Aloha and Namaste everyone, and welcome to Impolitic with John Heilman, my podcast on politics and culture for odyssey and puck, coming at you every Wednesday and Friday like today, with fresh, topical, candid, excellent, hopefully stimulating, bracing, exceptional, candid, intimate conversations with people who shape and shift our culture from the worlds of entertainment and tech, business, sports and politics and mediaev. And today we have with us a guest whose career exists on an elevated and rarefied plane at the intersection of journalism and activism, from domestic policy and politics to foreign affairs, international security, public health, gender based violence, human trafficking, factory farming, artificial intelligence, and countless more, is at once mind boggling and mind blowing, and whose work has had as much or more tangible, recurring real life impact as anyone's that I can think of in the profession. The man in question New York Times columnist Nicholas Christoph at 65, Kristoff has spent his entire journalistic career at the New York Times, which he joined in 1984 at the tender age of 25, becoming the gray lady's youngest national correspondent. Over the next 40 years, Nick served as a correspondent in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo, and also traveled to 170 countries, 170 countries on assignment.

I don't think that if you ask Donald Trump, you would even know there were 170 countries in the world, and I certainly couldn't name them all. In 1990, Nick Kristoff won his first Pulitzer Prize, along with his wife, Cheryl, for international reporting with their coverage of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Since then, Nick has been a Pulitzer finalist six more times and claimed the prize again for the second time in 2006 in his current role as an op ed columnist for a series of what the Pulitzer board called graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on the genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world. You won't be surprised to learn, given that, that Christoph has won basically every journalistic prize, plaudit, accolade, or honor under the sun. But what is more impressive is the number of times and the degree to which Nick's work has, in an appropriate application of an overused phrase, changed the world. Back in 1997, a story of his about how millions of kids in India and throughout the developing world were dying due to water contamination and diarrhea was the spark that led Bill and Melinda Gates to focus their philanthropic efforts on global health, resulting in the Gates foundation spending billions of dollars and saving millions of lives by fighting malaria, AIDS and other health scourges.

Christophe's columns on Darfur were among the first reports to prove that there was, in fact, a genocide going on there. According to the former head of the international Rescue committee. Christophe's doggedness in banging the drum for years over Darfur saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Christophe published a memoir this spring called chasing a reporter's life. He describes the book as a love letter to journalism and that it is. But it's also a powerful testament to how essential our vocation can be and how much good it can do when it's done the right way and with high purpose. Chasing Hope was one reason why I wanted to have Nick on the show, but another was a column he published earlier this month about, wait for it, dogs and pigs, a column in which he argued that we draw a distinction between dogs and farm animals that is difficult to find a moral basis for, and a column that, given my longstanding interest in, and some would say membership in both species, I found fascinating and wanted to discuss more deeply with him. You got that joke right, saying that, you know, some people think I'm a dog and some people think I'm a pig.

You know, in case you can't follow.

You'Ll find the dog and pig discussion, along with the discussion of the book and a whole lot more about the state of the post Biden democratic party, about whether Barack Obama is right, that there are more people out there than some believe who just want to get along. And Nick's own seminal experiences as a kid with the amorous geese on his family's farm. So settle in for an absolutely riveting, rollicking, delightful Labor Day weekend. Listen, as we go deep with the one and only Nicholas Kristof here on in politic with John Heilman, coming at you in three, two, one.

And so as somebody who spends a lot of time in small towns in rural areas in New York and Arkansas and other places, I urge you to talk to all your neighbors. I urge you to meet people where they are. I urge you not to demean them, but not to pretend you don't disagree with them. If you do, treat them with respect, just the way you'd like them to treat you. Ask for their help and then follow our leader, Kamala, and ask them, how.

Can I help you, Nicholas Kristof, how can I help you? Is there a way I can help you? I'm following Bill Clinton's dictum there. I feel like we should ask, although I'm not sure we disagree about all that much.

Yeah, I think we're not so far apart. And look, you're helping me because I'm peddling a recent book, and we're going to talk about that. So we've got some synergy here.

I noticed, when I was at the democratic convention, I noticed that you had singled out, I'm a reader of your Twitter feed, your ex feed, whatever it is, one of the few remaining islands of sanity in that otherwise toxic hellhole that is Elon Musk's platform. But I noted that you pointed to this, to that Bill Clinton thing as being correct, as good advice. And it struck me, over the course of the convention, you have the normal, predictable amount of beating the shit out of Donald Trump, and that is obviously red meat for the base. Also, I think, appropriate in a lot of cases. But it was interesting because that Clinton line, along with something that Tim Walls said, along with a bunch of Barack Obama speech, was this other kind of top note, which was even as they would take the wood to Trump, they were very, as far away from basket of deplorables as you could be. There was a lot of discussion of how do you meet the enemy, so to speak, or how do you meet the opponent? And the opponent's supporters, how do you meet them? With an open hand, in some ways.

Right. And I'm curious what you think about that and why and why you think it is that that's both important and why you think it is that some of the most prominent speakers in this democratic convention decided to lean into that at a moment when there's nothing the party likes more than kicking the shit out of Trump. And a lot of people in the party think that everyone who follows Trump is deplorable.

So I think it's really important that we distinguish between Trump and people who have voted for Trump. I think it is harder to win people over when you're accusing them of being racist bigots. And I also think that we shouldn't use stereotypes in a way that is invidious. And frankly, the Democratic Party, too many Democrats, after the 2016 election, I think too many people fell into that trap of seeing every Trump voter as a racist and a bigot in ways that were unfair and counterproductive. And, you know, look, I'm talking to you right now from rural Oregon, and most of the folks around me are Trump voters. Most of them have views about gun policy that I completely disagree with. But they are also good people. And I can't believe the way they think about some issues and they can't believe the way I think about some of these issues. But we can talk to each other, and as a country, I think we need to. I've really welcomed that shift in the Democratic Party, I think, to do less finger wagging at people who have at times voted for Trump. I must say, though, John, that I was, after I tweeted that and put it on threads, I got a lot of pushback from people who said, oh, but they are deplorable.

