I am very stressed out, like so many Americans. I'm actually having trouble sleeping now. I don't think I should be feeling this way about a presidential election, but I don't think I'm alone. There's so much anger and rancor really permeating throughout the country. Clearly a lot of people have been left out of the American dream. This is the autumn of our discontent. And I guess the question I have is how did it happen? I want to know why? What are the underpinnings of our anger? And really the class warfare that we're witnessing is trade to blame? Is globalization to blame? We hear Donald Trump certainly driving that point home whenever he can. You go anywhere, you watch Secretary Clinton, and you will see Devis Station where manufacturers down thirty forty. Sometimes NAFTA is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere, but certainly ever signed in this country. And now you want to approve trans specific partnership. You were totally in favor of it. Then you heard what I was saying how bad it is, and you said, I can't win that debate. But you know that if you did win, you would approve that, and that will be almost as bad as NAFTA. Nothing will ever dump NAPTON. So I decided to invite one of the smartest people I know on these issues to come and really give us trade and globalization one oh one. Tom Friedman, I think is such a great writer. A New Yorker profile talked about the fact that he writes like it's a conversation with the taxi driver. Well, sign me up, hire me. I am your taxi driver, and I want you to go along for the ride. Tom Friedman, Welcome to our podcast. Great to be with you, Katie. Now normally would be our podcast because my friend, my partner in crime, my colleague, Brian Goldsmith, is normally with me Tom, and he is wonderful. But guess what, he just had a baby. Isn't that nice? Fantastic? Her name is Eliza. I'm wondering if there was some kind of HAMILTONI yeah, So what the hell is going on? Tom? Why whatever do you mean, Katie? I mean he must be You've been in this business a long time, Tom, as have I, and I don't think I've seen anything like this. Are you as upset about the state of the Union as I am. Well, there's no question we're seeing um election like no other. We're seeing a candidate like no other in Donald Trump, and to me, the single most honest, true, an important statement Donald Trump has made since the beginning of the campaign is that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue UM in New York City and his supporters would still stick with him. And UM, I think that is accurate, and I think we have I don't think this is an economic event. I think it's a cultural event. It's touching something I think very deep in the American psyche. Uh. There there are at least three things it's touching, if not more. The first thing that I think is producing this is a profound sense of what I would call stuck nous in the country that we we feel stuck, you know, after eight years of a lot of congressional gridlock around Obama. Um, a lot of it was deliberately engineered by Republicans to make Obama fail. But in the end, they they so soiled their own garden that um, they ended up inviting in an invasive species called Donald Trump. And I think one of the Trump's very successful a pe olls is that I'm a business guy. I know how to get stuff done. I can unstick us. I am King Arthur, and I can pull the sword from the stone. And I think a lot of people look at that and listen to him and think, well, you know, I kind of doubt it, But you know what, what if he can, why not give him a chance? What do we have to lose? Someone I know described him as an experimental drug that you've tried everything, nothing has worked. You're willing to go forward and and and inject him and just deal with the side effects. That's a very very good UM analogy. And I think the second thing feeding Trump is a profound sense of homelessness, uh, the likes of which I've never seen at the national scale. When you say homelessness, do you mean lack of community? Um? Well, I mean people feeling not at home in their own homes. I don't mean people living on sidewalks. I mean, um let's remember Barack Obama ran for resident um claiming that a marriage was between a man and a woman. All right, he will follow Ireland in in uh proclaiming marriages between any two people who love each other. That's a big shift for a lot of people, and it took Obama, you know, eight years to get his mind around it, or six or however many. So for other people who come from more conservative, um faith based background, I can I can understand why all of this is making them feel unmoored, really unsettling. It's sort of like the culture wars are alive, and well exactly. Secondly, you have in the same homelessness vein um. You're You're in the grocery store and everyone around you is speaking Spanish again. I'm a really pro immigration person, but this rise in the number of sort of immigrants we've had and people not speaking the language again makes some people feel really homeless. Okay. And Donald Trump's a value proposition is that I will erect a wall um that will stop these changes, that will make you feel home again. And it's really not make America great again, per se. It is make me feel home again, isn't it Isn't it isn't it making make us go back to the way things were, Because I think, you know, one of the things that I've thought about a lot as I've watched this unfold is that we're in the midst of a massive transformation of society. Pile on that with globalization, right, and immigration and suddenly you have a melting pot that you're not sure you love the ingredients. Right, No, absolutely, And then um, you know you have the whole rise of political correctness on college campuses, which you can also people makes people feel I'm not I can I say this? Can I tell this joke? Is it going to get me to lose my job? Um? And again, um, you shouldn't tell off color jokes or or racist or sexist jokes in ways that will make other people feel not at home. But all I'm saying is all of these changes at once are something that I think is propelling him and accounts for the fact that he can declare that if I shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, I won't lose any support. I think on top of all this, we have a broader trend where the line between entertainment has become politics and politics has become entertainment. I was going to ask you about why Donald Trump. Why is he the Night in Shiny Armor? Is it because of his celebrity? Yeah, I think there's a lot of people who just like the show. Um. And he even says that he said, look at people come to my rallies because they're fun. Because you never know what's going to come out of his mouth. Just on the pure entertainment level, it's a train wreck in some cases. And it's it is like a reality show. You can't take your you can't take your eyes off it is going to talk about his hotel, his steaks, is wine. And we've lost the line between entertainment and politics and and that I think you wrap all those things together, and I think you can explain where we are. And you said, you know this moment of rapid change. I couldn't agree more. I a book coming out November, plug exactly, Plug Plug Plug. It's called Thank You for Being Late Um, An Optimist Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, Because I think we're in an age of acceleration. Well, let's talk. Can we can we sort of take a step back, Tom, because you're such an expert on globalization and trade and there there's been so much discussion about you know, China and people taking our jobs and you know, the economy, and can we sort of just dissect some of these things that have surfaced in this campaign so we can hopefully get some clarity. Do we need to rethink sort of this whole neoliberalism philosophy that free trade is a great thing for everyone. Well again, let's let's so let's unpack it. Um. People who benefit from trade tend to have no idea who they are. People who are hurt by trade no exactly who they are. So you begin with that asymmetry. No one sits around and say, had cut this basket full of goods I got at Walmart? Um, you know, for half the price I would have had to pay for them, these tennis hues, these T shirts, you know, this stereo, this iPod Um, I'm so glad we have free trade because that's why it's costing me half as much. Um. That person has no idea how much they're benefiting from globalization. But the person who lost their job, um at the textile factory, it knows exactly who they are. It definitely hurts specific groups, and our job as a society should be to cushion the impact on those groups. We have not done that. I was reading an economist that we spend a minuscule amount of the GDP on retraining people, and as we are making this massive transition, it seems