Roads Less Travelled: Nicholas Kristof Podcast Transcript
Roads Less Travelled is a series of conversations with remarkable individuals who have, in one way or another, taken a road less travelled to discover their vocation. The aim behind the podcast is to share stories in the hope that we can shine a light on some practical wisdom for those of us still forging our own paths.
Sophie Ryan:
Welcome to Roads Less Travelled. My name is Sophie Ryan, and I'm an Australian Rhodes Scholar currently studying in Oxford. In this series of conversations, I talk to some remarkable individuals about the roads less travelled they've taken in life, and some of the things they've learned along the way.
Our guest today is Nicholas Kristof, renowned New York Times columnist and author. Nick has become known for his unique brand of reporting that aims to shine a light on the most neglected people and places around the world, and he is really good at it. He's won two Pulitzer surprises for journalism, an Emmy for his video reporting on COVID-19, numerous humanitarian awards, and pretty much every honor available in American journalism. Together with his wife Sheryl WuDunn, he's also authored numerous books, including The New York Times number one Bestseller, Half The Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, which for me personally remains one of the most important books I've read. Nick, welcome to Roads Less Travelled. Thank you so very much for being with us.
Nick Kristof:
Oh, great to be with you.
Sophie Ryan:
Let's dive straight in, Nick. The way we usually start these interviews is by taking you on back to the beginning of your road, so to say, and in that regard, I was hoping you can just tell us a little bit about your childhood and where you grew up.
Nick Kristof:
Sure. So I grew up in actually where I'm speaking to you from right now, which is the family farm in rural Oregon, and it's very much shaped my thinking about a lot of issues, because it's an area that did well. It's a working class area. The biggest industries here traditionally were timber, agriculture, and light manufacturing. The biggest employer was a glove factory, and so it was doing pretty well when I was a kid, and there were a lot of kids who were much better auto mechanics than I was, and I was better at reading than they were, but it wasn't obvious which skillset would actually be a more useful one.
And then the rewards to being good at school surged, and the rewards to being good at mechanics plummeted, and so this area has really struggled. I know then methamphetamines came in, it struggled more, and this is Trump country around here. People mostly support President Trump, and the urban rural divide is... In many ways, all my values and beliefs are very much with urban, liberal, educated America, but I happen geographically now to be in rural, conservative, somewhat less educated America, and it shapes my thinking a great deal.
Sophie Ryan:
Absolutely. And tell us a little bit about your parents as well. How were you raised in that regard?
Nick Kristof:
So my parents were academics. We happened geographically to live on this family farm, but they commuted much longer than anybody else did to Portland, and so there were books all over the house. The family discussion at the dinner table was about philosophy, et cetera, and it was always understood that I would go to college, and so I raised sheep, and at other times we had various other livestock. We have a cherry orchard, and we weren't so much more affluent than other families in the area, but the educational expectations were much, much greater, and that made all the difference. The kids right down the road from me who I walked to school with every day, one spent 20 years in prison, and the other died while he was homeless, and people sometimes ask me what the difference was, and the difference was I was surrounded by books, and they were growing up in a somewhat dysfunctional home with well-meaning parents who were alcoholics.
Sophie Ryan:
Yeah, yeah. You've been described as the moral conscience of your generation of journalists. Do you think was there anything particular about the home that you grew up in and the context in Oregon that led to the formation of your moral compass and also a quite international compass in that regard?
Nick Kristof:
Well, my dad was a refugee from Eastern Europe, and I mean, he's lucky to be alive. I'm actually just finishing a memoir right now, and I learned a little more about his past. So in the post-war period, he fled to Yugoslavia, and at one point was almost executed, and a French diplomat intervened on his behalf, and spoke up for him, and helped, and probably because of that he survived. And look, this wasn't really any of that French diplomat's business. I mean, he wasn't advancing French interests. That diplomat's career did not thrive, and I've always wondered whether he paid some price for his efforts beyond supporting France, but it was completely transformative for us. That's why I exist, and so that sense of internationalism, having a dad who was a refugee, understanding how sometimes modest efforts can completely transform lives.