We should demean them. They deserve to be rebuked. And so I think the message went through the democratic convention. I don't know that it necessarily went to all democratic voters.

Well, I didn't get all of them, although I will say one of my favorite bits of comedy is there's a moment in one of Dave Chappelle's specials where he says this thing about, he's telling a story about something that happened to someone. He knows how they were dragged on Twitter, and then he stops and goes, I don't, at least they told me that she was dragged on Twitter. I don't know. I don't go on Twitter because Twitter isn't a real place. And I will say, and we'll talk about this in the context of Biden, too, the online discourse of what if you thought that if the, the democratic party was, consisted of its membership on social media, there's no election it would ever win in America. I mean, it's a small subset of what the Democratic Party is. Yamhill is, is rural, like you're, I know, or I can't imagine there are a lot of Trump voters, even in rural Oregon. I think of Oregon as a pretty progressive place. And I've spent my share of time there, though. Nothing like yours. But that's like, that's rural Oregon, where I don't even really know exactly where Yamhill is relative to, like Spokane, relative to Portland.

So we're about an hour southwest of Portland, right, where the Willamette valley goes into the coastal range. So Yamhill is a town of about 1000 people on a good day. And traditionally, the economy was built around agriculture, timber and light manufacturing. And then those jobs all went away.

Right. It's good. I mean, I was at a show, again, I think about things that stick in my mind. I was at a Steve Earl show last summer in Los Angeles. And at the end of the show, and Steve Earl, as you know, probably know, country blues performer who has a lot in common with kind of appalachian coal miners, you know, but is obviously very progressive. And at the end of the show, he was talking about politics for a minute, and he said that he thought that the most pernicious thing going on in our political culture was not merely that we were polarized and that we had, he didn't put it quite the way I'm putting it, but this is basically what he said. Not merely that we were like, in our kind of sealed off epistemic closure enclaves where the left only talks to the left and the right only talks to the right, but that we now were actively avoiding having conversations with anyone who we knew we'd disagree with. Like, if you just met this person and they had the MAGA hat on, your immediate reaction to that was not even to fight with them, was just to be like, talked to that person.

And his view was, this is the death of democracy. If you can't engage with people who, as soon as you see them coming, you know they're not on your team, and therefore you just say, fuck it, I'm not going to talk to that person. And I thought that. I think that's right. I mean, I think it's right that that is the death of democracy if that's where we end up.

And it's even worse when it's in with families. I mean, I so often I hear from people who say, oh, they're not going to go back to Thanksgiving because dad is a Trump voter and they can't bear those discussions. Would we give up on trying to engage people? You know, we lose something. And I also, I mean, I don't know what your take is. I'm curious, but I really think that it actually still is possible to have conversations with people we deeply disagree with. And I think that it has to be done carefully. I think it involves what, what social psychologists call complexifying an issue. So you don't talk about it at 30,000ft, you talk about it in the weeds. And, you know, I talk to friends out here who are pretty much have second Amendment stamped on their forehead and I, you know, we don't talk about Second Amendment, but I will say, look, we all recognize there has to be some age limit to buy a handgun. And in Wyoming it's 21. Here in Oregon it's 18. You know, wouldn't it make sense to move toward the age of one of the most pro gun states there is, Wyoming, and move it up to 21?

Or, yeah, we recognize that a felon can't buy a firearm. What about somebody who has a violent misdemeanor conviction for a violent misdemeanor? You know, should that person maybe be barred for five years from buying a firearm? I mean, people are willing to have that conversation. If you also listen to them. But to get them to listen to you, you've got to listen to them.

Yeah. And I do think I am broadly, we'll talk about Barack Obama in a second. But I'm broadly in that category where, I mean, look, there are people who are, I would say there are people on the left who I, that are far enough on the left that I'm just like, I don't want, I can't engage. It's just they're too angry. But that's like, I have more of a category of angry people. Within the rest of the ideological spectrum. I meet people who are voting for, who voted for Donald Trump have not done it necessarily enthusiastically, but they have a very strong view, again, which I disagree with, but they have a very strong view that, like Joe Biden or Democrats are destroying the country. And although they don't love Donald Trump, they dislike him less than they dislike what they see as the democratic, the poison of the democratic policies and ideology. And I can have a conversation with that person. I mean, that's, you know, they'll acknowledge that Trump's a lunatic and we can kind of have an engagement on it. It's where you get with, into the conspiracy theorists and the Luna, the angry lunatics, those people you don't want to talk to.

But I think there's a lot of people in the, who I disagree with. I mean, that if I didn't talk to everybody I disagree with, boy, I'd be a lonely man.

But even the lunatics I find kind of fascinating. You know, after 911, after 911, there was a real interest in what extremist jihadis think. And so I used to go off and talk to extremist, extremist Muslims, and there was intellectual interest in that. But somehow I think in this country, among liberals, there isn't as much intellectual curiosity about conservative evangelicals, for example, with conspiracy theories. And, you know, I think conspiracies are kind of interesting.

Well, look, you have a journalistic temperament, as do I. So, like, I kind of put the slevic category as people who I speak to who I think are interesting. I wouldn't want to go to a dinner party with them. But, but they're, but they're, you know, they're anthropologically or journalistically interesting. I wanted to ask you about just, you know, you're thinking about all these, you mentioned the Thanksgiving thing. One other thing about Tim Walz when he was getting on his campaign to become Kamala Harris's running mate, he got a lot of attention for labeling republicans weird. The thing that I found really more powerful in some of his early appearances was he would say this thing about how we want to rescue Thanksgiving dinner for you. The worst thing in our culture now is that we know that if we go home at Thanksgiving dinner, we get caught in these toxic arguments and these bizarre conversations and that on some level you want the Democratic Party to be the one again, the Harris Walls ticket, to be the ones who are on the side of like, let's make Thanksgiving normal again. Rather than forget about making America great again, let's make Thanksgiving tolerable again for all of us.

