https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KJehxRJRgdU

I’ve been exceptionally curious about exactly what happened with you since I was out of sync with the entire world for a good long time, but I did know that you left the New York Times to start on your own, start as an independent journalist on Substack. And that’s quite the turn of events, let’s say, especially given that Vanity Fair called you the Times Star Opinion writer. That feels like 100 years ago. Yeah, it’s not so long ago though, is it? But many things have happened in the interim. So should we start with something easy, like just exactly what the hell happened at the New York Times? Sure. Okay. Sure. Well, I guess I should start with what drove me to come to the New York Times in the first place. I came to the New York Times following the—well, it was shocking in the context of the New York Times—the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 election. There was a brief period of soul-searching that happened after Trump won, I would say inside the New York Times, but inside the legacy media in general. And there was a sense of, wow, our job is to hold up a mirror to the country as it is, and we sort of failed our readers. We haven’t exposed them, let’s say, to views or to the zeitgeist outside of places like the Upper West Side and Berkeley. And so, in a way, I was an intellectual diversity hire, along with Brett Stevens. I had been at the Wall Street Journal editorial page for years in two different stints. And as viewers may or may not know, the Wall Street Journal editorial page is conservative. Its motto is free people, free markets. And I was always the squish in the context of the journal’s editorial page. I was always on the leftmost flank. So you were a diversity hire at the Wall Street Journal as well. I’ve always just been on a fringe in one place or another. Yeah. Weird to be fringe and in the center. Well, not weird. I feel like that’s increasingly where anyone who’s in the center is these days. You’re politically homeless, and you’re sort of forced to choose between one side or another. I’m not sure. It’s maybe unique insofar as the kind of jobs that I had, but the number of people I know who feel that way, who feel politically homeless, who feel like they have to sort of contort themselves to fit into one of these two tribes is growing by the second. And so, in that sense, I don’t think my experience was that unique. So anyway, I get to the New York Times, and I want to be clear. I didn’t go into the New York Times naive. I read the paper for years. I saw what’s obviously its liberal bias, but I felt fundamentally like the paper was still trying to adhere to what it claims to be all about in its mission statement, pursuing the truth, even when it’s hard. The famous ad that the Times has, the truth is hard. It’s all over tote bags. Striving for objectivity. That tells you how hard it is. Right, right, exactly. Striving for objectivity, even though we know none of us are objective. Telling people the truth even when it’s inconvenient. So right, still nested inside this idea that journalists, for example, could represent a viewpoint that was actually objectively true rather than inevitably expressing their association with an arbitrary power structure. It was still an enlightenment idea, as far as you were concerned, that reigned at the Times. Right. And specifically on the editorial page, I was an op-ed editor. So what the public saw that I did was write columns, but the majority of what my job was, was to commission and edit op-eds from people who wouldn’t otherwise think of the New York Times as their natural political home. So that meant conservatives, God forbid. It meant libertarians. It meant heterodox thinkers. It meant high schoolers and first-time writers and dissidents across the Arab world, which is a subject I’m particularly passionate about. So my job was specifically to expose our readers to views that would not otherwise naturally appear on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Okay. And that was an explicit condition of your hiring. Everyone knew that to begin with. That was my job description. Very much. Okay. So you weren’t a fifth column, or if you were, it was something that everybody had agreed upon. Yeah. The goal was for me to bring in pieces that would otherwise make maybe even my desk mates uncomfortable. And so- Why did they pick you, do you think? And why did the Wall Street Journal pick you to begin with? Those are very difficult positions to attain. And how old were you when you started with the Wall Street Journal? So I started at the Wall Street Journal. I had a fellowship there the summer that I graduated from Columbia University. The way that I got to the Wall Street Journal is very serendipitous. I was very much a, I would say center-left liberal when I was a student in college. But I was very passionate on the subject of Israel and fighting antisemitism, which is the book that I ended up writing. I had been writing that book for a very long time. And I would frequently host debates on campus with the socialist group or the sort of anti-Zionist group. And there was an older gentleman that would come to some of my events. And one day, he definitely was not an undergraduate. And one day he came up to me and said, my name is Charles Stevens. You need to meet my son, Brett Stevens. He works at the Wall Street Journal and they have this amazing summer internship. I had never really heard of Brett. I had never heard of the Wall Street Journal, but that was how I ended up getting there. It started with a summer internship called the Bartley Fellowship that’s still in existence today.