The degree to which we can be enriched by immigrants rather than not impoverished by them I think was something that I absorbed very early, and I guess the other thing that has shaped maybe the earnestness of a lot of my columns, or as critics might say, sanctimony, but it's just the interviews I've done in the field. And I mean, that really started when I was at Oxford and this great system of these incredible vacations when you're at Oxford, and the road stipend at that point was paid to us at the beginning of every vacation as well. And so I did a lot of travel and reporting when I was at Oxford through West Africa, through India, Pakistan.
Sophie Ryan:
Just before you go into further also the journalism that you did while you were in Oxford, I was curious to know at what point you had the light bulb moment that journalism was what you wanted to do. I know that you were very involved in the school paper in junior high school and then also at Harvard as well. At what point did you have that light bulb moment that that was what you wanted to do?
Nick Kristof:
So my journalism career really began in the beginning of eighth grade when the school decided to start a school newspaper, and I wasn't really thinking about it. I didn't go to the organizational meeting, and the next day, a friend of mine said, "Well, nobody wanted to be editor, but we solved that problem. We chose one anyway." And I said, "Oh, who'd you choose?" And he said, "You." And [inaudible 00:08:04]. And my Half the Sky inclinations kind of began then because our middle school, our seventh and eighth grade, they did not allow girls to wear blue jeans, and they could wear other colors of jeans. They could wear blue clothes of other, but not blue jeans, and so I championed this as an quality issue, and it was very cool to have seventh and eighth grade girls loving my work.
And so that was my first successful editorial campaign. I loved journalism. I did a lot of it in high school and college, but I wasn't sure that I would end up as a journalist, and when I was at Oxford, I read law. I was in some danger of becoming a lawyer or a law professor, but-
Sophie Ryan:
When you say, "Some danger," how seriously did you consider law as a pathway?
Nick Kristof:
Quite seriously. So I read law as an undergraduate at Oxford, and then to pass the bar exam in most states in the US, I needed at least one more year of US law school. So I applied for an LLM, a one year LLM, and got in at Harvard, and so I was thinking about the LLM, and that then there would've been a certain amount of debt, there would've been a desire, "Well, I should pass the bar exam. I should get a clerkship. A lot of my friends were ending up at the Supreme Court as Supreme Court clerks, and that is so cool." That would've been hard to... And so I could well have gone through that kind of academic or lawyer route, but at the same time, I was weighing a invitation from the American University in Cairo to study Arabic there, and that was really appealing.
I didn't know anything about Arabic, but it just seemed like a very cool thing to do, and I wanted to be a foreign correspondent, and I thought that Arabic would be a very useful toolbox to help me get there. So I was wavering I guess it was spring of my second year at Oxford between this kind of legal future and this arabic/journalism future, and-
Sophie Ryan:
And you'd been doing some journalism while at Oxford as well, right? You'd been traveling during the vacations I understand, and writing?
Nick Kristof:
Yeah, that's right. My first vacation I went with a fellow Rhodess from the Pacific Northwest, and we went to Poland just when martial law was declared, and then the warden of Rhodess House at the time asked the British Foreign Office, "We have two Rhodes Scholars in Poland under martial law," and I'm not sure what he expected, send in the helicopters or something, but-
Sophie Ryan:
Did you go to Poland suspecting that something might happen while you were there, or it was just whim of the moment?
Nick Kristof:
No, I mean, it was the solidarity labor movement was full swing against a communist government, and that was exciting and thrilling, and I wanted to write about that, but we didn't anticipate that the crackdown would come right then. That was really an accident, and I was very lucky in that most of the reporters were in Warsaw, and when the crackdown happened, they could not send out their stories. Phone lines were cut. Telex lines were cut, telegraph, phone, everything was cut off, so the world knew that something enormous had happened in Poland, had no idea what. They couldn't get their stories out. Meanwhile, in Krakow, I was able to find people leaving who essentially were able to get stories out, and so my stories were on the top of the front page of the Washington Post several days, and that was a tremendous opportunity.
Sophie Ryan:
Wow.
Nick Kristof:
And so a lot of Pols suffered. I benefited. That's one of the troubling things about journalism, if you will.
Sophie Ryan:
Yeah, absolutely.