the skill set you need to be successful has just changed dramatically. So one that gets to the other. I'm in the New York Times Washington office, okay, and I'm sitting at my desk with a fancy new Assisco phone. We used to have a receptionist at the Washington office of the New York Times out in the hall. We don't have her there now. She did not lose her job to a Mexican. She lost her job to a microchip. It's called voicemail. Okay. So the vast majority of jobs are not lost to foreign factories or competition. They're lost to technology. They aren't outsourced to Mexico. They're outsourced to history. They're made obsolete. If horses could have voted, we never would have had cars. We know that free trade benefits the society overall. Where we have failed is to give targeted help to our brothers and sisters who are really born the brunt of trade. Why aren't we doing more for them? And did we did? Were we blindsided by the kind of pain that would be inflicted by some of these free trade agreements. I'd love you to tell me if you think NAFTA was a good thing or a bad thing, because that's confusing. But again, because it's confusing because it's a mixed picture. Um Uh, it definitely benefited certain companies. If you're in a an agriculture company now exporting to Mexico, not to mention to Canada, but to Mexico, you love NAFTA. If you were working in an auto parts company in Detroit that's been moved to the Michauladores or mont Uh, then you don't like uh NAFTA. So it's entirely depends you know where you sit. But I'll tell you something else. How lucky are we as a as a country that our two neighbors are Mexico and Canada too stable free market democracies. Mexico one reason Mexico is a stable free market democracy was NAFTA. Naft to help consolidate Mexican democracy, which is wonderful. But honestly, people who are suffering in Detroit or in the rust Bell Tom aren't really that excited that Mexico is doing better. You know, I think Macrick cosmically, I think that's an incredibly important point. But what do you say to the guy who cannot, for the life of him, translate his skills, maybe on the assembly line or in a factory who's been replaced by robots who or whose firm has has gone overseas. Yeah. What I say to him is, please, Um, let's your legislator, My legislator, Uh, create legislation where I can transfer my text dollars to you in a way that will give you opportunities to be successful in this new world. You really feel for a lot of these workers, Tom, because you know it's not that far from St. Louis Park, where you grew up a suburb of Minneapolis and had a father who was the vice president of a ball bearings company. Um. You know, I think people may see you as a snobby New York Times columnists, but you really understand well, you know I think that you're a kid from the Midwest. Well, I grew up with these people I want, I'm What frustrates me is we haven't had the legislation to properly take care of these people. I totally understand their anger. I just don't want their anger to be translated into national policy that will hurt them and us. Tell me why you think protection ism is bad for for the average Joe or Gene Genie. Well, let's just start with I mean, if you're a Walmart shopper. If we have protection is um um. I mean everything in your shopping card is going to cost more. Um. You know, the tennis shoes, the T shirts, um, of the appliances, the iPods. I mean, if we literally put up walls of protection, uh, they all might be made here. But you know you are not going to get banged for your buck at all. Before we go to a break, do you think China is the boogeyman that it's been portrayed to be. I'm sure you saw Saturday Night Live Alec Baldwin kind of mocking Donald Trump for talking repeatedly about China. I think he pronounced it China. Yeah. Right, our jobs flee in this country, they're going to Mexico, They're going to China. So is China the boogeyman? Or is it? You know? I mean what role is China playing? And all this time, you know there's no question that China, once it got admitted to the w t O UM, you know, has engaged in protectionist practices and in some ways, you know, shakedowns of American industries. Um that uh, you know, I think need to be addressed and should be addressed in a in a very tough minded way. At the same time, let's remember China holds you know, well over a trillion dollars of our debt. So the fact that you have the low price mortgage you have today is in part because China gives us their money and we give them an iou because they're sitting on those io U s Uh. Interest rates are what they are, So your home mortgage is what it is. So you alienate China at your own risk. I always joke that, you know, they say China Hong Kong or one country, two systems. I say no, no, no, it's America and China that are one country, two systems. Uh. China can't roll over in bed without hitting us. We can't roll over in bed without hitting China. And so we've got to find a way to work at out term mutual benefit because there's only one thing worse more dangerous to us than a rising China, and that's a falling China. And if falling China will affect the cost of everything from the shoes on your feet to the money in your wallet, to the value of your mortgage. And do you think Donald Trump will lead to a falling China? You know, I I don't want to make any any predictions. Who knows what Trump believes? I have no. Whenever people say to me, what do you think you know Trump would do? I always say which Trump? The Trump who went to meet with the President of Mexico and was all sweetness and light and we have to get along, we're neighbors. Or the Trump who went a few hours later back to Arizona and denounced Mexican rapists and immigrants, etcetera. With the with Donald, it's always the question of which Trump. We'll be back with Tom Friedman right after this. How do you come up with the ideas for your columns? Tom? It's so demanding, it seems to me. I mean, do you have ever have just complete writer's block and think, oh my god, I have no idea what I want to write about? Or do you have so many columns in your head just waiting to to vomit out on the page. Yeah? No, I don't mean that in a bad way, you know what I mean. I see columns everywhere, um, and so for me, I've never ever in twenty one years, you'll come to the day of my columns. Oh my god, what am I gonna write? That's a good invitation, and of me exactly don't about I'm interested in a lot of things. Technology is science, education, geopolitics, politics. The way my mind works is I'm a dot connector. So I tend to see the connections between things that sometimes other people don't, and so that gives me a leg up. But it's never never been a problem for me. I wouldn't be doing this job for twenty one years if it were a lot of people. Really. I think credit you with taking complicated concepts and really distilling them. And I think in that New Yorker profile about you, it talked about how you sort of are a master at branding catchphrases, folks, the analysis of big fat geopolitical issues, and it's you you distill it to a point where it's like you're having a chat with a taxi driver. I went into journalism because I love being a translator from English to English. I like taking really complicated subjects and breaking them down and ways first of all that I can understand and then hopefully others can understand. And I happen to think there's some thing very idealistic about that. But I will tell you this to simplify something accurately. You have to understand it deeply. So I'm not just doing advertising branding. I mean I'm able to sometimes distill really complex things into simple images that people understand and can grasp because I've taken a lot of time to understand them, take them apart, and put them together in a way that someone can understand. Do you worry that, you know, speaking of your new book that's coming out later in November, that are you worried about the pace of our lives? It seems to me that the desire to really dig deep into some issues. And when I say dig deep, I'm saying read a column um that that people that people aren't really um, they don't seem so invested in knowledge. And in fact, there's such a strain of anti intellectualism, not only in this country but around the world. Dare I say, well, you can get such a rise now for yourself, you know, with just a hundred forty two characters. If if you come up with a really clever, snappy tweet and it goes viral quote unquote, wow, you just got a global buzz out of characters. You don't have to write an article, a column, a book. So the system now rewards that kind of behavior. You see Trump doing it, you know, um, And you know, all good things require patients. You can't speed up the gestation of a baby elephant or a bibob treat things