{"id":17457,"date":"2025-12-14T08:39:34","date_gmt":"2025-12-14T16:39:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=17457"},"modified":"2025-12-17T03:28:37","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T11:28:37","slug":"issue-of-the-week-human-rights-personal-growth-economic-opportunity-environment-war-hunger-disease-population-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=17457","title":{"rendered":"Issue of the Week: Human Rights, Personal Growth, Economic Opportunity, Environment, War, Hunger, Disease, Population"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Back to News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thomas L. Friedman Says We\u2019re in a New Epoch. David Brooks Has Questions,<\/em> New York Times, 12.12.25<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For many years, David Brooks and Thomas L. Friedman have been writing about the same topics much of the time, in commentaries for The New York Times, often from different perspectives, yet arriving at similar conclusions. We don’t always agree with either of them, but generally we do with both. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We would always say that these two acclaimed columnists and authors are both must reads. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Never more so than in the year we are about to conclude, 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fittingly, on Friday, the most recent episode of The Opinions<\/em> featured them both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas L. Friedman Says We\u2019re in a New Epoch. David Brooks Has Questions.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two columnists debate this strange moment.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

They discuss issues at the core of our concerns and commentaries for years, often covered in our Issue of the Week posts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is the transcript of the episode:<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

OPINION<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

THE OPINIONS<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas L. Friedman Says We\u2019re in a New Epoch. David Brooks Has Questions.<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Two columnists debate this strange moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dec. 12, 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By David Brooks<\/a> and Thomas L. Friedman<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Produced by Derek Arthur<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re living in a strange moment. According to the columnist Thomas L. Friedman, it\u2019s a completely new era, called the Polycene \u2014 one in which everything moves faster and science, technology and politics are more connected than ever. The columnist David Brooks sits down with Friedman to make sense of what the modern world\u2019s cascading crises mean for the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas L. Friedman Says We\u2019re in a New Epoch. David Brooks Has Questions.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Two columnists debate this strange moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Below is a transcript of an episode of \u201cThe Opinions.\u201d We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the <\/em>NYTimes app<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Apple<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Spotify<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Amazon Music<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>YouTube<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>iHeartRadio<\/em><\/a> or wherever you get your podcasts.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

David Brooks:<\/strong> My name is David Brooks. I am a columnist at The New York Times. I\u2019m joined by my friend and colleague Thomas L. Friedman, who I will start calling Tom from here on out. We\u2019ve been working together for a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between us we have three Pulitzer Prizes. Some would point out that Tom has all three, and I have never been nominated. But when it comes to Pulitzers, I\u2019m a socialist. I believe in sharing them equally from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, it\u2019s good to be with you in the Pulitzer category, Tom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas L. Friedman:<\/strong> [Laughs.] Always, David.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> One of the things I love about Tom\u2019s writing is that he\u2019s not just reacting to whatever happened in the last 12 hours. He does big sweeping columns, which help us explain the times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re going to talk about a piece called \u201cWelcome to Our New Era. What Do We Call It?<\/a>\u201d You repeat the term \u201cthe Polycene,\u201d and we\u2019re going to talk about your theory of where we are as a world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before we get there, there\u2019s a great saying in Talmudic scholarship \u2014 and I think our ancestors were probably debating the Book of Job somewhere back in the shtetl in the 19th century \u2014 that goes, \u201cFind the disagreement under the disagreement.