Nick Kristof:
After that, I did another trip with another Rhodess friend. We kind of hitchhiked across West Africa from Nigeria to Senegal and Gambia, then a trip through Pakistan and India. After when I went down, when I finished my scholarship, a couple of friends and I took the Trans-Siberian Railroad, I mean, through Europe, across Russia, through Mongolia into China. So it was really the Oxford experience that opened my eyes to the world.
Sophie Ryan:
And also you did very well in your law degree, didn't you? How'd you manage that with all of the travel?
Nick Kristof:
I carried my torts and contract books along with me on my [inaudible 00:13:20].
Sophie Ryan:
They were in your backpack. [inaudible 00:13:21].
Nick Kristof:
Yeah, as we were bouncing along buses in rural India, I was reading about torts.
Sophie Ryan:
I love that. Okay. Well, backtracking then to you're at the end of your time in Oxford, and you are faced with this decision between going to do the LLM in the states or going to Cairo to study Arabic. Was there anything that swayed you in the end to go to... You obviously went to Egypt, and you studied Arabic. Was that the moment where you veered off the law track, do you think? And what prompted you to take the path?
Nick Kristof:
Yeah, that was fundamentally when I chose journalism. If I had not been able to find a good job in journalism, then maybe I would've later gone on and pursued the law track, but that was fundamentally the moment that I chose journalism, and I think that there were a few things going on. The American University in Cairo was essentially free. They were giving me a free scholarship. Harvard Law School was incredibly expensive for a year, and I liked the adventure, well, of Cairo for a year, but also the idea of journalism. In my travels, I had been really excited to learn about the world, to meet people.
The idea of getting paid to interview interesting people I found kind of thrilling, and the idea of being a fat cat lawyer in New York was also appealing, and that nice big corner office, and the weekend home somewhere, that was appealing, but fundamentally, I found just the excitement and the chance to do something, to have an impact, the world's fight, that seemed a better prospect in journalism. I was very conscious of my dad's experience as a refugee, and this was not that long after Watergate, which two reporters at the Washington Post had broken and had an enormous effect on politics with. So while I did see law as a potential path to have a real impact, and I maybe saw journalism as perhaps a better path to do that and a more exciting one.
Sophie Ryan:
And you pointed out earlier as well that journalism and particularly the type of journalism that you have practiced involves witnessing and writing about some pretty harrowing events and people's hardest moments many times. What is it that you draw meaning from in that, and what makes that worth it for you doing personally as well? That must be really, really hard, the process of doing that.
Nick Kristof:
People periodically approach me kind of on eggshells, and they think I must be deeply pessimistic as a person or a little depressive, kind of the Eeyore of journalists, because I spent so much time covering global poverty, disease, genocide, war, but in truth, I manage to return from covering conflicts and terrible things feeling pretty good about humanity, and I think that's maybe two reasons, partly that over the course of my career, I have seen clear unmistakable progress. And when my friend Dan and I first RhodesTravelled through Africa on vacation from Oxford, for example, every city you would go to, there would be people begging with leprosy, or clubfoot, or blindness from river blindness, things like that, and I travel now, and yes, there are some, but river blindness has been, well, dramatically reduced partly because of Jimmy Carter.
Leprosy is down more than 90%. Clubfoot is easily treated. There are now as many girls as boys going to elementary school around the world. Women have much greater opportunities in these societies, much less forced marriage of young children, and literacy. When I was a kid, a majority of human beings had always been illiterate throughout history. Now we're approaching 90% adult literacy. That changes the world, changes societies.
And so I've seen that progress, and then I think the thing that doesn't always come through is that I've seen terrible things in my reporting and massacres, but side by side with the worst of humanity, invariably you find the best. And so you come across a war lord, who is slaughtering people, and his soldiers are raping people and so on, but you also come across these just heroic individuals who are risking everything to do the right thing and to assert their humanity, and that evidence of kind of that when we're tested that human decency comes through has somehow reassured my faith in humanity even when I'm reporting on some of the grimmest things we can possibly cover.
Sophie Ryan:
That's pretty powerful to be able to witness that, a real privilege too, I'm sure, to be able to see that and know that deep in your being.