I wonder what you think of him because he is someone, I wonder what you think of the way that the people you've been talking about in Yamhill who are second amendment nuts, and Tim Wells, a guy who during the convention talked about how he was a better marksman than most republicans. Is that a guy who culturally resonates with folks in Yamhill?

Yes, I think he is. I think it's, the football coach is a big part of that. I think the hunting, just the sense of somebody who isn't extremely educated, who doesn't, democrats have this amazing ability sometimes to come across as condescending and patronizing. And I think that walls is very good at avoiding that. And so I think he's totally somebody who resonates.

So one of the things that's true, I was looking at the, I was looking at the Christoph archive, and I had been thinking that you had done a series of columns over time that touched on the Biden conundrum. And I indeed was right about that. You wrote about, in July, you had a column that was, the headline was, was President Biden voters want change. You had another, that was, you know, the way democrats aren't standing up to Biden is awfully familiar. And then you had the, here's the hope if Biden withdraws. And I, you know, you're, you're one of many, of many, I'll call you a pundit for this purpose, columnists, opinionators, gas bags, who had a view about this. And I wonder, I mean, on some level, there's this kind of, it worked out pretty well, you know, in the sense that he stepped away and the whole party was unified and energized, and now they're back in the fight. I wonder, watching him speak and seeing the way that first night of the convention went and how it all has unfolded from this point of reflection, how you think about that period where, and what came before it that got the party into a situation where there could be a thing as crazy as a bad debate performance in late June that provoked what Biden's debate debacle did provoke and how we ended up in a weird situation where there's this woman at the top of the ticket who didn't have to go through a primary and who is, has been swept up, you know, like, like Dorothy kind of in the wizard of Oz.

Yeah, I, I think we are in so much better place right now than we were six weeks ago. And I'm, and just so glad that people spoke up, including members of Congress, for whom it was, I think, pretty awkward to do that. It's very easy for us in the cheap seats to squawk and demand a new nominee. I think it was a lot harder for members of Congress, and, boy, we're just in so much a better place. I was in favor of somebody like Gretchen Whitmer leading the ticket. I just thought that she'd be more likely to win in November. But I must say that Kamala Harris has done an amazing job uniting the party, building excitement. So maybe I misjudged her in that respect. You asked about how this came to be, and I do, frankly, I do, I do feel a little bit betrayed and misled in that. When I was hearing Republicans talk in the spring about Biden being doddering and being victim of his age that I tended to dismiss it because so many of the things they were saying were completely preposterous. And in retrospect, there was clearly some truth to that.

And there were, you know, there were times when he was completely lucid and there were times when he was something of a mess. And the mess one showed up in that first debate. But what if he had shown up in the second debate? And then I think Trump would have been very much destined to be elected. So I think these are fair questions we've got to ask people who were around Biden about how could they let this happen?

Well, there's that question and then there's this other question, which is, you know, I'm like a broken record about this. But the first poll that asked whether Biden was too old to be president that I know of was in October of 2021. Now, that is not a question that normally turns up on polls nine months into a new president's term, but because of his age, it was, and in October of 2021, a clear majority of the country, and I think a plurality for sure, and possibly even a bare majority of Democrats in October of 2021, said Joe Biden's too old for a second term. That poll finding was consistent from that day until the debate in June of 2024. So almost three years of consistent polling that showed that a strong majority of the country and a bare majority of Democrats all thought too old to be president. And if you looked at his numbers over the course of that whole time, it didn't take a genius to see that this was the only thing that was holding him back. Why was he losing? Not dramatically, but why was he running underperforming his 2020 performance?

And why was he running behind Trump? This was the cause. And the country, through polling, was making it clear what its view about this was. And I kind of asked the question. Not so much. There's one question which relates to the White House and how much of his condition, whatever you call that was concealed or was nothing, dealt with forthrightly. There's another question, which is how does a political party, looking at those numbers, not do what the Democratic Party eventually did, which was act like a political party and say our candidate is fatally flawed? The numbers are telling us this for years. They're telling us this, and we have to make a change. We have to force a primary. We have to do something. I don't really, that is the thing that I still am most baffled by in some ways that there wasn't, after the midterms, say, in 2022, there wasn't, that the party didn't kind of, in the various ways that it eventually did communicate with him, say, hey, you know what? You've done an incredible thing here. You said you were going to be transitional. Time to pass the torch.

Doom. You know, we have often, we on the left have often noted that the Republican Party was way too deferential to Trump. And in retrospect, I do think that the Democratic Party as a whole and members of Congress, etcetera, have been too deferential to the White House. And that relates to the point you're making. It probably relates to policy as well. I mean, I think that Biden is messed up on Gaza. If you look at Fafsa, that's a debacle. And there are fewer kids who are getting a chance to go to college this fall because the White House bungled FAFSA. And that has gotten very little attention or oversight or accountability. And it's a little hard when you're looking at a November election and you're looking at the stakes and it's a little hard to say, well, but the White House screwed up FAFSA. But we have to figure out how to create accountability without empowering Trump.

Did you take an incredible amount of shit from Democrats online or elsewhere. When you, in that period between the debate and Biden's decision to bow out, when you repeatedly basically said he should, the best thing would be for him to bow out. Did you take a lot of shit for Democrats who, as you, one of your columns seemed to focus on that very question? Did you take, were people mad at you in a way that you didn't expect?

People were mad at me in a way I kind of did expect. But there were also obviously a lot of people who were quietly texting me, thank God you're saying this, because they can't. I think members of Congress felt that. And look, we're, I mean, my Gaza columns, I think, have generated even more animosity and resentment than the ones about Biden. So we're in the business of dishing it out. We got to be willing to take it, too.

