October 10, 2019 • 43 mins
In the last episode of this season, Daniel Scheffler reflects on South Africa and has an extra long chat with his friend Richard Stengel (MSNBC pundit, author of a new book on Disinformation, former editor of Time magazine, and father to Ella's best friend Thandi). #travel
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hi, I'm Daniel Scheffler. This is Everywhere, a production of
I Heart Radio. I have traveled to and fro South
Africa my whole life. South Africa's special to me. It
is my country of birth. The country is both my
(00:24):
shield and my sword. It has protected me and it
has also violated me. For my next interview, I'm with
Richard Stengel, my best friend, Mary's husband and Ella's girlfriend,
Tundy's father. He spent time in South Africa writing Nelson
Mandela's book Long Walk to Freedom. He also happened to
(00:47):
work for Time magazine as its managing editor for many
years and the government as Under Secretary of State for
Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, and has now written a
timely book about disinformation, which he is going to tell
us all about. I decided that for this week because
(01:07):
my interview with Richard was so fascinating. You don't want
to hear me. What you really want to hear is
Richard Stingle discussing South Africa and his life on the road.
So here we go. On another note, you remember my
friend Sarah Scarborough on episode seven talking about tea and
(01:29):
the history of tea across the world. Well, Sarah and
I are planning a trip into the soul of Tea.
We're going to China for ten days to UNESCO World
Heritage sites, Tiger Leaping Gorge, and also Shanghai. You can
book this trip with us at a classic tour dot
(01:52):
com slash Soul of t or on my website Daniel
Scheffler dot com, or on her website t Huntress dot com.
Come spend some time with us. We're going everywhere. I'm
with my friend's husband, Richard Stengel, and I've known Richard
(02:17):
for a long time, and I feel like I know
you better because my best friend is your wife, and
I walk the dogs with her in Central Park every day.
So you feel almost part of my life as someone
who I have not spent that much time with. Well,
you're spending time with me, Daniel, when you're spending time
with my wife and my dog, the beloved Toundy. Well,
(02:42):
as everybody knows Ella, Tandy is Ella's girlfriend and they
have been in love for two years now, and they
get to spend the funnest time together. And I have
seen even you soften and become sweet with Tundy. Yes,
she um, she definitely. I've never been a dog person
(03:05):
before and I kind of didn't understand it, and I
get it now and late in life, I'm finally becoming
a dog person, or really a Tundy person. Well, I've
seen you with her and it's very sweet, Richard. I
love it. Even Michael has commented how like sweet you
are with Tundy. And then if we watch you on
MSNBC and you this like serious policy wonk, like intellectual,
(03:27):
and then I'll see you with the dog and you're
like soft and cuddly, and I love that. You know,
it's interesting what dogs do with couples because you direct
a lot of affection towards the dog and in some
ways not so much towards each other, and that the
dog becomes this kind of symbol of your connection in
a in a strange way. Well, whenever I'm traveling, which
is all the time, and a lot of the time
(03:48):
Michael Kohn come with me, he'll say, Oh, ellis missing you.
Ellis really missing you. Oh. He'll um. You know, he's
not the first to have an emotion outwardly, and he'll
say something like, Ella's very sad today because you're not here.
And I hear it for what it is, but it is.
It's a beautiful part of the relationship that it's kind
(04:12):
of made my travel life almost bearable because I'm always
on the road. But I know that there's this dog
at home that's loving Michael. That doesn't have the opposite
effect and make you not want to leave. Yes, of course,
we got back from Italy last night and both Michael
and I we went to pick up Ella from Norna,
(04:33):
and both of us were so like, we couldn't wait
to get to the dog. And it was funny. When
we got home, I was like, Oh, everything's back to normal,
Like it felt like you ease into a normality when
it's the three of us opposed to just us and
we were together in Italy on a holiday. Well, the
way I look at it is, as you know, I
(04:54):
have two sons and a wife, and Tandy I feel
as the one person in the household. It actually has
genuine affection for me. So I can come home and
bore boys are completely uninterested at this age that they're
in now. So Tandi becomes my kind of heartfelt friend
at home. That's very sweet. Richard. I know you have
(05:16):
a book coming out. Tell me about the book. The
book is called Information wars, how we lost the global
battle against disinformation and what to do about it, And
it's the story of my time at the State Department.
I went to the State Department. I've been an editor
of Time for seven years, and I became the Under
Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, which
(05:36):
is always thought of that's the chief marketing officer of
Brand USA. But what I found when I was there
because two events happened about the same time just as
I came into the administration, the Russian annexation of Crimea
and the first of the ISIS beheadings, and I suddenly
saw this tsunami of disinformation coming from Russia about what
(05:59):
was happening, and you Crane and Crimea, all of the
propaganda coming from ISIS about the grievances of of Sunni Muslims,
And this was a whole new world for me. And
we started in both cases these two engines counter ISIS
messaging and counter Russian propaganda. And it's the story of
how we attempted to do that and mostly failed at
(06:20):
it because it's a really hard thing to do, especially
for government. Right, do you think that we'll ever be
able to get over this disinformation issue. You know, one
of the things I say in the book is that
disinformation is as old as information. Right as soon as
there was factual information, there were people lying about it.
And you know, I joked that that began in the
(06:42):
Garden of Eden when Satan said to Eve, you know,
take a bite out of that apple, and nothing's going
to happen to you. That was that was disinformation. So
I think it's unrealistic and naive to think that you
can do away with it. I'm not a purest about
what truth is, um, but it's hard because us there
will always be people who lie, and there will always
(07:03):
be people who believe those laws. And part of that
comes from confirmation bias, which is this idea that we
tend to agree with the things that we already agree with.
So if someone's telling I agree with you, you're such
a smart young man. So the thing is, if someone
is telling you an untruth, but it does adhere to
what you already believe, you'll be much more likely to
(07:25):
believe it. And in fact, there's a something called the opposite,
which is the backfire effect, which is when you try
to disabuse someone of what they believe, they double down
and become even more confirmed in that belief. So so
that's why it's a really hard thing to come back,
because it's really about who we are as human beings. Right. Well,
I spend some time with some trumpet support is recently,
(07:47):
and I think at some point I realize that there's
such a divide between what I believe, whatever it is
gay rights. I'm kind of more we're all in this
mess together, opposed to what this particular person believes, where
it is a much more of a it's me, it's
me alone, and I'm gonna work and do this myself.
(08:09):
And instead of fighting with them and kind of avoiding
that doubling down, as you say, I just listened and
it was one of the most incredible things that's happened
to me. I do a whole episode on this because
I think it's important too to realize that we need
to bridge gaps, all these gaps that are being created
every day. But it's unbelievable what people want to believe.
(08:32):
And I spend time in ushrooms in India, and the
teachers said to me at the end, when you strip
it all away, when you strip away everything you are,
your religion, your bullshit, your sexuality, your gender. You will
only be left with your belief system, and most people
will never let go of that. Yes, there's a lot
(08:56):
in there, Daniel Um. And the thing is one of
the things that Trump did, and I talked about this
in the book is There became this kind of unholy
trinity between Trump and Putin? And isis because in some
ways they were doing the same thing. What did isis do?
They weaponized the grievance of Sunni Muslims who felt left
(09:17):
out by the modern world. What did Putin do? He
weaponized the grievance of Russians who bemoaned the fall of
the Soviet Unit that they were not a global power anymore.
And Trump weaponized the grievance of mostly older, white, not
highly educated Americans who also felt left out by the
modern world, felt left out by globalization, felt that they
(09:37):
weren't having the attention paid to them with the credit
they deserved, and it was going instead to people of
color or LGBT people are all of these new ideas
that they couldn't reckon with. And I don't want to be,
you know, sound um paternalistic about that or or it's
a real thing. And I think one of the things
that we discounted is people who did the a left
(10:00):
out by globalization, which is actually not about jobs being
shipped overseas, but it's really about automation. Is that, you know,
machines and robots are taking the place of workers. And
we've never done a very good job of telling folks,
you know what, that job and that tire making factory
is going to go away because there's a machine that
can do it automatically, who won't have sick days and
do it for one tenth to cost. So I do
(10:23):
think there's this group of people in the United States
who feel that way, and we have and and and
we that is Democrats and liberals, whatever you want to
call it, haven't done a very good job of talking
to them, and haven't done a very good job of
explaining what the future is like. I mean, and I
don't even know what to do about it. I mean,
I think that there's a demographic solution in the US
in the sense that the country is getting darker and
(10:45):
it will be a majority non white country in twenty
I mean, it's a different place than the world that
so many of those Trump voters grew up in. And
I think we all have to adapt to it, said it.
