TRANSCRIPT: Thomas Friedman on the Future of America and the World: The Post-Election Dissection (Part 1)

Thank you all for coming out on such a cold evening.

Why, you know, I really, although I live in America and I’m a journalist and a columnist, I don’t claim any particular expertise on American politics. I would just say this, you know, I think the first thing to keep in mind, just checking the vote totals before I came out here. So Donald Trump won basically 76 million votes and Kamala Harris won 74 million. So the notion that like this was a giant landslide, you know, I think we have to keep our feet on the ground in terms of this wasn’t like some overwhelming mandate for the MAGA agenda. I’m not diminishing that. I’m just saying no question, but I’m just saying the numbers are what the numbers are. It isn’t like three quarters of Americans are now behind this agenda. So I just want to keep that in mind.

I think there are a lot of things. It’s never one thing. I think the most important thing was inflation. Larry Summers made a good point the other day that when unemployment goes from, you know, down or up one percent, that affects a certain number of people. When inflation’s up, it affects everybody. And we’ve seen in our history presidents toppled by inflation. Jimmy Carter was one. Lyndon Johnson was one. And so I think that was a big cross-cutting issue.

I think the cultural agenda, the backlash against the woke agenda was definitely a factor. It played out in different states and different localities, but I think it was very, very important. Democrats had adopted certain positions that were really far away from the median American voter. I think the three dumbest words in the English language were, “defund the police.” And that was not something that minority Americans or white Americans wanted to do in their communities. I think that was a huge mistake. And there were a lot of those sort of cultural markers.

I think a lot of people were just fed up with feeling that there were certain things that you couldn’t say and you would be cancelled for. I think that was part of it. There’s no question the Gaza War, in certain communities, worked against Kamala Harris. Hard to believe how it could have worked in Trump’s favor in a kind of positive way, but a lot of people didn’t vote. I think that was part of it.

A Nation Experiencing Rapid Change

I think more broadly, though, there is a sense of a lot of people of a loss of control. And, you know, we’ve gone through just such accelerated change in America. You know, sometime in the last 10 years, people went to the grocery store and the person at the cash register wasn’t wearing a baseball hat. They went into the men’s room and they saw someone of a different gender. And then they went to the office and their boss rolled a robot up and it seemed to be studying their job. And it all happened at the same time. People’s sense of home, of social norms and of work all got disrupted at the same time.

And along came a guy named Donald Trump, who came up with a brilliant metaphor, which was a wall. The wall was supposed to stop immigrants from illegal immigrants from Mexico. But it was a metaphor for I can stop the winds of change, make America a great again. The most important word in that sense is again. It’s to harken back to something, to a simpler time.

And then I think, you know, there is, you know, if you’re making a movie about it, it would be called “there’s just something about Donald.” I don’t know what it is, how someone can be this shameless at times, this crude, this nasty, this dishonest, this criminal, and yet exude a sense of strength at a time when people feel things are out of control that really attracted certain people to him. I think also I thought Kamala Harris really ran the best campaign she could in the time she had. But it was difficult—she was always sailing into the wind.

What You Say When You Listen: Lessons from Journalism

RITULA SHAH: So before we get into that, I just want to bring up your next book, which is called “What You Say When You Listen.” How does that apply then, given everything you’ve just said about the Democrats and how they ran that race?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Yeah, fortunately, my book isn’t about politics, politics per se. But I decided to write a book. It’s the title is called “What You Say When You Listen,” which was the biggest lesson I learned as a journalist. I’ve been doing it since 1978. And the book is about really how to write a column. Since we live in an age where everyone wants to be a columnist. So I thought I’d write a book about how to write a column.

RITULA SHAH: Right. So here was I thinking it was about how you respond in debates. But I’ll get to that.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: So it’s, you know, I had a sort of a very, you know, weird background. I was a Jewish kid from Minnesota who wanted to cover the Arab world in the 70s. Not a natural thing. And the New York Times had a rule that you couldn’t be Jewish and go to Beirut or Jerusalem. And I broke both those molds in succession.