Nick Kristof:
Yeah. Well, I mean, we're not tested in this country or in the West in the same way, and we don't have soldiers coming through asking about our neighbors. And sometimes when that happens, people do really terrible things, and they fail that test, but it's kind of incredible that when we are tested, what we are capable of.
Sophie Ryan:
Nick, can we turn back to... We've stepped through your schooling, where you've grown up, and your time in Oxford, and then also the beginning of the journalism career in Cairo. Can you talk us through the road to the New York Times from there?
Nick Kristof:
Sure. I had interned several summers for the Washington Post, and there was this understanding that the Washington Post would hire me when I was finished my schooling. It was ready. And I wrote quite a bit for the Washington Post from abroad, and so then I showed up in Washington at the end of my year in Cairo to say, "Okay, I'm here. Time to hire me." And they didn't hire me, and the foreign editor and national editor wanted to hire me, but the desk that would normally do the hiring was the metro desk, and the metro editor, he thought correctly that I just wanted to use the metro desk as a stepping stone to go abroad, and he felt kind of imposed upon by the others. And so he never said, "We won't hire you," but he just never hired me. And an Oxford girlfriend who was kind of with me at the same time, so she was hired by the Wash Post, and I was not, and so all this was very hard on my ego as well.
Sophie Ryan:
Yeah, I bet.
Nick Kristof:
So I decided to go and be a stringer from Tunisia, and I thought that would help me work on my French and my Arabic, and it would be, again, a fun adventure, and so I set off for Tunisia, but I stopped off in New York to visit friends, including one who was working for the New York Times. And he said, "Oh, by the way, the Times business editor, financial editor is looking to hire some people." And I said, "Well, put my name in," and I gave him a resume and a cover letter, and met that editor, and he said, "Oh, when are you going to Tunisia?" I told him. "Well, can you delay it just a few more days to meet our personnel people?" And so I did, and then they said, "Well, can you delay another few days to meet the next," and so I never actually managed to get to Tunisia. The Times hired me as a young economics reporter, and I faked an interest in business and economics, and-
Sophie Ryan:
I did see that. I did see that on the TV, that you started off in business and economics, and thought that was quite interesting.
Nick Kristof:
The business editor at the time had spent a couple years reporting in London, so he was a great anglophile, and so we spent our interview talking about Britain, and books in Britain, and this and that, and Oxford, and Cambridge, and he never got around to quizzing me about business and economics, and other editors thought that if the business editor had... He must have vetted me on these subjects. And so when I arrived complete ignoramus on issues of business, then I think everybody was sort of surprised, but it worked out.
Sophie Ryan:
And then you moved to Tokyo, I think, after that and started working from Tokyo. Is that right?
Nick Kristof:
It was a little longer than that.
Sophie Ryan:
Okay, I see.
Nick Kristof:
So I spent a year in New York covering business and economics, then a year in Los Angeles as a national correspondent, mostly covering business and economics, then a year in Hong Kong as the Hong Kong bureau chief, and then the foreign editor was unhappy with the Beijing bureau chief at the time, and I was kind of in the neighborhood in Hong Kong, and so they arranged to give me a year of language training and then send me to China.
Sophie Ryan:
Right, right. I see.
Nick Kristof:
After China was Japan.
Sophie Ryan:
I see. Okay. So I really skipped a few steps in getting to Japan first. Tell us about when you met Cheryl in all of this as well.
Nick Kristof:
So when I was reporting for the New York Times covering business economics in Los Angeles, she was in Los Angeles for covering interning for the Wall Street Journal, and so we were direct competitors, and we met and dated, but we couldn't talk about anything either of us was doing because we were competitors, and I would call up the Wall Street Journal and say, "Can I speak to Cheryl?" And they'd say, "Oh, who can I say as calling?" And I'd say, "Nick," and they'd say, "Nick who?" "Just say Nick." It was really a little like a CIA, KGB romance, and then we had a wonderful summer dating, but then she went off to finish one of her many graduate degrees at Princeton, and she wanted to spend the next summer in Hong Kong, and it looked as if the Times was likely to send me to be a correspondent in West Africa, and so it wasn't obvious how we were going to be able to sustain this.
