The Christiane Amanpour Interview

Christiane Amanpour is the host of CNN's award-winning flagship global program “Amanpour,” https://www.cnn.com/shows/amanpour where she’s been one of the network's most trusted voices on foreign affairs since 1983. She joins us this week from New York City amid the UN General Assembly and President Trump’s continued attacks on the press. We begin with the White House ban (3:00), the President's challenges to the First Amendment (4:18), and the erosion of public trust in mainstream media (11:00). Then, we tell some of Christiane’s story: fleeing Iran during the Islamic revolution (23:55), her seminal reporting from the frontlines in Bosnia (31:17), and how she sees the role—and function—of journalism (33:53). On the back-half, Amanpour reflects on navigating family and motherhood in a high-risk career (39:45), the trauma and healing that followed years of war reporting (44:00), and modeling civil dialogue on ⁠The Ex Files⁠ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/christiane-amanpour-presents-the-ex-files/id1807787260, a podcast she co-hosts with her ex-husband, former U. S. diplomat and Assistant Secretary of State Jamie Rubin (55:38). To close, she discusses CNN’s coverage of Israel and Gaza (58:47), the “fight of her life” for free speech (1:13:32), and why, after more than four decades, she still believes in asking questions guided by facts, holding those in power to account, bearing witness—and doing a job she continues to love (1:14:00). Subscribe to our ⁠⁠⁠YouTube channel⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@talkeasypod. As always, our email: [email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Again, I don't think I'm political, but I have a deep respect for human rights.

• 0:05Sam Fragoso?

  What do you mean you're not political?

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Because if it's being political, holding up democracy, then I'm political. If it's political advocating for the truth and honesty, then I'm political. If it's political believing in human rights, I'm political.

• 0:20Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, I think you're political.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 0:24Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:40Sam Fragoso?

  Today, legendary journalist Christiane Amanpour. Her illustrious career spans more than four decades, joining CNN in 1983, just years after she left Iran for the US amid the revolution. She quickly rose the ranks at the then fledgling network out of Atlanta, eventually becoming CNN's leading international correspondent, and later, chief international anchor, reporting from war-torn conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Gaza, resulting in a reputation immortalized in a New York Times Magazine profile with the headline, "Where There's War, There's Amanpour." But despite Amanpour's celebrated career,

• 1:23Sam Fragoso?

  16 Emmys, four Peabodies, enough honorary degrees to fill a corner office, she rarely agrees to long-form interviews. And so this past week, I flew out to New York City ahead of the high-level meetings at this year's UN General Assembly to talk to Amanpour about the recent attacks President Trump has made against the press, including MSNBC, CNN, and Politico, all of which the president temporarily banned from the White House for intentionally publishing, quote, "negative news." In turn, the four-mentioned outlets filed a joint lawsuit to which a US district judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the ban for 14 days and prompting the White House to reinstate press access. But that's just the beginning of today's episode.

• 2:08Sam Fragoso?

  In Act Two and Three, we tell some of Christiane's story: fleeing Iran during the Islamic Revolution, making a name for herself as a young, fearless reporter in a male-dominated field, her contentious exchange with President Bill Clinton, her seminal coverage from the front lines in Bosnia, how she sees the role and function of journalism, the emotional toll of the job, the internal pressures inside CNN, the critiques she's faced along the way, and why she believes asking questions guided by facts and not feelings, holding those in power to account and bearing witness, is still worth doing after 40 years of work. That's coming up next with Christiane Amanpour.

• 2:50Sam Fragoso?

  Christiane Amanpour.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:51Sam Fragoso?

  Thank you for being here.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  You're welcome, Sam. You got my name right.

• 2:55Sam Fragoso?

  You know, I worked hard to get it right. Hopefully, I get a few other things right today.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  Let's hope.

• 3:00Sam Fragoso?

  This past week, President Trump announced that he was banning MSNBC.

• 3:05Speaker 00

  Let's get right to it, yeah.

• 3:06Sam Fragoso?

  Politico, and of course, your company, CNN,

• 3:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:09Sam Fragoso?

  from the White House as a result of what he calls "their constant reporting of fake news, fiction, and lies." When pressed about the decision, this is what the president had to say. Do you want to take a look?

• 3:23Speaker 00

  Yes, please.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  It's sick. I mean, there's something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories. Now, if they want to write them, that's fine, but I don't have to let them into the people's house.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  So I'm happy that he very quickly recognized that the White House is the people's house and not his house. And I just think that, as you've heard from many of our organizations who've just been banned, they continue to report, and they are going to take matters into their own hands, depending on how it goes, right? They're going to see how this is going to fall out. I brought my little iPad here, and it's great that you asked me that question because I have also, you know, I'm an activist for the press. I'm on many, many boards. I believe in being an activist for the truth and for the press. So I've quoted Thomas Jefferson and many others about the First Amendment and the role of the press.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  So Thomas Jefferson, and I'm going to paraphrase, when doing the amendments and putting the Constitution together and giving the United States this special gift that none of us have, I mean, we, the Brits, are older than you guys. We don't even have a First Amendment, right? But here, we are protected. I'm not even me, but the press is. And Jefferson said, "If it comes to, would I prefer government without the press or the press without the government, I would choose the latter." I.e., so fundamental is the press, the free and independent press, to the actual governance of a healthy and thriving democracy that it is imperative that we protect, and the government and everybody else get serious about the First Amendment

• 5:07Speaker 00

  and keeps protecting, you know, this right that only America affords. So some people think what the president does, I'm not going to use that legal term, but is somewhere on the outskirts of what is allowed under the Constitution. And, you know, this, some people believe, violates the First Amendment. And this is what Teddy Roosevelt once said, which is why I want to quote, because it's important.

• 5:31Sam Fragoso?

  By the way, let me set the stage a little bit.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 5:33Sam Fragoso?

  In case people were wondering what it's like for two interviewers to sit at a table.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:38Sam Fragoso?

  It's dueling iPads.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  It's dueling, but I'm going to put mine away. The minute I finish this quote.

• 5:43Sam Fragoso?

  It's quotes.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. The minute I finish this quote.

• 5:46Sam Fragoso?

  The due diligence, I respect endlessly.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  So this is Teddy Roosevelt.

• 5:49Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." And I think that's really the bottom line. The United States of America has this First Amendment, which demands that journalists are independent, and they speak truth to power, and they hold the powerful accountable on behalf of the American people who've elected those individuals. It's a basic contract, and I think anybody who forgets that contract does it at their peril. But of course, as Maggie Haberman, the president's really excellent biographer and daily reporter,

• 6:32Speaker 00

  and her new book with Jonathan Swan, they basically have told me, anyway, that the president's superpower, this president's superpower, is his shamelessness. He just doesn't care. And he's ready to do whatever it takes to, you know, basically try to control the narrative. And I think that's what this is about. Things are not going awfully well for the president. The war in Iran is not going as he expected. Inflation is not great. Cost of living is still a problem for the American people. You know, we're not sure how the midterms are going to go, but polling suggests that it's not going to go great for him. The Kennedy Center, is he going to pull it down or not? Again, extrajudiciously.

• 7:12Sam Fragoso?

  He loves a construction job.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  And his own name.

• 7:15Sam Fragoso?

  Interior design is really, I think, where he's meant to be. Of course, that clip is a lot of talk from Trump. But reporters from those outlets, including CNN, at the time of recording, did just have their badges confiscated.

• 7:28Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 7:29Sam Fragoso?

  As someone who's been doing this work as long as you have.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:34Sam Fragoso?

  And you've been in it day to day, reporting on the US, at least in some capacity, basically since 1983. How do you see this political moment? Does it feel different to you?

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Well, look, first of all, I started at CNN in 1983. That's 43 years ago at the time of recording. That's 43 years. And I was literally on the bottom rung of the job there. I was like entry-level assistant on the international desk. So I learnt in the 80s, again, it was a pretty hostile environment for the press, you know, and as we know, during the Nixon administration, before that, it was pretty hostile for the press. But I learnt, before I even became a reporter in the late 1980s, and then a foreign correspondent in 1990, that you must take this job seriously. You must understand what it means to be a reporter and a journalist for an American organization

• 8:31Speaker 00

  which has this unique constitutional protection called the First Amendment. And you must be willing to walk the walk, to talk the talk, and to hold power accountable. That's your basic contract with the people. And if you're not prepared to do that, then you might as well hang up your spurs and be a stenographer. I mean, if they want us to just describe what they do, I mean, I grew up like that. I grew up in Iran, watching news, you know, as just one praiseworthy item after another about the Shah. The same thing then happened about Ayatollah Khomeini. The same thing happens in many of the countries that I cover, in many of the authoritarian and dictatorships, whether it's in Africa, whether it's in Asia, wherever it might be. So I've seen this, and I've witnessed it, and I see what it does.

• 9:16Sam Fragoso?

  Having seen all that you have, does it feel different?

• 9:19Speaker 00

  It feels different this time around, and thank you for coming back to the question, because this is the second Trump round. And what it feels is that he has surrounded himself by like-minded loyalists, some would say sycophants, some of them are, ideologues. And he has made it his business this time, the president, to, through, you know, the way the people accept and through the courts, has tried to and has successfully redefined the limits of executive power. Apparently, who knew that in the United States, there aren't laws to stop this stuff? We all thought there were, but apparently they're not. So when it's challenged by somebody as high-level

• 10:04Speaker 00

  as the president of the United States, any president. And suddenly you see Congress or certain other, you know, members of civil society and corporations and all the rest of it, so-called bending the knee, and in some cases preemptively so. And you think, oh, well, surely that norm will prevent this happening. Just take pulling down the east wing of the White House. Just take the threat against the Kennedy Center, which was a bipartisan building. It was started and it was, yeah, started under the President Eisenhower, who is what? A Republican.

