Fareed Zakaria on the Age of Revolutions, the Power of Ideas, and the Rewards of Intellectual Curiosity

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 27 March 2024

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Those who know Fareed Zakaria through his weekly column or CNN show may be surprised to learn he considers books the important way he can put new ideas in the world. But Fareed's original aspiration was to be an academic, and it was a chance lunch with Walter Isaacson that convinced him to apply for a job as editor of Foreign Affairs instead of accepting an assistant professorship at Harvard. His latest book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present is a testament to his enduring passion for ideas and his belief in the importance of classical liberalism in an age of increasing populism and authoritarianism.

Tyler sat down with Fareed to discuss what he learned from Khushwant Singh as a boy, what made his father lean towards socialism, why the Bengali intelligentsia is so left-wing, what's stuck with him from his time at an Anglican school, what's so special about visiting Amritsar, why he misses a more syncretic India, how his time at the Yale Political Union dissuaded him from politics, what he learned from Walter Isaacson and Sam Huntington, what put him off academia, how well some of his earlier writing as held up, why he's become focused on classical liberal values, whether he had reservations about becoming a TV journalist, how he's maintained a rich personal life, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded March 8th, 2024.

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Photo Credit: Jeremy P. Freeman, CNN

Transcript

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0:00.0	Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercadus Center at George Mason University,
0:09.3	bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems.
0:13.0	Learn more at Merkatus.org.
0:16.0	For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links,
0:20.0	visit Conversations with Tyler.com. Thanks. Tyler, today I'm chatting with Fareed Zakaria, who truly needs no introduction, but I would like to point
0:36.0	out as of March 26th, he has a new and wonderful book out, Age of Revolutions, Progress and Backlash backlash from 1600 to the present.
0:45.0	Fareed, welcome.
0:47.0	It's a huge pleasure to be here.
0:48.0	I'm a little intimidated, I must confess, because I've listened to you, I'm a fan of the
0:52.3	podcast, and you range very widely and I'm worried
0:56.0	you can ask me questions about something I wrote about 15 years ago that I don't remember.
1:01.8	You will remember it but I want to start by trying to figure out you. So what
1:06.1	did you learn from Kuzwan Singh and when was that? So this is the dedication of my book where I decided this current book I decided I was going to
1:16.4	to kind of try to remember all the people who helped me along the way in my life.
1:23.0	And it starts with Hushwan Singh,
1:26.0	who is probably, if you had asked somebody in India 10 years ago,
1:30.0	they would have told you,
1:31.0	he's the most famous journalist in India. I got to know when I was 10 years old.
1:35.9	He was my mom's boss. My mother worked at a magazine called The Illustrated Weekly of India.
1:41.4	And he was an extraordinary character. He was a novelist who had also been a diplomat and then he would become editor of this magazine. And he was a kind of intellectual who I don't know we have as many of these kinds of people as we used to.
1:57.2	He was a novelist who won a couple of awards for his books.
1:59.8	He was a great lover of the English language and of poetry in particular and it was infectious
	...

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