And then soon after that, I got a call from a old friend at the New York Times in New York who had been a clerk, and so he knew the passwords to get into the computer system. And he called me and said, "Nick, the foreign editor is writing a memo right now to the executive editor proposing various changes on the foreign desk, and one is the creation of a Hong Kong bureau and making you the Hong Kong bureau chief." I mean, it was just deus ex machina. It was incredible, and so sure enough, the foreign editor called up about a week later and said, "Nick, this is going to be a bolt out of the blue, but would you like to be your Hong Kong bureau chief?" And I said, "Oh, that's such a surprise. Yeah, I'll do it." And then Cheryl went out to Hong Kong after her year at Princeton, and then we never looked back. It was then we moved together. We started our married life in Beijing as Beijing correspondents.
Sophie Ryan:
And let's talk about Beijing as well. One of your many claims to fame and also Cheryl's is that you are the first married couple, I believe, to win a Pulitzer Prize, correct? For your coverage of the Tiananmen Square movement.
Nick Kristof:
First married couple to win a Pulitzer for journalism. Will and Ariel Durant won a Pulitzer for literature in about 1960.
Sophie Ryan:
Oh, I see. Well, thank you. Tell us about Tiananmen Square, and then I'm also interested in I want to know more about how it is working together with Cheryl, and how you've come to publish so many books together.
Nick Kristof:
So Tiananmen, we arrived in China in the fall of 1988. It was time when everything was very open. We made a lot of very good friends, and in journalism in China, in academia, and in government among reformers in the Communist Party, and then the Tiananmen democracy movement began, and it was just thrilling to cover the millions of people in the streets seeking more democratic change, and it was unclear how it was going to go. And then on the night of June 3, 1989, I got a bunch of phone calls that the Army is invading and heading toward Tiananmen Square. The protesting students had set up tank traps to stop the army in case it invaded, and so I couldn't drive. So I jumped on my bicycle and frantically rode toward the gunfire as everybody else was running away, and I was thinking, "What a crazy job this is that it has us riding toward gunfire when everybody in their right mind is running away."
Sophie Ryan:
Fleeing.I bet.
Nick Kristof:
And then arrived at about the time same time the troops did, and watched a modern army turned its guns on its people and just mow people down, and it was one of those searing experiences that you just never forget, and so Cheryl was at home writing. This was before cell phones, so she could hear the gunfire but had no idea what was happening with me. And I was normally very good about deadlines, and so she expected me back easily in time for the deadline, and in the chaos of being shot at, I'd forgotten that this was a Saturday night, and so we had early deadlines for the Sunday paper, and so I wasn't showing up when I should have. She was frantic.
Sophie Ryan:
And she's hearing gun fire.
Nick Kristof:
And she can hear the gunfire. She knows that there's a massacre underway. Editors in New York are calling constantly saying, "Where is Nick? Is he okay?" So I had to abandon my bicycle because of the troops, but I ran back and got back, and she was pretty frantic. New York was frantic, and sat down, and wrote a story that I just hated to write about the People's Liberation Army massacring its people.
Sophie Ryan:
Can I ask, do you find it hard the process of sitting and writing then about an event like that? Do you find the words just come, or is it a slow painstaking process to get that story on paper?
Nick Kristof:
So news stories in general, I'd say pretty much write themselves, as that one did, and also deadlines have that way of kind of forcing you to just spill it and write very quickly. When I'm working with longer feature projects, then I tend to do a lot of rewriting, and I tend to have an idea in my mind of how I tend to approach things, but my typical process is that I will write maybe 25% longer than what I need, and then I'll trim it down, and I will very often move things around. So for me at least, it's when I have the luxury of time, it's a slower process with a lot of revising.
Sophie Ryan:
Okay. I see. Half the Sky became about during your time in Beijing, didn't it? What led to you and Cheryl wanting to write Half the Sky?
Nick Kristof:
So we were so seared by covering Tiananmen, and we don't really know, but there were probably between 400 and 800 people killed at Tiananmen. It occupied the front pages for months, and meanwhile, I think it was the next year, I came across a study saying that every year in China, 30,000 baby girls died because they didn't have the same access to food and healthcare as boys. And around the same time, the economist, Amartya Sen, found that worldwide there were about 100 million females who essentially had been discriminated against to death, and I realized this was something I'd never written a paragraph about, and meanwhile, the political side I was writing about constantly.