So yesterday I get off the plane and we're driving
back to the city in a cab and I see
a Confederate flag with New Jersey plates and Michael and
(11:08):
I started discussing this, and I said to him, have
you ever seen that? Not in the South? And he
said no, And he was like, but Daniel, what does
it really mean? And my instinct was, it's a call
for help. I need to help him. I need to
not call him a fucking racist. I need to help
this person. I need to show them that me, the
(11:30):
gay white boy from Africa, is the same as him,
that I have the same fears and the same loves
and the same hopes and desires. And that's how I
feel about Trump voters. That's how I feel about other
They call me other, but to me, they are also other.
Somehow I have to help them. Somehow, we have to
help each other because otherwise we're fucked. I completely agree.
(11:53):
And I mean, for years, I was a political correspondent.
I covered three presidential campaigns. I traveled all around extensively
in the South, covered Republican candidates, many of whom I adored.
And you do see this divide, which is too simple
a term for it, where where it all goes back
(12:13):
to America's original sin, which was slavery. And even the
Democratic candidates are now talking about reparations and things, But
it's this original sin because it created a cleave in
America between the South and the North, and the South
and the West, and today the legacy of it is
is a cultural thing. I'm not even I wouldn't in
my heart. I don't necessarily call somebody a racist because
(12:35):
I don't know what's in their heart. I do know
there's a cultural divide and people in the South who
feel that they've been left out, that the direction that
America is going in is a different direction that they
want to go in. And look, some of it I
think is animated by distrust, animosity, fear of the other,
(12:56):
which everybody has. And I do agree that that people
like that need help. The problem is that it's very
hard to have that conversation. For the reasons we were
talking about already, that people double down and their belief
beliefs even the definition of that term, and not necessarily
based on facts. That's one reason it's so hard to
dislodge them. So um again, I don't have an easy answer.
(13:20):
I mean, because even even when you try to disabuse
somebody of something, there are these things that sociologists called
belief echo. So if you if you retweet a Trump
tweet just to say that it's full of falsehoods, there's
a belief echo that people get from seeing the original
Trump tweet that never goes away, even if you say
it's completely false. So it's a difficult problem. And I
(13:42):
do think, you know, not not to get on my
preachy soapbox, but you know, I grew up in the
sixties and seventies, and I always believed what the you know,
the motto on the which is the presidential seal e
plurbus unum out of many one. And my family were
all immigrants. I mean, both of my grandfather's never graduated
(14:02):
from high school, neither of them were born here. And
I always believe in this idea of out of many one,
that that the values of America, the ideas of America,
transcended religion or color or race, and that if you
believed in that, that's what made you an American, and
that's what made you not only equal with other people,
but brothers and sisters with everyone. Else and and I
(14:22):
feel that's been lost. And I feel that one of
the things that Donald Trump has done is deliberately dividing people.
I mean, look, when you run for president, you try
to get votes. But every president, and that i've it's
been in my lifetime, ultimately tries to speak to all
Americans and it has this understanding that I'm president of
all Americans. And Trump doesn't have that. He feels like
(14:43):
I'm only the president for the people who voted for me,
and even not necessarily all of them. So so again,
it's a big problem, and I'm sorry, I'm I'm not
offering any real solutions to it, but I do think
it trying to understand what the person on the other
side thinks is the first up in trying to come
to some kind of harmonious relationship with people. Do you
(15:06):
think that do you feel optimistic? Let me put it
that way. You know, again, partly for this book, I've
I've thought and written a fair amount about cognitive biases,
and and the great Daniel Khneman said that optimism and pessimism,
it's a biological thing, has nothing to do with the
(15:27):
reality you could you know, you could be in the
gates of hell and feel optimistic if that's your temperament.
So I am, by nature an optimistic but I do
think there are some causes for optimism in the sense
that there is more transparency now than there was before.
When when Republican candidates used to run, they just used
dog whistles to appeal to some of these voters. Now
(15:49):
we have a guy in the White House who talking
to them directly, you know, who's using that direct language
of division. And I feel, Okay, now we know it's
out in the open, how do we figure out how
to move forward from here? So I think, you know what,
in the sense that it's it's open and transparent, I
feel good about that, not about those sentiments, but about
(16:10):
how we how we figure out how to move forward
knowing that that this is really who folks are. Right,
Let's take a breathe and we'll be right back with
Everywhere after a word from our sponsors. Thanks for sticking around.
Here's more of Everywhere with no further ado. Let's get
(16:32):
back to Richard Stingle. Richard, So, what I would love
to talk about is how travel has played into your life.
It was such a big part of being the Undersecretary
of State, and obviously as the Edited Time Magazine managing
Edited Time Magazine, you were on a plane all the time,
So share some stories. I know, the chance to flying
(16:56):
coach when you were at the State Department, not always
and them Mary and I have had many a laugh
about that, imagining you shuttling across to the Middle East
in a little seat. Well, you know, the thing that
people didn't realize and I guess I didn't realize before
going into government, is that government travel, at least State
Department travel, is actually governed by congressional legislation which says
(17:21):
you have to always your default carrier has to be
an American carrier, that you sit in coach unless the
flight is over fourteen hours. But one of the things
that I loved about the Obama administration is that people
took the rule seriously, and I would see the Secretary
of the Treasury flying in coach between New York and Washington.
(17:42):
You'd never see that in any other country in the world,
and you probably don't see it in the Trump administration.
So there was something very American, small are Republican about
it that I liked, and because in many ways, part
of the job was, as I said, to project Americans,
the brand of America. And I remember, even when I
was in office, when one of Barack Obama's first trips
(18:04):
to China, he got off the plane and it was
raining out and he was carrying his own umbrella. Well,
it was on the front page of every Chinese newspaper.
The President of the United States was carrying his own umbrella.
Even the deputy mayor of the smallest city in China
has three people carrying umbrellas for him when he gets
off an airplane. And so there's something American about it.
(18:26):
There's something small d democratic about it that I like
much as I didn't always like, you know, sitting in
a very cramped seat for thirteen and a half hours.
And as you know Mary probably told you, in my
State Department staff knows I'm a very cranky traveler, and
people would be like, you know, only the guys who
got the short straw would travel with me at the
(18:47):
State Department because it's like, oh no, but by way,
you have special assistance. That's what the job is called.
You have four as an undersecretary. They're like your go
to people for different reasons in the world. And they
would always have of pieces of dark chocolate espresso beings
covered in dark chocolate and express those for me. Whenever
I was traveling, whenever I got really cranky, it was like,
(19:08):
here's the chocolate and here's the caffeine. So that was
their solution. I have the same with Michael. He gets
so cranky. We flew to room last week and he
was in the worst mood. At some point he said
to me, just don't speak, just don't speak at all.
And I was like, oh, he needs food. Yes. But
the thing about State Department travel, and I have to
(19:30):
say I have I have not done much travel since then.
Is it kind of cures you have travel for a while,
and part because it's not about sight seeing or feeling
the culture. It's about flying all night, getting off an airplane,
going into a series of meetings and not seeing anything.
So I probably went to twenty five different countries during
my three years maybe more in the State Department. And
(19:53):
after the first year or so, I said, hey, you
gotta put at least one sight seeing thing for me
every day. I mean, I remember one of my first
trips to was to burn it to me and mar
I didn't get to see anything and it's like, that's
just not right. And in fact, because part of my
job was to kind of promote cultural connections, I needed
to do things like that sea museums, you know, meet
(20:15):
with young people, and that always was a bit of
a refresher and u But because my kids were still
at home, I tried to travel only between Monday and Friday,
but sometimes I'd be on a trip to three different
countries between Monday and Friday and spend three nights on
an airplane. I mean it was you know, it's not
fun gallivanting around the world. That's what I've been doing.
(20:38):
So that is what you've been doing. Richard, tell me, um,
tell me a story that was memorable or meaningful to
you about the state upon and travel. Well, for me,
I'm trying to think of something and more irreverent. But
this is a little more serious because I got engaged
in this countering Russian disinformation and was so upset, like
(21:01):
so many people about what Russia did in Crimea, which
was part of Ukraine, and then the soft invasion that
they did in eastern Ukraine. I went to Ukraine three
times and completely fell in love with it. I mean,
it feels like a country that is at war, and
they are at war, but it's this country where there's
a lot of resilience and it's a you know, it's
a Kieva is a beautiful city. The Ukrainians a beautiful people,
(21:24):
and it felt like there was an aliveness there when
I was there that that was very inspiring. And because
they're under the gun and they know that, you know,
they're big neighbor to the north, there's always you know,
kind of threatening them. And I also went two or
three times to the Baltics, you know, Riga, Latvia, Lithuania.
