33:37
  And at the same time, you've had this enormous sorting by political viewpoint.
• 33:41
  So people live with people who have the same political views. Maybe they volunteer at their
• 33:45
  little league because they trust that those people are going to vote the same way they do.
• 33:49
  And there is still community in some of these relatively homogenous partisan
• 33:53
  locals. But I don't think there's as much just being thrown in with people that you don't know
• 34:01
  doing something that, you know, is less about identity. And I don't know. I think that there's
• 34:09
  still less comfort with the throw your arm around someone and force them to do something they've
• 34:14
  never done before. There's an assumption that you get to choose if you want to do this.
• 34:18
  So what are some ways in which that showed up in Australia? You've mentioned that doing a
• 34:22
  sausage sizzle and one of the big themes in your book is nippers, which you can explain. But are
• 34:26
  there any other examples that you can throw in to complete the picture for American listeners?
• 34:30
  Yeah, I mean, the sort of lifesaving clubs is definitely the main thing for me and my family
• 34:34
  of kind of being forced into a frightening ocean and just expected to figure it out.
• 34:38
  I also had reporting trips where I would be doing, I did a story about this guy who was writing
• 34:43
  a children's story every day for 365 days a year. And he was a hardcore,
• 34:49
  footy AFL Australian rules guy and literally forced me to do training with him. Like,
• 34:55
  made me borrow boots from someone, someone else's old uniform that smelled like a dead rat.
• 35:00
  And like put me on the pitch, you know, and I did everything I could to try to get out of it.
• 35:05
  I was like, oh, I'm wearing boots. I got jeans. I mean, I thought I had various ways to protect
• 35:09
  myself. And it wasn't possible. And then I got out there under the lights with all these guys
• 35:14
  who were at first like who the hell's the city of American. But then afterwards there was a lot,
• 35:19
  there was enough camaraderie for me to come away from that feeling like I'd learned something and
• 35:23
  had a bit of a thrill. And then I was grateful for that. So that's that's one example. I also kept
• 35:28
  having things as I don't even know if I mentioned this in the book, but I had these experiences where
• 35:31
  like I had I was covering the fires at one point in my car broke down. We had a flat tire. And
• 35:37
  every car that drove by stopped to make sure we were okay. We weren't very close to the fires
• 35:42
  by any means. We were just in a rural area, but every single vehicle stopped to see if we needed help.
• 35:48
  In the United States, yes, someone would stop, but every vehicle, I don't think so.
• 35:52
  Yeah, really interesting actually. I was just at the last school holidays. I went out to the desert
• 35:56
  with my kids and went on a big road trip and I wasn't sure whether I'd gotten lost and taken
• 36:01
  a wrong turn. So I just pulled over to the side of the highway, you know, middle and nowhere, flat
• 36:06
  red desert that looks like you're on Mars and just a two lane road. And I'm on the side of the road.
• 36:11
  And I hear a rap knock on the window next door. There's no one around. And the bloke's pulled over
• 36:17
  behind us because he just seen that the cars on the side of the road. He was like, yeah, okay, mate.
• 36:20
  I was like, oh, yeah, sorry. I just wanted to make sure I was going the right direction. All right,
• 36:24
  no worries. And that's not to say that Australia is perfect. And that's not to say that that
• 36:27
  sense of community isn't feeding. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that, you know, Australia
• 36:32
  20 or 30 years ago, also was more connected than it used to be. Definitely, you know, but it's
• 36:37
  always what middle-aged people say, right? When I was a kid, things were different, things were better.
• 36:42
  But I do remember walking through the neighborhood of Sydney where I grew up and even as a teenager,
• 36:49
  people saying hello to each other, strangers saying, hi, I mean, it's like that scene from Crocodile
• 36:55
  Dundee when McDundee gets to New York and he walks through, yeah, he's walking along, you know,
• 37:00
  Broadway and it just threw a throng of people going, good, I, good, I, good, I, good, I, good, I,
• 37:05
  trying to say hi to everybody. There actually was more of that. Yeah, I was growing up in there
• 37:09
  yesterday. But there's still, there's still, and this is a little bit for Australia as part of
• 37:12
  the reason I wrote this book is I wanted to kind of say, hey, don't let go of this. Don't lose this,
• 37:17
  you know, this is something that as an outsider, I can see is valuable. And there are a lot of ways
• 37:23
  that it can be protected, but it does disappear without work. Yeah. And so I do think that Australians
• 37:28
  have to continue to work harder that. And as the country becomes more internationalized and more
• 37:33
  diverse and has more different kinds of communities, the country still has a lot of work to do to kind
• 37:37
  of bring people into this thing that is Australia. So you mentioned like sort of being thrown into
• 37:44
  things and there is that component, right? Like my daughter does, she trains at AFL, she's only six,
• 37:49
  but like, you know, it goes out on football. I got an email the other day saying,
• 37:53
  you're on sausage, there's a duty. There's no choice. There's no choice. Yeah. If I want her to be part
• 37:58
  of it, then I'm going to come and I'm just going to fry up some sausages on a grill for everybody.
