Transcript

(echoing ding)

Tony's history with the magazine

actually goes a long way back,

and I thought we could start out by hearing

a little bit about how that piece

first came to be in the magazine.

So, there I was, age 44. (humming)

I was still dunking french fries at Brasserie Les Halles,

which I thought was a pretty good gig at the time.

But there was this little free paper

they gave out on corners in the little boxes

called the New York Press, and I thought

I'm gonna write something that will entertain other cooks,

maybe I'll get a hundred bucks and,

you know, my fry cook will find this funny.

So I wrote that first piece, the first version of it,

with the intention of being published

by the New York Press, and makin' a hundred bucks,

and being a hero to a few fry cooks in New York.

I wrote it.

I sent it to the New York Press.

The editor at the New York Press in charge

of the department at the time was Sam Sifton, of couse.

As much as he liked it and as much

as he assured me that he would print it,

he did not have the juice, apparently,

to keep me from getting bumped every week

by the then publisher of the New York Press, Russ Smith.

So every week I'd run to the corner

oh, I'm gonna be in the free paper!

And I wasn't in there.

And in a moment of frustration

and possible inebriation, I mentioned this to my mom,

who said Well, you should send it to the New Yorker!

You know, I'm like. (laughing)

I know somebody there.

You know, They'll read it!

And I'm thinking, like,

what is the statistical likelihood ever,

even if you're represented, even if,

there's no chance, ever!

Out of alcohol-fueled hubris

and on the insistence of my mom,

I stuffed a copy, a print, of this thing

I had written into an envelope,

and sent it off to the New Yorker,

and thought that's the last I will every hear of this.

And then a month and a half later, kitchen phone rings,

and it's David Remnick, the publisher of the New Yorker

saying We'd like to run this piece.

And when it ran, it transformed my life within two day.

Within two days, everything changed.

It was a hard news story, first of all.

I mean, I had just come back from Japan.

(laughing)

I was doing jury duty.

And I remember coming out of jury duty,

and there were journalists there

with cameras asking me about this piece.

And I think the next day, I had the offer of a book deal.

Everything changed, everything from that point on.

What...

I gotta ask you about Trump.

(laughing) (humming)

And it's weird, right, 'cause most of the time

I spent with you when I was working on the profile

was prior to the election.

Yeah.

And I'm pretty sure we were sitting there

in Vietnam, the two of us.

I either was just about to

or I had just had this incredible experience

of eating dinner with President Obama.

And at the time, the notion that Donald Trump

would ever be president was unthinkable.

Yeah.

And boy, was I wrong.

What does it do, I mean, so here's what strikes me.

I saw you right after the meal with Obama,

and you were veritably buzzing with, kind of, exhilaration.

And some of that,

and this wasn't me intuiting, I mean,

you said this yourself, was that he seemed,

in your encounters with him, Obama did,

to resonate strongly with, you know,

what might be said to be kind of the thesis of your show,

which is get out there, see the world,

see people where they live, and try

and understand their experience

and how they got to be where they are.

And I think you can make an argument

that there are aspects of...

Where the country seems to be drifting today,

that are like a repudiation of that, right.

Yes!

[Patrick] Or antithetical to that.

There's no doubt about it!

And I wonder what does that mean for you?

Like, what does that mean for the show?

Interesting.

(humming) Look, I had dinner

with what felt like a regular guy.

I was jacked.

I mean, all of us, when we were shooting,

we were shooting in a relatively small room,

and the secret service couldn't fit in the room.

So we were alone with the president

and these customers and crew members who were eating.

All of us felt very relaxed in his presence, this elegant,

empathetic man who seemed to speak from his heart.

Not running for office anymore,

he spoke very freely and off the cuff.

I asked him at one point Do you smell that,

Mr. President, do you smell that,

the wood fire, the pork sizzling in the distance,

you know durian, the smell of sweet food?

And he responded very emotionally about his childhood,

parts of his childhood in Jakarta and Indonesia.

And hen was sentimental about those things.

So to go from that to this, where the world

does seem to be turning inwards and fearful of the other.

And you know, President Obama talked about

how important it is to travel, and walk

in somebody else's shoes, and think about

the other.

The pendulum seems to be swinging in the other way.

Look, I don't know.

I do not, I scrupulously avoid an agenda as best I can.

Clearly, I'm pissed off about some things,

and I do have some issues that I feel

very strongly about, immigration.

This is a personal thing to me.

You know, you work with...

Mexicans and Central Americans for as many years

and as intimately as I have, that's gonna be

an issue for me, and I'm gonna use

every opportunity to talk about it.

But generally speaking, I try to avoid thinkin' about it.

I go out there,

I go to places,

I do a bunch of stuff,

and I talk about how that felt and how I react

to those things as truthfully as I can.

And by truthfully, I mean I do not owe you

journalistic truth as a viewer.

I owe you only the truth about how I felt at the time.

Do I feel stupid, disoriented, angry, passionate, confused?

That's the only mission I set for myself.

That hasn't changed,

because I've understood, as much as I might think

it's good for America to go to Vietnam,

or to Cuba, or to Iran, to walk in their shoes

and to experience what I experienced

in those places, that one is just as likely

to feel that same way, that same empathy,

that same sense of surprise and confusion

of having all your preconceptions turned upside-down,

in West Virginia, where I just was,

which is the absolute heart of gun, god, and Trump country.

And I cannot tell you how warmly I was received there,

how comfortable I felt, how beautiful it is,

how generally fucking awesome.

And as wrong as I've been, I'm always

the stupidest person in the room wherever I go.

You know, you shoot in Beirut,

you can be pretty sure if you're in a room full of people

that you have no idea what's actually goin' on,

what the real agendas of everybody is.

But it's the same in West Virginia.

It's the same.

So really, to answer your question,

things aren't that different.

(applause) You were shooting a show?

Yeah.

It was extraordinary.

How so?

Absolutely extraordinary,

and I think that's one of the things

that travel has done for me, is that,

you know, I said, well, wait a minute.

I'm eating with Viet Cong, I'm eating

with former KGB officers, I'm eating with, you know,

in all of these other belief systems

in places where practices or beliefs

are completely foreign to the way I was brought up.

And yet I give, I'm empathetic,

I'm willing to give people a pass

who's attitudes towards women or homosexuals,

would be conversation enders to me.

I mean, like, you say this shit at my table

in New York, that's it, we're never gonna meet again.

But here it's okay when I'm in West Africa

or parts of Asia and the Middle East,

why can't I kinda go to West Virginia

and feel, make that same leap of faith

that people are doin' the best they can.

(applause)