Fell in love with the Baltics. Beautiful old world places, lovely,
(21:47):
lovely people also who felt threatened for a thousand years
by Russia, and over that course of the thousand years
they were sometimes part of Russian sometimes not. And so
for me being able to go to those play it
says as an American and saying we're on your side
was was powerful. So it was a different kind of
travel and it made you aware of this sort of
(22:09):
existential threat that different people around the world have. So
it was beautiful and it was meaningful, and I felt
like we were trying to do the right thing. Maybe
there's a part of that that is open to all travelers.
Perhaps it's not just going and enjoying the sites and
being a part of the culture and eating the food,
(22:31):
but also being aware of more of the political, socio
political and as you call it, existential things that are happening.
So go to Africa and be aware of all these
nuances and extremisms that play in a beautiful, scary, incredibly
(22:52):
feisty way in every moment that you're there. Yes, I mean,
when I was a young journalist, the thing that I
love more than anything else was to get an assignment
that would put me on an airplane to go someplace
I had never been before, either in the US or abroad,
and I just felt like my whole world was expanding.
That you know, your view is expanding, it it changes
(23:15):
the court pustles in your body, I think. And in fact,
one of those places was when I first went to
South Africa, and I had been writing for Rolling Stone
Magazine as a freelancer, and I did a couple of
pieces and I was sitting in my editor's office there
one day and she got a phone call from a
famous British journalist who was saying he couldn't go to
(23:38):
South Africa to cover the township riots and the and
the kind of revolution going on there in the mid eighties.
And she turned to me and said, I want to
go to South Africa. Yes, ma'am. I'd never been to
Africa before, and in a couple of weeks I was
flying down there and they wanted me to do a
story about young people and are there friendship across the
(24:00):
color line? And I ended up doing a story in
this little town of Brits in the Western Transport where
there was a forced removal where the where the white
authorities were trying to move the black township further away
from the white town. And I did a story for
them about a young black man and a and a
young white boy living in the same town, which eventually
became my first book called January Son, which was about
(24:23):
three families, including an Indian family, and it was just
so different and and you know, South Africa was an
authoritarian state in those days, and it was a racist
authoritarian state, and it just it just felt so different
that you felt this kind of pressure on you at
all times. But it's an incredibly beautiful place with wonderful,
beautiful people, and it kind of opened my eyes and
(24:46):
I and I remember, you know, I think you probably
know that famous journalistic expression when you go through a
new country. After the first three days, you can write
a book. After the first three weeks, you can write
an article. But after three months you don't know what
to say. You feel there in that you have that
kind of overconfidence about your sense of a situation when
(25:07):
you're first there, of that first week or so. But
I remember when I went back to work on the book,
and I spent about six months living in this really
godforsaken little town, African speaking town, and and I did
do the book, but it just becomes much more complex.
It's just you don't have these factile and easy things
to say about any place when you've spend a lot
of time there. And it's an interesting rule. And you know,
(25:30):
most of us when we travel, we don't spend a
long time in a particular place. And even though it
expands your brain, you also have to realize you're not
really completely understanding the place the way you would if
you really spend a lot of time there. People go
to Cape Town all the time, right, and they tell
me the story, Oh, Cape Town is incredible, so beautiful,
in the food and the wine and the blah blah blah.
(25:50):
You know what they tell and then I go, yes,
but one about everything else. And it's so easy to
not see that. That's the thing about travel. You have
to be open to the good in the band. Yes,
and Cape Town is a particularly good example, because it's
such a stunningly beautiful place. But you know, we're talking
about first world white travelers, and they don't go to Kayla,
(26:13):
to the township, or see how vast that is. I mean,
and I guess people don't want to get cloud revision.
It's a little bit depressing. And that's why South Africa
is such a poignant and heartbreaking place, because there's so
much beauty and wealth and then so much poverty and
and despair, and it's hard to see all of that.
(26:33):
And you know, you know, I worked with Nelson Mandela,
and so of course when I was working with him,
we were always going to places like Kayla and Soweto
and and and it was also an eye opener for
me and to go with him where he was beloved,
and just to see the poverty that they lived in
the and the fact that you know that the first
(26:54):
world part of South Africa depended on the on the
poverty of black South Africans, and you know that's a
hard thing and and they're still, of course trying to
evolve out of that. How was your time with Nelson Mandela.
You wrote the book for him with him to Freedom,
To Freedom. Um. I remember reading that as a child
(27:15):
and I struggled through it. But it's something I remember.
I remember my opinions of South Africa and feeling complicated
about it, and being from there but not growing up there,
but my parents not being from there but sort of
from there, and what all of that meant to me.
Travel has taken me out of all that and back
(27:37):
in And that's the beauty that travel has given me.
And I don't know if I would have had this
perspective or this feeling in the world if I wasn't
from South Africa. Well there's that saying from I think
it was Emerson. What do Americans know? Who only America? No?
And that's how I feel about South Africans. What do
(27:58):
South Africans now? Who only South African knows? Because of
course South Africans weren't allowed to travel anywhere else in
the world, and there's a kind of narcissism that white
South Africans have, but to see it through Nelson Mandela,
whom I loved, was such a privilege. And you know
he was a beautiful man, right, I mean he's six two, handsome, big, beaming, smile,
(28:21):
broad's shoulders, had been a boxer as a young man.
I remember Walter Susula, who was with him on Robin
Island for all those years and really was his closest
friend and advisor. One of the great privileges working on
the book is I got to meet all of those
people and interview them. And I remember Walter told me
this story when Mandela first came to Johannesburg as eighteen
years old from the Provinces, and Walter Ssuli was a
(28:42):
real estate Asian in Soweto and was the head of
the A n C Youth League, and he said, when
Nelson Mandela walked through that door, I said to myself,
we want to be a mass organization. That young man
as a mass leader. For all the reasons I was said.
He was tall, he was handsome, he's mild, which was
an unusual thing in the nineteen fifties for a leader
(29:04):
to smile. We were you all used to that now
and and sort of see South Africa through his eyes
and through all of the terrible prejudice that he was
the victim of. I mean, it just unimaginable. Right, He's
spent twenty seven years in prison, the prime of his life.
He missed out on his family life and and all
of that. And I was about to say, yet, he's
(29:26):
not bitter, what people always say, I can't believe he's
not bitter. He in fact, he was bitter, but part
of his leadership was to hide that from people. He
could not have reconciled the country and let people see
him being bitter towards jailers. So what did he do.
He spoke Afrikaans to his jailers, He had lunch with them,
He went to see Mrs f Voote, who was the
you know, the wife of the man who created apartheide
(29:47):
because he needed people to believe that he wasn't bitter,
that they could reconcile, that black and white could get
along without feeling like this history of enmity was going
to corrupt the present. Shouldn't we be applying that to
this country right now? Shouldn't I be going for lunch
(30:08):
or with tea with Mrs Trump. I need to do something.
I have a small platform. I have this show that's
about travel, and it's about opening your eyes, and it's
about life and it's and it's about being open and
and I want to use this to get people to vote.
For instance, I don't care who the funk your vote for,
just vote, exercise your democracy. Or I want to use
(30:31):
this to just be like I'm just like you. You know,
they are truck drivers that listen to my show. I
know this because they've contacted me on Instagram. They travel
a lot, they travel a lot, and they must have
heard my ad on I Heart radio across the nation
and they download my show. Like a white straight truck
(30:54):
driver from Idaho sent me a message on Instagram and
told me I love your show. That for me is
crossing a divide which I'm almost overwhelmed by. And and
that's encouraging. I mean, it's almost a bit of a
dirty word. I mean to say, I'm an American exceptionalist.
And but what I mean by American exceptionalism is this
(31:18):
idea of out of many, one of e Plurbius un
him that this is the country that is this great
as the cliche goes melting pot where people come here
and embrace the ideas and get past their prejudices and
hatreds from the old world wherever they came from. I mean, again,
that's a bit of a sentimentalization of the whole thing.
But it hurts me that America is so divided that
(31:42):
people aren't embracing the ideas that make us who we are.