• 38:03
  So there is that kind of community mindedness. But you mentioned risk as well. What does it
• 38:08
  how does risk plan to? So this one's complicated. Whenever I started researching the book and I would
• 38:11
  say to Australians, I think I'm going to do a book about risk in Australia. They'd be like, oh,
• 38:16
  we're not. We're so risk averse. Like, what are you talking about? Yeah, I still believe
• 38:20
  where it was. Yeah. Well, and but this is the thing about risk and this is the important takeaway,
• 38:24
  I think, from my book, is that it's not either or it's not your a risk taker or you're not.
• 38:30
  It's not in part of our individual personalities nor a national personality. There are areas of risk
• 38:35
  that people feel more comfortable embracing and areas of risk that people feel less comfortable
• 38:39
  embracing. So I would argue United States is pretty good at embracing capitalist risk. Like,
• 38:44
  if you want to start a company and fail and lose $100 million, you can do that. If you want to
• 38:49
  like let your kid walk to school alone at seven or eight, no way. And so they're probably going
• 38:56
  to call the police on you. And so that's one marker of a sharp difference in the United States.
• 39:01
  In Australia, in some ways, it's the opposite where my kids were walking to school and encouraged
• 39:05
  to watch school very early when we moved here when they were pretty young and same throwing them
• 39:10
  in the ocean or make sure you check behind the bins. There's no snakes or deadly spiders.
• 39:14
  But if you want to start a new theater company and maybe get a little money raised for that,
• 39:20
  probably not. All the government money is going to go to the stable established players. If you
• 39:25
  want to do something creative in finance and something that feels wild and really taps into Asia,
• 39:31
  well, the big banks here are probably going to frown on that. So I think in terms of the economy
• 39:35
  and culture, Australia is still very cautious in ways that make it very risk averse.
• 39:42
  And sometimes I wish that they would actually take their attitude from a surf lifesaving club,
• 39:47
  which is an institution that's thriving in Australia and scaring the living shit if I could say so
• 39:52
  out of children all over the place, including my own children. But then they learned to overcome it.
• 39:57
  And so that same culture of, okay, we're going to throw you in the deep end and you're going to
• 40:01
  learn to overcome this with your peers, with your community, and you're going to learn that it's
• 40:05
  going to be okay. And then you're going to tolerate risk in this area is something that I think
• 40:09
  could be applied to broader aspects of Australian society. So yeah, there is a greater tolerance of
• 40:16
  risk. Certainly when it comes to the natural world and when it comes to like, you know,
• 40:20
  stranger danger and stuff like that, we're less coddled, perhaps than middle America.
• 40:26
  And yet our speed limits are very low and very tightly enforced and there are speed cameras everywhere
• 40:32
  and there are safety street safety cameras everywhere and where people drive lower than
• 40:37
  the speed. I mean, Aussies love a rule. We love a rule about how much we can drink and where
• 40:45
  about whether you can smoke in the same outside area as where people are eating in. We love a
• 40:51
  rule about how later you can go into an establishment and how, you know, whether you can return after
• 40:57
  you've left, how do you reconcile that with your sense of kind of, I don't know, rugged outdoors
• 41:04
  well, I think they can coexist and I think that they do here in the same way, like I said, that there
• 41:08
  are risk-averse tendencies and risk-embracing tendencies in the United States. And so, you know,
• 41:14
  they don't have to be contradictory. Part of it is just exposure, you know, and choices that a
• 41:18
  society makes. So the driving thing, I mean, I've given the Australian government so much money
• 41:23
  in tickets over my time here. It's a little license because at some point they just take it away.
• 41:28
  No, I know. There's some finagling to maintain that I still have a license.
• 41:34
  But I also think, though, that that's when I looked in the statistics, Australia has significantly
• 41:39
  lower death rates on the roads. Oh, absolutely. And almost any other developed countries.
• 41:43
  And we had 90% fewer COVID deaths per capita, but there was a price to pay for that as well. And
• 41:48
  I wonder how, I'm since you were writing the book during COVID, you must have to do a lot of
• 41:53
  explaining to American colleagues about what the hell happened here. I did. And I do think that what,
• 41:58
  you know, I did this big piece for the times when the United States hit a million deaths. And
• 42:03
  Australia's death rate from COVID at that point was one-thirteenth of America's death rate.
• 42:08
  And I ended up writing a lot about what happens in societies where there's greater trust,
• 42:12
  where hospitals work together better because they have greater trust. There's social trust that says,
• 42:17
  okay, I'll be careful with how often I go out compared to others. And so that degree of social
• 42:24
  trust on one hand feels super cautious and protective. And there was a whole bunch of people
• 42:28
  on the American right that demonized Australia for this idea. And how could you take where
• 42:32
  their rights and say it's anti-democratic? But you know what? My kids were in school more than most
• 42:36
  of my friends' kids in the United States were in school because there was greater safety.
