"I Think of It More as Seduction": CNN Host Fareed Zakaria, on the Art of the Interview

0:01Will it all be these silos where everyone has constructed their individual media diet? And I worry about that because I think you lose a common conversation. We're sitting here with one of the great broadcasters in American history. So at the risk of getting too meta on a podcast show asking you about interviewing, we do want to hear your tips and what you've learned about the art of the great interview. gosh i you know i've never thought about it in as in in in a systematic way and so um it's an interesting question i think that there are many different ways one can interview i don't think there is a formula that works i think you have to be true to yourself so i'll give you a simple example i am not a very confrontational interviewer um i i'd find in my experience when you when you approach it that way, you sometimes look good because you're, quote unquote, asking the hard questions and being tough and all that kind of thing.

1:05But if the person you're interviewing is any good, that person now, it gets the person's back up. They're very defensive. They're very cagey. And you're not going to get much more out of them than very programmed responses where they feel under attack. And so they're very, you know, carefully choosing their words. Now, if I were in a kind of news interview situation where like I'm, you know, in the White House and you're trying to get the president to admit they made a mistake, maybe that works. But that's not my kind of interview. In my kind of interview, I think of it more as seduction. What you're trying to do is to get the person relaxed, get them to talk about things they might not have talked about in an open and unguarded way where they may say a few things that they really believe, but they haven't quite thought about putting that in the way they do or, you know, things like that.

2:00And so my effort is always to make people, to make them feel at ease, to ask them the kind of questions that might get them to feel confident and secure. And I think sometimes, if you even ask difficult questions in those circumstances, you find you get, you at least get an, you get an interesting conversation, because people see that you're not trying to, you know, you're not going at them with a hammer. I did this interview just a couple of weeks ago, and I thought about this with Omar Bartoff, a Israeli scholar of genocide, who has very reluctantly come to the conclusion that Israel is guilty of at least war crimes, maybe even genocide in Gaza.

2:45And I, and I, know that, you know, a lot of people feel very strongly that he's wrong in the United States. And so after a couple of questions, I said to him, let me pose to you what many people hear when they hear you who are Jewish. And they hear, they think you are somebody who is very uncomfortable with Jews who have power, who have strength. You want the Jew to be the victim. You want, you want, you know, you're comfortable. You come out of that, he's 80 years old. You come out of that world and that generation. But yeah, today's Israel is a tough-minded, scrappy, thuggish country that is going to assert its rights.

3:28And that leaves you feeling very uncomfortable. And he gave me a very thoughtful response to that in a way that I think wouldn't have happened if I had started out hammer and tongs saying, you know, you're an anti-Semite, You're a self-hating Jew or whatever it is, you know? So it's not that one is better than the other, but I find that I learn more. You know, you can only do what you think is interesting. I learn more if the conversation is one where the person feels it doesn't doubt your goodwill or your bona fides and is willing to actually engage. Have you noticed that guests have become so much more media trained over time?

4:10Oh my God. But yeah, I mean, I remember the feeling, I had this feeling, I know it's a macabre story, but I had this feeling once when I was in India after maybe about 10 years of Indian liberalization, so probably in the early 2000s. And some tragedy had taken place in an Indian family. One of the family members had killed the other or something like that. and I'm standing there. Remember, I grew up in India, so I know how also chaotic Indian life is and how histrionic and emotional people can be. And out comes one of the people, one of the family members in a spotless white shirt and dark trousers and he says, I have been designated by the family to speak for them.

5:02We would like to thank all the people who have, you know, for the outpouring of concern and affection. The family is in mourning. We are deeply aware of, you know, and he gave this clearly, you know, rehearsed speech about what, you know, what this feeling was. And it was so incongruous coming out of, you know, coming in India where normally you'd hear people shrieking and wailing and, you know, and things like that. And I thought, oh my God, you know, I pity the anthropologist because there are no natives left. Everyone has become this media trained. Do you find it hard on TV to get to anything more than kind of media trained soundbites?