And I have again at a positive view of what
American nous is and and it crushes me to see
that that people are not embracing that, and that you
have a president of the United States who doesn't seem
to understand that. But Daniel, you know what, I think
you'll solve the whole problem by having Milannia Trump on
(32:03):
your show and that will bring the whole country togame. Well, Milannia, come,
I'm waiting. This is a great moment for us to
travel to advertising Land and we'll be right back with everywhere.
Welcome once again to everywhere. Let's hop back to it.
So with no further ado, let's get back to Richard
(32:27):
and I. I remember last year there was a death
threat with the male bomber towards you and your family.
Was an MSNBC, and I remember feeling like, how shocking
that was. Mary and I walked that day with the
dogs and she's sub African and she was a war
(32:47):
photographer and she's like chilled. But I remember feeling like, fuck,
that's serious. But I think if you and that person
happened to be in the same room, that person would
see that you are no threat, that you don't need
to be bombed, that you are only interested in this
country and what's best for this country, and that you
(33:08):
are just the same. Well, I I was sort of
blaise about it, because these guys of knuckleheads, and they
tend to not be able to do the thing that
they say they want to do. And I and when
I was at the State Department, I got many threats
from from ISIS guys and their acolytes. And even when
I was editor of Time, similar kinds of things. And
(33:29):
I think when you're in the arena or in the
public eye, that that is part of the job. And again,
as you said about Mary, I mean she was a
township war photographer. I remember when when I was an
editor of Time, and we we did the protester as
a Person of the Year, and we I was the
entire square during the protests there during the Arab Spring,
(33:50):
and I got tear gased back. The our foreign editor
kind of grabbed me and rescued me from it, and
like I proudly called her at night and she was like,
I was tear guests fifty different times. Completely yeah, completely unimpressed.
And so yeah, so I mean, get you get used
(34:11):
to it. At the same time, I think there is
a on a continuum. I think people in left and
right do have more in common than they think they do.
This idea that we're so polarized is in some ways exaggerated.
I mean, we're not as polarized as we were during
the Civil War, when one out of four American boys
between eighteen and twenty four lost their lives and there
(34:34):
was a civil war about an ideological disagreement. So we're very,
very far from that. But I do think this, like
this Caesar sayok Fellow and the and other sort of
white supremacist terrorists. You know, we have to figure out
how to tone down the language because it does obviously
have an effect on them. And we see that all
the time. And I've always thought it was naive when
(34:56):
I'd hear Congress. People say, oh, so and so was
created by the internet, or this terrorism is caused by
the internet. That's silly. The internet doesn't cause anybody anything.
But at the same time, it does make people more extreme.
They double down on their beliefs, and we have to
figure out how to how to tone down the rhetoric
(35:17):
and how to talk to each other in a more
civil way. This leads me into thinking about something that
you and I have definitely talked about, but I don't
know if we've talked about this enough. I wonder how
do we then combat the disinformation. So I speak to
my neighbor and she's convinced that climate change is not real.
(35:38):
I push her friend in Italy in a wheelchair around
ma Tera and it's a hundred and four degrees and
the guide who's with us keeps saying it's the hottest
sum on record, glaciers are melting, it's it's never been
this hot in Italy, and the woman goes, it's a hoax,
don't believe it. How do I possibly show her that
(36:02):
the information that she has is not correct. It's it's tough,
as we've been saying. And one of the things I
say in the book is that we don't have a
fake news problem. We have a media literacy problem that
people can't and haven't been taught how to distinguish between
something that's fact and fiction what the provenance of that
information is. And we're also scientifically illiterate that so much
(36:27):
of the skepticism and doubt about climate change comes from
people who are not scientifically literate, that are not reading
scientific papers about the way the environment has changed and
what how man has caused that to change. And again,
I don't it's not an easy answer, because as we
were talking about earlier, there's that backfire effect if someone
(36:48):
is so persuaded that climate change is false, when you
try to dissuade them of that or try to persuade
them of something else, that often reconfirms the belief that
they already have. And I do think, you know, one
of the things that that is a problem of our
time is that now this is going to sound really grandiose,
which is that technology is evolving, but human beings are not.
(37:13):
Technology is evolving at a rapid rate, and we still
have the you know, reptilian brain that we had years ago.
That's a problem. And I actually think that we can
figure out how to use technology to evolve us and
to make democracy work better. But right now we're so
focused on how technology is undermining that, which it may be,
(37:36):
but it also has the potential of making us more
evolved and in an objective, scientific way, saying, look, here's
the reality. Everybody's got to recognize that we may differ
on what to do about it or what caused it,
but this is the state of play that we can
all acknowledge. And you know, when I was went into
the State Department and was confirmed before Congress, one of
(37:59):
the things I said in my opening remarks was this
great line from from Daniel Patrick moynihan. It was the
New York Senator when I was growing up here, and
he said, Uh, people are entitled to their own opinions,
they're not entitled to their own facts. But nowadays people
feel like they're entitled to their own facts. That that
I have a fact, it's not an opinion. Well, that's
a very hard thing to disabuse people of. And I
(38:22):
do think technology can help us come to a factual
basis of different things that we can all agree on.
That to me is the foundation for progress. Right to
just agree that two plus two equals four. Then how
do we move on from there? Right? I would talk
to you all day. Let's some rap and tell me
something like a funny story about Nelson Mandela, or like
(38:45):
something funny or travel story that's funny. Um. I don't
know if you know, but when I was working with Mandela,
he knew Mary because Mary photographed him on the first
day he came out of active verst air prison. And
she's a beautiful, red haired photographer, pretty unforgettable. And when
(39:06):
he saw that we were going out together, he would
always say to me, you must marry that girl. It's
hard to say no to Nelson Mandela and I did not.
And when our first son was about to be born,
we called him on New Year's Day. We used to
call him or see him every New Year's Day, and
I wanted to tell him that Mary was pregnant, which
(39:26):
I did do. And I was talking to him on
the phone and I said, if if it's a boy,
we're going to call him Harley clock Law. As you know,
that's Nelson Mandela's real first name. I caused the name
that's unpronounceable and unspellable. Well, he has a pretty good
sense of humor. And he was silent, and I thought,
did I mispronounced it? Did he think it was presumptuous
(39:48):
of this white American to name his son Holy Colock Law?
So I said, would you like to say hello to Mary?
And he said of course, And I passed the phone
to her and she said hello, Medee. But what everybody
called him? And then I was standing close so I
could hear what he said. After that, he said, I
cannot wait to see you and a little holly clack clock. Well,
(40:10):
I love that it turned out to be Gabe and not.
So what happened was, you know, cut to whatever it was.
Five months later, we're in the hospital and the boy
is born, and we thought, oh my god, can we
we have to do something. But we can't call him
Holly clockline his first name. So Gabriel Stengel's middle name
is Curley clock Clock. I never knew that. Gaby, baby, yes,
(40:34):
with the beautiful middle name. That's sweet. I could spend
the rest of the day with you and talk everything.
I'm happy to thank you for making time for me,
and I can't wait for your book. That's some imminent.
So congratulations on the book. Thank you so much. It's
great to have it done, and it's been fantastic to
(40:57):
be with you today. Than Richard, I guess I'll go
back to may Verry now have her on the show.
I'd love to have on the show. It has come
to the end of our season one. I have had
the most memorable and joyous time. I love creating and
(41:20):
thinking about this. We've covered so much ground emotionally and
of course physically, and it's left me hungry to travel more,
hungry to think more. It has shown me how travel
is a way that you can lose yourself to find yourself.
(41:41):
I set out on this podcast Everywhere to remind people
how if you're not filled with fear, you can go
and find love in travel. I realize that a part
of that has to do with not telling people want
to do, but merely suggesting. So I will see you
(42:06):
with some bonus episodes that we're going to scatter into
the rest of the year as a surprise, and then
I will see you early next year with season two.
Of course, there's lots to look forward to, but I
will tease that to you later. For the moment, think
about how good boys go to heaven and bad boys
(42:28):
go everywhere. Also think about some of the suggestions I've
made over the last few months, being generous, leaving your smartphone,
trying something new, embracing the stillness, universal values, things that
I can do and you can do, and anyone can do.
(42:49):
Of course, I couldn't have done this without my executive producers,
Holly and Christopher the finest Chandler Maze, who's my lead producer.
May this journey so much more collaborative and creative. Thank
you Chandler, and then of course Tristan as co editor
and creator of the soundtrack. So I bid you farewell.