Yeah, Nick, I mentioned earlier that we were going to talk about Barack Obama, so we're going to do that now. And in the service of that, I'm going to play another piece of sound from the convention. And this goes back to that Bill Clinton conversation we were having a little earlier. But it also relates to a larger question about our politics that I'd love to get your view on. So let's take a listen to Barack Obama in Chicago.

I know these ideas can feel pretty naive right now. We live in a time of such confusion and rancor with a culture that puts a premium on things that don't last. Money, fame, status, likes. We chase the approval of strangers on our phones. We build all manner of walls and fences around ourselves. And then we wonder why we feel so alone. We don't trust each other as much because we don't take the time to know each other. And in that space between us, politicians and algorithms teach us to caricature each other, control each other, and fear each other. But here's the good news, Chicago. All across America, in big cities and small towns, away from all the noise, the ties that bind us together are still there. We still coach little league and look out for our elderly neighbors. We still feed the hungry in churches and mosques and synagogues and temples. We share the same pride when our olympic athletes compete for the gold. Because the vast majority of us do not want to live in a country that's bitter and divided. We want something better. We want to be better. And the joy and the excitement that we're seeing around this campaign tells us we're not alone.

I don't think Barack Obama's perfect by any means. And when he was president, I got in fights with him on some occasions. But, man, that sentiment, when I listen to him do that, I think, man, I miss him. I miss a president that can talk like that. And I think what he said there is true. And I know there's a good counterargument that he's wrong, that he is being naive. Curious what your thought is.

I think he's dead right in the first thought about the fraying ties and the loneliness, I think we do suffer an epidemic of loneliness in America and frankly, in all industrialized countries. And that is a real problem that kills a lot of people as a source of social distrust and unhappiness. I'm now in his second thought. He was saying that actually we still do have these ties that bind us together, and I see much less evidence for that. I mean, of course, we do still have little league and coaches and a lot of shared visions, but if you look around the country, ever since bowling alone, people have made the point that we are engaged less, that we have fewer friends. When you ask people how many friends they have, men in particular, middle aged men and young men, have very, very few unemployed men. I forget this. Maybe they spend like, 18 minutes a day actually helping out around that house and the rest of the time sitting on the couch feeling alienated and upset and buying into conspiracy theories. So I think President Obama was absolutely right in that diagnosis. I think his counterpoint about where we are was more aspirational.

And I do think we can have better policies to try to address that social isolation and loneliness.

Well, the man is famously a prisoner of hope. So we're going to take a quick break, and we'll come back on the other side of this little ad break with morphin Dick Kristoff. We're gonna talk about pigs and dogs after this.

Want some bacon?

No, man, I don't eat pork.

Are you jewish?

No, I ain't jewish. I just don't dig on swine, that's all.

Why not?

Pigs are filthy animals. I don't eat filthy animals.

Yeah, my bacon tastes good. Pork chops taste good.

Hey, sewer wrap may taste like pumpkin pie, but I never know. Cause I wouldn't eat the filthy motherfuckers. Pigs sleep and root and shit. That's a filthy animal. I ain't eating nothing. Ain't got sense enough to disregard its own feces.

How about a dog? Dog eats its own feces.

I don't eat dog either.

Yeah, but do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal.

I wouldn't go so far as to call a dog, but they're definitely dirty. But dogs got personality. Personality goes a long way.

So by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true?

Well, we have to be talking about one charming motherfucking pig. I mean, he had to be ten times more charming than that arm along green ankles. You know what I'm saying?

There are many things that are brilliant about pulp fiction, but the philosophical inquiry led there by John Travolta questioning Samuel L. Jackson on the nature of animal personality, also a green acre shout out. I mean, who doesn't? I mean, you know, the people younger than us. I have no idea what that is. I had to play my girlfriend. I had to play my girlfriend. The beginning of greenhouse. She's like, what the fuck is this Arnold? The pig thing? I'm like, oh, there was a talking pig on this show with one of the Gabor sisters. They don't know who the Gabor sisters are either. It's terrible. I play it because there actually is a lot in that that relates to the topic at hand. And I said to you before we started that having you getting a chance to talk to you about stuff is wonderful on a million levels. But the thing that really incited me here, or inspired me, was this column he wrote not that long ago. The headline of it was, dogs are the best, but they highlight our hypocrisy. And right below that headline, there's a picture of a pig in a bed.

And you in this piece go on. Basically to make. You've been on the. You've been writing about the cruelty towards pigs in our industrial farming system for quite some time. And you basically. I won't speak for you, but more than just to summarize this by basically saying we treat dogs basically like humans, and that's great, but pigs and dogs are basically the same in terms of their personality, their mental capacity. And we let pigs be tortured in ways we would never allow dogs to be tortured. And that tells us something that we should learn from. That's my brief summary of it. But I want you to kind of explain in a little more detail what the column says and then I want to dig into it with you.

Yeah. The bottom line is that if somebody is saying eating a dog, then that person, somebody will call 911, that person will be arrested and prosecuted. On the other hand, a CEO who tortures millions of hogs, will get his great paychecks, will be promoted, will be hailed by the chamber of Commerce for his brilliant business model. What we do on an individual level to dogs is a crime, and what we do at a societal level as a business model for hogs is just accepted. And I don't see a moral distinction. I say that as a farm kid who grew up on a farm raising, you know, raising poultry, raising pigs. And the pigs that we had, they were, they weren't warm and cuddly like dogs. They weren't friendly in the same way, but absolutely, they had strong personalities. They were much more like people, frankly, than dogs are. You know, they're, they're strong personalities. And some were good mothers and others were bad mothers, and they were, they were complainers, and, you know, they were just the full range of personalities. And I think that just as we look back and wonder how on earth Thomas Jefferson Church Washington could have kept slaves and how could they have been so morally obtuse, I think that we will, some people, our descendants, will look back and think, how in 2024, could humans have accepted a system of institutionalized cruelty and torture and brutality to, you know, to pigs and to poultry and other animals, too?