• 10:38Sam Fragoso?

  So you quoted Teddy Roosevelt a little bit earlier. I'm going to quote you for a second.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 10:42Sam Fragoso?

  In the opening speech at last year's gala for the Committee to Protect Journalists, you said, "Understand that only a strong, vibrant and independent press can ensure a healthy democracy. We are a vital pillar of civil society, and killing us off will not make any nation great again." And yet, as David Remnick, The New Yorker, often points out, "Public distrust of outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The New Yorker are at record levels." He says, quote, "Our ratings are a misery." How have you squared away this question of public distrust and the erosion of faith in mainstream media? How do you grapple with that? Because of course you call it a vital pillar of civil society.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Number one, it is. No civil society or democracy without a healthy, vibrant, independent press is a healthy democracy. That is just a fact.

• 11:36Sam Fragoso?

  And yet, why is that not a shared belief in the viewers and readers?

• 11:39Speaker 00

  Well, I think it might be, but of course, you're talking about viewers and readers in the United States who have only known an independent press, right? That's all they've known. But as you know, over the last decades, and particularly the last few years, a series of events have happened which conspired to puncture trust in institutions, right? So you've had the internet, you've had social media, you've had all of this stuff which has divided people. There's no, you know, crossing the aisle, no cross-party lines anymore, even in Congress, even in anywhere, you know? Everything is weaponized, ideas are weaponized, politics are weaponized, you know, opinions are weaponized. So the people now are being brought up on a diet of hatred,

• 12:25Speaker 00

  a diet of mistrust, a diet of partisanship, a diet of not believing anything other than their own echo chamber, a diet of conspiracy theories, a diet of going down various, you know, rabbit holes.

• 12:35Sam Fragoso?

  And do you think CNN has contributed to that culture?

• 12:37Speaker 00

  I think what the problem is, is that we, of course, have suffered also from, A, and CNN, and all legacy media, by the way. This is not just a CNN issue. It's all legacy media. Have suffered from the changing economic model, the changing business model, the changing priorities. And yet, I do believe, and I see it every single day, that organizations such as CNN, which are legacy, tried, true, tested organizations, you can name any others around the world, from, you know, Le Monde in France, to The New York Times, to the FT, to the whatever, you know, everywhere, plus ProPublica, and all those things that contribute to a very, very important

• 13:22Speaker 00

  and vital news infrastructure. I think people still know, and I tell them anyway, that now you need, you, the viewers and the consumers and the listeners and the podcasters and all the rest of it, you need to go and do your own homework and do your own due diligence and find the tried and true and trusted sources of information. Because for me, it's like breaks my heart. It's like a dagger through my heart when I've spent my whole life practically with my colleagues, risking my life in the worst places in the world to try to bring the truth. When people say to me, I don't know where to look to find the truth, I'm like, you know, and then I say, okay, well, I'll give you a few names. There's CNN, there's The New York, et cetera, et cetera, right?

• 14:05Speaker 00

  So I do think that the situation of the world has contributed to our pain and our troubles right now. But I still think, because you see subscriptions, you see people looking for, whether it's online and whatever platform there is right now, you see people also gravitating to try to find where they can find credible news delivered by people with integrity, with a code of professional conduct, with rules of the road, fact checking and all the rest of it. So I do think that it's a big issue, no doubt about it, but we have to keep, you know, plugging away. And I, with respect perhaps, disagree with the president that this is all about fake news. And remember, in his first term,

• 14:48Speaker 00

  he tried to ban our then correspondent, Jim Acosta. You know, so this is not new, but it's annoying and it mustn't stop us.

• 14:56Sam Fragoso?

  It's not new, and of course, Donald Trump is not the first president.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 15:00Sam Fragoso?

  American or otherwise, that you've confronted head on. But your feelings about the country and the office of the presidency, I think are maybe a little bit more complicated than people may realize. And I thought, if you're open to it, you could read this passage for us. It comes from a.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Comes from me?

• 15:22Sam Fragoso?

  It comes from a 1994 profile.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 15:24Sam Fragoso?

  That appeared in The New York Times Magazine with the headline, "Where There's War, There's Amanpour."

• 15:29Speaker 00

  People think I have this adversarial thing with Clinton, that would be Bill Clinton, but I don't. I really believe in the American presidency. I think he has to be supported, and it's awful that people are trying to tear him down with sleazy and obviously political attacks. But if America still wants to be a real force in the world, it has to act like a real force. If it wants to have a leadership role, it has to lead. I believe in the law of the jungle. There are strong and there are weak. There is an order in our species and our world. What's happening now is that no one seems to know what the order is. Christiane Amanpour, 10/9/94. So it's September, right? September 10th? Or is it, is 10 in your way?

• 16:06Sam Fragoso?

  October.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  October, more or less.

• 16:08Sam Fragoso?

  I should have changed it.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  More or less, more or less. So that's more than 30 years ago, 32 years ago. And I think I'm absolutely correct. I, as an immigrant to the United States, which I'm not formally, but a foreigner, part Iranian, part English, who was brought up really admiring the United States, like the typical foreigner view of the United States, thinking that it was the, as they said under Reagan, the shining city on the hill, believing in the values, believing in the, you know, upward mobility, believing if you, you know, if you try, you can get there. It's what brought me to the US for university and to start CNN. But to say that, I believed in the power, and this is 1994, right?

• 16:52Speaker 00

  I believe in the power of the nations that claim to be democratic, to observe the values of human rights, to be moral arbiters and hold themselves as a beacon for the rest of the world, which the United States has done until this administration, right?

• 17:09Sam Fragoso?

  So has your faith been shaken?

• 17:10Speaker 00

  Well, yes, but the reason I was saying that there is because it was in the middle of the genocide in Bosnia that neither Clinton nor any of the Western leaders around the world were ready to intervene. Until one year after that, maybe a little bit more than one year, less, there was the massacre at Srebrenica. We've just gone through the 31st anniversary of that,

• 17:36Speaker 00

  when seven to 8,000 Muslim European boys and men were slaughtered in Europe. It was the first time such a thing had happened since World War II in Europe, and the world didn't know how to deal with it. And the lack of leadership, which I was complaining about there, was the first big challenge to the American-led world order after World War II. Well, finally, after Srebrenica, President Clinton said, "Enough already. That's one massacre in Bosnia too much, and we are going to stop the Bosnian Serbs. We're going to attack their military emplacements." Not them. They barely killed anybody when they did go in and stop this, but they attacked the mortar positions and the heavy guns and the, you know, the ammunition storage and this and that. Within two weeks, it was over.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  And then they led a successful diplomatic effort to bring peace to Bosnia, which has held ever since. So yes, I stand by that, and I think things are very different now. Show me the diplomacy. There's a war going on in Iran right now. In two major cases, civilians have been killed. There was a wedding party recently, and there was the school where more than 100 children were killed. And the US has still not done a full investigation into it and accepted responsibility for it. And worse, there's no active diplomacy to end this war, which is going who knows where.

• 18:57Sam Fragoso?

  So growing up in Iran, you had this notion.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:00Sam Fragoso?

  Of America as, what did you call it?

• 19:03Speaker 00

  The shining city on the hill. That is not my term.

• 19:05Sam Fragoso?

  It was Reagan's term.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  The Reagans, yeah.

• 19:06Sam Fragoso?

  Of course, but you had this idea.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  We all wanted to be Americans. We all wanted to go to America.

• 19:10Sam Fragoso?

  A belief, as you said in this quote, "I really believe in the American presidency," which is a sentence that I don't think a lot of people could or would say.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. I'm not sure exactly why I said that, but I'm sure I was asked about President Clinton, because I had a famous ding dong with him.

• 19:26Sam Fragoso?

  Yes.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  In which I asked him, why all his flip flops? Could you justify the flip flops? And he went, in those days.

• 19:34Sam Fragoso?

  Do you want to?

• 19:35Speaker 00

  Batshit crazy.

• 19:35Sam Fragoso?

  Play some of that ding dong?

• 19:36Speaker 00

  If you'd like to.

• 19:37Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  So my question is, as leader of the free world, as leader of the only superpower, why has it taken you, the United States, so long to articulate a policy on Bosnia? Why, in the absence of a policy, have you allowed the US and the West?

• 19:53Speaker 03

  To be held hostage to those who do have a clear policy, the Bosnian Serbs. And do you not think that the constant flip flops of your administration on the issue of Bosnia sets a very dangerous precedent and would lead people such as Kamil Song or other strong people to take you less seriously than you would like to be taken?

• 20:18Speaker 04

  No, but speeches like that may make them take me less seriously than I'd like to be taken. There have been no constant flip flops, madam. I ran for president, saying that I would do my best to limit ethnic cleansing and to see the United States play a more active role in resolving the problem in Bosnia.

• 20:37Sam Fragoso?

  Watching that, what did your parents think?

• 20:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, not just my parents, but my whole family thought I'd gone crazy and that I'd lost my mind. And that's not how this good girl was brought up and that we were brought up to respect authority.

• 20:51Sam Fragoso?

  So your parents saw you on TV.

• 20:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, they were all mad at me.

• 20:55Sam Fragoso?