• 42:40
  You know, so fewer people I know died in Australia than they did in the United States.
• 42:44
  Fewer people got really sick. And so I do think that Australia ultimately decided that those
• 42:49
  retreat office worth making. And that even though there were regrets, you know, Australia's Australians
• 42:54
  kind of just bucked up and pushed through it. And with the exception of Melbourne and Victoria,
• 43:00
  we actually spent more time at pubs and parks and beaches and bars and cafes than
• 43:06
  most of the people I know in America did. Yeah, you know why? Because even if there isn't an official
• 43:11
  lockdown, nobody thinks that it's worth getting really awfully sick for two weeks,
• 43:17
  like the going over bars worth that mostly. So you mostly self-lockdown in the middle of a
• 43:23
  raging pandemic anyway. Although there were also creative, I mean, I remember walking by the beach
• 43:28
  in Sydney and people were, you know, walking with coffee cups that of course were not coffee.
• 43:34
  Or, you know, we had a group of neighbors where we would all dress up in athletic where
• 43:39
  as our kids played on the street to make clear that we were exercising because you're all
• 43:43
  hard to go for exercise. Absolutely. Social connections. Australians find social connections and they
• 43:47
  did find a way to do it. And so the mental health effects while they're severe in Australia,
• 43:52
  especially for young people after the pandemic, again, they're a fraction of what they are in the
• 43:55
  United States. So explain stuff, life-saving to Americans who who's only image of it is by watch.
• 44:01
  What it means to light Australian community. So Australia is this place that has this enormous
• 44:06
  coastline that's also extremely dangerous, right? And there's simply no way to have paid
• 44:12
  lifeguards protect the beaches in the same way that they do if you're in LA or Coney Island,
• 44:17
  New York. And so at some point at the turn of the 20th century or earlier, there were a group of
• 44:24
  community leaders who basically created little groups of volunteers at these beaches to protect
• 44:28
  people from drowning. And they based it on a bunch of, you know, things, a bunch of people were
• 44:34
  former military guys and they had this sort of semi-rigorous training, semi-comradery driven,
• 44:41
  show off that you can swim, culture, that then started to sprout up at hundreds and hundreds of
• 44:46
  beaches all over Russia. And now I think there's 185,000 volunteers in different communities. And
• 44:53
  at some point it became not just the men from the neighborhood who did it, which is how it started.
• 44:58
  It became women and then it became families. And while you got to train your kids so that they can
• 45:03
  continue to fill the ranks. And in the 1960s, when everybody decided they wanted to surf instead of
• 45:07
  just be a surf lifesaver, you know, the surf lifesaving clubs had to find some way to keep their
• 45:12
  ranks up. And that was when nippers and the kids kind of got nippers being what nippers is basically
• 45:17
  junior lifesaving training. It starts at like five or six where kids start to learn how to be safe
• 45:22
  in the water. They're splashing in the water at first, but pretty quickly they're learning about,
• 45:27
  you know, deadly wildlife. And they're going out into the rip currents and figuring out how to
• 45:33
  come back. You know, it's what I really love about it is it's not like initially I thought it was
• 45:38
  just like beach camp. Like when I first signed up, I thought my kids were just going to go play in
• 45:41
  the water because in America, that's what they would do. And here very quickly was like, no, this
• 45:46
  is training for like serious ocean safety for them. And there appears and I met lots of us
• 45:51
  grandparents that basically said, if my kids want to go to the beach alone, I need to know that
• 45:56
  they're going to be safe. And this is why I'm doing it. So I don't really care if they don't want to
• 45:59
  do it. They have no choice. And every week there would be kids crying and not wanting to be
• 46:04
  thrown in the water. But what I loved about it was it wasn't just for the kids. It was the whole
• 46:08
  community. All the parents were involved. Some parents on the beach, some parents in the water.