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes, when two people disagree, it\u2019s because they have very different ways of looking at the world. You and I have discussed this many times, that we often come out to the same spot. We have pretty similar views, but we come by very different avenues. One of the pleasures of reading you is I get the pleasure of agreeing with you and also the pleasure of disagreeing with you at the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> Ditto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> Correct me if I\u2019m wrong. I would say the simplistic way to summarize the difference in the way we see the world is that you would be more technology-first and I would probably be more culture-first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks: <\/strong>So, I\u2019m going to make my little two-minute critique of the technological viewpoint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> Go for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> My view of the problem with the technological viewpoint is that technology is obviously very important in driving world events, but it sometimes falls into the danger of what you might call Norman Angellism. Norman Angell is famously a guy who wrote a book called \u201cThe Great Illusion\u201d in 1910, saying the world is so interconnected, we can never have a world war. Four years later, World War I.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think technology explains a lot, but it often doesn\u2019t explain the biggest world events, like World War II. The war maybe had some technological impulse. I\u2019d say it came about mostly because of German humiliation after Versailles and a belief in dictatorships in that era, which was pretty universal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Am I getting this wrong or right? Why do you think technology is so forward, if I\u2019m summarizing your view correctly? And how did you get here?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> I would say a couple of things, David. One is that it\u2019s a little bit of a misinterpretation of me. I get this a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I wrote \u201cThe World Is Flat\u201d \u2014 let me just back up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was in China last year and I was at Beijing Airport. I was coming to a conference, so they sent a college student to greet me, and we were sitting waiting for my luggage, and she said: \u201cMr. Friedman, I just have to ask you one thing. Is the world still flat?\u201d And I said, \u201cActually, it\u2019s flatter than ever in the way I meant it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What did I mean? I meant that we had created a technological platform on which more people could do more things in more ways with more other people for less money, from more places than ever before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s what the book was about. What the book wasn\u2019t about is what people would do on that platform driven by culture or politics or something else. I got conflated into the Norman Angell thing by people saying, \u201cWell, because the world\u2019s flat, therefore everyone will love each other and it\u2019ll be Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s world of just building wonderful communities.\u201d I never, never believed that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the better real frame for my thinking, David, is actually the book I wrote before \u201cThe World Is Flat,\u201d which was a book that basically took on the challenge of, what is the system that would replace the Cold War system? At the time, there were several big ideas out there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Francis Fukuyama said it\u2019ll be the end of history. Didn\u2019t work out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second was Sam Huntington: It\u2019ll be a clash of civilization. Well, that didn\u2019t work out, because there are more clashes within civilizations \u2014 Sunnis and Shiites, just to name one \u2014 than between them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Third was Robert Kaplan. He said it would be the coming anarchy. Well, we\u2019ve had a lot of anarchy, but a lot of stability, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I weighed in with \u201cThe Lexus and the Olive Tree.\u201d My argument was that what\u2019s going to actually replace it is a tension between culture \u2014 the olive tree, the things that anchor us, root us, and drive us into the world \u2014 and this new globalization system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, to take up the Norman Angell point, sometimes that globalization system will actually restrain behavior. Putin will invade Crimea, but he might not go to Kyiv. China will threaten Taiwan, but they won\u2019t actually invade. And sometimes you\u2019ll burst through that system, but my real framework is that it\u2019s a tension between the two. That\u2019s my real worldview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> Now, one more point on this and then we\u2019ll get to your column. What about the argument that the reaction to technology \u2014 and I would say the counterreaction \u2014 is often more important than the actual technology?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the things I\u2019ve learned over the course of my career is to not only look at the people who everyone is focused on, but to look at the people who are silently watching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 1968, you would\u2019ve seen the hippies and you would\u2019ve seen the new left and the peace movement, and you would\u2019ve thought, \u201cMan, this is going to be a liberal era.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But quietly, in the hallways of Yale University, there were two guys named Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, and they were saying: \u201cThis is disgusting. These people are taking us off the rails.