that can last for a thousand years, they all take patients. It's the reason my book is called thank You for Being Late, Um, which is I want to celebrate pausing, taking time to reflect or rethink, to renew, to reimagine. I remember reading the science of sort of brain interaction and daydreaming is actually a good thing, despite what we were told in school by teachers, that kind of having a moment, to not be constantly stimulated by your phone or by conversation ends, or by social media or any kind of media. That's when you're creative. Juices really flow. That's why people have their best ideas when they're in the shower. Do you intentionally disconnect so you can just plaine? Thank Tom? Well? Absolutely, you know, I mean again, the reason my book is called thank You for Being Late is I would meet people in Washington, d C. For breakfast, and they'd come sometimes fifteen twenty minutes late. Every once in a while, say Tom, I really started as the weather driving the subway, the dog game, my homework, and um. One day I spontaneously said to one of them, Actually, Katie, thank you for being late. Because you were late. I've been eavesdropping on the conversation next to me. Fascinating. What did you forget your phone? Yeah, I've been people watching the law be fantastic. But you know, nobody, nobody does that, Tom, because if there's any break in the action, if you have any free time, I mean, there's no such thing as free time, because you automatically go to your phone. Well that's the thing. I don't. I go automatically go golfing. I know you do. In fact, my husband John was upset he couldn't be here to talk to you about the writer cup. I was like, whatever, whatever, John, you and Tom get together and go golfing. But do you do you? Um? I'm serious about this, Tom, because I find it. I have a problem with it. As you may know, I'm actually not on Twitter. The New York Times tweets my column and I'm not a uh and even a remotely Twitter user. I wouldn't even know how to use it myself. Really, do you ever feel like you're missing out on it? Anything? No, you know, I somehow, Kat, you have survived sixty three years without it. You know, you have seven sevent thousand followers, So I guess it's not hurting you so much? Is that? Um? The New York Times tweets my column, so those are followers of my column. So I'm thrilled by that. But I myself because I don't. First of all, I changed my mind all the time. If you asked me to tweet something, you know, immediately after an event, my reaction, I need to stop, pause and think about it because I and by the way, I may change my time my mind three times over the next two days as I think about it. So I would hate to be out there saying, you know, this thumbs up and then next day feel God, I really should have made thumbs down and I gotta write my column about it. But I have a tweet out there on Monday saying this, so you know, I just don't. And by the way, if I find out about the fire of the earthquake, the shooting, uh five minutes later from CNN and from Twitter, you know what, I'm okay with that. You sound so reasonable. Let's talk a little bit more about this campaign. Why is the country so divided. Hillary Clinton seems to be much more experienced, more competent, but people are so uneasy about her, and there's a lot of sort of moral equivalence being made between her fallibilities and Donald Trump's. Why is that? You know, they say, Katie, that people after a while start to resemble their dogs. You know, I hope I don't resemble mine, because I have a seventeen year old Karen Terrier and she is she's not looking so good. But I think over time people start to resemble their problems. And what I mean by that is, um, we have started to really look like Sunnies and Shiites, Democrats and Republicans. That not two parties divided by a different set of competing ideas that must and cannon always should be able to compromise in the middle but two different tribes who who people now would say, I wouldn't let my kid marry one of them? And the result is, um, we become like the warring tribes in the Middle East. Not two parties that go to Washington to govern and always find a way to compromise in the middle but two parties that resemble those in the Middle East and their philosophy and their abiding philosophy in the Middle East is I'm strong, why should I compromise? I'm weak? How can I compromise? But they never look for that that common ground in the middle that can serve both lives and elevate them both at the same time. So that's so depressing, Tom. You know, what do you do about that? I mean, I think you're right. It's almost like we're in one of those ovens, a convection of and right, you're just kind of sitting in in in your you're marinating in your own juices and people you're listening to people who agree with you. And my daughter Carrie, who's twenty years old, said the saddest thing to me. She said, I cannot I think about the Yates poem. Every day things fall apart, the center cannot hold and and and it's just this feeling of just kind of this huge fissure in our country, almost like it's a fault line between two different America's. Well, that's this is not a shameless plug, but that is why I wrote my book. That is I was feeling this, uh that after all my years in the Middle East, um covering the Israeli Palestinian Conflict, Saudi Arena, Indian shiait Sunni UM. I came back to America and it started to look and sound and talk and feel exactly like that part of the world. So I felt a need to go back to my own roots in Minnesota, the small suburb of Minneapolis where I grew up, which was not like that, UM, which was a truly center right, center left place where the commons worked. UM, that was a healthy community. And to go back and try to understand why it was that way, uh, and and really to just reaffirm to myself that I didn't make the whole thing up that um, it really was like that. And then to see if those lessons can apply to today, because I think that's the biggest issue. I still think we're a center right, center left country, but our politics does not reflect that at the national stage. That said, Katie, if you want to be an optimist about America, stand on your head, because the country so much better from the bottom up than from the top down. If you want to be an optimist, come with me back to Minnesota, and I'll show you communities at work, um that aren't being torn apart by this politics, where there still is a sense of the commons where people do come together, but it's it's not that way at the national level, and I think it's much worse than the reality on the ground in most of the country. Well, I think wage stagnation. You know, this is another thing where you hear different stories about the economy. I know you wrote recently when you wrote your scathing column about Donald Trump, uh that there is good news on the economic horizon. But then when you hear about wage stagnation and you read things like wages and benefits have essentially flatlined or declined for four out of five Americans between two thousand seven and two thousand fourteen, um, you you can see why people aren't feeling like the economy is getting better for everyone. They feel like the economy is getting better quite frankly for people like you and me. Well, there's no question that you know, there's nothing like a growing economic pie to make people feel more generous, more pluralistic, willing to experiment and reach out. And we had that kind of pie in the eighties and a lot of the nineties, and and we've lost that kind of pie in recent years. Although there's lots of data now suggesting that things are improving and coming back. Um, and that the politics you see right now as a lagging indicator. There's a lot of thriving communities around the country. You know. Come with me to Raleigh, to Austin, to Minorapoulis, to Seattle, you know. And I will also tell you the number of people who, you know, thanks to this world, can now start businesses on their own, get educated online in ways they never could before. Um. You know, there's the thing about globalization. You know, people think because I wrote The World Is Flat that Um, I'm somehow love with globalization. If you read that book, it's very clear. I think mobilization is everything, and it's opposite. It's incredibly democratizing, and it's incredibly authoritarian. It's incredibly particularizing, and it's incredibly homogenizing. Uh. You know, it's incredibly empowering and secredibly disempowering. It all depends what values you bring to the system. The system itself is not inherently anything. The same globalization systems that allows me to start a website or to write my own novel now and put it up on Amazon dot Com and not have to wait through way through fifty rejection letters from publishers. That