  She has lost her goddamn mind.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. What is she doing challenging the American president on live television? But again, it was about the issue of Bosnia, right? I was witnessing and he was saying something completely different at a CNN town hall. I was ordered with other CNN journalists to ask him a question from the field. I heard what he was saying. I asked him a question. I didn't have a pre-written question that I was going to ask him, no matter what he said. I was listening. It was two or three o'clock in the morning or something like that, Sarajevo time. It was prime time in the United States. President was running for his second term and he was giving a foreign policy speech at CNN.

• 21:28Sam Fragoso?

  That was you at two or three in the morning?

• 21:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:30Sam Fragoso?

  I gotta say.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  I know. Pretty hot, right?

• 21:33Sam Fragoso?

  Really well done. Really well done.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  And I was feeling sick, you know, and we had to.

• 21:38Sam Fragoso?

  You're putting all of us to shame.

• 21:40Speaker 00

  Well, I was feeling sick, partly because I was feeling physically sick, but I was also feeling nervous. I had never asked a president a question before. I've never interviewed a sitting president.

• 21:48Sam Fragoso?

  And the situation was sickening?

• 21:50Speaker 00

  It was sickening, actually, because I was watching the ethnic cleansing and the genocide unfold. And we were calling it like it was, like it was.

• 21:57Sam Fragoso?

  So why were your parents upset with you calling balls and strikes?

• 22:00Speaker 00

  Because it's not what we did growing up in Iran. There's a very famous, I think I will tell you. So the Shah of Iran, my family supported the Shah of Iran. So at one point, we had the Asian Games in Iran. And the Asian Games were like the Asian Olympics, but they were, you know, and it was happening in Tehran. And a very close family friend of my family's, and I called uncle, was an architect and a builder, and he built the stadium. And when we went to his house for Friday lunch, as we often did, there was, ready to go into the stadium, a bust of the Shah sitting on, in the hallway. And he was going to take it to the stadium. Remember, he built the stadium and he had all the accoutrements and there was a bust

• 22:44Speaker 00

  of the Shah. My sister, we were young, went up and grabbed the nose of the statue and just did a little side, you know, like one of those cheeky things, right? My father came up and in front of anybody who might have been looking, slapped her away from it. And that was to say, I don't approve of that to any of you who are surveilling us or who are watching us. I grew up in that kind of situation. And so, yes, my parents were shocked that I would have challenged an elected president of the most powerful country in the whole wide world. I thought I was just doing my job, by the way. I was just asking a question that I would have done in any press conference. But the funniest thing was that also in the room, because this was a live event in Atlanta,

• 23:26Speaker 00

  was Ted Turner, at the time, the president of CNN, Tom Johnson, and all the other CNN, you know, muckety mucks. And they went white, apparently. But to their credit, I didn't get fired and I didn't get told off.

• 23:40Sam Fragoso?

  According to this article, where there's war, there's Amanpour. I think he got promoted. I mean, there's a whole section about contract disputes and you're getting offered millions of dollars from competing.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true.

• 23:51Sam Fragoso?

  So it seems like it worked out.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  It worked out.

• 23:54Sam Fragoso?

  Now, back in Iran, tell me, what did the Iranian revolution of 1978, you must have been 20 years old at the time, did it change the way you saw the world? Because it's one thing to read or watch a news story. It's another to be at the center of one. I mean, you had friends and family who were imprisoned and executed. What did that do to you?

• 24:15Speaker 00

  First of all, it very quickly opened my eyes and it made me grow up. I mean, as I say, I'd lived a political, you know, beautiful childhood. And when that happened, I was old enough to, you know, it went through my brain, you know, it just shocked me. And I happened to be, what should we call it, on a year out of education, because I hadn't done terribly well trying to get into medical school. So I was wandering around in the educational and professional wilderness, wondering what to do with myself.

• 24:47Sam Fragoso?

  So this was Amanpour's gap year.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Gap year. Gap year plus, in any event.

• 24:52Sam Fragoso?

  You almost seem ashamed of this.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  I don't, I'm not. I just think it's, now it's good, now I'm glad, you know? And I always would always talk about failure because I think that that's a very, very important part of growing up. But more to the point, this failure actually led to my success because I actually then picked a profession that I, who knew, but I ended up being good at. Because I looked at the Iranian revolution, which was then brewing. It started in January 1978. And interestingly, like a week after President Jimmy Carter had come to Iran to celebrate New Year and the US-Iran relationship in Tehran and praised the Shah for his Iran being an island of stability in the Middle East, literally a week later, the revolutionaries

• 25:38Speaker 00

  started. It took about a year, it took exactly a year, for them to essentially overthrow the Shah. And I left, I was there because I was on my gap year, as we said, and so I saw the whole thing. I saw martial law, I saw what it was like to leave your house one minute after the curfew. I saw what it was like to be on your own, previously peaceful, friendly neighborhood sidewalks with suddenly soldiers who were trying to keep, you know, the revolutionaries down, you know, put their guns up to you.

• 26:09Sam Fragoso?

  You saw what it was like to see family members.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:12Sam Fragoso?

  imprisoned and executed.

• 26:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:14Sam Fragoso?

  What does that do to a 20-year-old kid?

• 26:16Speaker 00

  Makes you understand that the world is not what you thought it was and you better get tough quickly and you better get real quickly. And in my case, that's what I wanted to do with my life. I decided I want to tell those stories to the world. So immediately, I said, I need to go to America. There's only one place for me to go to, to study, to hopefully get a job and be a journalist. And that's what I did, even though, you know, I had to get a visa, you know, I had not, no, I had no family, no contacts, nothing in America, some friends. So that's what I did, went to America, came to America.

• 26:51Sam Fragoso?

  Well, let's talk about what that looked like after the break. That's coming up next with Christiane Amanpour. When the fall rolls around, there's always a moment when I look at my calendar and wonder, how did I get so busy so quickly? The days become packed and begin to feel spoken for before they even started. I've tried not to reinvent my routine too much because of this. I keep things that are already working in place. And for me, one of those things is AG1. It's one scoop and eight ounces of cold water every morning. AG1 is a daily health drink with a multivitamin, pre and probiotics, superfoods and antioxidants. Their next-gen formula has more than 75 ingredients and is clinically shown to support gut health, fill common nutrient gaps and improve key nutrient levels within three months.

• 27:36Sam Fragoso?

  It also helps maintain energy and support immune health. I use AG1 just about every day. And what I appreciate about it is that it doesn't require a whole lot from me. Whenever the morning starts, wherever it starts, it's one piece of my routine I can keep consistent. Whether I'm heading into a day of reading and writing or going into the studio to tape, AG1 is a constant. For a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro at drinkag1.com/talkeasy. That's drinkag1.com/talkeasy. MUBI is a global film company bringing great cinema to the world and to you.

• 28:18Sam Fragoso?

  Everything at MUBI is handpicked with an emphasis on visionary filmmakers and movies worth discovering. One new movie is called Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, from writer-director Jane Schonbruch, who made the film I Saw the TV Glow. The film stars Hanna Einbinder and Gillian Anderson. It follows a young director tasked with resurrecting Camp Miasma, a once-beloved slasher franchise that after years of sequels has fallen out of favor. Looking for inspiration, she visits the reclusive actress who starred in the original film. What begins at attempt to revive the franchise soon pulls the two women into a blood-soaked world of desire, fear and delirium. It's a world-expanding, genre-bending movie from one of the most distinctive filmmakers working today.

• 29:02Sam Fragoso?

  Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now streaming exclusively on MUBI. You can try MUBI free for 30 days at MUBI.com/talkeasy. That's MUBI, M-U-B-I dot com slash talkeasy for a whole month of great cinema for free. I think the best clothes you own are probably the ones you spend the least amount of time thinking about. They're just there when you need them. The sweater that goes with everything, the perfect pair of pants or the tee you always reach for first. That's what I've always liked about Quince. They focus on everyday staples made with premium materials like organic cotton, merino wool, 100% Mongolian cashmere. Their cashmere sweaters start at just $60 and everything is designed to be versatile

• 29:47Sam Fragoso?

  enough to work with what you already own. And now that the temperatures are starting to drop, they also have premium down jackets and classic wool outerwear, easy layers that can carry you through the fall and into winter. I've had a few of their merino wool all-season tees for just over a year now and they've really become my go-to in my wardrobe. The quality was the thing that surprised me when I first tried them out. They're comfortable, easy to layer, and after a year of wearing them regularly, they've held up remarkably well. I use them all the time and would absolutely recommend them. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, which allows them to price everything 50 to 80% less than similar brands. So you're paying for the quality of the materials rather than a big brand markup. It's not just clothing.

• 30:32Sam Fragoso?

  Quince brings that same approach to hotel-quality bedding and bath, kitchen essentials and thoughtfully-designed furniture, well-made pieces for everyday living. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. You can get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was talkeasy. It's really the best way to support the show. Enjoy.

• 31:04Sam Fragoso?

  Coming back, you arrive at CNN headquarters 1983, fresh out of college, with little more than a bicycle, a suitcase, and I think about $100 in your pocket, and very quickly, quote, "filled a series of dead men's shoes and eventually got overseas as a war correspondent."

• 31:21Speaker 00

  It wasn't quick, quick. I mean, it took a few years of hard work and hard graft and you know, various positions.

• 31:27Sam Fragoso?

  Now, The New York Times suggested that you never found being female to be anything other than an advantage. Is that true?