And so I began to report on it a little bit, issues like sex trafficking, domestic violence, unequal access to education, and it just felt to me as if a couple things, one, that a huge amount of injustice was strongly associated with the gender, that so many women were being battered, were being denied the chance to go to school, get a good job, whatever because of their sex, which was just so unfair, and it wasn't being redressed because it was this kind of domestic violence or sex trafficking, because they were girls. And the other was that if we tried to figure out how we wanted to create a better world, and fight poverty, fight disease, then that educating girls and bringing those educated women into giving them opportunities in the labor force was a pretty crucial way to do that.
And when I tried to understand why Asia had prospered greatly under a very different economic systems, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan, there's so little in common economically, and yet it seemed to me that the common factor helping explaining their rapid economic growth was that they invested in human capital, and the education of girls, and then moved very, very low productivity female laborers in the house or the countryside into the modern economy, and everybody benefited. And so Cheryl and I became very interested in these gender issues. Initially, we couldn't imagine writing a book about it. We thought of ourselves as serious journalist, and serious journalists write about missiles and what presidents do, but the more you report... I went out to Cambodia and visited a brothel where there were these very young girls for sale, their virginity up for the highest bidder, and it just felt just like what a 19th century slave auction would've felt like, except these girls were going to be dead of AIDS by their early twenties.
And so Cheryl and I began talking more about, well, how do we address this? Is there a book to be written? And we raised it with our publisher who said, "Well, it's a pretty obscure topic." At that point, we'd written a couple of books, one about China, one about Asia that had done well. It was hard to see what the audience would be for this. So we took that seriously, but we delayed a bit, but then we came back and said, "We really wanted to do this." And the publisher said, "Great, and that's fine if you're committed." And so we did it, and initially, indeed, TV completely ignored it. We couldn't get on any of the morning shows, and it was just seen as this kind of earnest but not very relevant issue of empowering women. And then Oprah Winfrey kind of rescued us, and she gave us two shows about the book and then word of mouth just rescued it
Sophie Ryan:
Wow. And it turned around the back of that?
Nick Kristof:
Yeah.
Sophie Ryan:
Wow.
Nick Kristof:
It's a reminder of how hard it is to predict, but the one thing that I think we would've done differently is that in Half the Sky, we very much focused on the developing world and inequality facing women and girls in the developing world, and there's a reason for that. The stakes are greater. Girls are more likely to be discriminated against to death in India or Algeria, but we also have, obviously, enormous inequities in the industrialized world, and I don't think we have the moral authority to tell other countries to clean up their act unless we do a better job trying to clean up our own act.
Sophie Ryan:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And often we don't put those two things together, do we? We keep them very separate in our conversations. As I said in the intro, I personally am very grateful for Half the Sky as a book, because I similarly grew up in a relatively small town in Australia, and Half the Sky, for whatever reason, I just stumbled across it in I think it must have been the bookshop in town. There was a copy in there, and I bought it. And for me, that was the book that took my focus from being very domestic to international in I just never knew about so much that was happening in the world, had just never turned my mind to it. Off the back of that, we started our not for sale school interest group where we would try and raise awareness of how girls are trafficked and sold throughout the world, and also the way that Australia might be involved or not in that process as well.
So for me, that book was one that took my focus from being very insular to just opening my eyes to a huge portion of the world I had no idea about. So thank you personally for that. The follow-up question I wanted to ask off the back of that is, do you think that today people are much more aware of these issues than they were when you wrote, for instance, Half the Sky?
Nick Kristof:
So I think there is greater understanding of issues of sex trafficking, for example, and human trafficking, and a greater understanding that if a 15-year-old girl is out on the street come hithering people that she may look like she's there entirely enthusiastic, but there may be a pimp, there may be circumstances, and anyway, she's 15. So I think there is a greater understanding of the complexity of this. Some issues like maternal mortality there has been huge strides in. Nobody had really heard of obstetric fistula, which is a childbirth injury. At that point now, I think a lot of people have heard about it. A Lot of money is going to repair fistulas and in general going to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity, so there's clearly been improvement.