same system Okay, also, you know shifts jobs and wages faster than ever. It's all about what values we bring to it. It seems to me Hillary Clinton has a big opening, right. Donald Trump is is trashing free trade, he's fat trashing China, He's trashing a lot of things. But I don't hear a lot of how are we going to fix things? How are you going to adjust to this new reality? If you will, do you think that she's communicated properly, like how we navigate this? Well, you know they will tell you. You go to their website. It's full of job creating ideas and educating ideas and how to get debt free college and um those kind of things. So I wouldn't want to make a blanket statement because I think there is a lot of beef and substance there. But I don't think she's communicated it people. It's always been my view. People don't listen through their ears. They listen through their stomach. If I connect with you on a gut level, O, Katie, you're gonna say to me, Tom, I trust you don't bother me with the details. If I don't connect with you on a gut level, you're gonna say to me, Tom, could you show me those details one more time? And um, for any number of reasons, I think Hillary has failed to connect with people on a gut level, that she understands the problem and has the solutions and a part of it she's up against. Just she's just been around a long time, you know. So it's just so you know, he sucks all the oxygen out of the room because he he says all these crazy things. I mean, he just sucks all the auctions. Yeah, and she's she's been around a long time. She's a serious woman trying to make serious arguments. They're kind of boring. That's the nature of serious arguments. Um Uh, it's much more thrilling to have someone you know, I tell you I'm going to make America great again and and not tell you how that I have a secret plan to destroy isis. But I can't tell you how. Um. What I think can't be excused is for any number of reasons, she's not a natural politician to begin with. You, she has not made that gut connection with people, and and therefore there's a lot of people who want to keep seeing the details do you think that's going to cost her in November, that inability to connect on that gut level. Well, there's one thing I absolutely haven't done from the beginning, kid, and I wouldn't do not. I would not predict this election. If you look at Brexit vote in the UK, um, if you look at the Columbia vote that just came through about whether to do their peace deal with their guerrillas. Um. I think these publics are very volatile, and I would make no predictions about this election. Do you think we might have a U S version of Brexit here? Because you know, I thought about the parallels actually coming here today, about the fact that so many young people didn't vote, and about how all the people who did were mostly in rural areas. London overwhelmingly didn't want Brexit, but a lot of other places in the UK did. And I think, gosh, the parallels are uncanny in some ways. No question, and I I just don't don't rule anything in, but I sure don't rule anything out. I'll be I'll be a very interested observer on the evening of election day before we go. I have to ask you about Anne, your wife, who you have read all your columns before you hand them in, tell me why you do that and what kind of UM input do you value from your wife? Be careful, she might be listening. Sure. My wife is First of all, she is a professional editor. She was editor uh, copy editor for Institutional Investor when we met, actually magazine um or soon after we met and um uh, and then for HBO, So she is actually a copy editor by profession. UM. Secondly, she's the most well read person I know, and um, she's also the smartest woman or man that I know. And so to have her correction, by the way, it's my exactly, she's my ever as my copy editor and editor and ideas person to bounce things off of, uh is really one of the great joys of my life. And also, UM, it's fun because then she's involved in my column and she's involved in my work, and it's not something I go off and do, and so we really share these ideas. The biggest fights we have in our marriage are over my column. I'm not taking that word out. It's my column. I'm not taking that word out exactly. So, but it's a it's been a source of great joy. It's not only my columns, my books. That's something we do together and share. Do you get ideas from man? Do you talk about sort of things and then you say, you know I should write about that? Yeah? I mean sometimes, you know, UM, I pretty much generate almost all my ideas myself, you know I don't. But UM, every once in a while she'll send me something or but but there's never been a column that you know, she's edited that she hasn't made better. In closing, you know, I started this podcast by talking about how anxiety written I am, about the state of the Union, about this campaign, about where we are as a country, about the fact that maybe we need more people willing to run for president. UM. Tell me why I should be optimistic. I'm going to save a lot of money on therapy bills. Right again, you should be optimistic, Katie, because when you get out of Washington and you get out of the kind of bubble you and I have to write about UM and talk about UM. What you find is the country is still a center right, center left country. UM. At the local level, there's still an enormous number of people working together to promote the commons. Uh. You see, if you go to towns all over the country, you'll see businesses trying to work with local educators and local government and local philanthropies to upgrade their school systems to to help young people become more productive and competitive workers. UM. I see so many good things happening here and um and I'm not this is not to flawed by book, but I found in doing this book and going to communities, this is amazing innovation going on at the local level. We actually don't have to invent anything, we just have to scale what's going on out there. Uh. It's still the greatest country in the world. If only we had the politicians, UM we need, deserve and should have at the national level to take care of this gym. You know, I have a friend from Zimbabwe, UM who I actually quote at the end of my book because she she says, you know, you Americans kick this country around like it's a football. But it's not a football. It's a faberge egg. You can drop it, you can break it, so be careful. That makes me cry a little bit, you know, because I think people are so so quick to um trash our country and trash the people who are who have the courage to actually lead. Well, you know, I just think everyone needs to um step up and appreciate. And maybe because I've lived abroad and lived in a war zone, in particular in the in a civil war and be rout for five years. You know, when you do that, you start to appreciate the public. You start to appreciate the public square, the public school, the public institutions, UM. The things that bind us together and that comments. You know, that um, without which nothing good can happen. I've seen people tear their commons apart in the Middle East, and I'm doing everything I can in my column, my books to make sure that virus doesn't come here. Tom So many people feel that neither candidate they don't like all of the above. UM. And how can we get more people engaged and not not in the process of voting, which obviously is critically important, but get more people to actually run for office. Well, it's again at the local level, I think you do see it happening. But at the national level, it's going to take someone who dares to go out there with a moderate message and show they can win. Barack Obama did in many ways, at least try to. I wouldn't take this election as the be all in the end all the sooner it's over the better. Um, we survived a civil war, will survive this, I hope. I still think at some point people are gonna understand that this was just a moment of madness and we'll get beyond it. Well. Tom Freeman is always great to listen to a voice of reason in the seemingly very unreasonable times. Thank you so much, Tom. I love talking to you always and I'm really grateful. Thank you. It was really my pleasure. A big thank you to Gianna Palmer, Gretta Cone and the right Reverend John Delore. 