• 31:36Speaker 00

  That is absolutely true. And I did not suffer from being a woman, in terms of my progression up the ranks at CNN, and nor at that time did I suffer from any of the horrendous Me Too stuff that we now know that all girls and women have suffered in every profession for decades and decades and decades. And there was really never an accounting until about 2017. I would say that in the field, whether it was in the Gulf War, or in Afghanistan, or whatever, if you want to get to the mothers and the children and the young girls and things like that, at the time, you couldn't do it if you were a guy, because the family wouldn't allow you. You know, the conservative men

• 32:18Speaker 00

  who say that they're taking care of their women so that they don't get defiled by strange men from other religions and countries and this and that, they wouldn't let the guys in. And then some of the, one of the stories that's just leaping into my mind that tells me the difference, when we went to Saudi Arabia, which is the, sorry to pun, but the king of patriarchal societies, again, it was then, now it's changed a tiny weeny bit, but not quite, CNN deployed three girls to Saudi Arabia. Did they know that it was a patriarchal Muslim society that basically didn't let women work? I don't know. But me, my camera woman, and at that time, the sound woman, but there was a two-person crew

• 33:02Speaker 00

  all the time, who also did the editing. And the guys were so shocked to see us. On the one hand, some guys were quoted as saying, "What is wrong with CNN? How could they don't, they know anything about our culture, our religion? That CNN team, they need to remove them, blah, blah, blah." On the other hand, some of them were just so thrilled to see girls, that they actually drove us in their private car, I remember. And we went all the way to the border, very early in like September-ish, whenever we were deployed, August or September of 1990. And we saw the first evidence of Saddam Hussein's tanks threatening Saudi Arabia at the, at the border, the no man's land. And we came back,

• 33:44Speaker 00

  and we had our footage, and we blew everybody else out of the water. Little CNN, right? We scooped all the other nets and everything. And that made me realize that actually, you can, if you're a woman, get far in this world. Mostly because men can be chivalrous, they quite like to be chivalrous sometimes. So they'll always often open the door, you get your foot in it, and you don't take it out.

• 34:08Sam Fragoso?

  Well, the door opened in 1992, when you make an effort, a concerted effort. I think you first had to convince CNN, but you did, to cover the Bosnian war. It's an experience you've called "Being Defined and Shaped By." Can you tell me what happened that night in Sarajevo, at the Holiday Inn?

• 34:27Speaker 00

  It was one night, and it was in 92. I can't remember the month or what we were doing, but I was mostly there with my team, with a few outs. And we thought that we were in the safe side, on the safe side of the Holiday Inn, which was actually away from the front line, and that the front of the hotel was completely shell-marked and gun-parked and all the rest of it. It was absolutely a disaster. And inside, even the rooms, you could see that they were unusable. It was just rubble strewn. So we were on the other side of the hotel. It was a big atrium-style hotel. And one morning, I woke up, and I woke up to all these people knocking on my door, "Have you seen, have you seen what

• 35:09Speaker 00

  happened?" And I went out, and they showed me, in two or three rooms down from me, I think it was two rooms, a shell, it was 105-millimeter mortar shell, had come through, pierced the wall, destroyed that room. But fortunately, the explosive was faulty, so it didn't explode, and therefore it didn't take us all out. And I still have that shell. For me, it's a big reminder of the danger, and not just the danger of being caught in the crossfire. Bosnia was the first war where journalists were specifically targeted. The Bosnian Serbs, who were the aggressors, did not want us in their backyard, with all

• 35:52Speaker 00

  the accoutrements of the late 20th century, 24/7, satellite live, you know, broadcasting ability.

• 35:59Sam Fragoso?

  I believe you had a colleague of yours from ABC who was shot and killed?

• 36:03Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 36:03Sam Fragoso?

  Your camera woman?

• 36:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 36:05Sam Fragoso?

  Margaret Mauth. She was shot by a sniper. She luckily survived narrowly.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 36:11Sam Fragoso?

  And I think immediately got back to work within a year.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  It's remarkable, the dedication of people, but it's also remarkable, the progression now, exponentially worse for journalists, by being deliberately targeted, deliberately targeted, whether it's in, you know, whether it was in Bosnia, whether it's in Russia, whether it's, you know, Mexico, or Turkey, where all of these, you know, if you look at the CPJ, Committee to Protect Journalists-

• 36:34Sam Fragoso?

  The numbers from Gaza are-

• 36:36Speaker 00

  And now, I was going to say, the latest has been Gaza. Palestinian journalists, Lebanese journalists in Lebanon, I mean, it's just horrendous.

• 36:44Sam Fragoso?

  But that story also seems like it produced something morally within your work.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, it did.

• 36:50Sam Fragoso?

  A change or a shift?

• 36:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:52Sam Fragoso?

  Where you come back to this quote over and over, "I am truthful, not neutral." Is that the story?

• 36:57Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 36:57Sam Fragoso?

  That changed that?

• 36:58Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 36:59Sam Fragoso?

  Well, tell me what that means.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  Well, because the very same article that you quoted, the New York Times article, which was, I thought, "My god, I've got a profile in the New York Times, it's 1994, I'm young, this is fabulous, wow, I've made it." I read all the way to the end, and there's a CNN colleague, quoted anonymously-

• 37:18Sam Fragoso?

  Who accused you of, quote, "having omniscience which no journalist has. I have winced at some of what she's done, at what used to be called advocacy journalism." Is that a fair critique?

• 37:30Speaker 00

  I had to think about that very, very carefully. I didn't just dismiss it, nor did I completely take it on board. But I was wounded to the core, I was shocked to the core, because I thought, "Holy shit, our mantra is objectivity, right? That's our golden rule." Then I had to think, "What does objectivity mean?" And in situations where you're witnessing the grotesque and the most heinous violation of the world's worst crimes, crimes against humanity, a whole section of war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, which, by the way, I'm not making up, this was adjudicated later in

• 38:12Speaker 00

  trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. So these people who did what I was witnessing have been convicted of genocide. So I suddenly thought, "Yeah, we do have to be objective." But objective means telling the truth. It means giving all sides a hearing, but it does not mean coming to any false equivalence when there is none. It doesn't mean treating all sides equal. It means, because if you do that, you're telling lies, right? You're telling lies, and, and you are accessible. And I wasn't going to be accessible to these kind of crimes, just because I was too afraid to call it, you know, what it was.

• 38:54Sam Fragoso?

  Did the quote shake you to your core, because you thought some of it was true?

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Well, I thought maybe. I thought, I thought, "Well, what does they mean by advocacy? What do they mean by omniscience? Look, I can hold my hands up and say, sometimes I can be a little self-righteous. I think I'm being, you know, you know, sort of for the good cause. Maybe it comes across as a bit self-righteous or whatever."

• 39:16Sam Fragoso?

  On many driver's podcasts, you said, "The quality I like in myself the least is self-righteousness."

• 39:24Speaker 00

  Well, there you go. I don't know whether I've tempered that or what, but in any event, but it's because I'm so passionate. And I feel that I grew up in a very privileged environment, and that I can recognize that we, as journalists, are actually meant to be advocating for the, for those, you know, for the underdogs. We're meant to be telling that truth.

• 39:47Sam Fragoso?

  So do you believe there's a moral bent to your work?

• 39:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 39:51Sam Fragoso?

  You do. Mark Thompson, the chairman and CEO of CNN, he's also the editor in chief of CNN, said, quote, "Our job is not to be moral arbiters, it is to report what's happening." So is there daylight between his view and yours?

• 40:06Speaker 00

  I don't know. I mean, he said moral arbiters. You asked me if there's a moral quality. So I was raised a Catholic. It's part of my moral and ethical and personal framework. And the reason why I'm not too embarrassed to say this, although I think it's quite personal, I was just reading a very, very good opinion about the new British Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, who is also a Catholic, but is also not a every Sunday Catholic. But he's written about how the notion of what we learn in the Bible, and it's not just Catholics, it's Christians, it's Jews, it's Muslims, they all have this idea of social justice, of do unto others, of reach out to the poor, the most downtrodden.

• 40:49Speaker 00

  All our parables, all the miracles, all the stories we hear in the Gospels and all the rest of it, are about precisely that. So somehow, that must have infiltrated me, so that when I was confronted with it as a professional, I acted in a certain way, not thinking about religion or anything like that, but just thinking of, of the injustice that I was witnessing, not in all instances, but in a lot of the stuff that I was covering. And I just think that when people tell us we're biased, or when people tell us we're liberal, or when people tell us this, no, we, I think, let me speak for myself, I-

• 41:26Speaker 00

  Don't see it in political terms. I see it in terms of, of, of, of people. And if there's somebody there being killed, or raped, or attacked, or excluded, or hated because of their gender, their race, their sexuality, their, whatever it might be, their ethnicity, then I know that that's wrong. Again, I don't think I'm political, but I have a deep respect for human rights.

• 41:53Sam Fragoso?

  What do you mean you're not political?

• 41:54Speaker 00

  Because I, if, if it's being political, holding up democracy, then I'm political. If it's political advocating for the truth and honesty, then I'm political. If it's political believing in human rights, I'm political.

• 42:07Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, I think you're political.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  Okay. In that regard, yeah. But I'm not blue-red political.

• 42:12Sam Fragoso?

  I understand that. But you describe yourself as a Democrat?

• 42:17Speaker 00

  No, certainly not. I'm, I'm not an American.

• 42:20Sam Fragoso?

  What about on The X-Files, the show you host with your ex-husband?

• 42:23Speaker 00

  That's my ex-husband. He's a Democrat. And he says it over and over again.

• 42:26Sam Fragoso?

  He does?

• 42:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:27Sam Fragoso?

  Worked for Madeleine Albright?

• 42:28Speaker 00

  Correct. For the Clinton administration, when there was peace and prosperity in the world, as he likes to remind us.

• 42:32Sam Fragoso?

  Joe Biden, when there was less so, unfortunately. Speaking of when you became a mother, you had your child at 42, I think.