There's a growing understanding of the returns to girls' education, but I also think that there is something of a retreat in both America and Europe. I'm not so sure about Australia, but a sense that we, and in the US, look, we engaged in the world for year after year and didn't do much good, and the world isn't really interested in us, and let's fix our own problems first, and we need to solve the problems in our own backyard before we worry about Tanzania. And I think that's there's a lot of people who think that and believe that.
I think there's something parallel in Europe. And even among university students, I think that there's a fallacy that goes the other way. I think that for a lot of young people, it's cool to go and spend a summer in whatever, in Tanzania or Costa Rica working on social problems in a way that it is not cool to try to address inequities at home on the other side of the railroad tracks at home. And I think that we need to convey that it's really important that both are important, and that we can't solve every problem, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to solve some, and some of those are going to be domestic and some abroad, but we can do a better job.
Sophie Ryan:
Returning, Nick, to... So we got sidetracked relatively early in your journalistic career, I have to say. Fast-forward through all of the many years of extraordinary reporting that you've done, the excellent books you've written, you in 2021, nearly went down the public office pathway. Our conversation just now, knowing that as well, has brought me back to I've had so many conversations with friends and colleagues of late in the world that we're in with this idea being thrown around that if you really want to change something, you have to run for government. You have to get in and get things done. I wondered what you think of that, and also now having run for governor of Oregon and going back to the New York Times now, has that changed your perspective on anything?
Nick Kristof:
Not really. I mean, I'm glad I ran, not glad about [inaudible 00:40:49]. I was [inaudible 00:40:53] from running. The Secretary of State said that I was ineligible, but I learned a lot running, and I believe that it's important for people to compete for office. I really also developed a real appreciation for those folks who toil in state legislatures, and county commissions, and just puts themself out there, don't get a lot of credit, get often almost no pay, and really engage in public service in the best way. So I developed a real appreciation for that. When I was in as a journalist, I kept seeing public officials doing things that seemed completely hair-brained to me, and I thought, "If only there were people who sort of followed evidence and adopted evidence based policies, boy, we'd be in better shape."
And then when I was actually running for office, I immediately saw all the constraints, and how hard it is to tell voters that they're wrong about things. And so in journalism, I'm paid to be provocative and to tell people that they're wrong. In politics, that's a lot harder, and so that's the trade-off of truth telling, that I think it can be challenging for people in politics to provide that kind of real leadership when the public wants to do something different, but that said, boy, I encourage people to do it. It was an incredible experience. I gained a deeper understanding, and it didn't work, but I did my best. I gave it a shot, and it didn't work out.
Sophie Ryan:
And so if not public office for the next little while at least, what's next on the cards for Nick Kristof?
Nick Kristof:
Well, after I was booted off the ballot, so I wrote a memoir, which will come out next year, and that has a lot of Rhodess, and Oxford, and early journalism material. I've been working on that. I need to get the photos put together for that and then rejoined the Times in October, and so I'll continue to do international reporting. I was in Ukraine, was in Somalia, and I find that really important. I'm going to India soon. I deeply believe in that kind of international reporting, but I also became interested when I was running for office really... Well, I mean, partly even before that. It was maybe one of the reasons I did run for office, but just the social destruction in communities that have been left behind, and on my old school bus now, more than a third of the kids who were on the school bus with me are now dead from drugs, alcohol, and suicide, and that's just is unconscionable.
Sophie Ryan:
Geez.
Nick Kristof:
And in America, I think too often we tend to say that, well, that's because of globalization, industrialization, mechanization, and it's not, because other countries manage to industrialize without that kind of mortality. We made some really bad policy choices, and I think that we persist in some really bad policy choices because often, I mean, the divide increasingly is between the well-educated and those without an education. It's a political divide, and it's an opportunity divide. We're seeing these deaths of despair in America. We lost 107,000 Americans last year to overdoses, a quarter million total to drugs, alcohol, and suicide. Again, just this scale of this is staggering, and I will be writing more about this and trying to understand it.