And I did it. My sort of key, I think that that enabled me to do this job the way I did it was that I learned to be a really good listener because I discovered two things happen when you—because I did not go out there and say, “you’re all great, you’re all wonderful. It’s all the other guy’s fault.” I mean, I’m in everybody’s face a lot. And but I survived, I think, I hope by being a good listener, because I discovered that two things happen when you listen.

One is what you learn when you listen. And I can tell you all the stories I got wrong. And there are more than a few were because I was talking when I should have been listening. But much more important is what you say when you listen, because listening is a sign of respect. And I discovered it was amazing what people would let me say to or about them if they thought I respected them. And if you didn’t, they didn’t think you respected them, you couldn’t tell them it was dark outside. And so that was really my survival mechanism.

Around 2015, I changed my business card, I can give you one afterwards. I changed it from New York Times foreign affairs columnist to New York Times humiliation and dignity columnist, because I discovered or I came to terms with the fact that I was really spending my career covering people acting out on their humiliation and questing for dignity. By the way, it can be Vladimir Putin, who described the fall of the Soviet Union as the worst humiliation, you know, of the of the 20th century, it can be China after after what he called a century of humiliation. I can be Palestinians at an Israeli checkpoint can be Swarovski Jews versus Ashkenazi Jews can be Muslim youth in Europe, wherever you wherever I went, I was encountering that phenomena. And so that’s what the first half of the book is about that. The second half of the book is about what actually happened in my time as a journalist now four plus decades. And the theme of that is that I was here.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: We were all here for what I call a Promethean moment. So Promethean moments are these moments in history, where we get the introduction of a new technology or set of ideas that don’t just change one thing, they actually force you to change everything, how you work, how you govern, how you learn, how you do commerce, how you fight wars, how you defend yourself, how you commit crimes, how you prevent crimes. And I believe that my time in journalism, our time here, corresponded with a Promethean moment.

We know what they are, they’re the printing press, the scientific revolution, the ag revolution, the industrial revolution. And right now, we are going through a Promethean moment. Only what’s different about our Promethean moment is it isn’t driven by simply one thing like a new machine, a printing press or a combustion engine, or a new set of ideas about how the solar system works. It’s actually driven by two super cycles.

One is the super cycle in technology. It’s our ability to sense, digitize, connect, process, learn, share, act, all now amplified by AI. And we’re putting that into everything from your watch to your toaster, to your F35, to your computer. At the same time, what’s unique about our Promethean era is that it’s paralleled by a climate super cycle. Emissions, warming, ice melt, change in ocean currents, change in wind patterns, extreme weather. It’s also fed by feedback loops. And so one is a vicious cycle, one is a virtuous cycle, and they are actually reshaping everything. And they both go faster and faster. And the second half of the book is basically about how we understand and adapt to that world.

Trump’s Appeal in an Age of Rapid Change

RITULA SHAH: So I’m going to bring you back to US politics. Is that a lesson that in a sense, the Democrats have ignored, and actually Donald Trump has somehow tapped into by this agenda of, look, you’ve got this world of rapid change. I’m the person that can protect you from this. I’m going to build a wall. I’m going to make America great again. These are messages that he was stating before 2016. The Democrats saw that as an aberration somehow. But actually, this is a man who listened, who said something that people wanted to hear, felt the need to hear.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Yeah, I mean, you certainly have to give Trump credit for understanding the anxiety that this rapid, accelerating pace of change we’re going through. But I would say Biden certainly didn’t miss it. He enacted a lot of legislation that was aimed at responding to it. You know, as I say, I go back to all the reasons I explained before. And I think Donald Trump is a unique figure in history, political history.

RITULA SHAH: Have you met him? What’s he like?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Yeah, so we know each other. And he can be extremely entertaining in person. Outrageous, but entertaining. The last time I talked to him, actually, it’s quite a posit for what’s going on right now. In fact, for the column I just pressed send on a minute before I came out here.

When the Abraham Accords were signed. These were accords which normalized relations between Israel and Bahrain and UAE. Morocco and Sudan. I embraced him. I thought this is really good. I strongly endorsed them. And he quoted that. And then he called me and said, “Tom, I can’t believe the New York Times lets you say that.” I said, “Donald, I can write whatever I want. You know, when you do the right thing, I will write it. And when you do the wrong thing, I will write it.” That was the last time we spoke.