5:45How do you get a very condensed window, unlike a show like this where you've got, you know, endless time? How do you manage to get to the truth really quickly in a way that's not just soundbites? So that's one of the reasons I only, I rarely have politicians on. I found that I, you know, and I did have some when I started out and I came to realize exactly what you're saying. I mean, it's what you're getting most of the political shows that you listen to. Essentially, it's sort of made for a TV theater. You could almost say that, you know, you know what he's going to say, you know what the other guy is going to say, and then you know what the...

6:22So it's sort of almost like you're watching a ping pong game where you know exactly how each side is going to play it. So I decided I'd rather get just smart people, scholars. You know, I occasionally have often politicians out of power who are willing to be honest, much more useful. When you get somebody in power, and we've occasionally done it and, you know, regretted it for the most part, you know, I don't, I suppose I don't blame them, but it's all talking points. And it's all this kind of rehearsed talking points that are so inauthentic. I mean, this is one of the challenges in today's environment.

7:01how do you come across as authentic? Somebody once said about Bill Clinton, that guy has it made because he can do something nobody else can do. He can fake authenticity. And I think that that's absolutely true about Clinton. It's true, by the way, if you watch Mamdani in New York, another incredibly gifted politician. If you watch those viral videos on Instagram, it seems like he's talking to you in just a completely natural, aw shucks way. And then you watch and you'll notice the shot is perfect. He looks perfect. If you think about camera angles, you realize he's got a two-camera shot. If you think about it, you know, he's in the shot in a perfect place.

7:45The bodega owner is standing right next to him. These are all, you know, these are created moments, but they work because there's something about him that is authentic. The Bob Dylons of politics, It's effortlessly cool, but so much has gone into it. Maybe a funny question, given that you said it was somewhat like seduction, but you've interviewed some amazing people. Who came across as the most brilliant, and who made you the most uncomfortable? Probably the most brilliant is an unusual, at least not somebody who looms large. Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of Singapore. Yeah. because, you know, most political figures or statesmen are men of action.

8:29And I've interviewed many, many men of ideas, you know, who are very thoughtful. Lee Kuan Yew actually combined the two. He was deeply strategic in the way he thought about the world, deeply philosophical. But he also then had a way to execute, which was really quite extraordinary. It's actually very similar to, you know, the very greatest business leaders, like somebody like a Steve Jobs, had that ability to conceive of a product, but then to drive it down and say, and I want this thing to be thin, and I don't want there to be an external drive, and I don't want, you know, and I'm going to force you to make that happen.

9:07So Lee Kuan Yew once told me that the greatest achievement he had, which most people thought was to take this sandbar at the end of Malaysia, which kicked him out as a city and create Singapore and then make it one of the richest cities in the world. He said, my greatest achievement was to create a nation. What most people don't think about is I got a polyglot population of Chinese, Malays, Indians, some expats, and I turned it into a nation. And after the first five years, we've never had a race riot. We've never had a religious riot. But how do we do that? And he had this very detailed and elaborate plan about how you would have housing, where people were going to live in communities.

9:50And so that still exists in Singapore today. You know, you live in racially, there are quotas for your neighborhood block. And if you go past the quota, well, then you can only sell your apartment to an Indian or whoever they need to restore the balance. So it's a very thoughtful approach, very much a nanny state. But that I think is so unusual to find that combination. The person who probably left me most uneasy was the Dalai Lama. Really? Because, you know, it's sort of, it's not a format that allows for the wisdom that he has. You know, I was sort of trying to find an interesting, you know, quote or moment or soundbite.

10:41And that's just not his thing. I mean, he's, you know, so I'll give you, I mean, we, you know, we normally tape for, we try to do particularly important interviews where we'll tape for half an hour and edit down, give you the best 15 minutes as a viewer. I mean, we taped with the Dalai Lama for like 55-0 minutes because I couldn't find the soundbite. I couldn't find the moment because in a sense - He wasn't engaging on that level? He was, you know, it's the, he's - He's brilliant, huh? Right, I mean, but it's a different brilliance. You know, it's a kind of aura. It's a way of being. It's a way of, yeah, it's a way of being more than a way of articulating.