Sophie Ryan:
And rightfully so. Let's pivot slightly now, Nick, to what we call our rapid fire questions, which as they sound, just whatever comes to mind when you hear the question really. My first question for you is something interesting that you've learned about yourself or more generally in this past year?
Nick Kristof:
Running for office I was really struck by how older people are overrepresented in the political process, partly because they vote more, mostly because they donate more. So that's one thing I learned.
Sophie Ryan:
Okay. How does it feel to have been described as the Indiana Jones of your generation of journalists?
Nick Kristof:
Well, I'm [inaudible 00:46:02] slightly, but good. I mean, I believe it's important to get out and report, and I think that too often journalism to save money has been about stirring the pot rather than going out and reporting, adding things to the pot. I think we contribute best when we go and actually report.
Sophie Ryan:
Sure, one person, Nick, that you would love to have a meal with alive or dead.
Nick Kristof:
Part of me wants to say Gandhi or somebody like that, and of course, I would, but I mean, this will surprise people, but it might be Donald Trump, and that's because, I mean, I think the US, I have a hard time understanding how the US did something as dumb as put this guy in the White House once and almost a second time, and I've spoken to him a couple of times, but I don't really know him, and trying to understand that cataclysm, and how we could have done that, and what the risks might have been, so I think I'd strangely put Trump at the top of that list.
Sophie Ryan:
Interesting. Well, I would love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation, I have to say. Nick, you've been to some of the most far-flung countries in the world and places. Is there one that comes to mind that has really surprised you or led to just a wholly unexpected experience?
Nick Kristof:
So there are a pair of countries in West Africa that on my first trip I think affected my political evolution. I was a good liberal sort of lefty, and in driving across West Africa, Benin was socialist, and the country right next to her, Togo, was this very kind of right wing capitalist country with this quite awful dictator, and so I expected to adore Benin and completely scorn Togo, and in going through them, it was obvious that Benin, while it had fairly equitable aspirations, that in fact it was not providing decent healthcare or education, largely because it couldn't afford them because the economic incentives weren't right, and meanwhile, Togo, while had a more rapacious capitalist system, was actually doing a somewhat better job at that time of getting kids in school as a result, generating a certain amount of wealth so that people could put a tin roof over their home.
Women could deliver in a clinic rather than at home, et cetera, and so it really forced me to focus not just on kind of ideology, and intentions, and being well-meaning, but on pragmatic results. And the outcome, I mean, there are some right-wing countries that have been awful in terms of results, but it really focused me not just on the rhetoric, but on what is actually happening in a village somewhere.
Sophie Ryan:
And interrogate some assumptions I'm sure too.
Nick Kristof:
Yes.
Sophie Ryan:
One last rapid fire question for you, Nick, which is whether you have a favorite quote?
Nick Kristof:
I always feel that I should, because I'm periodically asked when I do books to write a quote, but I kind of fail you there. But if I can, maybe a thought is more than a quote. One of the people that I met at Oxford was Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher turned historian of ideas, and I was introduced to his ideas there, and I had dinner with him, and he emphasized the idea of competing values, that there's no one, that we all as humans, we want to search for the one idea, the one value, the one primal thing. And he emphasized that there're actually many different ones that we want to elevate, and they're incommensurate, so we have these very difficult trade-offs that are impossible to calculate, and that decisions have to be made in sort of a moral ad hoc way sometimes.
And he was very skeptical of ideologues for that reason, and that has just very much rung true to me as I've reported around the world, that we face these very difficult, messy decisions, and anybody who sounds too sure of themselves, keep your hand on your wallet then. But Isaiah Berlin's quotes would be way too long too.
Sophie Ryan:
A general recommendation of reading in that direction.
Nick Kristof:
Absolutely.
Sophie Ryan:
Well, that's a perfect point I think for us to draw a line under our conversation for today, Nick, thank you so much for your time, and your insights, and all of your wisdom. It's just been a pleasure.
Nick Kristof:
Well, thank you Sophie, and my warmest wishes to all of Oxford, to Rhodes House, and of course, especially to Magdalen. So next time you're at Magdalen, say, "Hi," to the Deer.
Sophie Ryan:
I definitely will. Thank you, Nick.