(43:14):
I will see you in disguise or some way random,
and you will find me everywhere. For more podcasts from
(43:35):
I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi, I'm Daniel Scheffler. This is Everywhere, a production of
I Heart Radio. I have traveled to and fro South
Africa my whole life. South Africa's special to me. It
is my country of birth. The country is both my
(00:24):
shield and my sword. It has protected me and it
has also violated me. For my next interview, I'm with
Richard Stengel, my best friend, Mary's husband and Ella's girlfriend,
Tundy's father. He spent time in South Africa writing Nelson
Mandela's book Long Walk to Freedom. He also happened to
(00:47):
work for Time magazine as its managing editor for many
years and the government as Under Secretary of State for
Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, and has now written a
timely book about disinformation, which he is going to tell
us all about. I decided that for this week because
(01:07):
my interview with Richard was so fascinating. You don't want
to hear me. What you really want to hear is
Richard Stingle discussing South Africa and his life on the road.
So here we go. On another note, you remember my
friend Sarah Scarborough on episode seven talking about tea and
(01:29):
the history of tea across the world. Well, Sarah and
I are planning a trip into the soul of Tea.
We're going to China for ten days to UNESCO World
Heritage sites, Tiger Leaping Gorge, and also Shanghai. You can
book this trip with us at a classic tour dot
(01:52):
com slash Soul of t or on my website Daniel
Scheffler dot com, or on her website t Huntress dot com.
Come spend some time with us. We're going everywhere. I'm
with my friend's husband, Richard Stengel, and I've known Richard
(02:17):
for a long time, and I feel like I know
you better because my best friend is your wife, and
I walk the dogs with her in Central Park every day.
So you feel almost part of my life as someone
who I have not spent that much time with. Well,
you're spending time with me, Daniel, when you're spending time
with my wife and my dog, the beloved Toundy. Well,
(02:42):
as everybody knows Ella, Tandy is Ella's girlfriend and they
have been in love for two years now, and they
get to spend the funnest time together. And I have
seen even you soften and become sweet with Tundy. Yes,
she um, she definitely. I've never been a dog person
(03:05):
before and I kind of didn't understand it, and I
get it now and late in life, I'm finally becoming
a dog person, or really a Tundy person. Well, I've
seen you with her and it's very sweet, Richard. I
love it. Even Michael has commented how like sweet you
are with Tundy. And then if we watch you on
MSNBC and you this like serious policy wonk, like intellectual,
(03:27):
and then I'll see you with the dog and you're
like soft and cuddly, and I love that. You know,
it's interesting what dogs do with couples because you direct
a lot of affection towards the dog and in some
ways not so much towards each other, and that the
dog becomes this kind of symbol of your connection in
a in a strange way. Well, whenever I'm traveling, which
is all the time, and a lot of the time
(03:48):
Michael Kohn come with me, he'll say, Oh, ellis missing you.
Ellis really missing you. Oh. He'll um. You know, he's
not the first to have an emotion outwardly, and he'll
say something like, Ella's very sad today because you're not here.
And I hear it for what it is, but it is.
It's a beautiful part of the relationship that it's kind
(04:12):
of made my travel life almost bearable because I'm always
on the road. But I know that there's this dog
at home that's loving Michael. That doesn't have the opposite
effect and make you not want to leave. Yes, of course,
we got back from Italy last night and both Michael
and I we went to pick up Ella from Norna,
(04:33):
and both of us were so like, we couldn't wait
to get to the dog. And it was funny. When
we got home, I was like, Oh, everything's back to normal,
Like it felt like you ease into a normality when
it's the three of us opposed to just us and
we were together in Italy on a holiday. Well, the
way I look at it is, as you know, I
(04:54):
have two sons and a wife, and Tandy I feel
as the one person in the household. It actually has
genuine affection for me. So I can come home and
bore boys are completely uninterested at this age that they're
in now. So Tandi becomes my kind of heartfelt friend
at home. That's very sweet. Richard. I know you have
(05:16):
a book coming out. Tell me about the book. The
book is called Information wars, how we lost the global
battle against disinformation and what to do about it, And
it's the story of my time at the State Department.
I went to the State Department. I've been an editor
of Time for seven years, and I became the Under
Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, which
(05:36):
is always thought of that's the chief marketing officer of
Brand USA. But what I found when I was there
because two events happened about the same time just as
I came into the administration, the Russian annexation of Crimea
and the first of the ISIS beheadings, and I suddenly
saw this tsunami of disinformation coming from Russia about what
(05:59):
was happening, and you Crane and Crimea, all of the
propaganda coming from ISIS about the grievances of of Sunni Muslims,
And this was a whole new world for me. And
we started in both cases these two engines counter ISIS
messaging and counter Russian propaganda. And it's the story of
how we attempted to do that and mostly failed at
(06:20):
it because it's a really hard thing to do, especially
for government. Right, do you think that we'll ever be
able to get over this disinformation issue. You know, one
of the things I say in the book is that
disinformation is as old as information. Right as soon as
there was factual information, there were people lying about it.
And you know, I joked that that began in the
(06:42):
Garden of Eden when Satan said to Eve, you know,
take a bite out of that apple, and nothing's going
to happen to you. That was that was disinformation. So
I think it's unrealistic and naive to think that you
can do away with it. I'm not a purest about
what truth is, um, but it's hard because us there
will always be people who lie, and there will always
(07:03):
be people who believe those laws. And part of that
comes from confirmation bias, which is this idea that we
tend to agree with the things that we already agree with.
So if someone's telling I agree with you, you're such
a smart young man. So the thing is, if someone
is telling you an untruth, but it does adhere to
what you already believe, you'll be much more likely to
(07:25):
believe it. And in fact, there's a something called the opposite,
which is the backfire effect, which is when you try
to disabuse someone of what they believe, they double down
and become even more confirmed in that belief. So so
that's why it's a really hard thing to come back,
because it's really about who we are as human beings. Right. Well,
I spend some time with some trumpet support is recently,
(07:47):
and I think at some point I realize that there's
such a divide between what I believe, whatever it is
gay rights. I'm kind of more we're all in this
mess together, opposed to what this particular person believes, where
it is a much more of a it's me, it's
me alone, and I'm gonna work and do this myself.
(08:09):
And instead of fighting with them and kind of avoiding
that doubling down, as you say, I just listened and
it was one of the most incredible things that's happened
to me. I do a whole episode on this because
I think it's important too to realize that we need
to bridge gaps, all these gaps that are being created
every day. But it's unbelievable what people want to believe.
(08:32):
And I spend time in ushrooms in India, and the
teachers said to me at the end, when you strip
it all away, when you strip away everything you are,
your religion, your bullshit, your sexuality, your gender. You will
only be left with your belief system, and most people
will never let go of that. Yes, there's a lot
(08:56):
in there, Daniel Um. And the thing is one of
the things that Trump did, and I talked about this
in the book is There became this kind of unholy
trinity between Trump and Putin? And isis because in some
ways they were doing the same thing. What did isis do?
They weaponized the grievance of Sunni Muslims who felt left
(09:17):
out by the modern world. What did Putin do? He
weaponized the grievance of Russians who bemoaned the fall of
the Soviet Unit that they were not a global power anymore.
And Trump weaponized the grievance of mostly older, white, not
highly educated Americans who also felt left out by the
modern world, felt left out by globalization, felt that they
(09:37):
weren't having the attention paid to them with the credit
they deserved, and it was going instead to people of
color or LGBT people are all of these new ideas
that they couldn't reckon with. And I don't want to be,
you know, sound um paternalistic about that or or it's
a real thing. And I think one of the things
that we discounted is people who did the a left
(10:00):
out by globalization, which is actually not about jobs being
shipped overseas, but it's really about automation. Is that, you know,
machines and robots are taking the place of workers. And
we've never done a very good job of telling folks,
you know what, that job and that tire making factory
is going to go away because there's a machine that
can do it automatically, who won't have sick days and
do it for one tenth to cost. So I do
(10:23):
think there's this group of people in the United States
who feel that way, and we have and and and
we that is Democrats and liberals, whatever you want to
call it, haven't done a very good job of talking
to them, and haven't done a very good job of
explaining what the future is like. I mean, and I
don't even know what to do about it. I mean,
I think that there's a demographic solution in the US
in the sense that the country is getting darker and
(10:45):
it will be a majority non white country in twenty
I mean, it's a different place than the world that
so many of those Trump voters grew up in. And
I think we all have to adapt to it, said it.