• 46:12
  And you know, your kids, you start to learn who the parents are in the community. If you see them
• 46:19
  outside of the beach and the kid is doing something wrong, they might notice. I mean, it just
• 46:23
  created a sense of community that was unlike anything that I had grown up with in the United
• 46:29
  States. And that I think was really valuable and that was really focused on
• 46:33
  community building, overcoming fear. And this idea of proficiency, which is another thing that I
• 46:39
  don't think Americans really think a lot about. They think about perfection. But for Australians,
• 46:44
  the sort of life saving club, and it's not just that it's volunteer firefighting. It's a whole
• 46:47
  bunch of things. It's this idea of being skilled in doing. It doesn't mean perfect. It doesn't
• 46:53
  mean you do it all alone. Being proficient just means good enough to do a good job to help when
• 46:58
  someone's in trouble. And I think that in some ways, that's something that was really valuable
• 47:03
  for me. And then I think it would be really valuable for the United States to kind of learn
• 47:06
  how to focus on is proficiency instead of perfection. It's the thing that I took away from
• 47:11
  your book the most, actually. And the one thing that I would tell people about afterwards that
• 47:14
  stuck with me, this idea of proficiency, because you're putting your finger on something that's
• 47:18
  quite inevitable about Australian culture. And that I think a lot of American friends have
• 47:24
  missed in their reveries about what America used to be, where a man used to be able to stop and
• 47:31
  change a tire on a car. People just sort of knew how to do shit. We don't know how to do shit
• 47:36
  anymore. We're all like soft and squishy and like coddled on our phones swiping madly. And
• 47:42
  nobody's good at shit anymore. You don't have to be great. It's not about being
• 47:46
  yeah. It just became obsessed with greatness and excellence. And it became such a competitive
• 47:52
  society that, well, if you couldn't be great, then why do it? You know, it was this overly
• 47:57
  way or yeah, you know, if you're not winning, then you're losing an idea. I had this really
• 48:03
  conversation with Angela Duckworth who's the author of grit. And I was trying to explain to her
• 48:07
  how it works in Australia. And I was like, basically, like, tell me if this sounds weird to you,
• 48:11
  because as an American here, I'm still trying to figure out if this is different. So someone who
• 48:17
  say, like, I joined a basketball team here in Australia and a bunch of my Australian friends had
• 48:21
  literally never touched a basketball in their lives. And they still decided they wanted to be a part
• 48:26
  of this team. And Angela Duckworth and I were talking about how this shows a willingness to do
• 48:32
  things that are inherently not productive. It is not productive to use your time to learn to play
• 48:38
  basketball at 45. And we were joking about that. She was like, yeah, there's just no way like,
• 48:43
  you know, the Americans might join a cycling group because maybe they can network and find
• 48:47
  some way to get a better job out of it. You know, like, it's so focused on productivity and
• 48:52
  work performance and networking for network stake that there's a whole lot that's lost
• 48:57
  from the spontaneity of just life and trying things. Oh, that's so interesting. I hadn't even
• 49:02
  thought about that twist on it. That there's an instrumentalism in the pursuit of American
• 49:07
  intelligence. Yeah. Yeah. Everything is in order to in order to in order to. Yeah. It's funny. I
• 49:14
  noticed one of the reasons I didn't like Los Angeles and move back to New York because I felt
• 49:18
  that as a single industry town, a lot was instrumental. A lot was about who you know in order to
• 49:25
  who's going to come to this thing who might be able to put you in touch with this other person
• 49:29
  that everyone's on this gigantic ladder. Whereas I felt that New York was much more
• 49:34
  heterodox and like diverse and a lot of people doing a lot of different things. I think that's
• 49:39
  true. New York does and it's more concentrated, right? So you're rubbing elbows with people in
• 49:43
  different worlds and different walks of life. But you know, you still do look at trends in the
• 49:49
  United States. Things like humanities, educations, it's sharply declined because well, what's the
• 49:54
  point? Right? So if you're going to go to college and you're going to spend an absolute fortune
• 49:58
  to do so, then you have to get a job to get a good job to make money. So that instrumentalism,
• 50:03
  which is a good way to describe it. I hadn't thought about it that way is rampant in American
• 50:07
  society. And if you look at the mental health numbers, it doesn't exactly lead to happiness.
• 50:11
  I do think there's a connection between those two things. I mean, it fails to recognize that
• 50:15
  at the end of the day, your life is going to amount to you trying to get something done and then
• 50:21
  not being able to do it because you died. Yeah. Yeah. That's ultimately, yeah, that's the end of
• 50:27
  the end of the instrumental line is a tombstone. Exactly. And in the United States,
• 50:33
  what they're really good at is like commodifying that, turning into a business, right? So you've
• 50:37
  got the wellness industry, which is the way to counter that instrumentalism and productivity
• 50:42
  industry. Whereas in Australia, like one of the things that I still find fascinating is like there's
• 50:46
  probably no busier time on the coastline of Australia than like six in the morning. You know, and like
• 50:53
  people aren't there doing it. I mean, some are doing it for their Instagram feeds or their
• 50:57
  wellness industry. But most people are just doing because that's what they do. And it's not for
• 51:02
  consumption. It's not to lead to a better job. It's not because they've bought into some, you know,
• 51:09
  wellness script or theory. It's just because it makes for a healthier life. And if you look at both
• 51:15
  lifespan and, you know, happiness quotient, so Australians do pretty well. They're still in,
• 51:20
  they're still like a sharp negativity. Australians still run themselves down a bit more than I think
• 51:25
  they probably could or should in some surveys. But in terms of lifespan and health, like it's, you
• 51:30
  know, they do do it pretty well. What about the culture of like no versus a culture of yes? I mean,
• 51:36
  one of the things that I liked about living in the States was the sense that if I came up with an
• 51:40
  idea I had an aspiration or an ambition or a new way of looking at things. The instinctive knee
• 51:46
  jerk response of an American is to say yes is to be like, that's cool. Okay. How would that happen?