\u201d And they turned out to be more powerful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you get a technological advance, you always get a nostalgic counterreaction. In some <\/strong>ways, the counterreaction is more important than the actual technology itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> Well, I actually agree with that, which is why so much of my writing is also about community and things like that. The head of Anthropic is in the other room, and I was just listening to him, and he was talking about the power of computing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This piece on the Polycene actually follows one that I did on A.I. ethics<\/a>, and what I said is that the faster, more powerful, more integrated, complex the world gets, the more everything you learned at Sunday school matters more than ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you ask me what\u2019s the most dangerous statistic in the world today, in the world of A.I., it isn\u2019t anything with chips. It\u2019s the Gallup poll<\/a> that said fewer people than ever are going to church.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because if we\u2019re going into a world where we\u2019re all much more empowered and all much more interconnected, then what you learned in Sunday school matters more than ever, starting with \u201cDo unto others as you wish them to do unto you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it\u2019s even more complicated. If we don\u2019t endow those values into this new species we have spawned \u2014 artificially intelligent beings \u2014 all hell is going to break loose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve got a lot more David Brooks in me [laughs] than you realize. I start in a different place, but as you know, I end in the same place you are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> We\u2019re going to do a David Brooks exorcism. [Laughs.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> That\u2019s right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks: <\/strong>OK, let\u2019s get to the column. So you\u2019ve got this term, the Polycene. Just give us a summary of what the argument is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> One of the things I wanted to do in this column was something I\u2019ve never done. I have some real thought partners around the world; I\u2019m really privileged over the years and I consider myself an acorn collector. That\u2019s what I\u2019m really good at. I see stuff out there, but I\u2019m not smart enough to crack them. I\u2019ve developed this set of partners over 40 years who are just so much smarter than me, and we crack acorns together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two summers ago, I was actually in Aspen and my friend Craig Mundie, former chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, who\u2019s been my A.I. tutor since \u201cThe World Is Flat,\u201d came and tutored me on A.I. He gave me my introductory tutorial to A.I.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What a great thing. Craig\u2019s a supercomputer designer. He explained to me that the goal of A.I. was polymathic artificial general intelligence. That\u2019s an artificial brain that\u2019s mastered chemistry, biology, physics, baseball, Mozart and the New York Yankees and can then reason across all of them. I\u2019d never heard that term before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A week later, I get an email from my climate tutor, Johan Rockstrom, talking about polycrisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I said: \u201cWell, that\u2019s interesting. I\u2019ve just been with my A.I. tutor talking about polymathic. Now you\u2019re talking about polycrisis.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea that the world isn\u2019t a binary thing of hot and cold. It\u2019s that climate change triggers deforestation, triggers crop loss, triggers internal migration, triggers state collapse \u2014 a polycrisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, at the same time, I started giving a speech on foreign policy that Secretary of State Blinken started citing. The speech was about two secretaries of state: Henry Kissinger, Tony Blinken. Two Middle East October wars: October 1973, October 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kissinger, to do his job, to put together the first disengagement agreement between Syria, Egypt, Israel, needed three dimes \u2014 I\u2019m dating myself here \u2014 a dime to call Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel; a dime to call Anwar el-Sadat, the president of Egypt; and a dime to call Hafez al-Assad, the president of Syria. Three dimes, Kissinger\u2019s airplane, three months, Kissinger magic, and he produced the first disengagement agreements \u2014 the diplomatic equivalent, David, of tic-tac-toe: three across.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fast forward 50 years later. Tony Blinken saw double everywhere he went. He had to deal with inside Hamas and outside Hamas, political Hamas and military Hamas, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In Lebanon, he had the Iranians, Hezbollah and the Lebanese government. In Syria, he had the Syrian government, Iran, Hezbollah and Russia. In Yemen, he had 18 tribes. In Iraq, he had 18 militias. And in Israel, he had 18 parties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tony Blinken wasn\u2019t playing tic-tac-toe. He had a Rubik\u2019s Cube. His world had become incredibly polymorphic and polyamorous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last example, I\u2019m thinking about the community and the time I grew up in: Minneapolis in the \u201950s, St. Louis Park. Everything was binary then. You\u2019re either a man or a woman. You\u2019re either white or Black. You\u2019re either Christian or Jewish. You are either at work or at home. My world was entirely binary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fast forward to today, in my little town, St. Louis Park, the mayor is a Somali woman. The new mayor of St. Paul is a Hmong woman from Laos who defeated an African American guy. And the elementary school around the block from me now has 30 different languages in it, which is 29 more than when I was there. My universe there has exploded into polymorphism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, the net effect of all that is, I came back to Craig and I said: \u201cCraig, we are not in the Cold War anymore. We are not in the post-Cold War. We\u2019re not in the post-post-Cold War. What do we call this era?