So there are a couple different things here that I want to tease out. One of them relates to. The good starting point is factory farming, industrial agriculture, industrial farming, and the process of how protein gets, our protein products get to us. And you write here, this is a topic you have come back to again and again with relation to pigs. In this column, the one about dogs, you say this thing where you say, female pigs often spend nearly all of their adult lives confined to coffin sized pens so narrow that they cannot turn around. They don't go outside, touch soil, see the sky or exercise. And then you quote the Kirkpatrick foundation saying, smart, social and playful sows will demonstrate resistance when first confined screaming and bar chewing. Distress eventually gives way to despondency. A three year old pregnant sow rarely responds to a nudge or dousing of water. And you go on and talk about the way that the difference between how, for example, dogs are fixed versus how pigs are fixed and the cruelty, anesthesia for the dogs. Nothing like that for. For how hogs are fixed. So the starting point here is, is the basis for the complaint that the way that pigs are killed is the problem.

That is, they are killed cruelly and treated cruelly while they're alive. Or is it these things have personalities. They're like dogs and we shouldn't kill them at all, because that's the view of most dog owners, is that, like dogs are it's not just we shouldn't kill him a certain way, it's that dog slaughter for food. Even on a great farm to table farm, no one would accept the notion of one of my great Danes being, even if it was treated very well in the process of them being killed for meat.

So I object essentially, to the idea of factory farming of animals. And I, in the US in particular, they are more likely to be slaughtered in really brutal ways. The slaughter is a little better in Europe, but I don't eat factory farmed hogs. I do eat game. If somebody shoots an elk or a deer, then I will eat that. I don't hunt myself, but I. You know, but I. I do think hunting is completely defensive, defensive, defensible. Morally, I do. But the hypocrisy of it really does bother me, as well as the cruelty. And Americans have always jumped on Koreans and Chinese, for example, for raising dogs and having them in cages and then eating them. And I think we have no right to complain about the way folks in Asia have eaten dog meat when we engage in far, far greater slaughter and brutality of animals with which there is no ethical distinction.

Right? And so I guess, like one of my questions here, this is a purely practical thing, and I'll tell you why. I'm part of why I'm interested in it, in addition to this thinking, is very interesting. It is a fascinating ethical and moral. The comparison is very illuminating between pigs and dogs. It's also the case that I've been a carnivore for most of my life. I'm not like when I was a younger man, ate a lot more meat. As an older man, I eat a lot less meat, but I don't hesitate to eat meat. And I haven't, although I have started to recently, for reasons we'll get to. But, for example, in New York, where I live, I was trying to explain to someone just now that I once wrote a piece for outside magazine after someone had given me a. One of the big giant Weber ranch kettles. And there was a farmer's market in front of my house in Brooklyn where a very. One of these super humane hog farms would come. And these pigs were treated the way you would if you. If you found it tolerable to kill any animal, this is the way you would want them to be treated.

They were, the farmers were respectful of them. They had. They were not in pens. They were free range pigs. They were not quite at Biraco ham. They weren't being fed acorns and sweet cream all day long. But they were well taken care of. They had long, full lives. And then eventually they were slaughtered. And I cooked a whole 180 pound hog on my weber, and I wrote about it. And I thought that answer to this, which was factory farming, bad. But there are ways to get to source, whether it's beef or pork or anything else. There are ways in poultry that are morally tenable. You lived on a farm, you know, where animals were farmed. Is there a way that, for you, morally, is there a way where if the animals are treated properly on the way to meet their maker, so to speak, where it's acceptable, and you would then eat the bacon or. No?

I struggle with that question. But I think that, on balance, I would. I think partly about the fact that we used to raise sheep. I had sheep from I four h and ffa project, and if farmers weren't raising Cordale sheep, then there would be no Cordale sheep, and these animals would not exist. And it's not obvious to me that the world would be worse with sheep being raised or treated well and then executed, you know, in a humane way. I think it's actually a little more complicated for some other animals, like geese. We. We raise geese, and geese mate for life. You know, I'm still haunted by my job. When my dad was beheading the geese was. I was, you know, 1011 years old, I would run into the barn and grab a goose and take it off to the chocolate and block, and then the geese would all be running in terror away, and I'd have the one, and then its mate would come tremulously toward me and try to reassure the one I had in my hands. And it was a display of courage and fidelity that I have, you know, rarely seen, equaled and never surpassed.

And so I would never want to, you know, I'd be more comfortable doing that to a lamb or a steer and a little less comfortable doing that to a goose that might lose its mate.

You know, it's. You just, I swear, you were about. I thought you were going to go. You were about to tell a story that made you into, like, clarice Starling and silence of the lambs and that you were like, suddenly you woke up one night and tried to steal, like, you know, free one of the geese. And that, you know, it would have been silence of the geese, could have been the book instead of silence of the lambs. I find. Look, I totally get this. And I think one of the things that, I mean, I presume, like, you'll eat a clam, right?

Yes. Where exactly we draw that line, I think, is really hard. And I've interviewed other folks, and it's ambiguous, actually. Octopus, I do not eat. I read a book about octopuses, and me neither.

They're smarter than we are. I mean, like, you know, the stories from the, from the Monterey aquarium are enough. I'm like, I'm never gonna eat an octopus because that's bad karma. But, like, chicken, they're. They're idiots. I mean, they're. At least they're not repeatedly smart if they're not factory farmed. I'm into not factory farming on anything that I put in my body, but. But chicken are far enough down the intelligence scale that I have many less qualms about them. And part of the issue with pigs is that, you know, they are not as smart as we are, although they're probably as smart as some people, but they're not. Yeah, but they're high enough. They're. They're at dog level. And to your point, you know, yeah, chickens.

I mean, I do think if chickens were well raised and happily raised, you know, as I think we used to raise our chickens, then I think there is an argument for eating them. I think that's really rare. I mean, I think it's hard to have that in a factory farming environment, but.