• 51:51
  Like, maybe I know somebody who can help. Like maybe they find Americans very open and optimistic
• 51:57
  about the future. And Australia, you know, even just I noticed it when a friend of mine who
• 52:03
  is effusive in her praise for anything that she eats that she likes, whose American came to Australia
• 52:08
  and was like, oh my God, this is so awesome. And like one of my other friends was like, oh,
• 52:13
  it's all right, but it was actually probably the best thing he'd had. He'd eaten in a few months.
• 52:16
  Yeah, pretty good. Yeah, but you know, there's this understated kind of culture of sort of no,
• 52:24
  like I mean, I try to get things up here and people like, oh yeah, but no, you know,
• 52:28
  someone else tried to do that, you know, that didn't really work out, but my, you know, you
• 52:31
  could. That's a good point. I mean, one of the things that I have concerns about with like my kids
• 52:36
  having spent a good chunk of their lives here is what I call a tolerance for mediocrity. Yeah.
• 52:41
  And so I do think Australia sometimes suffers from that. I love that Americans say yes to things,
• 52:47
  especially, but it's usually things that are creative or the lead to jobs, right? So again,
• 52:50
  it's within a certain universe. If you were like, yeah, I think I might just like swim from
• 52:56
  Brooklyn over to New Jersey. I'm not sure you'd get the same kind of yes. That's true.
• 53:00
  And so I think it will take a year off. Yeah, I'm trying to take a year off and drive around
• 53:05
  the country. I mean, you sure you want to do that? Just go to Argentina for a year. Yeah,
• 53:08
  that's hard. You might get some yeses on there, but I do often say and I do love that about
• 53:12
  America. I mean, I often tell people, you know, the United States is the only place that produces
• 53:16
  Steve Jobs and Beyonce. Like that's like a very particular set of things and circumstances
• 53:21
  that the United States has that creates that. And so, you know, there are enormous benefits to that,
• 53:26
  to that yes culture. And I, you know, I do think that there is a desire, especially in New York,
• 53:30
  to help people get to where they want to go. You know, and that I do think Australia sometimes
• 53:35
  that same community vibe that I describe can become clubbyness and conformity. And so if you only
• 53:41
  are allowed in Australia to do what everybody is already doing, then you're not going to have the
• 53:47
  most creative, the most dynamic, you know, the best kind of yes culture like you're describing.
• 53:53
  I had this tattoo that I got. I got from an Australian in Brooklyn. And he said to me,
• 53:59
  oh, I left Sydney. It's just the city's dead. They killed it. They killed it. It's no fun anymore.
• 54:03
  And they just overruled it and I'm talking probably about changes to nightlife laws,
• 54:09
  which were opposed to about 15 years ago. Yeah, but I think it's actually there was nightlife
• 54:14
  laws, but I also think that he just did feel that like Australia wasn't the place that you could be
• 54:20
  as bold and experimental as you needed to be sometimes. Yeah, it's not. It's not. I mean, a lot of,
• 54:25
  I mean, I did. I left a lot of really creative and ambitious, yeah, young people go to the US,
• 54:33
  or but are you happier since you've been back? Yeah, but that's because I'm in a time in my life
• 54:38
  when it's time to settle down, right? I got married. I had kids at Border House,
• 54:42
  all that boring stuff. It's a great place. It's great place to be boring, Damien. You know, it's like
• 54:48
  who wouldn't? Yeah, it's very hard to raise a couple of young kids in New York when you know
• 54:56
  that Sydney exists. Yes, you know, it's like just the sheer, there's the climate, the lifestyle,
• 55:02
  the culture, the kind of Mediterraneanness of everything, the shimmering water and the
• 55:08
  shiny blue skies and the beaches and the rock pools and the trees to climb. Like I didn't want to
• 55:12
  be struggling with a straw down the icy steps of, you know, this fourth straight subway station.
• 55:19
  Yes, and that was my conclusion too, but I also think, and this is one of the things that like
• 55:22
  is an undercurrent in my book is I sometimes wonder if as parents and as adults, we don't do enough
• 55:28
  to learn from our kids, you know, like I ended up doing sort of life saving because my son was like,
• 55:33
  well, if you're going to make me do it, why don't you do it? And at various points along the way,
• 55:37
  I felt like I learned to see the world through my children's eyes a little bit more instead of me
• 55:41
  trying to impose my way of viewing things. And when you do that, you start to allow for mistakes,
• 55:47
  you start to allow for nervousness when you're in new social environments that are different.
• 55:52
  You start to sort of push yourself into ways that may not feel as risky or big as they do in
• 55:58
  New York, but that are still really valuable. And then I think can make you a better human. So even
• 56:02
  even in Australia, in a place where like it's okay to be boring, there are ways to become better
• 56:08
  humans if we kind of almost adopt those same reasons that made us come here for our children.
• 56:15
  You know, you're pitching me this life-saving lifestyle now.
• 56:18
  Well, people haven't said it. I feel very pressured.
• 56:20
  What do people do if they're not, you know, near the coast? And I'm like, well, you know,
• 56:23
  there's the mountains and there's, you know, a lot of other things that you can do in your community.