So yeah, look, I’m incredibly worried. Because it’s one thing to say I can read the room’s anxiety. It’s another thing to say I actually understand the big trends in the world and I have a plan for fixing them. Those are two very different things. And he got elected by reading the room, I think, really well. I’m ready to watch and see what he’s going to do.

I’m not happy about this. I endorsed publicly and voted for Kamala Harris for my own reasons and who I’ve never spoken to or once bumped into, by the way. But I’m very worried because I don’t… I look at the initial appointments and these aren’t just… these are outrageous to appoint someone like Matt Gaetz as our attorney general.

The Media’s Role and Blind Spots

RITULA SHAH: I want to talk about that, but just talk about the media and the media’s role in all of this. The political scientist Yasha Monk wrote recently, if you were a faithful reader of the New York Times or a frequent listener of NPR, National Public Radio in the States, you’re less likely than the average American citizen to believe that Biden was suffering from serious mental decline or that Harris was an unpopular politician with a steeply uphill path towards winning the presidential election. Was there a sort of a collusion amongst the liberal media, this sort of will, in a sense, that Harris should win against the reality that they were facing? Was there a sort of a delusion, emperor’s clothes-like state?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Um, yeah, you know, well, again, if you read the New York Times, if you read the New York Times, you’ll discover we have, I think, the five best conservative columnists in the business right now. David Brooks, Ruth Douthat, Bret Stephens, David French, and John McWhorter. And if you were reading them, you certainly weren’t having those views. So I always bristle when people say the media or the New York Times or whatever, it’s who you’re reading when.

And so I think we actually offered a, and our pollster, Nate Cohn, was never saying that she was going to win. So we’re kind of a punching bag for a lot of that stuff, but if you’re saying did liberal America not take seriously the prospect of his winning or understand some of the forces that were driving that? Absolutely, and they’re going to have to do a deep rethink.

RITULA SHAH: One last observation on that, and I really think these appointments are really interesting and important. About three weeks before the election, I spoke to a Republican diplomat who wasn’t a Trump supporter, but wasn’t a never-Trumper either, and was convinced that Trump would win and that Harris was a terrible, terrible candidate. The Dems were failing, according to this person, to raise the issues that connected the voters. Now, at the time, I was struck by the certainty, but also I wasn’t sure if I was being spun, but it turned out he was much righter than I could possibly have imagined. Again, was there an element of delusion amongst those who were desperate that Harris should win, those perhaps around her who might have asked her to change course, to talk about inflation, to talk about the economy, to have a better story on those bread-and-butter issues, the price of eggs?

The Democratic Party’s Missteps

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: You know, again, I don’t know if the word is delusion, but there were people desperately hoping Donald Trump wouldn’t win, and obviously, again, I wasn’t involved in the campaign. I probably only wrote one column about it because I sort of was focused on other things, but yeah, I don’t know what to say. She wouldn’t have been the candidate I would have chosen had there been a primary. I wished Biden would have resigned earlier. As soon as I saw the debate, I wrote a column immediately saying, you need to go.

I don’t know what to say. Yes, they got it wrong, the Democrats. It was a bad campaign, but I think they were behind the eight ball the whole time. Inflation put them behind the eight ball, and Biden should have resigned, never should have run again. There should have been a proper primary. There should have been a competitive field where all these issues could have been laid out. They didn’t do that, and now we’re going to have this experiment.

But I would, again, when people say his policies were preferred by people, which policies? I will end the Ukraine war in a day. I will slay inflation. I will call women bitches. Which of those? Yeah. Yeah, they did resonate with some people.