So yesterday I get off the plane and we're driving
back to the city in a cab and I see
a Confederate flag with New Jersey plates and Michael and
(11:08):
I started discussing this, and I said to him, have
you ever seen that? Not in the South? And he
said no, And he was like, but Daniel, what does
it really mean? And my instinct was, it's a call
for help. I need to help him. I need to
not call him a fucking racist. I need to help
this person. I need to show them that me, the
(11:30):
gay white boy from Africa, is the same as him,
that I have the same fears and the same loves
and the same hopes and desires. And that's how I
feel about Trump voters. That's how I feel about other
They call me other, but to me, they are also other.
Somehow I have to help them. Somehow, we have to
help each other because otherwise we're fucked. I completely agree.
(11:53):
And I mean, for years, I was a political correspondent.
I covered three presidential campaigns. I traveled all around extensively
in the South, covered Republican candidates, many of whom I adored.
And you do see this divide, which is too simple
a term for it, where where it all goes back
(12:13):
to America's original sin, which was slavery. And even the
Democratic candidates are now talking about reparations and things, But
it's this original sin because it created a cleave in
America between the South and the North, and the South
and the West, and today the legacy of it is
is a cultural thing. I'm not even I wouldn't in
my heart. I don't necessarily call somebody a racist because
(12:35):
I don't know what's in their heart. I do know
there's a cultural divide and people in the South who
feel that they've been left out, that the direction that
America is going in is a different direction that they
want to go in. And look, some of it I
think is animated by distrust, animosity, fear of the other,
(12:56):
which everybody has. And I do agree that that people
like that need help. The problem is that it's very
hard to have that conversation. For the reasons we were
talking about already, that people double down and their belief
beliefs even the definition of that term, and not necessarily
based on facts. That's one reason it's so hard to
dislodge them. So um again, I don't have an easy answer.
(13:20):
I mean, because even even when you try to disabuse
somebody of something, there are these things that sociologists called
belief echo. So if you if you retweet a Trump
tweet just to say that it's full of falsehoods, there's
a belief echo that people get from seeing the original
Trump tweet that never goes away, even if you say
it's completely false. So it's a difficult problem. And I
(13:42):
do think, you know, not not to get on my
preachy soapbox, but you know, I grew up in the
sixties and seventies, and I always believed what the you know,
the motto on the which is the presidential seal e
plurbus unum out of many one. And my family were
all immigrants. I mean, both of my grandfather's never graduated
(14:02):
from high school, neither of them were born here. And
I always believe in this idea of out of many one,
that that the values of America, the ideas of America,
transcended religion or color or race, and that if you
believed in that, that's what made you an American, and
that's what made you not only equal with other people,
but brothers and sisters with everyone. Else and and I
(14:22):
feel that's been lost. And I feel that one of
the things that Donald Trump has done is deliberately dividing people.
I mean, look, when you run for president, you try
to get votes. But every president, and that i've it's
been in my lifetime, ultimately tries to speak to all
Americans and it has this understanding that I'm president of
all Americans. And Trump doesn't have that. He feels like
(14:43):
I'm only the president for the people who voted for me,
and even not necessarily all of them. So so again,
it's a big problem, and I'm sorry, I'm I'm not
offering any real solutions to it, but I do think
it trying to understand what the person on the other
side thinks is the first up in trying to come
to some kind of harmonious relationship with people. Do you
(15:06):
think that do you feel optimistic? Let me put it
that way. You know, again, partly for this book, I've
I've thought and written a fair amount about cognitive biases,
and and the great Daniel Khneman said that optimism and pessimism,
it's a biological thing, has nothing to do with the
(15:27):
reality you could you know, you could be in the
gates of hell and feel optimistic if that's your temperament.
So I am, by nature an optimistic but I do
think there are some causes for optimism in the sense
that there is more transparency now than there was before.
When when Republican candidates used to run, they just used
dog whistles to appeal to some of these voters. Now
(15:49):
we have a guy in the White House who talking
to them directly, you know, who's using that direct language
of division. And I feel, Okay, now we know it's
out in the open, how do we figure out how
to move forward from here? So I think, you know what,
in the sense that it's it's open and transparent, I
feel good about that, not about those sentiments, but about
(16:10):
how we how we figure out how to move forward
knowing that that this is really who folks are. Right,
Let's take a breathe and we'll be right back with
Everywhere after a word from our sponsors. Thanks for sticking around.
Here's more of Everywhere with no further ado. Let's get
(16:32):
back to Richard Stingle. Richard, So, what I would love
to talk about is how travel has played into your life.
It was such a big part of being the Undersecretary
of State, and obviously as the Edited Time Magazine managing
Edited Time Magazine, you were on a plane all the time,
So share some stories. I know, the chance to flying
(16:56):
coach when you were at the State Department, not always
and them Mary and I have had many a laugh
about that, imagining you shuttling across to the Middle East
in a little seat. Well, you know, the thing that
people didn't realize and I guess I didn't realize before
going into government, is that government travel, at least State
Department travel, is actually governed by congressional legislation which says
(17:21):
you have to always your default carrier has to be
an American carrier, that you sit in coach unless the
flight is over fourteen hours. But one of the things
that I loved about the Obama administration is that people
took the rule seriously, and I would see the Secretary
of the Treasury flying in coach between New York and Washington.
(17:42):
You'd never see that in any other country in the world,
and you probably don't see it in the Trump administration.
So there was something very American, small are Republican about
it that I liked, and because in many ways, part
of the job was, as I said, to project Americans,
the brand of America. And I remember, even when I
was in office, when one of Barack Obama's first trips
(18:04):
to China, he got off the plane and it was
raining out and he was carrying his own umbrella. Well,
it was on the front page of every Chinese newspaper.
The President of the United States was carrying his own umbrella.
Even the deputy mayor of the smallest city in China
has three people carrying umbrellas for him when he gets
off an airplane. And so there's something American about it.
(18:26):
There's something small d democratic about it that I like
much as I didn't always like, you know, sitting in
a very cramped seat for thirteen and a half hours.
And as you know Mary probably told you, in my
State Department staff knows I'm a very cranky traveler, and
people would be like, you know, only the guys who
got the short straw would travel with me at the
(18:47):
State Department because it's like, oh no, but by way,
you have special assistance. That's what the job is called.
You have four as an undersecretary. They're like your go
to people for different reasons in the world. And they
would always have of pieces of dark chocolate espresso beings
covered in dark chocolate and express those for me. Whenever
I was traveling, whenever I got really cranky, it was like,
(19:08):
here's the chocolate and here's the caffeine. So that was
their solution. I have the same with Michael. He gets
so cranky. We flew to room last week and he
was in the worst mood. At some point he said
to me, just don't speak, just don't speak at all.
And I was like, oh, he needs food. Yes. But
the thing about State Department travel, and I have to
(19:30):
say I have I have not done much travel since then.
Is it kind of cures you have travel for a while,
and part because it's not about sight seeing or feeling
the culture. It's about flying all night, getting off an airplane,
going into a series of meetings and not seeing anything.
So I probably went to twenty five different countries during
my three years maybe more in the State Department. And
(19:53):
after the first year or so, I said, hey, you
gotta put at least one sight seeing thing for me
every day. I mean, I remember one of my first
trips to was to burn it to me and mar
I didn't get to see anything and it's like, that's
just not right. And in fact, because part of my
job was to kind of promote cultural connections, I needed
to do things like that sea museums, you know, meet
(20:15):
with young people, and that always was a bit of
a refresher and u But because my kids were still
at home, I tried to travel only between Monday and Friday,
but sometimes I'd be on a trip to three different
countries between Monday and Friday and spend three nights on
an airplane. I mean it was you know, it's not
fun gallivanting around the world. That's what I've been doing.
(20:38):
So that is what you've been doing. Richard, tell me, um,
tell me a story that was memorable or meaningful to
you about the state upon and travel. Well, for me,
I'm trying to think of something and more irreverent. But
this is a little more serious because I got engaged
in this countering Russian disinformation and was so upset, like
(21:01):
so many people about what Russia did in Crimea, which
was part of Ukraine, and then the soft invasion that
they did in eastern Ukraine. I went to Ukraine three
times and completely fell in love with it. I mean,
it feels like a country that is at war, and
they are at war, but it's this country where there's
a lot of resilience and it's a you know, it's
a Kieva is a beautiful city. The Ukrainians a beautiful people,
(21:24):
and it felt like there was an aliveness there when
I was there that that was very inspiring. And because
they're under the gun and they know that, you know,
they're big neighbor to the north, there's always you know,
kind of threatening them. And I also went two or
three times to the Baltics, you know, Riga, Latvia, Lithuania.