• 42:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 42:40Sam Fragoso?

  When you left for a story, and God knows you had to, early and often.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:45Sam Fragoso?

  What would you tell your son?

• 42:47Speaker 00

  You know, I didn't get married or have a kid at a more reasonable age because I was busy doing my career.

• 42:55Sam Fragoso?

  Well, who's to say reasonable?

• 42:56Speaker 00

  Well, back then, 26 and a half years ago, you know, I was called geriatric, for crying out loud. They called, they called us geriatric parents. And CNN gave me three months maternity leave because I was older than the usual two months.

• 43:07Sam Fragoso?

  I was born in 94. Don't look at me.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 43:09Sam Fragoso?

  I, I would never call you such a thing.

• 43:12Speaker 00

  But imagine. But, you know, when my son was born, I managed to extend informally my maternity leave because I didn't have to go into the office every day. I was available. But because I wasn't on the, you know, I didn't have a show, I was a foreign correspondent. The first story after my maternity leave was the, was the Air France Concorde that blew up. So I went to Paris. But I'm also slightly afraid of flying. So that really freaked me out. Especially when I came back, and then I had to go to another big story. My next big story as a mother was when there was another outbreak of the Intifada in, in Israel.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  There was a huge, you know, you know, the war had broken out again between the Israelis and the Palestinians. So this was 2000 and, 2000. And my son was, by then, probably nine months or something. And I wrote a piece for USA Today in which I said, and I admitted for the first time ever, that I'm afraid. I'm afraid getting on the plane. I'm afraid of the plane crashes. I'm afraid when I land that I get caught for the first time in my life in some kind of crossfire. I'm afraid if I get, you know, arrested and tortured and hidden and, you know, who knows where I am for my son. Everything was about my son. So that was the level of change in being a footloose and fancy-free and single,

• 44:39Speaker 00

  you know, foreign correspondent, to when I became a married and, and married woman and a parent. And I then became very crafty about how long I would spend at one time in the field. And I would hate to be more than two weeks away, which is, remember, before I was months away, before my son was born.

• 45:00Sam Fragoso?

  That was the free fancy single version?

• 45:02Speaker 00

  Correct. Lots of love on the road, but nonetheless.

• 45:06Sam Fragoso?

  Is that true?

• 45:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. It's great.

• 45:08Sam Fragoso?

  Do you fit that in somehow?

• 45:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. It just happens.

• 45:11Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. Well, you're kind of bound by something, right?

• 45:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. But anyway, that's a whole nother story. I would try to come home after two weeks, and then I would go back out again. That's how I tried to manage that whole separation thing. And I remember once, when the first, when the ridiculous Iraq war started and we had to go out there, I had to go before my son's third birthday, which his birthday was March, the end of March, 2003. So I had to, you know, I'm sure many parents do, I pretended his birthday was in February, and we had the birthday party, and everything was fine. But I was, it was horrendous being, being apart. So I would say that I would try to explain to my son, I don't know, and I don't really

• 45:55Speaker 00

  want to ask whether, you know, he to this day feels any abandonment. I, I think I was there so much and tried so hard. I was there at all the, you know, the school stuff and the, you know, Christmas parties and the performances and this and that. But it was really, I mean, I'm not going to minimize it, even though I had help. I was one of the privileged again, the fortunate. But it was really, in my heart, it was very difficult. And the fear factor, I just didn't want to get, you know, in any way injured or worse.

• 46:28Sam Fragoso?

  Are you afraid to ask him that question because you're afraid of the answer?

• 46:32Speaker 00

  I, you know, I'll ask him again. I'll say that Sam asked me, and I'll ask him. I'll check in with him again.

• 46:38Sam Fragoso?

  Make sure you put it on me.

• 46:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I will. Yeah. And we're very, very close. He's very close to his father. We just, we're very, very close family. And whatever happened, I think he's forgiven me.

• 46:50Sam Fragoso?

  On Ruthie's table, you said, "I've lived most of my professional life in a state of repressed fear."

• 46:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:57Sam Fragoso?

  What has that done to you?

• 46:59Speaker 00

  Well, I first made that statement in 2000 at the Edward R. Morrow, RTNDA Morrow speech.

• 47:07Sam Fragoso?

  That's quite a speech.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  And I admitted, you know, this stuff. And I'd never admitted it because you don't want to show weakness. And you, there was no such thing as mental health, by the way, back then. There was no such thing. There was no, there was no belief in us that if we showed any weakness or any natural trauma from what we'd seen on a daily basis, that we would be embraced and taken care of. We thought we'd lose our jobs, or we'd be sidelined or something else, even though we had a great, I mean, CNN is known for the way it looks after its people in the field. When Margaret was shot, and many other times that our, our, our staff have been hurt in the field. It's literally one of the best things it does

• 47:49Speaker 00

  on a human level. Still, I didn't think that I would be able to ask for any mental help or help. So, so it was, it was, you know, that, that part of it was difficult. So I admitted it in this speech, that actually I have lived, I've experienced, by that time it would have been 10 years of, and this was balls-to-the-wall 90s war everywhere. Bosnia, Rwanda genocide, Somalia with the warlords and the famine, Haiti with, with, with the US intervention there, and the poverty and the violence and all the rest of it. It was a really hard decade. Amazing reporting opportunities and phenomenal for my, both

• 48:31Speaker 00

  personal and professional growth. But it was very intense. But what I've done is not fallen apart and fallen about. I've managed the fear.

• 48:41Sam Fragoso?

  Was there a moment where it almost was too much? It was, it was suffocating?

• 48:46Speaker 00

  No, because I didn't stop.

• 48:48Sam Fragoso?

  You didn't stop? The only way forward was forward?

• 48:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, forward, yeah.

• 48:51Sam Fragoso?

  Is that a traumatic response to what happened?

• 48:53Speaker 00

  I don't know what it is. I'll have to do some more work on that. I don't know what it is. It's certainly a survival instinct. But I was very lucky also that even though I didn't talk about these, these, you know, these traumas and, you know, war stories and stuff like that, you know, which friend around which dinner table wants to hear you tell your war stories? I mean, none. Maybe I'm going to need a good old therapy session. But at the moment, I feel that I've managed it in the best way I can, and I don't lie about how I feel.

• 49:24Sam Fragoso?

  Have you gone to therapy?

• 49:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, but for other things.

• 49:32Sam Fragoso?

  You know, on that Mini Driver podcast, you said, "I don't have any professional regrets."

• 49:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:39Sam Fragoso?

  "But I do have some personal ones."

• 49:40Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 49:41Sam Fragoso?

  What are those?

• 49:42Speaker 00

  I didn't live in the present. I find it hard to live in the present because I'm always looking forward, or looking sideways, or looking behind me to make sure it's all okay. But I think that that's a big gift and, and, and, and obviously, an important aspect of self-awareness. And just to try to live in the present instead of constantly being stressed. So I, that's one of the personal ones. Maybe I didn't learn enough languages? I don't know. I don't know. I can't think of it right now because I feel that I've had a great personal life, a great family life, a great professional life. I just, with all the hardships. And I know that I'm really lucky. And I also believe,

• 50:25Speaker 00

  and I really know this, that, I know every generation of journalists says it, that ours was the golden age and, you know, you know. But I genuinely believe it about my generation. I genuinely, it's very different now. It's very different. I'm not sure that I'd want to be in the middle of my career now. I think if you're in the beginning, you can shape it in a different way. If you're the end, which I am, you know, I'm on the back nine, as they would say in, in golf.

• 50:52Sam Fragoso?

  Do you have any plans to retire?

• 50:54Speaker 00

  Maybe. I'll keep you posted.

• 50:56Sam Fragoso?

  Will you?

• 50:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:59Speaker 00

  Or do things differently. You know, it's not retire. Somebody said to me recently, it's not retire, it's, it's reinvent or something. Yes, I don't want to be out there, as I said once, dragging my carcass around where, you know, to where it's undignified.

• 51:14Sam Fragoso?

  What a terrible thing to say about yourself.

• 51:16Speaker 00

  Well, I, no, then. For then, now I'm not dragging no carcass. Now I'm, I'm strong.

• 51:22Sam Fragoso?

  Strong, okay.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  I'm hot.

• 51:23Sam Fragoso?

  No one would contest such a thing.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  Did I embarrass you, Sam?

• 51:26Sam Fragoso?

  Not at all.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 51:27Sam Fragoso?

  Why don't we talk about the present?

• 51:28Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 51:29Sam Fragoso?

  And we'll do that right after the break. That's coming up next.

• 51:33Sam Fragoso?

  This summer, I traveled to San Jose del Cabo. It was the first time I was in the city for an extended period of time, which allowed me to find a real rhythm within it. We would spend the day by the beach, then head to the famous art district in the evening. We'd have dinner and wander in and out of the galleries before the evening came to a close. I think I even went home with a few ceramics made by local artists. While we were off experiencing this incredible place, I couldn't help but think about the people that call it home. The shops, the restaurants, the views we came to love are part of that everyday experience. It changed how I think about my own home and when I'm away. Rather than simply letting it sit empty while I travel, I've considered listing my space on Airbnb

• 52:16Sam Fragoso?

  and giving someone visiting Los Angeles a comfortable place where they can discover the city for themselves. Maybe they'll find a neighborhood restaurant they love, or a museum they didn't know existed. And the extra income from listing my space can go toward experiences for my own trips, or just help cover some of the cost of getting there. The next time you're planning a getaway yourself, why not consider listing your space while you're gone? Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com/host.

• 52:48Sam Fragoso?