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I am very stressed out, like so many Americans. I'm actually having trouble sleeping now. I don't think I should be feeling this way about a presidential election, but I don't think I'm alone. There's so much anger and rancor really permeating throughout the country. Clearly a lot of people have been left out of the American dream. This is the autumn of our discontent. And I guess the question I have is how did it happen? I want to know why? What are the underpinnings of our anger? And really the class warfare that we're witnessing is trade to blame? Is globalization to blame? We hear Donald Trump certainly driving that point home whenever he can. You go anywhere, you watch Secretary Clinton, and you will see Devis Station where manufacturers down thirty forty. Sometimes NAFTA is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere, but certainly ever signed in this country. And now you want to approve trans specific partnership. You were totally in favor of it. Then you heard what I was saying how bad it is, and you said, I can't win that debate. But you know that if you did win, you would approve that, and that will be almost as bad as NAFTA. Nothing will ever dump NAPTON. So I decided to invite one of the smartest people I know on these issues to come and really give us trade and globalization one oh one. Tom Friedman, I think is such a great writer. A New Yorker profile talked about the fact that he writes like it's a conversation with the taxi driver. Well, sign me up, hire me. I am your taxi driver, and I want you to go along for the ride. Tom Friedman, Welcome to our podcast. Great to be with you, Katie. Now normally would be our podcast because my friend, my partner in crime, my colleague, Brian Goldsmith, is normally with me Tom, and he is wonderful. But guess what, he just had a baby. Isn't that nice? Fantastic? Her name is Eliza. I'm wondering if there was some kind of HAMILTONI yeah, So what the hell is going on? Tom? Why whatever do you mean, Katie? I mean he must be You've been in this business a long time, Tom, as have I, and I don't think I've seen anything like this. Are you as upset about the state of the Union as I am. Well, there's no question we're seeing um election like no other. We're seeing a candidate like no other in Donald Trump, and to me, the single most honest, true, an important statement Donald Trump has made since the beginning of the campaign is that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue UM in New York City and his supporters would still stick with him. And UM, I think that is accurate, and I think we have I don't think this is an economic event. I think it's a cultural event. It's touching something I think very deep in the American psyche. Uh. There there are at least three things it's touching, if not more. The first thing that I think is producing this is a profound sense of what I would call stuck nous in the country that we we feel stuck, you know, after eight years of a lot of congressional gridlock around Obama. Um, a lot of it was deliberately engineered by Republicans to make Obama fail. But in the end, they they so soiled their own garden that um, they ended up inviting in an invasive species called Donald Trump. And I think one of the Trump's very successful a pe olls is that I'm a business guy. I know how to get stuff done. I can unstick us. I am King Arthur, and I can pull the sword from the stone. And I think a lot of people look at that and listen to him and think, well, you know, I kind of doubt it, But you know what, what if he can, why not give him a chance? What do we have to lose? Someone I know described him as an experimental drug that you've tried everything, nothing has worked. You're willing to go forward and and and inject him and just deal with the side effects. That's a very very good UM analogy. And I think the second thing feeding Trump is a profound sense of homelessness, uh, the likes of which I've never seen at the national scale. When you say homelessness, do you mean lack of community? Um? Well, I mean people feeling not at home in their own homes. I don't mean people living on sidewalks. I mean, um let's remember Barack Obama ran for resident um claiming that a marriage was between a man and a woman. All right, he will follow Ireland in in uh proclaiming marriages between any two people who love each other. That's a big shift for a lot of people, and it took Obama, you know, eight years to get his mind around it, or six or however many. So for other people who come from more conservative, um faith based background, I can I can understand why all of this is making them feel unmoored, really unsettling. It's sort of like the culture wars are alive, and well exactly. Secondly, you have in the same homelessness vein um. You're You're in the grocery store and everyone around you is speaking Spanish again. I'm a really pro immigration person, but this rise in the number of sort of immigrants we've had and people not speaking the language again makes some people feel really homeless. Okay. And Donald Trump's a value proposition is that I will erect a wall um that will stop these changes, that will make you feel home again. And it's really not make America great again, per se. It is make me feel home again, isn't it Isn't it isn't it making make us go back to the way things were, Because I think, you know, one of the things that I've thought about a lot as I've watched this unfold is that we're in the midst of a massive transformation of society. Pile on that with globalization, right, and immigration and suddenly you have a melting pot that you're not sure you love the ingredients. Right, No, absolutely, And then um, you know you have the whole rise of political correctness on college campuses, which you can also people makes people feel I'm not I can I say this? Can I tell this joke? Is it going to get me to lose my job? Um? And again, um, you shouldn't tell off color jokes or or racist or sexist jokes in ways that will make other people feel not at home. But all I'm saying is all of these changes at once are something that I think is propelling him and accounts for the fact that he can declare that if I shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, I won't lose any support. I think on top of all this, we have a broader trend where the line between entertainment has become politics and politics has become entertainment. I was going to ask you about why Donald Trump. Why is he the Night in Shiny Armor? Is it because of his celebrity? Yeah, I think there's a lot of people who just like the show. Um. And he even says that he said, look at people come to my rallies because they're fun. Because you never know what's going to come out of his mouth. Just on the pure entertainment level, it's a train wreck in some cases. And it's it is like a reality show. You can't take your you can't take your eyes off it is going to talk about his hotel, his steaks, is wine. And we've lost the line between entertainment and politics and and that I think you wrap all those things together, and I think you can explain where we are. And you said, you know this moment of rapid change. I couldn't agree more. I a book coming out November, plug exactly, Plug Plug Plug. It's called Thank You for Being Late Um, An Optimist Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, Because I think we're in an age of acceleration. Well, let's talk. Can we can we sort of take a step back, Tom, because you're such an expert on globalization and trade and there there's been so much discussion about you know, China and people taking our jobs and you know, the economy, and can we sort of just dissect some of these things that have surfaced in this campaign so we can hopefully get some clarity. Do we need to rethink sort of this whole neoliberalism philosophy that free trade is a great thing for everyone. Well again, let's let's so let's unpack it. Um. People who benefit from trade tend to have no idea who they are. People who are hurt by trade no exactly who they are. So you begin with that asymmetry. No one sits around and say, had cut this basket full of goods I got at Walmart? Um, you know, for half the price I would have had to pay for them, these tennis hues, these T shirts, you know, this stereo, this iPod Um, I'm so glad we have free trade because that's why it's costing me half as much. Um. That person has no idea how much they're benefiting from globalization. But the person who lost their job, um at the textile factory, it knows exactly who they are. It definitely hurts specific groups, and our job as a society should be to cushion the impact on those groups. We have not done that. I was reading an economist that we spend a minuscule amount of the GDP on retraining people, and as we are making this massive transition, it seems the skill set you need to be successful has just changed dramatically. So one that gets to the other. I'm in the New York Times Washington office, okay, and I'm sitting at my desk with a fancy new Assisco phone. We used to have a receptionist at the Washington office of the New York Times out in the hall. We don't have her there now. She did not lose her job to a Mexican. She lost her job to a microchip. It's called voicemail. Okay. So the vast