Fell in love with the Baltics. Beautiful old world places, lovely,
(21:47):
lovely people also who felt threatened for a thousand years
by Russia, and over that course of the thousand years
they were sometimes part of Russian sometimes not. And so
for me being able to go to those play it
says as an American and saying we're on your side
was was powerful. So it was a different kind of
travel and it made you aware of this sort of
(22:09):
existential threat that different people around the world have. So
it was beautiful and it was meaningful, and I felt
like we were trying to do the right thing. Maybe
there's a part of that that is open to all travelers.
Perhaps it's not just going and enjoying the sites and
being a part of the culture and eating the food,
(22:31):
but also being aware of more of the political, socio
political and as you call it, existential things that are happening.
So go to Africa and be aware of all these
nuances and extremisms that play in a beautiful, scary, incredibly
(22:52):
feisty way in every moment that you're there. Yes, I mean,
when I was a young journalist, the thing that I
love more than anything else was to get an assignment
that would put me on an airplane to go someplace
I had never been before, either in the US or abroad,
and I just felt like my whole world was expanding.
That you know, your view is expanding, it it changes
(23:15):
the court pustles in your body, I think. And in fact,
one of those places was when I first went to
South Africa, and I had been writing for Rolling Stone
Magazine as a freelancer, and I did a couple of
pieces and I was sitting in my editor's office there
one day and she got a phone call from a
famous British journalist who was saying he couldn't go to
(23:38):
South Africa to cover the township riots and the and
the kind of revolution going on there in the mid eighties.
And she turned to me and said, I want to
go to South Africa. Yes, ma'am. I'd never been to
Africa before, and in a couple of weeks I was
flying down there and they wanted me to do a
story about young people and are there friendship across the
(24:00):
color line? And I ended up doing a story in
this little town of Brits in the Western Transport where
there was a forced removal where the where the white
authorities were trying to move the black township further away
from the white town. And I did a story for
them about a young black man and a and a
young white boy living in the same town, which eventually
became my first book called January Son, which was about
(24:23):
three families, including an Indian family, and it was just
so different and and you know, South Africa was an
authoritarian state in those days, and it was a racist
authoritarian state, and it just it just felt so different
that you felt this kind of pressure on you at
all times. But it's an incredibly beautiful place with wonderful,
beautiful people, and it kind of opened my eyes and
(24:46):
I and I remember, you know, I think you probably
know that famous journalistic expression when you go through a
new country. After the first three days, you can write
a book. After the first three weeks, you can write
an article. But after three months you don't know what
to say. You feel there in that you have that
kind of overconfidence about your sense of a situation when
(25:07):
you're first there, of that first week or so. But
I remember when I went back to work on the book,
and I spent about six months living in this really
godforsaken little town, African speaking town, and and I did
do the book, but it just becomes much more complex.
It's just you don't have these factile and easy things
to say about any place when you've spend a lot
of time there. And it's an interesting rule. And you know,
(25:30):
most of us when we travel, we don't spend a
long time in a particular place. And even though it
expands your brain, you also have to realize you're not
really completely understanding the place the way you would if
you really spend a lot of time there. People go
to Cape Town all the time, right, and they tell
me the story, Oh, Cape Town is incredible, so beautiful,
in the food and the wine and the blah blah blah.
(25:50):
You know what they tell and then I go, yes,
but one about everything else. And it's so easy to
not see that. That's the thing about travel. You have
to be open to the good in the band. Yes,
and Cape Town is a particularly good example, because it's
such a stunningly beautiful place. But you know, we're talking
about first world white travelers, and they don't go to Kayla,
(26:13):
to the township, or see how vast that is. I mean,
and I guess people don't want to get cloud revision.
It's a little bit depressing. And that's why South Africa
is such a poignant and heartbreaking place, because there's so
much beauty and wealth and then so much poverty and
and despair, and it's hard to see all of that.
(26:33):
And you know, you know, I worked with Nelson Mandela,
and so of course when I was working with him,
we were always going to places like Kayla and Soweto
and and and it was also an eye opener for
me and to go with him where he was beloved,
and just to see the poverty that they lived in
the and the fact that you know that the first
(26:54):
world part of South Africa depended on the on the
poverty of black South Africans, and you know that's a
hard thing and and they're still, of course trying to
evolve out of that. How was your time with Nelson Mandela.
You wrote the book for him with him to Freedom,
To Freedom. Um. I remember reading that as a child
(27:15):
and I struggled through it. But it's something I remember.
I remember my opinions of South Africa and feeling complicated
about it, and being from there but not growing up there,
but my parents not being from there but sort of
from there, and what all of that meant to me.
Travel has taken me out of all that and back
(27:37):
in And that's the beauty that travel has given me.
And I don't know if I would have had this
perspective or this feeling in the world if I wasn't
from South Africa. Well there's that saying from I think
it was Emerson. What do Americans know? Who only America? No?
And that's how I feel about South Africans. What do
(27:58):
South Africans now? Who only South African knows? Because of
course South Africans weren't allowed to travel anywhere else in
the world, and there's a kind of narcissism that white
South Africans have, but to see it through Nelson Mandela,
whom I loved, was such a privilege. And you know
he was a beautiful man, right, I mean he's six two, handsome, big, beaming, smile,
(28:21):
broad's shoulders, had been a boxer as a young man.
I remember Walter Susula, who was with him on Robin
Island for all those years and really was his closest
friend and advisor. One of the great privileges working on
the book is I got to meet all of those
people and interview them. And I remember Walter told me
this story when Mandela first came to Johannesburg as eighteen
years old from the Provinces, and Walter Ssuli was a
(28:42):
real estate Asian in Soweto and was the head of
the A n C Youth League, and he said, when
Nelson Mandela walked through that door, I said to myself,
we want to be a mass organization. That young man
as a mass leader. For all the reasons I was said.
He was tall, he was handsome, he's mild, which was
an unusual thing in the nineteen fifties for a leader
(29:04):
to smile. We were you all used to that now
and and sort of see South Africa through his eyes
and through all of the terrible prejudice that he was
the victim of. I mean, it just unimaginable. Right, He's
spent twenty seven years in prison, the prime of his life.
He missed out on his family life and and all
of that. And I was about to say, yet, he's
(29:26):
not bitter, what people always say, I can't believe he's
not bitter. He in fact, he was bitter, but part
of his leadership was to hide that from people. He
could not have reconciled the country and let people see
him being bitter towards jailers. So what did he do.
He spoke Afrikaans to his jailers, He had lunch with them,
He went to see Mrs f Voote, who was the
you know, the wife of the man who created apartheide
(29:47):
because he needed people to believe that he wasn't bitter,
that they could reconcile, that black and white could get
along without feeling like this history of enmity was going
to corrupt the present. Shouldn't we be applying that to
this country right now? Shouldn't I be going for lunch
(30:08):
or with tea with Mrs Trump. I need to do something.
I have a small platform. I have this show that's
about travel, and it's about opening your eyes, and it's
about life and it's and it's about being open and
and I want to use this to get people to vote.
For instance, I don't care who the funk your vote for,
just vote, exercise your democracy. Or I want to use
(30:31):
this to just be like I'm just like you. You know,
they are truck drivers that listen to my show. I
know this because they've contacted me on Instagram. They travel
a lot, they travel a lot, and they must have
heard my ad on I Heart radio across the nation
and they download my show. Like a white straight truck
(30:54):
driver from Idaho sent me a message on Instagram and
told me I love your show. That for me is
crossing a divide which I'm almost overwhelmed by. And and
that's encouraging. I mean, it's almost a bit of a
dirty word. I mean to say, I'm an American exceptionalist.
And but what I mean by American exceptionalism is this
(31:18):
idea of out of many, one of e Plurbius un
him that this is the country that is this great
as the cliche goes melting pot where people come here
and embrace the ideas and get past their prejudices and
hatreds from the old world wherever they came from. I mean, again,
that's a bit of a sentimentalization of the whole thing.
But it hurts me that America is so divided that
(31:42):
people aren't embracing the ideas that make us who we are.