  So you have long been outspoken in your work in interviews, et cetera, about being able to see the story from the other side.

• 52:57Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:58Sam Fragoso?

  Being willing to put aside genuine differences, looking to find answers rather than accepting conflict as a constant. Was starting a podcast with your ex-husband your way of practicing what you preach?

• 53:13Speaker 00

  Yes, I tell you, it came out of actually the horror of October 7th. And I was finding myself on the air, internalizing this unbelievable pain for so many months. And then what happened in revenge for October 7th with the war on Gaza. So the pain of what happened, of the killing of all these Israeli civilians, the kidnapping of all these hostages, where I was interviewing people who'd been, you know, grievously wounded, had survived the actual day, whether it was at the, you know, music festival, whether it was in various kibbutzes and things like that. And I was beginning for the first time of covering this kind of horror to feel like I couldn't take it anymore.

• 53:56Speaker 00

  I couldn't take the hatred, I couldn't take the war, I couldn't take the pain. I couldn't take the sense of there's no way out. Because I then would cast my mind back and I would say, well, actually, you know, 30 years ago, you had the Oslo Accords. Okay, I know they've sort of been whittled away and there's no hope at the moment for that. But I believe, having covered that, having covered the, um, the, the, the results of the end of apartheid in South Africa, having covered the peace between, you know, the nationalists and the, uh, the, the British government in Northern Ireland, et cetera. I knew that there is a way out, that there is a way to be able to cross party lines, cross ethnic, religious, political divisions.

• 54:40Speaker 00

  But it takes leadership and it takes being able to reset that muscle of diplomacy, of really putting all your effort into it, particularly if you're an elected leader or a government leader or whatever, or, or a local leader or leader of a faction, to believe that there's no way out of constant war. There's no way out for either side by just constant war. You have to come to some kind of political agreement and justice.

• 55:11Speaker 00

  There's.

• 55:12Sam Fragoso?

  I don't think I've ever seen.

• 55:14Speaker 00

  No, I've never shown it. No justice, no peace. And I really believe that. And it might be a slogan that's been used here and there, but I believe it from what I've seen in the rest of the world, from the stories that I've covered, where there, there has been. And I really mean it because there are, like, in South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in various other places, even in Rwanda. I would cover these, they were called Gacha courts. They were informal accountability where both sides, the Hutus and the Tutsis would come together. And the Hutus who committed horrendous crimes against their Tutsi neighbors would come and publicly apologize and hug and, you know, and try to, literally, I'm sorry to say, bury the hatchet.

• 56:00Speaker 00

  So I, I really, really, you know, believe in that. And when I, so that's why I wanted to try to get back to it. And I thought, well, maybe Jamie and I can talk about these things and talk about back then, when this was happening and that was happening and diplomacy finally entered and peace was made between both sides and decommissioning and disarming happened and all the kind of things that people are asking for now, whether it's Russia, Ukraine, whether it's Israel, Palestine, whether whoever it might be, you know? I believe that it can't just be a zero sum game.

• 56:37Sam Fragoso?

  So you believed it was worth modeling on the show?

• 56:39Speaker 00

  Yes, and I believe that you have to model that you can talk to all sides. You know, you can have a conversation without having a war.

• 56:52Sam Fragoso?

  You spent 20 years together, married, eight years apart now. And in the show's trailer, your ex-husband, who, as I mentioned earlier, worked for Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  Jamie Rubin.

• 57:04Sam Fragoso?

  He said, quote, "We always had good conversations on foreign policy. That was never our problem."

• 57:10Speaker 00

  And all I can say is he's right.

• 57:12Sam Fragoso?

  What was?

• 57:13Speaker 00

  I'm not going there. All I can tell you is this, that if we divorced people can sit around now, eight years after our divorce, 20, we'd been, as you said, together 20 years with a wonderful son. If we can talk civilly, and like all divorces, they're painful, they can be brutal, they can be everything. You think the whole world is collapsing. But somehow we managed to survive in a way that allow us to be friends, to be co-parents, obviously our son is an adult, but nonetheless,

• 57:51Speaker 00

  and to be able to talk about these things, you know? And that's good, that's good. I don't want to be a fighter. I don't want to have fights and wars in my own personal life.

• 58:00Sam Fragoso?

  My, my parents have done this as well.

• 58:01Speaker 00

  Really?

• 58:02Sam Fragoso?

  Uh huh, since they, they broke up before I was one.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  Really?

• 58:05Sam Fragoso?

  And they would come, we'd have Christmas together.

• 58:08Speaker 00

  How lovely.

• 58:08Sam Fragoso?

  They modeled it very well.

• 58:09Speaker 00

  I think that's beautiful, I really do.

• 58:11Sam Fragoso?

  They didn't do it on a podcast?

• 58:13Speaker 00

  No.

• 58:13Sam Fragoso?

  For the world to see?

• 58:13Speaker 00

  No, but it wasn't a podcast, to be fair, back then.

• 58:15Sam Fragoso?

  It's true, it's true.

• 58:16Speaker 00

  They might have done.

• 58:17Sam Fragoso?

  Let me ask you, what, between the two of you, was it easier to talk foreign policy than domestic issues?

• 58:25Speaker 00

  Domestic by, you mean by personal?

• 58:27Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  Where, when we were married?

• 58:28Sam Fragoso?

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  No, we talked personal, but you know, we'd often have fights.

• 58:33Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. But not always.

• 58:34Sam Fragoso?

  Who wins in a fight with you?

• 58:36Speaker 00

  Oh, oh, it just depends on when and where.

• 58:41Sam Fragoso?

  You seem like someone not to be in a fight with.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  I thought I came across all nice and sweet and lovely on this podcast.

• 58:47Sam Fragoso?

  To me?

• 58:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:49Sam Fragoso?

  We're not married.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  Now Jamie can give a good fight.

• 58:53Sam Fragoso?

  On an episode last year, you mentioned, or you alluded to the one time you issued an apology on air and you, quote, "deeply regretted it." And I want to play the time that I can find.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  Shoot, okay.

• 59:08Sam Fragoso?

  Why are you saying, oh, shoot?

• 59:09Speaker 00

  Because I know this is going to be highly political and controversial.

• 59:12Sam Fragoso?

  This right here?

• 59:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. And finally tonight, a comment on my program at the end of last week. I observed the 82nd anniversary of Kristallnacht, as I often do. It is the event that began the horrors of the Holocaust. I also noted President Trump's attacks on history, facts, knowledge and truth. I shouldn't have juxtaposed the two thoughts. Hitler and his evil standalone, of course, in history. I regret any pain my statement may have caused. My point was to say how democracy can potentially slip away and how we must always zealously guard our democratic values. My last few sentences speak volumes. My point was to show how democratic values can slowly slip away

• 59:55Speaker 00

  and not so slowly, and how we must always be vigilant. And that is what I believe. And that's what I was trying to say.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  And that's what, that's, that's it, really.

• 1:00:07Sam Fragoso?

  And why do you regret having issued the apology?

• 1:00:11Speaker 00

  I don't regret, I just, I don't regret it, but there was a lot of pressure on me to do it.

• 1:00:18Sam Fragoso?

  Pressure from home?

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  From the sphere. You know, the crazy sphere.

• 1:00:24Sam Fragoso?

  The sphere within your company?

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  Everywhere. Because when it's on social media and you, you know, I mean, now, I mean, they were calling people, I mean, but mind you, I'm quite used to it. I have been just somebody who attracts a whole load of, you know, bullshit from all sides all the time. And because I don't go online and read this stuff, and I always advise younger people, please don't read this stuff. Don't, don't, don't. Use online if you want to, you know, post something, your work, use it as a tool, but don't define yourself and don't be swayed from your beliefs, from your, you know, personal well-being by what happens online. Because it's honestly a bunch of mostly anonymous haters. Now, yes, there were people, you know, in various communities in regard of this,

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  who decided that I need to be slapped around and pulled down a peg. But I think that's just because some people are afraid of the truth.

• 1:01:19Sam Fragoso?

  Do you regret making the comparison?

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  It was at, the, the point was the assault on democracy. That's the big picture that I was addressing. So if I misspoke, I apologized. But that wasn't my intention, intention to misspeak like that. And yeah, I was basically told to apologize and I did.

• 1:01:38Sam Fragoso?

  When it comes to the coverage from CNN, I know we talked about, you know, that, that longstanding frustration some people have with mainstream media. In The Guardian, a colleague of yours at CNN said, quote, "The majority of news since the war began, regardless of how accurate the initial reporting, has been skewered by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel." Your colleague continued, "Ultimately, CNN's coverage of the Israel-Gaza war amounts to journalistic malpractice." What's your answer to that?

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  So I remember when those comments were made. And in fairness, they were made in a forum where Mark Thompson, our just installed new CEO, just days before October 7th, came to London, and this, I believe this took place in the London bureau. And he addressed the coverage and he allowed the, the, you know, the staff who had concerns to talk back. Now, remember, this was October 2023.

• 1:02:46Sam Fragoso?

  Yes.

• 1:02:47Speaker 00

  The whole landscape has changed in the three years since.

• 1:02:50Sam Fragoso?

  And the meeting took place in early 2024.

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  At which point it was still very, very alive with pain and grief and just real feelings on all sides.

• 1:03:05Sam Fragoso?

  It still is.

• 1:03:06Speaker 00

  No, of course, but that's when it started. And it was due to, I believe, at this time, was the Israeli reaction in Gaza, which already by that time had killed more people than were killed on October 7th. So that's why some of our producers, and particularly those from that region, were very, very concerned. And I would just say that.