• 56:28
  And I think like in the book, I talk about two kinds of risk, physical risk and social risk.
• 56:33
  And Australia really pushed me in both directions. You know, it's easy and you've had other guests
• 56:38
  who've talked about this to kind of end up in a world where you're only talking to and hanging
• 56:42
  out with people that make you feel comfortable because they have similar views, similar ages,
• 56:47
  similar economic and educational backgrounds. And the truth is we need to embrace more risk in our
• 56:53
  lives, not just physically, but socially too. We have to be able to put ourselves into places
• 56:59
  where we can learn from others where we can be nervous, overcome our fear of saying the wrong
• 57:03
  thing, maybe say the wrong thing, work around, figure out how to have those discussions.
• 57:07
  As democracies, we need to get better at social risk and at building societies that build trust.
• 57:12
  And that's not something we've gotten very good at.
• 57:14
  Yeah, that's a good analogy to draw. It makes me wonder where you say Australia on that ranking,
• 57:22
  because although you said that Australia seems to be more cohesive and more community-minded
• 57:26
  and that it lacks the partisan divisions of the United States, and I'd agree with that assessment
• 57:30
  as far as it goes, it can also be a bit more reluctant to have the bold conversations, right?
• 57:37
  I mean, and we can be quite cautious and polite and tiptoe and want to just skip straight to humor.
• 57:45
  You know, Australians are very good at skipping straight to humor. And sometimes with my
• 57:48
  Australian friends, I try to hold them in that uncomfortable place a little bit longer.
• 57:53
  Yeah. And so I do think Australians need to get better at that. I think that that's important,
• 57:58
  too. But like I said, you know, these institutions, and it doesn't have to be a life-saving club,
• 58:02
  but you know, the people in that group, they're in my sort of patrol, are increasingly international.
• 58:08
  There's people I know who are pro-Trump and who are very conservative people who are not.
• 58:13
  There's, you know, a guy who drives a beer truck. There's someone who's a banker. There's a
• 58:17
  Navy veteran. So figuring out what are those institutions or what are those environments that we
• 58:22
  can put ourselves in, where you're forced to spend time with people and get to know them a little
• 58:28
  bit in ways that maybe don't let you get out of those difficult conversations.
• 58:33
  Yeah. Well, they presupposes that there are people who believe things that are sufficiently
• 58:38
  different. Like I mean, to go back to COVID, you know, that was a moment where I think there was
• 58:43
  an enforced conformism in Australia. Yeah. Well, sort of everywhere, but especially here,
• 58:47
  where it was really regarded as being unseemly to question the extent and duration and
• 58:53
  intensity of the lockdowns and the state border closures and stuff like that. I wrote a piece
• 58:58
  in the Sydney Morning Eldon November of 2021 when people were still being imprisoned for two weeks
• 59:05
  for having been on a plane where one person had tested positive. And I was like saying,
• 59:11
  is there going to come a point at which we start having a conversation about the human rights
• 59:14
  implications of what we're doing? And that was regarded as really edgy and out there. You know,
• 59:19
  I was really bucking the, and now of course, it seems blindingly obvious that there was probably,
• 59:23
  we probably went a bit too far and a bit too long and in some ways, is there a way to get over
• 59:29
  that cultural, do you think, or are we stuck with that group think? I don't know. That's a good
• 59:33
  question. I mean, I do think there is a fair bit of group thinking. I don't think it's unique
• 59:37
  to us. I'm thinking of like conversations I had with my American friends who work in education
• 59:42
  and saying, listen, you're keeping kids at a school too long. Yeah. Like this is bad. I don't know.
• 59:45
  And this is, that's not a partisan point of view. It's the priority if like construction workers
• 59:50
  and other kinds of essential workers can go back to work, then like kids got to go back to school.