But the only column I actually wrote about the campaign was one after Jeff Bezos announced that he wasn’t going to have an endorsement in The Washington Post. And the column I wrote was simply to say, which is what I’ve been doing here all day at DeepMind. We are on the eve of the greatest and most disruptive scientific discovery of mankind. Artificial general intelligence. It’s going to be with us sometime in the next three to five years, and it is going to disrupt everything. And on the eve of this discovery, it was not mentioned in a single debate. And neither

RITULA SHAH: So AI is a particular obsession of mine, but let’s not get into that tonight. Let’s talk about these appointments that you referred to. What are we to make of them? Someone like you talk about Matt Gaetz, you know, a person who was under investigation by his own Republican colleagues. Is this a distraction tactic? Are these the people that he really imagines will take up the post? Tulsi Gabbard at National Intelligence? Or is this a game? Is this to see to test the loyalty, perhaps, of the Senate?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: You’re asking a perfectly legitimate question. I just have no idea. It’s so out of the norm, you know, these kind of people. These aren’t people you—Matt Gaetz, you wouldn’t want to write your, update your will. You know, I mean, let alone be the Attorney General. Tulsi Gabbard. I mean, literally, the idea that someone basically operated as a Putin troll will be the director of National Intelligence. And there’s just something just so nuts about the whole thing.

This is what worries me about Trump. I’m not a doctor. All I know is he’s 78 years old and I’m 71. And I’m not, you know, I confuse a few things every once in a while. And he’s led a crazy life. And I’m just very worried. We’re at an incredibly complicated moment. You need the very best people around you. And he’s got Elon Musk jumping up and down, tweeting, saying you should appoint this guy and not that guy. “I’m going to take a poll on Twitter. Do you like Riddler or Tom more?” I mean, the whole thing is just so uncontrolled, undisciplined.

The Weight of Physics Over Politics

And it’s why I will talk about it soon. I just came from the Middle East. I was in Israel and the UAE and the West Bank. And my wife said, “God, how do you feel?” And I just said, “Honey, I despair about politics now. I’m just into physics.” I mean, I’m just into the sheer weight of things changing people. I don’t think I can change anyone’s mind anymore.

And when you go back to my two super cycles, you know, Mother Nature, she is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is. You can’t talk her up. You can’t talk her down. You can’t say, “Mother Nature, we’re having a little inflation. Could you take a year off?” She’s going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate. And she always bats last. And she always bats a thousand. Do not mess with Mother Nature.

So that’s what we’re doing over here. And then you have technology over here. So basically, we’ve got this incredible climate change happening here. We’re on the eve of the greatest technology invention that is going to be incredibly disruptive and not just to blue collar jobs. I was at Google a few months ago and they showed me a beta version. They asked Gemini to create a debate about “the world is flat.” And in one second, a woman’s voice and a man’s voice were debating. And I suspect when I’m here in five years, Hannah won’t need either of us. This stuff is coming and it’s going to be so disruptive. And we’re playing around. When you appoint someone like Matt Gates, you’re just playing around.

RITULA SHAH: We’re staying with this idea of disruption. I think it’s Putin that’s described Trump as the American Gorbachev, the leader who brings the system down from within. He might be on to something there.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Yeah, he might. I mean, I’m sure he says it with glee, but that’s why to me it’s not funny. None of it’s funny. And that’s why you say, why did people vote for him? Again, it’s a multitude of things. But, you know, there’s physics and the apple doesn’t jump from the ground into the tree. It falls actually down from the tree. There is gravity and it will hit all of us. It’ll hit him.

Navigating Global Conflicts

RITULA SHAH: You’re clearly concerned about where we’ve arrived. Let’s talk about a couple of very big specific conflicts. Talk about Ukraine. First of all, it’s the thousandth day, I think, today since Moscow’s full scale invasion of Ukraine. Donald Trump, as you said, has proposed solving it potentially in one day. We’ve seen this authorization by Joe Biden of the use of long range missiles. Ukraine’s indeed fired them. Russia’s described it as an escalation, changed its nuclear doctrine. It feels as if Donald Trump might inherit a conflict that is in a new phase, a much hotter phase. How equipped is he to handle that?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Well, let me start at 30,000 feet to answer your question, because the point I made the other day is that the world has actually changed remarkably in just the four years that Trump was president. I would argue we ended the post-Cold War world and we entered into the post-post-Cold War world. So Trump now is resuming same office, same U.S. Army, same allies, but a different world.