majority of jobs are not lost to foreign factories or competition. They're lost to technology. They aren't outsourced to Mexico. They're outsourced to history. They're made obsolete. If horses could have voted, we never would have had cars. We know that free trade benefits the society overall. Where we have failed is to give targeted help to our brothers and sisters who are really born the brunt of trade. Why aren't we doing more for them? And did we did? Were we blindsided by the kind of pain that would be inflicted by some of these free trade agreements. I'd love you to tell me if you think NAFTA was a good thing or a bad thing, because that's confusing. But again, because it's confusing because it's a mixed picture. Um Uh, it definitely benefited certain companies. If you're in a an agriculture company now exporting to Mexico, not to mention to Canada, but to Mexico, you love NAFTA. If you were working in an auto parts company in Detroit that's been moved to the Michauladores or mont Uh, then you don't like uh NAFTA. So it's entirely depends you know where you sit. But I'll tell you something else. How lucky are we as a as a country that our two neighbors are Mexico and Canada too stable free market democracies. Mexico one reason Mexico is a stable free market democracy was NAFTA. Naft to help consolidate Mexican democracy, which is wonderful. But honestly, people who are suffering in Detroit or in the rust Bell Tom aren't really that excited that Mexico is doing better. You know, I think Macrick cosmically, I think that's an incredibly important point. But what do you say to the guy who cannot, for the life of him, translate his skills, maybe on the assembly line or in a factory who's been replaced by robots who or whose firm has has gone overseas. Yeah. What I say to him is, please, Um, let's your legislator, My legislator, Uh, create legislation where I can transfer my text dollars to you in a way that will give you opportunities to be successful in this new world. You really feel for a lot of these workers, Tom, because you know it's not that far from St. Louis Park, where you grew up a suburb of Minneapolis and had a father who was the vice president of a ball bearings company. Um. You know, I think people may see you as a snobby New York Times columnists, but you really understand well, you know I think that you're a kid from the Midwest. Well, I grew up with these people I want, I'm What frustrates me is we haven't had the legislation to properly take care of these people. I totally understand their anger. I just don't want their anger to be translated into national policy that will hurt them and us. Tell me why you think protection ism is bad for for the average Joe or Gene Genie. Well, let's just start with I mean, if you're a Walmart shopper. If we have protection is um um. I mean everything in your shopping card is going to cost more. Um. You know, the tennis shoes, the T shirts, um, of the appliances, the iPods. I mean, if we literally put up walls of protection, uh, they all might be made here. But you know you are not going to get banged for your buck at all. Before we go to a break, do you think China is the boogeyman that it's been portrayed to be. I'm sure you saw Saturday Night Live Alec Baldwin kind of mocking Donald Trump for talking repeatedly about China. I think he pronounced it China. Yeah. Right, our jobs flee in this country, they're going to Mexico, They're going to China. So is China the boogeyman? Or is it? You know? I mean what role is China playing? And all this time, you know there's no question that China, once it got admitted to the w t O UM, you know, has engaged in protectionist practices and in some ways, you know, shakedowns of American industries. Um that uh, you know, I think need to be addressed and should be addressed in a in a very tough minded way. At the same time, let's remember China holds you know, well over a trillion dollars of our debt. So the fact that you have the low price mortgage you have today is in part because China gives us their money and we give them an iou because they're sitting on those io U s Uh. Interest rates are what they are, So your home mortgage is what it is. So you alienate China at your own risk. I always joke that, you know, they say China Hong Kong or one country, two systems. I say no, no, no, it's America and China that are one country, two systems. Uh. China can't roll over in bed without hitting us. We can't roll over in bed without hitting China. And so we've got to find a way to work at out term mutual benefit because there's only one thing worse more dangerous to us than a rising China, and that's a falling China. And if falling China will affect the cost of everything from the shoes on your feet to the money in your wallet, to the value of your mortgage. And do you think Donald Trump will lead to a falling China? You know, I I don't want to make any any predictions. Who knows what Trump believes? I have no. Whenever people say to me, what do you think you know Trump would do? I always say which Trump? The Trump who went to meet with the President of Mexico and was all sweetness and light and we have to get along, we're neighbors. Or the Trump who went a few hours later back to Arizona and denounced Mexican rapists and immigrants, etcetera. With the with Donald, it's always the question of which Trump. We'll be back with Tom Friedman right after this. How do you come up with the ideas for your columns? Tom? It's so demanding, it seems to me. I mean, do you have ever have just complete writer's block and think, oh my god, I have no idea what I want to write about? Or do you have so many columns in your head just waiting to to vomit out on the page. Yeah? No, I don't mean that in a bad way, you know what I mean. I see columns everywhere, um, and so for me, I've never ever in twenty one years, you'll come to the day of my columns. Oh my god, what am I gonna write? That's a good invitation, and of me exactly don't about I'm interested in a lot of things. Technology is science, education, geopolitics, politics. The way my mind works is I'm a dot connector. So I tend to see the connections between things that sometimes other people don't, and so that gives me a leg up. But it's never never been a problem for me. I wouldn't be doing this job for twenty one years if it were a lot of people. Really. I think credit you with taking complicated concepts and really distilling them. And I think in that New Yorker profile about you, it talked about how you sort of are a master at branding catchphrases, folks, the analysis of big fat geopolitical issues, and it's you you distill it to a point where it's like you're having a chat with a taxi driver. I went into journalism because I love being a translator from English to English. I like taking really complicated subjects and breaking them down and ways first of all that I can understand and then hopefully others can understand. And I happen to think there's some thing very idealistic about that. But I will tell you this to simplify something accurately. You have to understand it deeply. So I'm not just doing advertising branding. I mean I'm able to sometimes distill really complex things into simple images that people understand and can grasp because I've taken a lot of time to understand them, take them apart, and put them together in a way that someone can understand. Do you worry that, you know, speaking of your new book that's coming out later in November, that are you worried about the pace of our lives? It seems to me that the desire to really dig deep into some issues. And when I say dig deep, I'm saying read a column um that that people that people aren't really um, they don't seem so invested in knowledge. And in fact, there's such a strain of anti intellectualism, not only in this country but around the world. Dare I say, well, you can get such a rise now for yourself, you know, with just a hundred forty two characters. If if you come up with a really clever, snappy tweet and it goes viral quote unquote, wow, you just got a global buzz out of characters. You don't have to write an article, a column, a book. So the system now rewards that kind of behavior. You see Trump doing it, you know, um, And you know, all good things require patients. You can't speed up the gestation of a baby elephant or a bibob treat things that can last for a thousand years, they all take patients. It's the reason my book is called thank You for Being Late, Um, which is I want to celebrate pausing, taking time to reflect or rethink, to renew, to reimagine. I remember reading the science of sort of brain interaction and daydreaming is actually a good thing, despite what we were told in school by teachers, that kind of having a moment, to not be constantly stimulated by your phone or by