So I want to play. So I want to play with something for you, because this, in addition to your piece, this was a thing that I saw somehow on, on one of the social platforms, and I would normally not have come across this because of one of the participants in Ithoodae, but it's an interview between Jon Stewart and Joe Rogan on the subject of food and nutrition. And Rogan is a hunter, but is one of these people who thinks that if you shoot an animal, you should eat the whole thing. His view is like, this is important. In fact, that's the way you should. He's like, I won't buy meat in the supermarket, but I will go kill an elk, and then we will cut it up and we'll eat it. My family, for some period of time. Time, which is an interesting way of thinking about it. Stewart is in an opposite camp. When I heard this, it was one of the things that pushed me further into the camp of, maybe I'm not eating pigs anymore. Let's play this John Stewart Joe Rogan thing.

I was a big meat eater. I was a big deli guy. Pastrami and corned beef and all that. My wife got into rescue and these types of things, and we ended up at a farm with pigs and goats and sheep and things like that. It became untenable for me to make that decision. You know, that sort of. That decision of, I think you'll be better off if I kill you. For me, I think it was, there was a certain part of consciousness that I never ascribed to animals to some extent. I mean, it's funny because I always thought of myself as, oh, you know, I love animals. I always had dogs and cats. You know, you find a bird with a broken wing, you stick him in a box, and two weeks later he flies away and you're a hero. But I never really ascribed, like, individuality to them. And I think that was the change for me, was interacting in an individual way.

On your farm?

On the farm, yeah. You know, I always told my mother, once we named them, you watch them like they're playing. They'll play, or they. And it. It just changed my relationship to what I wanted it to be with animals. And it just made it untenable in that moment for me.

John goes on in this clip to talk about in a little more detail, like, the differences between the personalities of the goats on their farm and the differences between the personalities of the pigs on their farm, as you were before, Nick and I, you know, I'm not highly influenced by just some celebrity, but, like, there was something about that. Like, I find that almost everyone that I run across who has actually spent time on a farm ends up in some position close to this where they. Not in some sentimental way, and not for all the animals on the farm, but for pigs, in some cases, in goats and donkeys. And, you know, not that everybody eats donkeys, but I. But they. Spending time in proximity to a whole bunch of animals that if you didn't think about it, you didn't realize that they had personalities. They suddenly are like, oh, they all have personalities. And that makes it a lot harder for people, if they're morally conscious, to not at least forswear certain forms of meat protein.

Although people are living on farms around the country and raising cattle and pigs and geese, and then they, you know, they are eating them. And, you know, look, when I was raising my corridale sheep as a four h and ffa kid, then, you know, we would drive those lambs that I had raised from a bottle off to the slaughterhouse. And I didn't, you know, I. Okay, I had qualms, but I didn't fundamentally question this. And it, you know, it took some maturity and kind of hearing other people raise questions and, you know, thinking about those geese so, but, you know, I guess I also do think that that fundamental distinction is the one of seeing these animals as individuals and the way most farms are structured today. People raise just monocultures of one kind of animal in a very impersonal way. And so you don't see the humanity, so to speak, in a pig or a calf or whatever it may be.

Well, I think that I'm increasingly finding myself in the camp of Samuel L. Jackson on pulp Fiction. I'm ready to, for other reasons, I may be ready to give up swine I hog. And I appreciate your columns actually have been helpful, have been helpful in how to think about this. And so I appreciate them in that context. I also still can't get, I still imagining Anthony Hopkins saying, there you are, Nick, still still haunted by the honking of the geese. We're gonna take one more break. We're gonna come back and talk about Nick's memoir. The book is called Chasing Hope. It's a fabulous book. I mean, for one thing, Nick has had a fabulous life as a journalist, the kind that probably any young person coming up in a journalism will never have again. So we'll talk about how lucky he's been after this.

The improvement in global health is one of those great miracles of the last century. Lifetimes have more than doubled. The number of people who die of these infectious diseases have been dramatically reduced. And so this has become a big priority for us. Smallpox was the first disease that was eliminated. And now with polio, we're very close. Over 99% of the infection rate has come down. And so we hope in the last few years where this will be the second disease completely eradicated.

So that's Bill Gates, co founder of Microsoft and head of the, what was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I guess it's now just the Gates foundation talking about global health, a subject that matters a lot to him. And that's a clip from 2009. But Nick, your relationship with Gates dates back further than that, more than a decade before that clip, in fact, when in 1997 you wrote a piece in the Times about kids dying in India from contaminated water and diarrhea. And that piece caught gates eye with considerable consequences. So I want you to talk about that, but also talk a little bit about how unusual, I mean, you have had an unusual career and unusual in the sense of the impact that it's had. You've written about a variety of things. You wrote about foreign policy. You write about pigs and dogs. You write about domestic politics. You've written from some of the most brutal war zones in the world. You've done local things written about very local, parochial concerns. I'm so curious to hear a lot about all of this, but let's start with the relationship with gates.

So I was the Tokyo Buruchi for the New York Times in the late 1990s and a little bored by Japan. It was functioning perfectly normally. It felt like it didn't really need me to be jumping up and down. And so I was periodically trying to escape Japan for wilder places and ended up doing a series about sex trafficking that enormously influenced me, and then a series about global health that I reported from India and Africa. And one of the pieces was noting that at that time, 3 million kids a year were dying for something as simple as diarrhea. And I wrote my series, and, you know, my mom read it, my wife read it, and not many others. It did not. It did not have a big impact. But there was this young couple in Seattle, Bill and Melinda Gates, who were thinking about philanthropy, who had struggled to find an effective way to make a difference. I think at that point, they had been experimenting with donating computers to South Africa, but it didn't feel like it was very effective. And then they read this and thought, hey, maybe we can do something on global health.

And Bill sent a note to his dad suggesting they look into it, and they did. And they've been incredible in what they've done, and they've been a reminder that that's kind of the low hanging fruit. And we can save. We have saved a lot of lives. We can continue to save a lot of lives if we care enough.

