| Mishal Husain recently made headlines when she interviewed a testy Elon Musk at the Qatar Economic Forum. In the colorful 40-minute exchange, Musk compared Husain to an NPC — a gaming term meaning a "non-player character," or a background figure lacking independent thought. He also told Husain, who joined Bloomberg this year after nearly three decades at the BBC, that he planned to cut down on political spending, an admission that foreshadowed his public bust-up with US President Donald Trump. In reality, Husain is anything but an NPC. One of the UK's most high-profile journalists, she presented the BBC's leading news program Today on BBC Radio 4 for more than a decade, where she was known for her incisive and impartial interviewing style. She hosted UK election debates, played central roles in coverage of Queen Elizabeth's funeral and King Charles' coronation, and reported on uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. In her new role, Husain is launching an interview show as editor-at-large at Bloomberg Weekend.  Mishal Husain Photographer: Hollie Adams/Bloomberg On Tuesday, she hosted an event for subscribers to Bloomberg.com and this newsletter at the our Hong Kong office, where she interviewed Chinese economist, author and investor Weijian Shan, as well as fellow journalists. (It was nice to meet so many of our readers!) The next day, I spoke to Husain about her career, her plans for her new show, as well her new book, Broken Threads: My Family From Empire to Independence. —Richard Frost Why are interviews important to you? What do they mean to you? I was brought up in a South Asian family. My parents came from Pakistan to the UK and then moved to the the UAE (United Arab Emirates). So I had an expat childhood before going to boarding school in England. But when I look back at my upbringing, I realized that some of the most important things to my parents were manners and courtesy. That was actually at the heart of how we were brought up, especially when interacting with our elders — which people of Asian backgrounds more widely will be able to relate to. The way you interacted with elders was that you asked them questions about their life. When I look back now, I feel that my journalistic curiosity probably stemmed from that, that I was not brought up to talk about myself or to say what I thought about things — I was brought up to display an interest in other people. I can now see that led to my professional life, in a way that I couldn't see when I was younger. So I think that desire to interview, to ask people about their world and their life, as well as the here and now, comes from very deep within me — and very far back probably in my personal DNA. The part that I struggle with in today's media is I also know that you have to put your own work forward, and you have to put yourself forward, and you have to say, this is what I've done. And I think that part — which is an essential skill in journalism and broadcasting, and it's important for amplifying your work in a crowded media landscape — that part still doesn't come as easily to me. But the sitting down with someone — appreciating the fact that they're giving you their time, knowing that there is something important that they are going to share — that is something that I feel goes to the heart of being human and how I want to live my life. The Musk interview. You obviously would've known before that interview he can be a very competitive individual. What strategies did you use with Musk to deal with someone like that ? I prepare in the same way for whatever kind of interview it's going to be. I interviewed [Prince] Harry and Meghan [Markle] when they just got engaged [in 2017] and that was unlike any other interview I've done. Here's a couple at an incredibly happy moment in their lives and yet the reason that they're doing an interview, which is going to go around the world, is because they are not only part of the British establishment. A marriage like that is part of an archive of the British royal family and therefore a part of British history. It's going to be looked back upon and, indeed, it really has been looked back upon because of what has happened since. So the common thread is preparation. I do think really, really hard about — I do dig really deeply into the person and their background or the issues. If it's someone like a prime minister, it's not so much into them as a person, it's more about the policy framework and the choices that surround them. But I think my strategy is rooted in knowledge and homework.  Mishal Husain interviews Elon Musk at the Qatar Economic Forum in May. Photographer: Christopher Pike/Bloomberg What makes a great interview? A great interview has to produce something unexpected. I think there has to be something that people were not imagining emerge from it. Something that is new. In journalism, we'll say a new line, but the way I think of it is more: Did we get on to ground that took us into new territory? And ultimately was there something in it that made the reader or viewer or listener think, oh, that was interesting, I didn't know that, I didn't expect that. That's the common denominator. And sometimes they do get heated and that can be sometimes even entertaining — although that's not really what I'm setting out to do. But things do need to be interesting to read, watch or listen to. Otherwise, why should people spend the time? Everyone's got so many demands on their time. I still like to think of my approach being one that is more light than heat. What are your plans for your new role? I've joined Bloomberg to launch a visualized podcast and interview show later in the year, which is part of the new Weekend dimension to Bloomberg, what we are offering on Bloomberg.com and in the apps and elsewhere on Saturdays and Sundays. I've started to do the initial stages of that already: Every weekend we have been publishing a print Q&A, called the Weekend Interview. And if there's one guiding principle in all that — the person we choose, I'd like to feel that the reader trusts me, that this is a person who's worth their while, even if they've never heard of them before.  Husain and Shen at the Bloomberg Weekend event. Source: Bloomberg LP That's the common thread between all of them. Some people are there because they are just very famous and very powerful and everything they say is important. Like Elon Musk. Some people are there because of the job they are doing, like British Prime Minister Keir Starmer or because they've got something really urgent to say right now that's worth hearing. Winnie Byanyima, head of UNAIDS, did that the other day about what has happened to the global HIV response through the US aid cuts. And other people are there because they've seen so much in their life and in their work that they are able to take a big sweep and give us big observations about the things that we are seeing play out every day. So Tina Brown is coming up, where she is talking about observing media and power and celebrity for 50 years. And here in Hong Kong I've just talked to [PAG co-founder] Dr. Weijian Shan about his experiences in the Cultural Revolution. You are also a successful author. You recently published Broken Threads: My Family From Empire to Independence [about Husain's family history around the time of the partition of India at independence]. What compelled you to write that book? Broken Threads was in the background of my mind for a really long time because I knew that my grandparents and their generation had lived through this period in the middle of the 20th century, which was part of a big shift from empire to nation state. For a long time I thought, well, this period is already well documented. And then I realized there is so much that history forgets and so much detail that's so rich and so important, and it's not always political detail. It's often the social fabric that gets missed.  Husain on stage at the Bloomberg Weekend event. Source: Bloomberg LP I found so much that I thought really painted a picture of society as it was then, and, of course, society differed according to social class and geography and religion, but I wanted to capture all of that. I like to think that I've painted a real portrait in Broken Threads of that coexistence with the British in colonial times, coexistence within different religious communities, and some of the heroism at a time of violence in 1947 as independent India and Pakistan were born. I poured my heart and soul into that book and it's been wonderful to see it go out into the world. I also think that it probably did expand my mind as a journalist — part of the shift of me working previously in daily news and in a minute by minute way, and stepping back slightly and now working on a weekly product where I am trying to think what's the one big thought that we can bring into this weekend's interview. | 
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