11:21Think about, have you ever, is there something you could quote of his that is, you know. I've read a lot of his books. Cameron probably could. I haven't written his thesis on Buddhist philosophy, but he might be in a minority of one. But, you know, it's so much of what he's trying to get you to do is not to be an analytic machine. Right. And right, he's trying to get you to be present, to be thoughtful, to, you know, to. Maybe he was deliberately undermining it. Right, to sort of turn off the analytic machine. You know, it's a, I think about this a lot with AI because I think AI is going to do, you know, at the end of the day, the AI is going to be a better analytic machine than we are.

11:58So what are we left with? So we have to cultivate those qualities that the Dalai Lama has. But it's just, it's hard for it to come across in a Q &A format. And I kept looking for it. And I kept saying, well, maybe if I ask him this, maybe if I ask him that, you know. And maybe just closing out on the future of media itself, do you think that there will be CNN in 20 years? Will there be big TV networks? Will there be TV at all? It's a great question in the sense of, you know, obviously there'll be a variety of formats and people will consume the news individually. That's already happened. What I wonder about is this question.

12:42You know, we went from a world where there was, media was largely cartelized. So you had the three big networks in the United States, a version of that in Britain. ITV, you know, and the BBC. And now you have this kind of disaggregated dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds and hundreds of media outlets. CNN remains one of the last, maybe the last global media platform. You know, when I go to Singapore, people are watching it. I was in China last month. I met with a member of the standing committee of the Politburo and he said, oh, I watch your show. I thought to myself, Obviously, you have a VPN because it's banned in China.

13:24But the question is, will there be any such platforms that kind of are open and broadly accessible and everybody is aware of, even if they don't watch it as much as they used to in the old days? Or will it all be these silos where, you know, you have these individual, where everyone has constructed their individual media diet? and I think it's probably going to be the latter and I worry about that because I think you lose a common conversation. Now we've lost it in the cultural realm. So I'm older than you guys. The world I grew up in, in the 1980s in the United States, for example, everybody had watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Indiana Jones movies.

14:15Everyone had watched When Harry Met Sally, the great romantic comedy. Star Wars. Everyone had watched, everybody. Everybody had read a certain set of books, you know, Bonfire of the Vanity, Storm Wolf's great book, or, you know, there was a certain kind of common culture that you get. It wasn't very high-brow. Everyone had watched Seinfeld. I think I have three kids. One is 27, one is 23, and one is 18. there's very little that they watch that is in common. There are a few things, particularly music, but for the most part, each constructs his or her own, and you see this in even the way they watch.

15:01So I have a nice family room with a big TV, and I watch my kids watching their shows on their phones, and I'd say, why don't you just screen it on the TV? and it's more that it's a personal relationship. You know, the show is, there's something personal about it when it's on a screen you control, right in front of you, you're getting your text messages at the same time on the same screen. You know, it's a very different experience. And so the thing I wonder is, okay, we don't have that common culture and, you know, in some ways it's incredibly liberating for people to be able to just do whatever they want.

15:45But democracy does require a kind of common civic discourse. And the fact that you had these broad media platforms that allowed everyone to participate, at least to be aware of the same facts and the same issues. And it tended to some element of objectivity. Exactly. And, you know, the producer had to do that because we knew that there was a broad, the audience was some liberals and some conservatives and some, you know, anarchists or whatever. And now the incentive, you know, let's be honest, the incentive, if you're only getting one sliver and that sliver is going to be politically skewed one way or the other, you know, is to preach to the converted, to preach to the choir, not to try to provide that set of objective facts.

16:31And the only people with the kind of reach of a CNN would be individuals like the Kardashians or Elon or Donald. Exactly. And very few of them have a unbiased desire, right? They have their own agenda that they're pushing, whether it's financial. So that's what worries me a lot. The democracy does depend on some kind of common set of facts, common set of values. And there are fewer and fewer places where one can air them, discuss them. It's a great, I think, distillation of your contribution over the past few decades. So a great place to end there. Thank you so much for joining Giant Ideas. This was such a pleasure.

17:10Thank you. you