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  I've never had pushback on, you know, from that, from that coverage, and I would have been very, very, very clear, again, truthful, not neutral. And I have hosted on my program, people from all sides and views from all sides. And as I say, you know, our job is also to give voice to those who don't otherwise have a voice and to always highlight the underdog. So in the immediate aftermath, and for several months after October 7th, we were practically wall to wall with the horrendous stories from

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  the victims in Israel. I mean, just horrendous. And then the story flipped. The hostages were still inside Gaza, and that still got a lot of attention from us and from the media, as it should. But then gradually, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, as the destruction of Gaza took place and the bodies piled up, most particularly the women and the children, the tone of the coverage reflected the reality. And I think that's, that's what you're seeing. And that's what you're seeing in terms of complaints

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  from staff. Again, to be fair, the company was open to this kind of public debate. And people can still have their own views about whether it was sufficient, whether it was not. And I would say our correspondence inside Israel right now, I mean, honestly, one of the people I admire so much right now is Jeremy Diamond, who's able to be there and report on the Israeli side, but also on the West Bank, on Gaza, not in Gaza, because none of us are allowed into Gaza, unless you go on a so-called embed. But I think that they're doing exceptional work there, as the situation continues apace now on the West Bank, in a different way to Gaza, but in a, in a very concerted way, that even,

• 1:05:34Speaker 00

  even now, Israeli national security hawks, former prime ministers, former national security, former military, former intelligence, have all banded together to write this enormously important letter to say, stop this, quote unquote, Jewish terrorism in the occupied West Bank, which involves settlers, aided and abetted by members of the security state, basically ethnically cleansing Palestinian civilians. This has become a big deal. And of course, it's now very much augmented by the fact that an election is happening in Israel at the end of, of October. So it's just a terrible situation going on into these,

• 1:06:17Speaker 00

  into these elections. And hope is running out, honestly, because leadership matters, leadership on both sides matters. And you've just got to hope, again, in, in many instances, because the United States has the most influence with their very close ally, Israel, you just have to hope that the US government will use all its good offices to really be an honest broker and bring them together. And just what I would like to say, given that it's 25 years since 9/11, which made me very emotional, looking at the memorial coverage and remembering everything that happened, happened in, you know, Afghanistan, and then

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  the war in Iraq. You remember Biden, when he went to Israel after October 7th and embraced Netanyahu, the prime minister, and the whole Israeli family, he said, don't do what we did after 9/11. Do not do what we did. Don't go completely overboard, because this is what happened to us with Iraq and all the rest of it. And sadly, they didn't pay attention to their biggest ally, you know? And look at the politics in the United States right now. It is unimaginable, even a year ago, to believe that decades of a fixed truism, that the majority, the American people, believe that the United States should stand by Israel

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  no matter what, has now been challenged, that there have to be conditions, that you can't just stand by an ally who's going to use your weapons and your money and your help to do the kind of things that they believe, you know, should not be done. And this has changed American politics as well. And it's showing up in elections.

• 1:08:00Sam Fragoso?

  Do you believe the United States will decouple from unconditional military support to Israel?

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  I do believe that there will be change, yes. But I think that the American nation, the US government, will always be a strong, and should be, a strong ally of Israel. But I do think, like many in Congress and many in the, you know, public sphere say, with almost every other allied country, we have conditions when we sell the most lethal weaponry. And so I think the people of the United States have spoken and are speaking, and the polls are completely changing. And to be fair, if you remember, I can't even remember when it was, but it was halfway between in, in this war, and the highest ranked elected

• 1:08:49Speaker 00

  Jewish American official, Senator Chuck Schumer, took to the Senate floor, and he warned Israel, please do not do things that alienate and push the United States away. We are your security blanket. We are your biggest defenders. Don't push the American people away. And the politics show, and the polls show, that the, the view of how exactly the nature of America's support for Israel has changed. And the support for, for the Palestinians has, has changed. It's just, there's just been a seesaw.

• 1:09:24Sam Fragoso?

  And thinking about what change could look like, what do you foresee? How do you see that?

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  Well, look, I, again, people will tell me that I'm on crack or something, but I go back to the 90s. I go back to when Israelis and Palestinians, even though it wasn't even legal for the Israeli government officials to talk to any Palestinians who were still called terrorists back before, before, forget Hamas, this was now the PLO, Yasser Arafat. There's a group of Norwegians who decided to create a civil society program around this problem, and managed to get very senior Palestinians and Israelis to Oslo to talk their problems out, talk all the issues out, and to see whether there was another way.

• 1:10:13Speaker 00

  And there was another way. There were the Oslo Accords. Now, there's many, obviously inherent difficulties in the way it was implemented and all the rest of it. But I strongly believe that if everybody on all sides had been committed to this, and that the Prime Minister of Israel hadn't been assassinated, yet Saqar bin, that, you know, there wasn't a second Intervada, that Yasser Arafat hadn't said no to Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton, when they offered such a huge, huge, important deal to the Palestinians. I, you know, could have, should have, but the parameters, I think, lie in that idea of, of, of political

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  resolution. This is a political issue. And as you can see, the current Israeli government, the current power structure, Benjamin Netanyahu, supported and kept in power by the far right, extreme right, Orthodox extremists, Smotrich and, and Ben-Gavir, whose policy is they do not want a Palestinian state. I think that's going to be to the detriment of that region. And even, you know, Israel who wants to, or that wants to have an accord to expand the Abraham Accords and bring Saudi Arabia in, they won't make it unless they agree

• 1:11:37Speaker 00

  to a different way. Remember, it was King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who in 2002, gave this incredible, we will recognize Israel, based on the 1967 borders, the, you know, the rights of Palestinians to a state, et cetera, et cetera. I'm sort of, you know, paraphrasing it. But it was an incredible offer from the nation in that part of the world, the Moslem nation, the guardian of the two holy mosques, all of that, to say, we accept Israel. We will recognize Israel, but it has to be on these terms. And that's still an issue right now. And many people, not just the Arabs, but many people in Europe, in the United States, many people in Israel, still believe that that's the only way to

• 1:12:22Speaker 00

  get out of this mess.

• 1:12:26Sam Fragoso?

  Did CNN commit journalistic malpractice?

• 1:12:30Speaker 00

  I think that's a little bit overboard, but I understood people's emotions at the time.

• 1:12:34Sam Fragoso?

  And when you think of this week that we're taping this, UN General Assembly, high-level meetings, we had Ben Rhodes on the show last week, and he said, quote, "International law does not exist in any meaningful way." To bring us back to where we started this conversation, and also, you know, an era that you grew up in, believing in that Reagan quote, thinking of America in this almost heroic context, where are you at these days?

• 1:13:03Speaker 00

  Very troubled, but agreeing a little bit with Ben Rhodes, hoping that it's temporary.

• 1:13:09Sam Fragoso?

  Agreeing that international law does not exist in any meaningful way.

• 1:13:11Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, yes, because actually, all you have to do is read the quotes from Stephen Miller.

• 1:13:17Speaker 05

  You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.

• 1:13:33Speaker 00

  And I am very, you know, dejected about it and somewhat distressed about it because, well, very distressed about it, because we've seen, we have seen, since January 2025 to now, nearly two years, when you do what you want based on the strength and power that you think you have in the world, you do not come to a pretty place. President Trump may think, and he did think, and many people think, that the Venezuela operation to lift Maduro, the dictator, out of Venezuela, was successful and the right way to go.

• 1:14:14Speaker 00

  Okay, but that model does not translate, for instance, to Iran. So my answer to Stephen Miller is that, listen, matey, be careful what you ask for, you know, because it hasn't worked out so good.

• 1:14:29Sam Fragoso?

  Matey almost sounds too nice.

• 1:14:31Speaker 00

  Well, I don't want to be horrible.

• 1:14:33Sam Fragoso?

  I think we may need a different noun.

• 1:14:34Speaker 00

  No, I said what I said. It doesn't work. It doesn't work, you know? You have to be serious about, about this stuff. And when you're the, in charge of the world's only superpower, which is right now being gobbled up by, you know, China.

• 1:14:53Sam Fragoso?

  No, no, I understood the gobble.

• 1:14:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, with China nipping at their heels.

• 1:14:58Speaker 00

  You don't want to get to a place where China looks like the adult in the room. And that's where we are right now.

• 1:15:03Sam Fragoso?

  Dejected and distressed is what you just said.

• 1:15:06Speaker 00

  I avoided saying depressed.

• 1:15:08Sam Fragoso?

  I know.

• 1:15:08Speaker 00

  Distressed.

• 1:15:09Sam Fragoso?

  You know, I understand.

• 1:15:12Speaker 00

  Worried.

• 1:15:13Sam Fragoso?

  CNN at the time of recording.

• 1:15:14Speaker 00

  In peril.

• 1:15:16Sam Fragoso?

  And more synonyms? Okay, all of those adjectives, and what?

• 1:15:20Speaker 00

  Well, we have to work hard as journalists to defend, let's just say, our right to report the truth, hopefully, as elected politicians, to defend just the rules of their own, voting laws, you know, defend your rights under the, you know, constitution that gave you three separate but equal branches of power in this country. You don't just lie back and surrender, because this is the fight of our life. Either you believe in democracy, or you don't, or you want to live in a chaotic might makes right world, or in a world which is not chaos. China's world is not chaos, but for many, it's malevolent. Do you want to live in a maximum surveillance world?

• 1:16:03Speaker 00

  Do you want to live in a world where you have maybe money and wealth and progress, but no personal or political liberties? Do you want to live in a world where a whole segment of society, a whole, I don't know, it's like a million Uighurs are in concentration camps? Trump 1.0 called it genocide. I don't think they're doing that right now.