\u201d And he suggested we call it the Polycene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> OK. Now, the New York Times audience wants us to have a long conversation on polyamory. We\u2019re not giving them that satisfaction. We are both married \u2014\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> That\u2019s right. Exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> And I don\u2019t think either of our wives would like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> Exactly. And we love our wives. [Laughs.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> But let me challenge you on two things. It\u2019s the same challenge, but it\u2019s on different spheres. First, on the domestic, and the core of my challenge is that the world wasn\u2019t that simple in the past, simpler than it is now, or that we were in a weird moment that you and I both grew up in, and that was just a weird moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> Right. Which I\u2019ve come to believe a lot more. But go ahead, please.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> So, the domestic. You talked about your childhood in Minneapolis or St. Paul.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> St. Louis Park.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> St. Louis Park. I grew up in Greenwich Village in New York City. And when I was in fourth grade, we heard a loud boom. And it turned out there was a radical group called the Weathermen, who were building bombs in a townhouse right by my school, and they blew themselves up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

New York was so violent in the 1970s. There was a serial castrator who was nicknamed Charlie Chopoff, who was castrating kids \u2014 and it wasn\u2019t even a big story because there was so much chaos. So, the simple world, I\u2019m not sure it was that simple. Uh, and \u2014\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> I grew up in a different place, but \u2014\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> It\u2019s easy to think the past was simple, but it wasn\u2019t that simple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then on a grander, global scale, we both grew up in the Cold War, and it was a world of binary superpowers. But that was a weird historical moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our mutual friend Robert Kagan sometimes suggests we\u2019re just going back to the world of great power rivalries. If you\u2019re dealing in Thucydides\u2019 world, in rivalries between Greek city-states, it was pretty damn complicated. If you\u2019re Machiavelli dealing with the rivalries in Italian city-states, pretty damn complicated. If you\u2019re Queen Elizabeth trying to balance power in her era \u2014 Queen Elizabeth I \u2014 pretty damn complicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then you go back to the 19th century, Metternich and all those people. \u2026 Aren\u2019t we just going back to normalcy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> It\u2019s a good question, and I will respond at two different levels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One is that I do believe we grew up, born in 1953 in my case, in this period of incredible income compression and incredible political compression. That is, the Minnesota politics I grew up with was very binary and very, very moderate. So, I think we did grow up in a unique time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But here\u2019s where I would push back on you, David. It\u2019s true what you said about Queen Elizabeth and all of those things, but it wasn\u2019t true that individuals in Queen Elizabeth\u2019s time had a phone that could reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before, and could call in an airstrike in their backyard or develop a weapon or a drone that could actually threaten Queen Elizabeth\u2019s army.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new thing to me today, which is the basis of the Polycene, is the degree to which the world has become sharded, and it\u2019s become sharded because each individual now has a tool to express their voice and express their power like never before. We\u2019re all connected. And it\u2019s that combination of sharding, empowerment and connectivity that I really think is new \u2014 even from the age Bob Kagan\u2019s talking about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> Gotcha, gotcha. OK. Let me try my theory of where we are today, because I want to understand how it fits within yours. I think it does, but I haven\u2019t connected the dots. My theory is that you go through historical tides and something will sweep over, at least Western history and maybe global history, where a lot of countries are affected by the same ideas all at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 1770s, the 1780s, you had the democratic tide \u2014 you had the American Revolution, the French Revolution, you had John Locke and the ideas that bubble up to the democratic revolutions of 1848.