• 59:54
  Yeah. And there was also very controversial among my group of friends. And so I do think every,
• 59:59
  lots of societies create these sort of conformist circles and bubbles. That's true. And I don't know,
• 1:00:05
  Australians. I mean, I do think that they're, you know, I hope that the younger generation
• 1:00:11
  can push through this. I mean, you know, I see my kids and some of the choices that they make for
• 1:00:16
  public speaking and that agree to which public speaking and performance is kind of a part of the
• 1:00:21
  Australian education in a deeper way than it is the United States. And so sometimes I wonder if
• 1:00:26
  that sort of younger generation is will hold the key to that. I mean, you look at the sort of
• 1:00:30
  climate change protests that were driven by young people in Australia, you know, even the gay
• 1:00:35
  marriage stuff was, you know, driven by a younger portion of Australia. And so it's possible that
• 1:00:40
  the younger generation of Australians will push harder on this stuff. Yeah. Well, I mean, of course,
• 1:00:44
  they good at things like, of course, they good at things that young people are always good at,
• 1:00:47
  which is caring about the environment and caring about equality. They might just be, it might be
• 1:00:51
  harder for them to get into the headspace of someone who's very different from them, like an old
• 1:00:56
  conservative who's. Yeah. I mean, I do think though the country, if you think if you look at it
• 1:01:01
  in terms of racial and ethnic diversity, Australia is significantly more diverse among the younger
• 1:01:05
  generations. And I think that's becoming a bigger part of the conversation here in a way that's
• 1:01:09
  different from it is in the United States. And so I think there's some room for growth and potential
• 1:01:14
  there. And then, you know, to what extent do they get in the headspace of that older guy at the
• 1:01:21
  RSL? I don't know, maybe, maybe not so much, but you still have RSLs where you still have people,
• 1:01:26
  again, in for Americans, it's the reserve service officer's league. It's basically a veteran's
• 1:01:30
  place that also serves, you know, beer and affordable food that brings together people for everybody,
• 1:01:35
  strange community. It's another example. And it's, you know, if you look at, you know,
• 1:01:39
  Donald Horn's book of Lucky Country, he talks about how Australia is this place that creates clubs
• 1:01:44
  for all kinds of things, you know, like to go to sports events, like if I want to go to a Sydney
• 1:01:48
  Swans game, I have to become a member. And so there's just this like second nature to Australia
• 1:01:53
  and life that Australians, he describes as a fraternalism that I think is still very relevant.
• 1:01:59
  Yes, that's true. And it would rub up against American individualism in a way that they'd be like,
• 1:02:03
  why do you name my name for me to go to a, you know, what kind of just buy the ticket? What do you
• 1:02:08
  why are you keeping tabs on me? Yeah, exactly. Making me join your club. Yeah, that's interesting.
• 1:02:13
  So the clubby piece is a, you know, is a big part of the way Australia operates.
• 1:02:17
  What do you think of the big risks and or like a big risk and then a big opportunity
• 1:02:22
  for Australia and for America? Like I'll take those in succession.
• 1:02:26
  Yeah. So, you know, Australia, one of the things that I think is fascinating about this place is
• 1:02:30
  that it's still, I think, has a bit of an outdated image of itself as a country. You know,
• 1:02:35
  I think it still sees itself as this small country that can't or doesn't have a big role on the
• 1:02:40
  world stage. And, you know, is, is still suffering from the tyranny of distance. And I just don't
• 1:02:46
  think that's accurate anymore. And nor is it this sort of middle class battle or country. You
• 1:02:51
  know, I often remind Australians, listen, your GDP is close to rushes. You think rushes thinking,
• 1:02:55
  oh, no, I just got to stay where I am. And I don't want to get involved. No, of course not. We know
• 1:02:59
  that. So I think Australia could play a much larger role. And I would think there's a benefit
• 1:03:05
  to seeing a fair bit of Australian values pushed out to the world more aggressively. I think Australia
• 1:03:10
  can stand taller than it does on the world stage. Frankly, that's the first thing that I think
• 1:03:14
  I would say. Let me just pause on that and throw something in, which is that there's been an
• 1:03:18
  explicit policy over the past couple of decades, which has been a kind of postcolonial reticence
• 1:03:24
  about being bossy that I think has infiltrated the public service in Australia to some extent. A
• 1:03:31
  friend of mine is a scientist who lives in the Solomon Islands and has only been there for a while.
• 1:03:36
  But if you talk to locals there, they are under the impression that China is just an enormous
• 1:03:42
  like is giving them a tremendous amount of stuff. China, the Chinese flag is on a whole bunch of
• 1:03:50
  now it's actually the case that Australia is a larger donor to the Solomon Islands than China is.
• 1:03:55
  But we do it on the slide. We do it stealthily. We think it would be ostentatious or obnoxious
• 1:04:00
  to put the Australian flag on everything. So there may be a reevaluation underway that I'm not
• 1:04:07
  aware of. I hope there is. It's kind of foreign affairs circles to change that posture. But yeah,
• 1:04:16
  I think it's partly just a kind of a postcolonial guilt and squeamishness about that, which maybe we
• 1:04:21
  need to reclaim. But I think there's an opportunity. I think Australia has an enormous opportunity
• 1:04:26
  to do more in the world and to play a larger role in the region, which has enormous economic
• 1:04:31
  benefits and global benefits. So I think that that's the opportunity for Australia. The risk,
• 1:04:37
  I do think that that kind of small-mindedness and that tolerance for mediocrity is a real risk
• 1:04:43
  for Australia. I think that it needs to figure out a way to kind of have that kind of deeper sense
• 1:04:50
  of self and into really strive and to see itself as a potentially ambitious nation in a way
• 1:04:56
  that I don't know that it has. And if it doesn't do that, then there are consequences that come from
• 1:05:00
  that. So yeah, and then on the United States side, I think the risks are pretty apparent in the
• 1:05:11
  degree of division. And sometimes people say to me, gosh, I wish Australian media or other parts
• 1:05:17
  of the world wouldn't pay as much attention to American politics. But American politics has an
• 1:05:22
  enormous impact on the rest of the globe. And the democracy that the United States has has some
• 1:05:28
  very serious structural flaws that at some point are going to need to get fixed or the country will
• 1:05:35
  spiral in ways that are even worse than what you're saying. What are the structural flaws?