How so? The way I give talks now in the States about foreign policy, this is how I like to start. And this is a good audience. I want to speak to all the parents in the audience. Mom, dad, if your son or daughter come home from college and say, “Mom, dad, I’d like to be the U.S. secretary of state one day.” Tell them, “Honey, anything but that—secretary of agriculture, commerce, education, health and human services. But promise mommy and daddy, you won’t try to be U.S. secretary of state. Worst job in the world.“

The Changing Complexity of Diplomacy

And the way I can illustrate it and make this point, let’s compare Henry Kissinger, 1973-74, after the Egyptian surprise attack and Tony Blinken after October 7th and Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel and its retaliation.

Henry Kissinger, I’m going to date myself here, needed three dimes, an airplane, three months and a little Kissinger magic to produce the 1974 disengagement agreements, which were really the precursor to Camp David. He needed a dime to call Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, a dime to call Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, and a dime to call Hafez Assad. They all lived in real states. And there was a phone. And when it rang, it didn’t come off the wall. Three months, three dimes, Kissinger magic. And he produced what I call tic-tac-toe—three across Egypt, Syria, Israel—disengagement agreements.

Flash forward to Tony Blinken. Tony Blinken sees double wherever he goes. He goes to Gaza. There’s inside Hamas and outside Hamas, military Hamas and political Hamas. He goes to Lebanon. There’s the Hezbollah and the Lebanese government. Goes to Syria. There’s the Syrian government, the Iranians in Syria, the Russians in Syria and the Turks in Syria, not to mention the Kurds in Syria. He goes to Iraq. He’s got the Shia militias and he’s got the Iraqi government. In Yemen, he’s got Houthi tribesmen in flip-flops who operate cruise missiles and the Yemeni government. He sees double everywhere he goes.

His challenge is to take a Rubik’s cube and get all the colors on one side aligned. Ever try to do that? It’s really hard. You do not want to be the U.S. Secretary of State.

OK, so this is an incredibly challenging moment. We’re not in the post-Cold War anymore. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I was working on this chapter in my book and I said, well, I grew up in the Cold War. My career, most of it was in the post-Cold War. And now I said, we’re in the post-post-Cold War. And then I said, wait a minute, that’s really stupid. This year has nothing to do with the Cold War anymore. It’s a world shaped by two super cycles, not by two superpowers. So that was sort of in the back of my head.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: This summer I decided to do a deep dive on A.I. You’ll see how this all connects in a second. And I got my tutor, Craig Mundy, who is former chief technology officer of Microsoft and has been my tutor on technology since “The World Is Flat.” And we sat down and we did a really deep dive on A.I. And it was really interesting. And it concluded with him explaining to me that the Holy Grail, where we are heading, is for polymathic artificial intelligence.

So not single domain artificial intelligence, say like Alpha Fold. I can do protein folding or Alpha Go. I can beat you at Go or Deep Blue. I can beat you at chess. That’s single domain. This is polymathic artificial intelligence. Why? I’ve mastered biology, chemistry, material science, Shakespeare and Mozart. OK. And produces really high dimensional thinking.

So I thought I’d never really thought about that term polymathic artificial intelligence. A couple of weeks later, my environmental tutor calls Johan Rockstrom, who runs the Potsdam Institute in Germany and says, I got a new book out. Would you come to New York for UN Climate Week and do an event with me? And I said, Johan, for you, anything. What’s the book called? He says called “Poly Crisis.”

I thought, well, that’s really interesting. My A.I. teacher’s talking about polymathic artificial intelligence. My climate teacher’s talking about poly crisis, meaning that we’re not just in a climate crisis anymore. Climate change drives agricultural decline, drives internal migration, drives external migration, drives state collapse. So you get poly crises.

The Poly Scene: A New Global Era

And then I was thinking about what I told you about Tony Blinken. He, unlike Kissinger, is dealing with poly actors. He’s dealing with superpowers, super empowered, angry people like Hizballah say, the Houthis. He’s dealing with super corporations. Elon Musk has a GDP bigger than half the countries in the world. He also has a space company, an Internet company that shaped battlefields. He’s dealing with super intelligence and super storms. He’s dealing with poly actors.

And so where we are right now, I think globally, is our great challenge is, will we be able to leverage polymathic artificial intelligence to give the poly actors, the poly solutions we’re going to need for the poly crisis, which is why I call the new era we’re in, not the post post-Cold War world, I call it the poly scene.

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