conversation ends, or by social media or any kind of media. That's when you're creative. Juices really flow. That's why people have their best ideas when they're in the shower. Do you intentionally disconnect so you can just plaine? Thank Tom? Well? Absolutely, you know, I mean again, the reason my book is called thank You for Being Late is I would meet people in Washington, d C. For breakfast, and they'd come sometimes fifteen twenty minutes late. Every once in a while, say Tom, I really started as the weather driving the subway, the dog game, my homework, and um. One day I spontaneously said to one of them, Actually, Katie, thank you for being late. Because you were late. I've been eavesdropping on the conversation next to me. Fascinating. What did you forget your phone? Yeah, I've been people watching the law be fantastic. But you know, nobody, nobody does that, Tom, because if there's any break in the action, if you have any free time, I mean, there's no such thing as free time, because you automatically go to your phone. Well that's the thing. I don't. I go automatically go golfing. I know you do. In fact, my husband John was upset he couldn't be here to talk to you about the writer cup. I was like, whatever, whatever, John, you and Tom get together and go golfing. But do you do you? Um? I'm serious about this, Tom, because I find it. I have a problem with it. As you may know, I'm actually not on Twitter. The New York Times tweets my column and I'm not a uh and even a remotely Twitter user. I wouldn't even know how to use it myself. Really, do you ever feel like you're missing out on it? Anything? No, you know, I somehow, Kat, you have survived sixty three years without it. You know, you have seven sevent thousand followers, So I guess it's not hurting you so much? Is that? Um? The New York Times tweets my column, so those are followers of my column. So I'm thrilled by that. But I myself because I don't. First of all, I changed my mind all the time. If you asked me to tweet something, you know, immediately after an event, my reaction, I need to stop, pause and think about it because I and by the way, I may change my time my mind three times over the next two days as I think about it. So I would hate to be out there saying, you know, this thumbs up and then next day feel God, I really should have made thumbs down and I gotta write my column about it. But I have a tweet out there on Monday saying this, so you know, I just don't. And by the way, if I find out about the fire of the earthquake, the shooting, uh five minutes later from CNN and from Twitter, you know what, I'm okay with that. You sound so reasonable. Let's talk a little bit more about this campaign. Why is the country so divided. Hillary Clinton seems to be much more experienced, more competent, but people are so uneasy about her, and there's a lot of sort of moral equivalence being made between her fallibilities and Donald Trump's. Why is that? You know, they say, Katie, that people after a while start to resemble their dogs. You know, I hope I don't resemble mine, because I have a seventeen year old Karen Terrier and she is she's not looking so good. But I think over time people start to resemble their problems. And what I mean by that is, um, we have started to really look like Sunnies and Shiites, Democrats and Republicans. That not two parties divided by a different set of competing ideas that must and cannon always should be able to compromise in the middle but two different tribes who who people now would say, I wouldn't let my kid marry one of them? And the result is, um, we become like the warring tribes in the Middle East. Not two parties that go to Washington to govern and always find a way to compromise in the middle but two parties that resemble those in the Middle East and their philosophy and their abiding philosophy in the Middle East is I'm strong, why should I compromise? I'm weak? How can I compromise? But they never look for that that common ground in the middle that can serve both lives and elevate them both at the same time. So that's so depressing, Tom. You know, what do you do about that? I mean, I think you're right. It's almost like we're in one of those ovens, a convection of and right, you're just kind of sitting in in in your you're marinating in your own juices and people you're listening to people who agree with you. And my daughter Carrie, who's twenty years old, said the saddest thing to me. She said, I cannot I think about the Yates poem. Every day things fall apart, the center cannot hold and and and it's just this feeling of just kind of this huge fissure in our country, almost like it's a fault line between two different America's. Well, that's this is not a shameless plug, but that is why I wrote my book. That is I was feeling this, uh that after all my years in the Middle East, um covering the Israeli Palestinian Conflict, Saudi Arena, Indian shiait Sunni UM. I came back to America and it started to look and sound and talk and feel exactly like that part of the world. So I felt a need to go back to my own roots in Minnesota, the small suburb of Minneapolis where I grew up, which was not like that, UM, which was a truly center right, center left place where the commons worked. UM, that was a healthy community. And to go back and try to understand why it was that way, uh, and and really to just reaffirm to myself that I didn't make the whole thing up that um, it really was like that. And then to see if those lessons can apply to today, because I think that's the biggest issue. I still think we're a center right, center left country, but our politics does not reflect that at the national stage. That said, Katie, if you want to be an optimist about America, stand on your head, because the country so much better from the bottom up than from the top down. If you want to be an optimist, come with me back to Minnesota, and I'll show you communities at work, um that aren't being torn apart by this politics, where there still is a sense of the commons where people do come together, but it's it's not that way at the national level, and I think it's much worse than the reality on the ground in most of the country. Well, I think wage stagnation. You know, this is another thing where you hear different stories about the economy. I know you wrote recently when you wrote your scathing column about Donald Trump, uh that there is good news on the economic horizon. But then when you hear about wage stagnation and you read things like wages and benefits have essentially flatlined or declined for four out of five Americans between two thousand seven and two thousand fourteen, um, you you can see why people aren't feeling like the economy is getting better for everyone. They feel like the economy is getting better quite frankly for people like you and me. Well, there's no question that you know, there's nothing like a growing economic pie to make people feel more generous, more pluralistic, willing to experiment and reach out. And we had that kind of pie in the eighties and a lot of the nineties, and and we've lost that kind of pie in recent years. Although there's lots of data now suggesting that things are improving and coming back. Um, and that the politics you see right now as a lagging indicator. There's a lot of thriving communities around the country. You know. Come with me to Raleigh, to Austin, to Minorapoulis, to Seattle, you know. And I will also tell you the number of people who, you know, thanks to this world, can now start businesses on their own, get educated online in ways they never could before. Um. You know, there's the thing about globalization. You know, people think because I wrote The World Is Flat that Um, I'm somehow love with globalization. If you read that book, it's very clear. I think mobilization is everything, and it's opposite. It's incredibly democratizing, and it's incredibly authoritarian. It's incredibly particularizing, and it's incredibly homogenizing. Uh. You know, it's incredibly empowering and secredibly disempowering. It all depends what values you bring to the system. The system itself is not inherently anything. The same globalization systems that allows me to start a website or to write my own novel now and put it up on Amazon dot Com and not have to wait through way through fifty rejection letters from publishers. That same system Okay, also, you know shifts jobs and wages faster than ever. It's all about what values we bring to it. It seems to me Hillary Clinton has a big opening, right. Donald Trump is is trashing free trade, he's fat trashing China, He's trashing a lot of things. But I don't hear a lot of how are we going to fix things? How are you going to adjust to this new reality? If you will, do you think that she's communicated properly, like how we