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then around the early 20th century, you have a totalitarian tide. You get the Russian Revolution, you get the Nazis, you get the Chinese Revolution. People believed that democracy was inefficient. We have scientific means to manage society, and we\u2019re going to do it from the top. And they tried that. Good luck to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then in the 1980s, you had the liberal tide. You had Margaret Thatcher, you had Ronald Reagan. In China you had Deng Xiaoping. You had Mikhail Gorbachev, and liberalism seemed to be the wave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since 2013 or so, we\u2019ve lived in the global populist tide. You get Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, I don\u2019t have to tell you, the AfD, Nigel Farage. In Latin America, I mean, it\u2019s just everywhere. Japan and South Korea have versions of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think the global populist tide has been caused by a rejection of elites, a loss of faith in societies, and a sense that a lot of people feel they\u2019re not respected and not seen. So, my explanation is, as you\u2019d expect, cultural. It has an economic element. I think it\u2019s a class revolt among other things. But, how do we fit these two stories together?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> As you said, we\u2019re going to end up in the same place. I think we\u2019re here for our third civil war, David.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> That\u2019s cheerful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> Yeah, exactly. Let me start with what is a bedrock thing in my identity, and I think it\u2019s in yours, too. For me, the two most powerful emotions driving human beings are one: humiliation and dignity. The quest for dignity and the revulsion of humiliation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s why I changed my business card back in 2015 from New York Times Foreign Affairs Columnist to New York Times Humiliation and Dignity Columnist. I felt that\u2019s really what I was covering, whether it\u2019s about China or Russia or Palestinians or anything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the second thing, the second most powerful human emotion, I believe, is home. It\u2019s a quest for home, to be anchored in the world. As my friend Andy Karsner describes it, \u201cto be anchored in a community where people are connected, protected and respected.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Best definition of home I\u2019ve ever heard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I believe we have had three civil wars basically over home. The first was, \u201cI can\u2019t feel at home if I\u2019m a Southerner and I can\u2019t enslave a Black person,\u201d and \u201cI can\u2019t feel at home if I\u2019m a Northerner and you are enslaving a Black person.\u201d It was a struggle over who gets to belong and be home in this world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second one, the 1960s civil rights movement, was about the failed Reconstruction and the fact that we didn\u2019t deliver on the promise of liberty for all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think we\u2019re in our third civil war now, only it\u2019s not just about race, it\u2019s about what I call race, pace and price. First of all, it\u2019s again about race, but in a very different way. Now it\u2019s, \u201cI don\u2019t feel at home in a minority majority country where I, as a white person,\u201d this is what some argue, \u201cdon\u2019t feel at home where the mayor of St. Paul is a Hmong refugee.\u201d That applies to a certain number of people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second is about the sheer pace of change. Back in the late \u201970s, my aunt and uncle grew up in a small town, Willmar, Minn., and I visited Willmar for 50 years. One day around 1975, my aunt came to a family event in Minneapolis. She pulls me aside and says, \u201cTom, I have to tell you, I was in the grocery store on Saturday and I heard someone speaking Spanish.\u201d [David laughs.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was her first encounter with the other, and she never forgot it, and I never forgot it. And today, Willmar is roughly a third people of color. That\u2019s how fast the pace of change is of who belongs here in terms of ethnic identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then they went to work and their boss rolled up a robot over their shoulder and it seemed to be studying their job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, people\u2019s sense of home, people\u2019s sense of cultural norms, which are what anchored you at home, and people\u2019s sense of work, which also anchors you at home, all got disrupted. That\u2019s pace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last is price. There\u2019s a whole generation that can\u2019t afford a home anymore to get anchored in the world, to be connected, protected and respected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, our civil war right now \u2014 our third civil war, I believe \u2014 is about identity, belonging and a place called home. I think it\u2019s going on all over the world. Ben-Gvir, the leader of the nationalist front in Israel, a nationalist group in Israel \u2014 for his ads during the last campaign he just bought the side of Egged buses, the main buses in Israel, and all the ads said were, \u201cWho is the landlord here?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who gets to be at home?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Along comes a guy \u2014 a political genius in his own way \u2014 named Donald Trump who says: \u201cI have a metaphor that can cut across all three of these lines, and it\u2019s called a wall. I\u2019m going to build a wall against those people who don\u2019t make you feel at home in your own home; I\u2019m going to build a wall against the pace of change of those things that make you not feel at home in your own fold; and I\u2019m going to bring down the walls to home ownership.