Noam Chomsky

I arranged this interview with a cold email during my second year at university, when I was 20. It became one of the last interviews Noam Chomsky gave before a stroke left him unable to speak.

I had never edited an interview before, so I taught myself Premiere Pro after recording it. I rehearsed by filming countless Zoom calls with friends and family, turned my sister's bedroom into a makeshift webcam studio, and went over my questions again and again. I read Chomsky's work intensively, pausing on every argument, and taught myself YouTube — thumbnails, captions, metadata, the lot. The video reached 10,000 views within a month.

That process showed me I could handle every stage of an interview myself, including sitting opposite a legend. It gave me confidence and purpose. I felt I had done something that genuinely reached across the span of Chomsky's deep and wide-ranging interests — from linguistics and anarchism to foreign policy, hope, practical steps and the lessons he wanted to leave people with.