navigate this? Well, you know they will tell you. You go to their website. It's full of job creating ideas and educating ideas and how to get debt free college and um those kind of things. So I wouldn't want to make a blanket statement because I think there is a lot of beef and substance there. But I don't think she's communicated it people. It's always been my view. People don't listen through their ears. They listen through their stomach. If I connect with you on a gut level, O, Katie, you're gonna say to me, Tom, I trust you don't bother me with the details. If I don't connect with you on a gut level, you're gonna say to me, Tom, could you show me those details one more time? And um, for any number of reasons, I think Hillary has failed to connect with people on a gut level, that she understands the problem and has the solutions and a part of it she's up against. Just she's just been around a long time, you know. So it's just so you know, he sucks all the oxygen out of the room because he he says all these crazy things. I mean, he just sucks all the auctions. Yeah, and she's she's been around a long time. She's a serious woman trying to make serious arguments. They're kind of boring. That's the nature of serious arguments. Um Uh, it's much more thrilling to have someone you know, I tell you I'm going to make America great again and and not tell you how that I have a secret plan to destroy isis. But I can't tell you how. Um. What I think can't be excused is for any number of reasons, she's not a natural politician to begin with. You, she has not made that gut connection with people, and and therefore there's a lot of people who want to keep seeing the details do you think that's going to cost her in November, that inability to connect on that gut level. Well, there's one thing I absolutely haven't done from the beginning, kid, and I wouldn't do not. I would not predict this election. If you look at Brexit vote in the UK, um, if you look at the Columbia vote that just came through about whether to do their peace deal with their guerrillas. Um. I think these publics are very volatile, and I would make no predictions about this election. Do you think we might have a U S version of Brexit here? Because you know, I thought about the parallels actually coming here today, about the fact that so many young people didn't vote, and about how all the people who did were mostly in rural areas. London overwhelmingly didn't want Brexit, but a lot of other places in the UK did. And I think, gosh, the parallels are uncanny in some ways. No question, and I I just don't don't rule anything in, but I sure don't rule anything out. I'll be I'll be a very interested observer on the evening of election day before we go. I have to ask you about Anne, your wife, who you have read all your columns before you hand them in, tell me why you do that and what kind of UM input do you value from your wife? Be careful, she might be listening. Sure. My wife is First of all, she is a professional editor. She was editor uh, copy editor for Institutional Investor when we met, actually magazine um or soon after we met and um uh, and then for HBO, So she is actually a copy editor by profession. UM. Secondly, she's the most well read person I know, and um, she's also the smartest woman or man that I know. And so to have her correction, by the way, it's my exactly, she's my ever as my copy editor and editor and ideas person to bounce things off of, uh is really one of the great joys of my life. And also, UM, it's fun because then she's involved in my column and she's involved in my work, and it's not something I go off and do, and so we really share these ideas. The biggest fights we have in our marriage are over my column. I'm not taking that word out. It's my column. I'm not taking that word out exactly. So, but it's a it's been a source of great joy. It's not only my columns, my books. That's something we do together and share. Do you get ideas from man? Do you talk about sort of things and then you say, you know I should write about that? Yeah? I mean sometimes, you know, UM, I pretty much generate almost all my ideas myself, you know I don't. But UM, every once in a while she'll send me something or but but there's never been a column that you know, she's edited that she hasn't made better. In closing, you know, I started this podcast by talking about how anxiety written I am, about the state of the Union, about this campaign, about where we are as a country, about the fact that maybe we need more people willing to run for president. UM. Tell me why I should be optimistic. I'm going to save a lot of money on therapy bills. Right again, you should be optimistic, Katie, because when you get out of Washington and you get out of the kind of bubble you and I have to write about UM and talk about UM. What you find is the country is still a center right, center left country. UM. At the local level, there's still an enormous number of people working together to promote the commons. Uh. You see, if you go to towns all over the country, you'll see businesses trying to work with local educators and local government and local philanthropies to upgrade their school systems to to help young people become more productive and competitive workers. UM. I see so many good things happening here and um and I'm not this is not to flawed by book, but I found in doing this book and going to communities, this is amazing innovation going on at the local level. We actually don't have to invent anything, we just have to scale what's going on out there. Uh. It's still the greatest country in the world. If only we had the politicians, UM we need, deserve and should have at the national level to take care of this gym. You know, I have a friend from Zimbabwe, UM who I actually quote at the end of my book because she she says, you know, you Americans kick this country around like it's a football. But it's not a football. It's a faberge egg. You can drop it, you can break it, so be careful. That makes me cry a little bit, you know, because I think people are so so quick to um trash our country and trash the people who are who have the courage to actually lead. Well, you know, I just think everyone needs to um step up and appreciate. And maybe because I've lived abroad and lived in a war zone, in particular in the in a civil war and be rout for five years. You know, when you do that, you start to appreciate the public. You start to appreciate the public square, the public school, the public institutions, UM. The things that bind us together and that comments. You know, that um, without which nothing good can happen. I've seen people tear their commons apart in the Middle East, and I'm doing everything I can in my column, my books to make sure that virus doesn't come here. Tom So many people feel that neither candidate they don't like all of the above. UM. And how can we get more people engaged and not not in the process of voting, which obviously is critically important, but get more people to actually run for office. Well, it's again at the local level, I think you do see it happening. But at the national level, it's going to take someone who dares to go out there with a moderate message and show they can win. Barack Obama did in many ways, at least try to. I wouldn't take this election as the be all in the end all the sooner it's over the better. Um, we survived a civil war, will survive this, I hope. I still think at some point people are gonna understand that this was just a moment of madness and we'll get beyond it. Well. Tom Freeman is always great to listen to a voice of reason in the seemingly very unreasonable times. Thank you so much, Tom. I love talking to you always and I'm really grateful. Thank you. It was really my pleasure. A big thank you to Gianna Palmer, Gretta Cone and the right Reverend John Delore. Garrett O'Connell and Zack Dinerstein mixed this episode. And also a big thank you to Mark Phillips for our terrifically music. And thanks to all of you for listening on our next episode. Samantha B, who spent more than a decade on The Daily Show, well now, as many of you know, she has her own show called Full Frontal with Samantha B. It's the only American late night talk show currently hosted by a woman. So what questions do you have for her? Please leave us a message at nine to nine to four, four six, three seven, and it is an answering machine. Please don't be angry that I'm not Nanny the Foones. Please subscribe, rate, and review our show because it helps other listeners find us. We'll talk to you next time. If you love podcasts, and you probably do. If you're listening to this, you don't want to miss now Here This you'll be able to see more than thirty grade podcast live on six stages. 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