So I think there's a. You know, you have been at the New York Times essentially forever, basically your entire adult life as a journalist, right? You write the book that you were, I think, the youngest national correspondent. You were in your. About 25, 24, 25 when you. When you had that gig. And the Times has a unique place in the world. If you happen to have that platform, it is read by people like Bill Gates. And if you have that platform, there's a way in which Times journalism can move the needle in the world in a way that a lot of other journalism can't. How important was it, the ability to have the stuff that you reported on and columnized about? But in an earlier phase, when you were just thinking, I'm going to be gory a reporter, how important was the notion of, I want to change the world to you when you decided to get into the business?

So my first job at the New York Times was writing about international economics and it was oil prices and exchange rates, and it did not really have this moral dimension, but it felt a little bit, felt like I was kind of groping for a little more of a sense of purpose. And I admire journalists who had been able to find that. And then I was the Beijing bureau chief of the New York Times in 1989, covering the Tiananmen democracy movement. And on the night of June 3 to fourth, 1989, I was on Tiananmen Square when the tanks rolled up and the troops opened fire in the crowd that I was in. And I think if you want to find a particular moment in my career where I decided I didn't just want to write about exchange rates, and I did want to find a real moral purpose. I think watching a modern army use weapons of war against unarmed protesters was that moment.

You won a Pulitzer Prize, I think, for that coverage, and one of two that you've gained. Do you realize how lucky you are that you get to ply your trade at the New York Times? It seems like an obvious question, but there are a lot of great journalists out there, as you know, doing really great work. And some of it, if it were published in different places, would maybe have a different impact. But you are really, even now, in a world where the Times, all media has been, to some extent, is not as powerful as it was back in the days of the monoculture you still have. It's an enormous. It's an enormous gift that you have given. Your aspirations. The fit between the times ability to move the needle and your desire to move the needle is an unusually good, unusually snug fit.

Absolutely. I mean, there really isn't much of a business model for what I do. For a while in Iraq, it cost $10,000 for every airport pickup from the Baghdad airport into the Times Bureau, $10,000.01 way because of the danger of getting blown up. And the New York Times are willing to pay that other news organizations weren't. My Yemen again, nobody reads my columns from Yemen. I'm planning a trip to Sudan now. Nope, that's not going to be well read by the Times is willing to send me there. And so I'm incredibly grateful. I'm incredibly lucky about that. But I must say that I think of my good luck in broader terms. That because I am from this small town in Oregon where a third of my classmates on my old school bus are now dead from drugs, alcohol and suicide, many others have been homeless, have wrestled with addiction, and I have watched as my good luck has accumulated. And because I wondez one prize then I would win another, and, you know, this would get me into Harvard, and then that would get me at the New York Times, and then I'd be a national chorus.

And my luck just kept accumulating because I had previously been lucky. And meanwhile, my old friends, because they had previously been unlucky, their bad luck multiplied in the same way. And because they lost a job, they self medicated with meth, and they got a criminal rest. They became less employable, they became less marriageable, and now they're dead. And so I think of my incredible good fortune, not just in the context of the New York Times, which is very true, but in this context of a community that I was a part of, and I was incredibly blessed. And my friends, they just ran into a shitstorm.

You know, in any interview with anybody who's written a book, one of the most reliable questions that one asks. And in some ways, it's a cheap, easy question to ask. And in some ways, it actually also often gets some interesting answers if you're talking to an interesting author, which is like, why did you write the book? And in your case, I think it seems, given the career you've had, the places you've been, the breadth of what you've written about, and all the good fortune that you just to a large extent, earned good fortune, by the way. I mean, this is not a matter of luck here. Little luck helps all of us. But this is a largely merit based system here. It seems obvious why you wrote the book. How could you not write the book? There is no world in which Nick Kristoff was not going to write a memoir like this. This. Was there a timing issue? What was the thing that made you think, now is the time?

So I owe the Oregon, in acknowledgments, I should thank the Oregon secretary of state because I was running for governor of Oregon, and then she bounced me off the ballot saying that I wasn't a resident. And then all of a sudden, I had time on my hands. I didn't have an editor. I needed to ask for a book leave from. And so I called up my publisher and my editor and said, hey, I want to do a book. What should I do it on? And I was actually thinking about an animal husbandry book and said, but the editor really wanted me to do the memoir. So instead of writing about pigs and dogs, I wrote about my own trajectory as a way, I hope, of getting people to get engaged in these issues that I really care about, my life.

In journalism or my life in animal husbandry, that'll be the sequel to. That'll be the sequel to Chasing Hope. This is a dumb question, but I'm telegraphing it as such because it's like when people ask me what my favorite rock album is and I'm always like, please leave me alone. I can't possibly answer that question. What's the best bottle of french red wine you've ever drunk? Is there any of the work, all of this work that you've done, is there not one piece but one focus where the totality of the work in that area? Because, again, you have had this great breadth of interests and coverage areas. Is there one area where you look back and think, this is what I'm most proud of?

I think it would be, I was going to say sex trafficking, but no, actually, I think it's Darfur, the Darfur genocide. And that, you know, in early 2004, I made one trip out to Darfur. I'd heard about atrocities there. We didn't really know if it was true. And I saw people being massacred. And it's an arid area where you have to go to wells to get water. And I would be with Darfur families that were hiding out. And if men went to the wells, then this jandaweed, this genocidal militia would kill the men. If women went to the wells, they would rape the women, but they would sometimes leave young kids alone. So these families were sending their, you know, 8910 year old kids miles across the desert with donkeys to get water. And seeing their anxiety and terror as they sent their kids off and waiting for the kids to see if they would come back, I just, you know, I got back home and I hugged my kids and I thought, would I do that? And if I didn't, you know, they would die of thirst. And so that sent me a back again and again and again.

And hundreds of thousands of people died unnecessarily in Darfur. But I think there are hundreds of thousands of people who are alive today because journalists, non profit organizations, advocacy groups together said, this is a genocide and we can stop it. And imperfectly, it was paused, at least.

