Stay Tuned with Preet

Well, that's interesting because the reason I was asking was not to understand necessarily your ethical worldview but rather your journalistic instinct. If a story is black and white, is it less interesting to you and maybe not? Uh, yeah, I mean I would say so. Um I from a narrative point of view Literally just talking about myself and what what would I read on a Saturday afternoon if you gave me an hour I want something that's going to take some surprising twists and turns um Complexity you like complexity. I like complexity and surprise. And so if you have a story in which you know, you meet a character and they're totally virtuous on page one and Totally virtuous an hour later. Um It's going to sleep you're young yeah to be sure there are people out there like that and there are those stories should get Written but I may not be the guy to do it I want to ask you a question and then we'll get into some of the particular stories because they're fascinating and you mentioned a couple There's a question that I get a lot And i'm sure you get it as well given what you write about Why do people do bad things? And I can give you some context, you know, I get asked that because of the job I used to do and I answer in some measure that obviously There are people do bad things for different reasons and there's some Who do it for greet? There's some who do it because of love There's some who do it because they make a mistake and they double down And there's some who are just I think Rotten to the core. How do you answer that question?

And the reason I asked the question what I was going to say is the next book I did was on the Sackler family and that's all moral clarity. Like I think that's a pretty straightforward story.

So this is a book that's about space weapons which are taking over the world of warfare.

The book is about a Russian space scientist named Ivan Volkov who finds evidence that makes him believe that Russia and China have developed a system, kill switch is what he thinks of it as, that can turn off the GPS global positioning system on which every aspect of U.S. communications, transportation and really our economic lifeline depends and feels that he has a responsibility to share that information with the CIA.

The book pulls back to look at how his obsession with space shared with two other main characters began in the mid 1990s in Beijing and how the stories of this Russian, a Chinese who's his mentor and an American woman who works for the CIA become entangled in ways that take them right to today to the shadow of the Ukraine war which is happening as the concluding action of the book takes place.

And I wanted to go there because I wanted to see what people who had been crushed after the fall of the Soviet Union looked and felt like. I wanted my character to be of that world. People were recovering from this catastrophe.

So I was all set to go, was thinking about what hotel to stay in and this Magnitogorsk faraway place when boom, Russia invaded. And I was, I think, in the first big chunk of people who were banned. I was, I think, the only or one of the few journalists to this day. I don't know quite why I was on the list, but it meant that my visa was gone, obviously, and my chance of going to Magnitogorsk and Moscow had vanished.

He's the author of the new book, Life After Power is about to tell us.

You've written another book, Life After Power, seven presidents and their search for purpose beyond the White House.

It's a great book. It's very educational, instructive, lots of history here, lots of analysis here.

She contacted me and said, do you know about this film? And this was in January of this year. And I said, I certainly do. They filmed it here. And she said, we need to reach out to them. They need to tell at least part of the history of the Downwinders.

And he said he would do what he could. And he got back to us and said they're not interested.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit? Yes. Settle? Not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the Pale Blue Dot, the only home we've ever known.

The perceived sin was blasphemy. That he had insulted the Prophet Muhammad. That he had written things about the origin story of Islam.

And so for the next 10 years, Rushdie lived like a fugitive in England and then came to America and lived much more freely in the past 20 years.

if we are in a situation where a novel like that, of that kind of daring, is not getting published, then that's a very, very sad state of affairs.

Yeah, Hanif Qureshi, who unfortunately is now in a hospital bed having suffered a terrible fall. And he's tweeting about it, live tweeting about it. We talked about him on the podcast a few weeks ago. You know, and terrific person and himself ran into trouble early in his career with a film called My Beautiful Landerette, but nothing like Salman's situation. Yeah, Qureshi said that it's hard to imagine that anybody would write that novel or publish it.

And it's enormous. It sounds crazy in the light of our conversation, but it's enormous fun. It's a kind of fantastical telling of the creation of a South Indian empire in medieval times.

It's a useful exercise, evaluating the merits of different explanations for poverty like those having to do with immigration or the family. But I found that doing so always leads me back to the taproot, the central feature from which all other rootlets spring, which in our case is the simple truth that poverty is an injury, a taking.

we don't need to outsmart this problem. We need to out-hate it

One of the things that I love about the war on poverty, which was launched by the Johnson administration in 64, was that when they launched the war, they set a deadline. It wasn't rhetoric. They set a deadline for the abolition of poverty in America.

I think the first step is to recognizing that the end of poverty is an attainable goal. And then to understand that we need to deepen our investments and deepen those investments by fair tax implementation. But we don't just need that. We also need different policies, policies that really address the root causes of poverty, like policies that expand worker power, for example, or housing choice. And then we need to end our embrace of segregation.

We don't need new ideas, actually. We need a political will in a way that this book is my call for that.

Your book has a very broad title, Freedom. A subject that from time to time people think about, write about, argue about, go to war about, right?

His latest work, Freedom, seeks to unpack what the word has meant to different communities throughout history.

The book is centered around, fair to say, a hike or a trek that you and a number of other men took alongside railway lines some years ago.

In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because Freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed.

The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing.

I listen to Ellie's that's Ellie Honeg. I listened to Ellie Honeg's book Untouchable and he talked about how he was one time conflicted off of a case because his dad's law partner represented a potential witness.