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last he\u2019s failed to do. But that\u2019s how I think we meet somewhere in a very core way because again, these quests for humiliation and dignity and a place called home, I think, matter more than ever, which is why I say Dorothy got it exactly right: \u201cThere\u2019s no place like home.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> Yeah. The great Brooks Friedman Confluence has indeed happened. I agree with you completely, but it\u2019s easy for people like me \u2014 who believe in progress and who basically believe a lot of these inventions, including A.I., are wonderful \u2014 to be condescending toward those who we would call reactionary. And so how do we not make it seem like they\u2019re the backward, primitive, intransigent ones and we\u2019re the modern, enlightened, pluralistic ones?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> Remember, I was a little Jewish kid from Minnesota who wanted to cover the Arab Muslim world in the \u201970s. Not a natural thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My secret for survival was to learn to be a good listener because I discovered two things happen when you listen. One is what you learn when you listen, because all the stories I got wrong were because I was yapping when I should have been listening. But much more important is what you say when you listen because listening is a sign of respect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I learned was if I just listen to people \u2014 and I mean deep listening, not just waiting for them to stop talking \u2014 it was amazing what they would let me say to and about them. I could go into a room with 30 young Arab students and they\u2019ve got my columns printed out \u2014 some things on Israel. They\u2019re ready to carve me up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You spend an hour listening to them, and at the end of the hour, everyone\u2019s got their cellphone out and they want a picture with you because so many people are just starved to be respected and heard. That became my survival mechanism. As you know, I\u2019m not out there saying, \u201cYou\u2019re all great, you\u2019re all wonderful, it\u2019s all the other guy\u2019s fault.\u201d I\u2019m in everybody\u2019s face. But I will listen. I do it not to get things wrong, but much more importantly, because that\u2019s what unlocks a conversation, and it all goes back to respect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks: <\/strong>Yeah, there\u2019s a great book I\u2019ll recommend to our listeners called \u201cCrucial Conversations\u201d by a whole bunch of authors. The lead one, or at least one of them, is a guy named Joseph Grenny. In that book they have a sentence: \u201cIn any conversation, respect is like air. When it\u2019s present, nobody notices. When it\u2019s absent, it\u2019s all anybody can think about.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> Oh, I love that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> I just think that is profoundly true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, there are two topics I want to cover that are implicit in your column, and one is A.I. In the next room we have the C.E.O. of Anthropic \u2014\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman: <\/strong>I just came from there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> Well, the simple question is, and I\u2019ve had trouble understanding this. I use A.I. every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman: <\/strong>Yes, me too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks: <\/strong>I find it moderately useful. I think my physicist friends find it extremely useful, but the stuff we write about is subjective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman: <\/strong>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks: <\/strong>So my question is really, I\u2019m just going to be basic: How big is it and what\u2019s it going to do to our governance?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> I\u2019m in the category of it\u2019s the biggest thing ever. The way I would explain it is a concept that Craig Mundie and I developed. We divide the history of the world into just three basic phases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first is the age of tools \u2014 literally from the dawn of man to the printing press. We analogize humans to H\u2082O molecules, so we call it the age of ice. Humans were very separated, as H\u2082O molecules are in ice, and they move very slowly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Technology is heat. We get the printing press; it melts the ice into water. Water begins the age of information. Ideas now flow, people flow, capital flows. The age of water lasts from the printing press through the computer age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve got more technology, A.I. We are entering the age of vapor. A vapor is going to go into everything. That\u2019s why it\u2019s different, and why you have to understand it. It\u2019s going to go into your glasses, your watch, your toaster, your refrigerator, your car, your microphone, this chair \u2014 which will say, \u201cGod, that question made Tom Friedman really uncomfortable\u201d very soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A.I. is going to go into everything. That\u2019s why I just spent a lot of time trying to understand it. But you get overwhelmed by it. As a journalist thinking about A.I., I just want to focus on one thing, and for me it\u2019s the ethical question. If we are going to have a tool that is actually going to be able to solve probably every problem we have \u2014 from energy to biology \u2014 what a tragedy it would be \u2014 and this is going to get right back to where you live \u2014 if we couldn\u2019t get the best out of that tool and cushion the worst because we didn\u2019t trust each other. And we didn\u2019t trust the artificial species, and we couldn\u2019t build trust into that, and we couldn\u2019t trust China, our biggest competitor in this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It always comes back to these core principles, which you focus on: trust, community and, again, it comes back to Sunday school. No matter how fast the technology gets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> As you\u2019re mentioning, all the vapor, I, of course, have a famous sentence running in my head, which comes from world literature: All that is holy is profane. All that is solid melts into air.