You know, it's, you're being a little bit just ever so. Obviously, you were not entirely alone in covering Darfur. But I believe it's true that the International Rescue Committee has essentially said that your work in bringing this attention to the world was responsible for saving many, many, many thousands or tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives. Something that, again, most people in our business will never even have a remote claim to. Although on Twitter, people say all kinds of weird shit. Is there a story in your career that you've really fucked up that you look back on with regret?

Yeah. I mean, there are tons of them on policy level, but maybe in particular the personal ones where I felt I've kind of screwed people over. I wrote in the early two thousands after the anthrax attacks about a, I thought that it was probably a domestic, an American who was responsible. And I called on the FBI to investigate a person. I called Doctor X, who he later outed himself as Steve Hatfield. And, and it, you know, I think I added, yeah, I created enormous problems for him. I'm deaf. I did investigate him. I did make him a person of interest. And, you know, I was barking under the wrong tree, and I think I needlessly caused immense pain.

Those are hard, hard things to grapple with sometimes in our business when that happens. And I don't know anybody who's been in the business for a while who, they don't have things like that that they look back on and kind of, you could understand why you made the decisions you made in real time, but, you know, you're kind of, the regret still lingers. You mentioned the gubernatorial run or the attempt to run for governor before the secretary of state decided that you didn't meet the, the residency requirement in Oregon. That was, what, 20:22 a.m. i, right?

Yeah. Correct.

2022. If I'm right, and I think I am, I'm not always great on this, but I think it's 2024. And you're presumably now, as you sit there in Yamhill, you presumably have now would meet the state's residency requirement. So do we have another Christophe run for, run for office to look forward to? And if not, why not?

Well, I think my wife would kill me if I tried again. I mean, it actually, it really did underscore to me the, you know, the sacrifices that people make running for office. Cheryl is a quite private person, and the prospect of her having to release her taxes and talk about all kinds of things was, I think, pretty painful to her. And also, you know, it's kind of wonderful that in journalism, we are paid to provoke and say what we think. And I did feel the pressure when I was running for office to kind of say Pablum. And in particular, you know, I'm running in a democratic primary, and Democrats have always run the state. We have real problems here. And it's, you know, if you're going to have a candid conversation, you need to acknowledge that we Democrats have screwed up in places like Portland and San Francisco. This is our mess, and we've got to clean it up. But that's a really hard conversation to have when you're running for the democratic nomination for governor. And so I, you know, I felt constrained, and it's nice to be liberated and be paid to say what I think.

Well, you probably owe a little thank you note to the secretary of state, therefore, give it all those reasons. The book's called chasing hope. You say in the book that you're, I believe, a perpetual optimist. We talked earlier in the podcast about the Obama diagnosis, and then which you were like, Obama's right about his diagnosis, correct his prescription or his assessment of what's possible, maybe a little bit too aspirational or more rooted in hope. To use the word hope again, then reality. You'd say you're chasing hope, kind of. You didn't chase hope, you're chasing it. Is that kind of how you think of what you're, how you think of your cause now? You're kind of in a constant pursuit of that, and even for a brief period of time. Have you ever caught it?

Oh, I've periodically I've caught it, but mostly it's still just around the corner. But I guess I would make the point that I do think that there has been more progress than we often acknowledge. That is particularly true internationally. If you ask people in polls, they always say, 90% of people say that global poverty is as bad as it's ever been or getting worse. In fact, we privilege to live in a period of unbelievable human progress against illiteracy, against disease, against mortality. But I also think, and especially if you talk to young people today, they are often so despairing they're never going to be able to buy a house. And there are wars in Ukraine and Gaza and Myanmar, and democracy is under attack, and the planet is going to be cooked. And all those are very true, but despair is paralyzing, you know, and all.

Those are very true. And the planets can be cooked and this and that, and you'll be able to build a house. I mean, all of that's true. You won't be able to buy a house, and the planet is going to be cooked, however.

But if the planet is cooked, you don't really need to buy the house. That's the silver lining. Separation. But despair is paralyzing. And I do think that hope in the sense not of this blind, myopic kind of panglossian confidence that somehow things will work, but hope in the sense that we have possibilities, and if we put our shoulder to the wheel, we can make a new path forward. I do think that that is real and empowering. You look at climate change, you know, ten years ago, it was hard to see a path forward. Now, actually, if you squint just right, you can kind of imagine that we can get through the next few decades and build a new future. I think the same is true on the democracy front, etcetera, etcetera. So the challenges are very real. But I think that that hope can help, can be self fulfilling, and while acknowledging all the challenges, can help find us navigate a path through it.

Well, I'm knocking wood on the climate change thing, and I agree with you. There's some signs of hope and progress there. And certainly I played that Bill Gates clip before. Just the basic story of life expectancy. Global life expectancy is just a very simple, straightforward way. While american incomes have stagnated and americana health results have stagnated, or in some cases, gotten worse. If you look outside America, the last 50 years have been an astonishing, an astonishing transformation in the standards of living for most people on planet Earth. Now, having said that, the planet's going to be cooked, and we're going to have to. None of us can afford houses. However, I do think we've learned today that there are two things. When Nick when you write your follow up, your sequel to the dog chasing hope, it's going to be a tough call between there must be a pony in there somewhere by Nick Kristoff and the silence of the geese, one or the other. Both of those would be compelling sequels to chasing ho.

One can be the subtitle of the other.

The silence of the geese. There must be a pony in there somewhere by Nick Christoph thanks for taking the time today, man. It was great to talk to you.

I enjoyed the conversation. Take care.

In politic with John Heilman is a puck podcast in partnership with Odyssey. Thanks again to Nick Kristoff for coming on the show. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow in politic with John Heilman and share us, rate us, review us nicely, please, on the free odyssey app or wherever you happen to bask in the splendor of the podcast universe. I'm John Heilman, your cruise director and.

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