But I always found that exciting and it was always something that I was interested in and I knew well before well before high school. That's what I wanted to do.

It was either, you know, pitching for the Mets. It didn't work out or, you know, I always had an interest in the law. I always liked history from a very young age. I don't know. Maybe it was watching, you know, my cousin Vinny, you know, or a few good men.

He's the author of Catch and Kill, Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators.

It's an account of his game-changing investigation into film producer Harvey Weinstein's history of sexual assault and the difficulties Farrow faced trying to get the initial story published.

So let's get to Catch and Kill.

So there's the book Catch and Kill, and then there's the podcast Catch and Kill.

I would not have written this book if I thought it was just a glum and dreary account of how broken our systems are or how acute the power imbalances.

You have a new book called The Deadline and in it, you write about time. And you say it was a time that felt like a time, felt like history. So before we get to what you mean by that, this last four years of not talking to you, it felt like a time.

Power first made waves when at 32 she won a Pulitzer Prize for A Problem From Hell, her book on America's response to genocide or lack thereof.

You know the morning after pill is what they call the week after pill and is actually an abortion.

In his final address as president, President Obama gave this speech in Chicago, it was supposed to be like the closing address of the administration. And in that speech, he talked about the line from To Kill a Mockingbird. If our democracy is to work the way it should in this increasingly diverse nation, then each one of us need to try to heed the advice of a great character in American fiction, Atticus Finch, who said, you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin, and walk around in it.

I write this in my book, that motive is not an essential part of proving the elements of a crime, except with some exceptions like hate crimes.

An Unfinished Love Story, a personal history of the 1960s which comes out next week, explores that decade through the memories of her late husband, Dick Goodwin, a political advisor and speechwriter to Presidents JFK and LBJ.

it was especially because I knew how much it meant to him to have this story told and that in the middle of the process of our working on it he had cancer so it meant even more to him and it just gave him a sense of purpose and a sense of excitement about every day that we would continue this process so it took on a whole extra meaning beyond the fact that I'm normally used to interviewing people and talking about presidents who are long dead and they don't answer me when I ask them questions but now suddenly here's this guy sitting across from me he's not Teddy Roosevelt, he's not Abraham Lincoln no, he's not FDR or any of the people that I've studied but he's somebody who was with all the major characters in the 60s and when I asked him questions he would answer and sometimes correct me and argue with me so it was great, it was a great process for us to go through in those last years of his life

we kept not looking in these boxes until finally after he turned 80 he came down the steps one day and it's still clumps of shaving cream on his face singing Oklahoma and saying it's time now, it's now or never and once we started going through the boxes chronologically and that's the way you really need to do history you shouldn't know how it ends we just were able to go year by year, week by week through the 60s there was an extraordinary promise in the 60s there were great things that happened and so it surprised me to see a lot of the places that he was how he responded I was surprised at his relationship with Jackie Kennedy at the closeness that he developed toward Lyndon Johnson even though he had turned against him on the war surprised about how women were treated in the early part of the 60s, so many things that it felt like it was a new way for us to do things together we were at places that we never knew we had been together, we finally discovered so for both of us it was an exploration into a decade that's such a pivotal time in our history and a decade that I think needs to be remembered so the famous phrase about history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes

I think that was true for Barack Obama as well in fact he had known about team of rivals he had read the book I've become friends with him in part because of that and we talked about it and then when he appointed Hillary everybody just said finally here's a team of rivals but he knew that he needed her experience on foreign policy in other areas as well and so it's that combination of humbleness and confidence that we don't see right now in fact it's an insecure person that is going to put rivals into jail or make threats against rivals on the contrary if you can bring them into your inner circle and listen to them and hear what they have to say and then understand it close up then you can reach their constituencies as well as them

it's not to say that they weren't active themselves but I think then the frustration set in they see supreme court decisions they see climate change that doesn't seem to be changing they see gun safety marches that don't seem to be reducing changes in the gun legislation and there's a sense of just not believing that it's making a difference and I think that's a really troubling if I could do anything from this book that I care about I mean if people in the civil rights movement in the 50s had lost patience because they weren't getting anywhere you know that they were marching even then against segregation against voting rights denials and yet nothing was seeming to happen except for difficult times and then they had to go through Birmingham when Bill Conner sent the dogs and the hoses after them go through Selma and what the troopers did to the people on the bridge and yet they kept going there was a sense of collective spirit even though it was really, really hard and I think that's what has to be understood I think by young people today because they're very much needed in these elections to vote and even if it's difficult and it seems like it doesn't mean that they have to want to be one of the people that's in office right now but we need them running for office on a different kind of person not for the power of broken congress where nothing can get done not for people who stay in office and you can't understand quite why because they don't feel like it's any good but we're seeing people leaving public office now huge numbers are which shows that the atmosphere in Washington is not one that a young person would say oh I can't wait to go down there right now but these things can change you know you get a number of people leaving and you get more people new coming in with spirit and energy and you can't give up I mean that's the whole point

It's called Twilight of Democracy, The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.

Her most recent, Twilight of Democracy, is a polemic against the anti-democratic parties that have grown in her adopted home Poland, in the United Kingdom, and right here in the United States.

This book, I think everyone needs to read Twilight of Democracy, The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.