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> One of the most brilliant lines from \u201cThe Communist Manifesto.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. A humanist would say: Vapor is the worst. I need spiritual depth. I need intellectual depth. I need to know who my heroes are. I need to be able to read serious books in a slow way, and I need to base my political system on some unchanging principles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Should we be worried in the world of poly that all that is solid is melting into air, and this will turn into a psychologically unsustainable condition for a lot of people?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> My answer will be the best question I ever got on a book tour. It was 1999. I was on a book tour with \u201cThe Lexus and the Olive Tree.\u201d I\u2019m at the Portland Theater in Portland, Ore. Last question \u2014 it\u2019s always the last question that gets you \u2014 young man waving from the balcony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Remember, it\u2019s 1999, and this thing called cyberspace has just been invented. And he says: \u201cMr. Friedman, I have a question. Is God in cyberspace?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I said, \u201cUh, uh, uh uh, I have no idea.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It really bothered me, so I called my spiritual teacher, he\u2019s a guy named Rabbi Zvi Mark. I got to know him when I was the New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem at the Hartman Institute, and I said, \u201cZvi, I got this question. What should I have said?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And he said: \u201cWell, Tom, in our faith community, we actually have two concepts of the Almighty. The one concept is the Almighty is almighty. He smites evil and rewards good. And if that\u2019s your view of God, he sure ain\u2019t in cyberspace, which is full of gambling, cheating, people smearing one another, pornography.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But he said: \u201cFortunately, we have an alternative concept of the Almighty, that God manifests himself by how we behave. So, if we want God to be in cyberspace, if we want God to be present, we have to bring him there by how we behave there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019re right back at Sunday school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> OK, our final topic: How do we govern the age of the Polycene? I\u2019ll set this up by making an observation that our teams are not doing particularly well. I\u2019m probably a little more center-right than you, and you\u2019re more center-left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I look around the world, at Keir Starmer\u2019s government. I look at Macron\u2019s government in France. I look at center-left governments around the world. Not doing well. So, how do people like us envision government in the age of the Polycene?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> Really good question. I think first of all, we have to start with a bedrock principle from my teacher and friend Dov Seidman, which is that because of everything that\u2019s happened technologically, interdependence is now our condition, not our choice. Technology, climate, communications have all made us interdependent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are either going to build healthy interdependencies and rise together, or we\u2019re going to build unhealthy interdependencies and fall together. But, baby, whatever we\u2019re doing going forward, we\u2019re doing it together. So I start with that point, which is that every problem now that needs solving is at a planetary scale \u2014 governing A.I., nuclear weapons, climate \u2014 and therefore, every solution will have to be at a planetary scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I believe that the politics that will work in such a world is really just what I call common sense and common purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I were running for office now as a Democrat or a moderate Republican, I\u2019d be running on common-sense solutions, but also national unity, because nothing can happen without it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had a funny experience, David. My lecture agent called me a year ago and said, \u201cYou have a lecture offer from Pittsburg State University.\u201d And I said: \u201cOh, that sounds interesting. Please sign them up.\u201d I go down there. Lovely people, lovely students. At the end, they asked a professor to interview me. I don\u2019t remember what question he asked me. I just remember my answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My answer was: \u201cDonald Trump says his favorite word is tariffs. My favorite word is public: public schools, public libraries, public parks, public service, public health, public places.