• 1:16:23Sam Fragoso?

  Trump 2.0 rescinded access to the White House.

• 1:16:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:28Sam Fragoso?

  New York Times reports that CNN may consider taking this battle to the courts. Would you support such an effort?

• 1:16:35Speaker 00

  Yes, I'd support what our leadership does, yes. I think we have to absolutely fight for our rights, absolutely, in whatever field it is. We have to fight for our rights. Otherwise, we just let go, and we just say, hey, you know, we have the First Amendment when it's okay, and we don't when it's not. And but nonetheless, the reporting will go on.

• 1:16:55Sam Fragoso?

  As you have done for a long, long time.

• 1:16:56Speaker 00

  Well, not me, I'm not a White House correspondent.

• 1:16:58Sam Fragoso?

  No, but you've been recovering the US from, from, from London for a long time, and I would be remiss to not end this episode, this conversation.

• 1:17:07Speaker 00

  Don't be remiss.

• 1:17:08Sam Fragoso?

  I'm trying not to be. In peril and all, on a story tremendously important to you. Can you take me back to 1992? You're working, of course, at CNN in Somalia, in the throes of a conflict.

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  It was a famine.

• 1:17:26Sam Fragoso?

  I can't even begin to describe.

• 1:17:28Speaker 00

  It was a terrible, terrible situation, where, again, thanks to the press, this famine had been exposed to the world. To his credit, President George H. W. Bush deployed immediately US Marines and, you know, all the equipment designed to not go to war or intervene in a war, but to intervene on a humanitarian level to save people from starving. And it worked. It was very painful. It was very difficult to, to cover, because you saw ordinary men, women, and children just dying in front of your eyes. When the Americans came in and started putting up feeding centers, as they were called, in various different parts, whether it was the dilapidated

• 1:18:11Speaker 00

  capital Mogadishu, or in places called like Baidoa, Badera, all these names of these places that were so terribly affected by this famine, they gradually, gradually fought back the famine and made and allowed people to eat and get their strength back. But at the early days, you know, I'd witnessed with my team, the Americans come ashore. And then, in the days after, we went to some of these feeding camps. And, you know, I was a, I was, again, a novice at this. I'd never seen starvation in front of my eyes. And I was doing a live shot for CNN.

• 1:18:52Speaker 00

  And in front of me, you know, a woman was dying. And my camera woman could see what was going on, and I could see what was going on, and we just didn't know what to do. Do we stop? Do we keep going and tell the story? We were frozen in this moment between life and death, not understanding exactly what we should do right now. Should we stop this? Was there a dignity? Was there an other issue that we shouldn't? And we carried on, and she died. And I still wonder whether we did the right thing. But I do believe it was one of the only ways to actually show what was actually at stake and why the humanitarian intervention

• 1:19:37Speaker 00

  from the United States was a good and positive thing, that, that was effective. This woman didn't survive, but others, so many others, did.

• 1:19:46Sam Fragoso?

  Do you have an answer to that question? Now that we're 30 years removed, if you did the right thing?

• 1:19:51Speaker 00

  I think we did the right thing. I do. I think in retrospect, and now, I probably would not do that again. But at the time, it wasn't a thing. You know, we weren't trying to shock. There was no social media. There was no, you know, we were just frozen young people confronted with this life and death situation. And we thought we'd done the right thing. And I still think then, we did the right thing, because it showed the gravity of the situation and the fact that actually, the United States had come to help.

• 1:20:27Sam Fragoso?

  I've been trying to think about the how and the why, and your continued efforts. And I found this passage in the prologue of Interview with History from Oriana Filacci. And I thought you'd maybe want to read it and see where it landed with you.

• 1:20:44Speaker 00

  Well, Oriana Filacci was like a badass war correspondent. In the early days, she's Italian, brilliant woman. "I do not feel myself to be, nor will I ever succeed, in feeling like a cold recorder of what I see and hear. On every professional experience, I leave shreds of my heart and soul, and I participate in what I see or hear as though the matter concerned me personally, and there were one on which I ought to take a stand. In brackets, in fact, I always take one, based on a specific moral choice." Oriana Filacci, 1974, in her classic book, Interview with History. So, are you asking me whether I agree with that? Yeah.

• 1:21:28Speaker 00

  I would say personally that that is more true for me more often than not. But professionally, I am able, because I'm a professional, to be objective. And so I tend not to, except in extraordinary situations, like the one I just described in Somalia, get emotional. Because I think that if you get overly emotional, it's almost like being a doctor in an emergency room. And I've said it before, if you fall apart, if you overdo it, you're no good to anybody. If all I do is pop up, you know, crying and blubbering and, you know, blah, blah, blah, it's not going to help anybody.

• 1:22:12Speaker 00

  It's not going to help, you know, anybody to understand or feel or whatever. Oriana was very, very emotional, brilliant, independent.

• 1:22:21Sam Fragoso?

  Italian.

• 1:22:24Speaker 00

  You can say that. Independent, and her interviews were works of art. And she could really, you know, take people down a peg or two, like people like Ayatollah Khomeini and the others. But when she says, and I do agree with this, because I've left shreds of my heart and soul in many, many parts of the world, and I just have. And that is because I've loved what I've done. I've loved being able to have the opportunity to really see the world in all its facets, and to be able to give voice to those who don't have a voice, and give a face to those who would never otherwise be seen or heard. And I take that really seriously.

• 1:23:08Speaker 00

  And I'm very, very proud that I've been able to use my platform, one CNN gives me, in a way that I think is responsible, but also human.

• 1:23:23Sam Fragoso?

  In the beginning, I didn't say, I didn't ask how you were doing. You have had this ovarian cancer three times.

• 1:23:31Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:31Sam Fragoso?

  Are you, are you all right?

• 1:23:33Speaker 00

  Well, officially, I am cancer free right now because I'm on a regimen. Yeah, touch wood. I'm on a regimen of immunotherapy, which, thanks to having private insurance, I am able to get. And it's saved my life. And it is phenomenal to be in the care of these amazing doctors at the Royal Marsden Hospital in the UK, which, along with Sloan-Kettering and, you know, the big hospital in Houston, are the best cancer hospitals in the world. And so I've been phenomenally lucky. But yeah, it's been three times. And fantastically, medicine is making so much progress on this issue.

• 1:24:14Speaker 00

  And the bottom line is, one of the doctors said to me, if you catch it early, it is absolutely treatable. And they said to me, don't forget, Christian, you must know this already, right? And I'm like, what? Cancer is a permanent condition that you have to manage. I'm saying, thank you very much. I didn't know it was going to be a permanent condition, but at least now you've told me. I get it. I put my hands in the professionals, my life and my fate in the hands of the professionals. And I'm very lucky and I know it.

• 1:24:41Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm. Well, I just want to say, we made this show 10 years ago, and it is not an overstatement. It would not be here. I would not be here without the work that you have done.

• 1:24:56Speaker 00

  Oh, Sam, I wasn't expecting you to say that. That's amazing.

• 1:25:01Sam Fragoso?

  So, thank you very much for that.

• 1:25:03Speaker 00

  Thank you for even saying that. You know, and the older I get, the more I cry, by the way. I just do. I remember things and I remember things, what I was doing. So I fully understand that emotional instinct.

• 1:25:14Sam Fragoso?

  Maybe I'll have the reverse, because I cried a lot young.

• 1:25:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:17Sam Fragoso?

  Maybe the older I get, I'll stop crying.

• 1:25:20Speaker 00

  But how sweet of you to say that. I'm really touched. Thank you.

• 1:25:24Sam Fragoso?

  It's very true. I know you don't do interviews almost ever. Thank you very much for the time.

• 1:25:28Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:25:42Sam Fragoso?

  Thank you for watching Talk Easy. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also leave us a review on Apple, drop us a comment on Spotify, or follow us on social media at Talk Easy Pod. Our producer is Caroline Reebok. This episode was edited by Alex Dishal. It was mixed by Andrew Vastola. Photographs are by Sarah Schneider. Social media by Lucy McGraw. I want to give a special thanks to Lauren Cohn and the team at CNN. This episode was made in partnership with the good people at Higher Ground Media, and I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for watching. I'll see you back here next Sunday. And until then, stay safe and so long.

• 1:26:24Speaker 06

  History gets written, then rewritten, sometimes by scholars correcting the record, sometimes by committees deciding what a generation of kids will and won't learn. The version that makes it into the textbook isn't always the only story. It's the one that won out. That's the kind of thing Ground News was built for. It shows you how outlets across the spectrum tell the same story, side by side, so you can spot the shading for yourself. Ground News gives each outlet a factuality rating, so you know how much weight to give the source, and shows you who owns it, so you know what's behind it. The Nobel Peace Center called it "an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers,

• 1:27:09Speaker 06

  and expand your worldview." So go to groundnews.com/rz. That's G-R-O-U-N-D-N-E-W-S dot com slash R-C for 40% off unlimited access vantage plan. Get it yourself or gift it to someone who'd rather know than not. Use my link, groundnews.com/rz, so you get the discount and they know I sent you. If you're a fan of learning all sides of history, then Ground News is for you. One more time, groundnews.com/rz.

• 1:27:45Speaker 07

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.

• 1:27:53Speaker 00

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 1:27:57Speaker 07

  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

• 1:27:59Speaker 00

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 1:28:02Speaker 07

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 1:28:05Speaker 00

  That's it.

• 1:28:08Speaker 07

  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast What It's Like to Be.