• 1:05:39
  I mean, I think that the way that you know, even if you just take Australia as a model where you have
• 1:05:44
  an independent election supervisor where districts are drawn in an independent fashion,
• 1:05:51
  where voting is on a weekend and celebrated. You don't need to have the sausages, but you can still
• 1:05:56
  change the way democracy operates in the United States so that it's not as easily manipulated to
• 1:06:01
  suppress the vote. What judges are not elected? Yeah, I mean, that's another example. But
• 1:06:06
  but there's all kinds of things. I mean, the way campaigns are financed, the way primaries run,
• 1:06:11
  you know, so there's a whole bunch of things that I think the United States just needs to kind of
• 1:06:16
  really examine the way that the system operates. And otherwise, the institutions to address
• 1:06:20
  those structural problems. It just takes acts of Congress. I mean, it's not like there was the
• 1:06:24
  American primary system, which pushes candidates to the extreme to satisfy the base,
• 1:06:29
  is a relatively new thing in the United States. That's not something that was always a part of how it
• 1:06:32
  worked. And so, you know, and to some degree, so that's the risk. And I actually think that the
• 1:06:37
  opportunity is this is the same. It's it is there is no country that is able to pivot and change
• 1:06:43
  as much as quickly as the United States. You know, I had this long conversation with this
• 1:06:47
  former American ambassador to the Soviet Union. And I was saying, you know, listen, in Asia,
• 1:06:51
  there's this really intense sense that American no matter who becomes president is in decline,
• 1:06:56
  that American power is on the way. And he said to me, Damien, I heard this, you know, decades ago too,
• 1:07:03
  you know, the United States was failing and was going to disappear during the civil rights
• 1:07:07
  era during Vietnam, you know, during the Great Depression. He said, you know, this is this is there's
• 1:07:12
  a long history of people County the United States out too quickly, you know, there's no country
• 1:07:17
  that's as capable of changing as as much as the United States. And so, you know, I do think there's
• 1:07:23
  an opportunity that for that kind of revival in American democracy that we haven't seen yet.
• 1:07:29
  But, you know, I don't know when that's coming. The fever hasn't broken. And in terms of the way
• 1:07:35
  America operates. And I do think it goes beyond partisan divisions to some of those structural
• 1:07:40
  societal things that I write about in the book. You haven't mentioned the information revolution
• 1:07:45
  as being a component of any of this. Yeah. I mean, I do think it and I think that's a big part of
• 1:07:49
  it too. I think that amplifies a lot of these problems. Now, I think sometimes, and this maybe
• 1:07:56
  sounds strange to the journalist, but I think sometimes people overestimate the degree of power that
• 1:08:00
  information and that media has to shape society. I think that it amplifies things and makes some
• 1:08:08
  things bigger than others. But, you know, if you look at Robert Putnam's research about
• 1:08:12
  bowling alone in the societal sort of disintegration of American community,
• 1:08:17
  it preceded smartphones. And the trend lines started long before we had Facebook. And so I think
• 1:08:25
  it's easy to blame the new technology. But to some degree, I think it's actually about real world
• 1:08:30
  interaction. I think it's as much about real estate as it is about Facebook. I think it's as much
• 1:08:34
  about, you know, how education policy is driven as it is about, you know, whether or not TikTok or
• 1:08:41
  Twitter is telling kids what to do. Yeah. Right. Right. If you could be anywhere for the next
• 1:08:46
  few decades, where would you be? Where will you be? How long are you here for? And is there
• 1:08:51
  a future post? Funny to mention that. So yes, actually, I've been sort of slowly moving toward
• 1:08:57
  a new role, which will lead me very soon to open the New York Times first Bureau and Vietnam
• 1:09:03
  since the war. Oh, cool. So yeah, so I'll be moving relatively soon to Ho Chi Minh City. I'll still
• 1:09:09
  have a man. I was hoping you'd say, you know, I like Hanoi, but the government, I applied and for
• 1:09:16
  either a Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City and the approval came back Ho Chi Minh City. And so that's
• 1:09:20
  done. It will go. So, but I was in Hanoi a couple weeks ago, just collecting the license and
• 1:09:24
  getting the process going. It was not sure if this was going to work out. My mandate will still
• 1:09:28
  include the region. So I've plenty of excuses to come back to Australia. We have gotten citizenship.
• 1:09:32
  And so, you know, my kids are as Australian as they need to be fabulous. Yeah, I'll never,
• 1:09:37
  to some extent, I think Australia has become as much our home as the United States. And so, you know,
• 1:09:42
  when we leave for breaks, we'll be as likely to come here as we will be to go to the U.S.
• 1:09:47
  Fabulous. Great. I know I have an excuse to get a bit of me as coffee and so I've gone with you.
• 1:09:52
  Thank you so much. Great to have you. Thank you.