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I got the loudest ovation of the night. I\u2019m telling you, the hidden secret in America today is how much people do not like what Donald Trump is doing in tearing us apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, there are people on the far left who love it, they feed on it; people on the far right who are tweeting it out; and, in the middle, is a huge number of people who want us back on our journey of making out of many, one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> But then you have a nice riff in the column about \u2014 what is it? And\/or?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> I\u2019m not an either\/or person. I\u2019m a both\/and person, and that\u2019s because of the way I grew up. I grew up in a time where politics works, in Minnesota.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On immigration, I\u2019ve said this all along: I\u2019m for a really high wall. A country has got to control its borders with a very big gate \u2014 because I still want immigration. I\u2019m for better police and more police. I\u2019m for growing the pie and redividing the pie. I\u2019m for all kinds of energy, as long as they\u2019re tending toward clean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

David, it\u2019s not because I can\u2019t make up my mind; it\u2019s because I have made up my mind. It\u2019s that synthesis between them where the real solutions and energy is. So, I\u2019m a both\/and person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You are center-right, I\u2019m center left. The country is two-thirds both\/and \u2014 and the politicians who figure that out, I think, are going to do really well going forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks: <\/strong>The counter view would be a more tragic view of history. One of my heroes is Isaiah Berlin. He once said he considered himself on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of his core ideas is pluralism, but the idea that ideas don\u2019t fit together. That there are inevitably tensions and trade-offs between liberty and inequality, between freedom and order, between cultural coherence and diversity, and you just have to make trade-offs. They do not fit together. There\u2019s no both\/and; you have to dial it a little more on diversity, a little more on order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As societies, we\u2019ve gone a little over on the pluralism side, and a lot of people are saying, \u201cDial that back a little.\u201d Right? Yes. And if we, if we did our politics on these terms \u2014\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> But I think that is both\/and. It\u2019s not either\/or. We\u2019re not going to stay out in the far right or far left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> We\u2019ll close with this. Are we getting out of this? This is the No. 1 one question I get asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> I am in a struggle with myself, David, every morning. I get up and I say, \u201cToday\u2019s the day I write the column: Folks, we\u2019re not going to make it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we stay on this trajectory where this administration is taking us \u2014 and it\u2019s not just the problem of this administration, but it is a big part of the problem \u2014 three more years of this, we\u2019re not going to make it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because I do live by the bedrock view that I heard a very, very senior Republican former president, who will go unnamed, say fairly recently: We can survive anything, as long as our institutions survive basically intact. But if we lose our institutions, the courts, the F.B.I., the police, the, the, the \u2014 what I call the beautiful state, not the deep state \u2014 the ability to rebuild out of this is going to be extremely difficult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, the optimist in me wants to believe that the institutions will hold, but that\u2019s what I\u2019m watching most closely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> Yeah, I think that\u2019s right. And given that there\u2019s only one former Republican president living, I think I can guess who your source is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> No comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks:<\/strong> It\u2019s been a pleasure talking. We should do this more often.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman:<\/strong> Would love to, David.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
Credit…Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by xiaokebetter\/Getty<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This episode of \u201cThe Opinions\u201d was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Sonia Herrero and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Times is committed to publishing <\/em>a diversity of letters<\/em><\/a> to the editor. We\u2019d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some <\/em>tips<\/em><\/a>. And here\u2019s our email: <\/em>letters@nytimes.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on <\/em>Facebook<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Instagram<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>TikTok<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Bluesky<\/em><\/a>, WhatsApp<\/em><\/a> and <\/em>Threads<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

David Brooks is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about political, social and cultural trends. @nytdavidbrooks<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including \u201cFrom Beirut to Jerusalem,\u201d which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman<\/a> \u2022 Facebook<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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