And I have again at a positive view of what
American nous is and and it crushes me to see
that that people are not embracing that, and that you
have a president of the United States who doesn't seem
to understand that. But Daniel, you know what, I think
you'll solve the whole problem by having Milannia Trump on
(32:03):
your show and that will bring the whole country togame. Well, Milannia, come,
I'm waiting. This is a great moment for us to
travel to advertising Land and we'll be right back with everywhere.
Welcome once again to everywhere. Let's hop back to it.
So with no further ado, let's get back to Richard
(32:27):
and I. I remember last year there was a death
threat with the male bomber towards you and your family.
Was an MSNBC, and I remember feeling like, how shocking
that was. Mary and I walked that day with the
dogs and she's sub African and she was a war
(32:47):
photographer and she's like chilled. But I remember feeling like, fuck,
that's serious. But I think if you and that person
happened to be in the same room, that person would
see that you are no threat, that you don't need
to be bombed, that you are only interested in this
country and what's best for this country, and that you
(33:08):
are just the same. Well, I I was sort of
blaise about it, because these guys of knuckleheads, and they
tend to not be able to do the thing that
they say they want to do. And I and when
I was at the State Department, I got many threats
from from ISIS guys and their acolytes. And even when
I was editor of Time, similar kinds of things. And
(33:29):
I think when you're in the arena or in the
public eye, that that is part of the job. And again,
as you said about Mary, I mean she was a
township war photographer. I remember when when I was an
editor of Time, and we we did the protester as
a Person of the Year, and we I was the
entire square during the protests there during the Arab Spring,
(33:50):
and I got tear gased back. The our foreign editor
kind of grabbed me and rescued me from it, and
like I proudly called her at night and she was like,
I was tear guests fifty different times. Completely yeah, completely unimpressed.
And so yeah, so I mean, get you get used
(34:11):
to it. At the same time, I think there is
a on a continuum. I think people in left and
right do have more in common than they think they do.
This idea that we're so polarized is in some ways exaggerated.
I mean, we're not as polarized as we were during
the Civil War, when one out of four American boys
between eighteen and twenty four lost their lives and there
(34:34):
was a civil war about an ideological disagreement. So we're very,
very far from that. But I do think this, like
this Caesar sayok Fellow and the and other sort of
white supremacist terrorists. You know, we have to figure out
how to tone down the language because it does obviously
have an effect on them. And we see that all
the time. And I've always thought it was naive when
(34:56):
I'd hear Congress. People say, oh, so and so was
created by the internet, or this terrorism is caused by
the internet. That's silly. The internet doesn't cause anybody anything.
But at the same time, it does make people more extreme.
They double down on their beliefs, and we have to
figure out how to how to tone down the rhetoric
(35:17):
and how to talk to each other in a more
civil way. This leads me into thinking about something that
you and I have definitely talked about, but I don't
know if we've talked about this enough. I wonder how
do we then combat the disinformation. So I speak to
my neighbor and she's convinced that climate change is not real.
(35:38):
I push her friend in Italy in a wheelchair around
ma Tera and it's a hundred and four degrees and
the guide who's with us keeps saying it's the hottest
sum on record, glaciers are melting, it's it's never been
this hot in Italy, and the woman goes, it's a hoax,
don't believe it. How do I possibly show her that
(36:02):
the information that she has is not correct. It's it's tough,
as we've been saying. And one of the things I
say in the book is that we don't have a
fake news problem. We have a media literacy problem that
people can't and haven't been taught how to distinguish between
something that's fact and fiction what the provenance of that
information is. And we're also scientifically illiterate that so much
(36:27):
of the skepticism and doubt about climate change comes from
people who are not scientifically literate, that are not reading
scientific papers about the way the environment has changed and
what how man has caused that to change. And again,
I don't it's not an easy answer, because as we
were talking about earlier, there's that backfire effect if someone
(36:48):
is so persuaded that climate change is false, when you
try to dissuade them of that or try to persuade
them of something else, that often reconfirms the belief that
they already have. And I do think, you know, one
of the things that that is a problem of our
time is that now this is going to sound really grandiose,
which is that technology is evolving, but human beings are not.
(37:13):
Technology is evolving at a rapid rate, and we still
have the you know, reptilian brain that we had years ago.
That's a problem. And I actually think that we can
figure out how to use technology to evolve us and
to make democracy work better. But right now we're so
focused on how technology is undermining that, which it may be,
(37:36):
but it also has the potential of making us more
evolved and in an objective, scientific way, saying, look, here's
the reality. Everybody's got to recognize that we may differ
on what to do about it or what caused it,
but this is the state of play that we can
all acknowledge. And you know, when I was went into
the State Department and was confirmed before Congress, one of
(37:59):
the things I said in my opening remarks was this
great line from from Daniel Patrick moynihan. It was the
New York Senator when I was growing up here, and
he said, Uh, people are entitled to their own opinions,
they're not entitled to their own facts. But nowadays people
feel like they're entitled to their own facts. That that
I have a fact, it's not an opinion. Well, that's
a very hard thing to disabuse people of. And I
(38:22):
do think technology can help us come to a factual
basis of different things that we can all agree on.
That to me is the foundation for progress. Right to
just agree that two plus two equals four. Then how
do we move on from there? Right? I would talk
to you all day. Let's some rap and tell me
something like a funny story about Nelson Mandela, or like
(38:45):
something funny or travel story that's funny. Um. I don't
know if you know, but when I was working with Mandela,
he knew Mary because Mary photographed him on the first
day he came out of active verst air prison. And
she's a beautiful, red haired photographer, pretty unforgettable. And when
(39:06):
he saw that we were going out together, he would
always say to me, you must marry that girl. It's
hard to say no to Nelson Mandela and I did not.
And when our first son was about to be born,
we called him on New Year's Day. We used to
call him or see him every New Year's Day, and
I wanted to tell him that Mary was pregnant, which
(39:26):
I did do. And I was talking to him on
the phone and I said, if if it's a boy,
we're going to call him Harley clock Law. As you know,
that's Nelson Mandela's real first name. I caused the name
that's unpronounceable and unspellable. Well, he has a pretty good
sense of humor. And he was silent, and I thought,
did I mispronounced it? Did he think it was presumptuous
(39:48):
of this white American to name his son Holy Colock Law?
So I said, would you like to say hello to Mary?
And he said of course, And I passed the phone
to her and she said hello, Medee. But what everybody
called him? And then I was standing close so I
could hear what he said. After that, he said, I
cannot wait to see you and a little holly clack clock. Well,
(40:10):
I love that it turned out to be Gabe and not.
So what happened was, you know, cut to whatever it was.
Five months later, we're in the hospital and the boy
is born, and we thought, oh my god, can we
we have to do something. But we can't call him
Holly clockline his first name. So Gabriel Stengel's middle name
is Curley clock Clock. I never knew that. Gaby, baby, yes,
(40:34):
with the beautiful middle name. That's sweet. I could spend
the rest of the day with you and talk everything.
I'm happy to thank you for making time for me,
and I can't wait for your book. That's some imminent.
So congratulations on the book. Thank you so much. It's
great to have it done, and it's been fantastic to
(40:57):
be with you today. Than Richard, I guess I'll go
back to may Verry now have her on the show.
I'd love to have on the show. It has come
to the end of our season one. I have had
the most memorable and joyous time. I love creating and
(41:20):
thinking about this. We've covered so much ground emotionally and
of course physically, and it's left me hungry to travel more,
hungry to think more. It has shown me how travel
is a way that you can lose yourself to find yourself.
(41:41):
I set out on this podcast Everywhere to remind people
how if you're not filled with fear, you can go
and find love in travel. I realize that a part
of that has to do with not telling people want
to do, but merely suggesting. So I will see you
(42:06):
with some bonus episodes that we're going to scatter into
the rest of the year as a surprise, and then
I will see you early next year with season two.
Of course, there's lots to look forward to, but I
will tease that to you later. For the moment, think
about how good boys go to heaven and bad boys
(42:28):
go everywhere. Also think about some of the suggestions I've
made over the last few months, being generous, leaving your smartphone,
trying something new, embracing the stillness, universal values, things that
I can do and you can do, and anyone can do.
(42:49):
Of course, I couldn't have done this without my executive producers,
Holly and Christopher the finest Chandler Maze, who's my lead producer.
May this journey so much more collaborative and creative. Thank
you Chandler, and then of course Tristan as co editor
and creator of the soundtrack. So I bid you farewell.
(43:14):
I will see you in disguise or some way random,
and you will find me everywhere. For more podcasts from
(43:35):
I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Everywhere News
Host
Daniel Scheffler
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