Status Games, Polyamory and the Merits of Meritocracy

Agnes Callard is an ethical philosopher who dissects, in dazzlingly precise detail, familiar human experiences that we think we understand. Whether her topic is expressing anger, fighting with others, jockeying for status, giving advice, or navigating jealousy, Callard provokes us to rethink the emotions and habits that govern how we live. She also happens to be one of my favorite columnists. In this conversation, I wanted to hear what Callard had to say about a tangle of topics we’ve explored before on the show: how we measure and trade status, and how that feeds into the amorphous thing we call “the meritocracy.” Callard’s argument is that we can have a “non-punitive” meritocracy, one that rewards us for our (virtuous) successes but doesn’t blame us for our failures. I’m not so sure, but it’s a fantastic conversation I’m still thinking about. But as they say on the infomercials — that’s not all! We also talk about why advice is useless, the benefits of jealousy, whether polyamory and monogamy suffer from the same problem, sad music, why Callard’s office is such a riot of color, and the secret to a good divorce. And, at the end, I’ve got some music recommendations for you. Enjoy! Mentioned in this episode: “Who Wants to Play the Status Game?” by Agnes Callard, The Point “Against Advice,” by Agnes Callard, The Point “The Other Woman,” by Agnes Callard, The Point “Parenting and Panic,” by Agnes Callard, The Point "Aspiration" by Agnes Callard Recommendations: "Tolstoy: A Russian Life" by Rosamund Bartlett "Pessoa: A Biography" by Richard Zenith "Augustine of Hippo" by Peter Brown “Real Death” by Mount Eerie You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

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

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein, and this is The Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:19Ezra Klein?

  Right now, if I were to list my top five regular column writers, Agnes Callard would definitely be on that list. Callard is a philosopher at the University of Chicago. She's the author of the book Aspiration, and she writes this wonderful public philosophy column for the magazine The Point. And I love that column. Every one of them is just dense with insight on all kinds of different topics: status, and jealousy, and parenting, and arguing, and anger, the things that we all live with, right? It's a problem in the news that you don't really have a news peg every day to write about what it means to be angry, or what it means to be jealous. But those are topics that all of us are dealing with every single day. So her column, I find, is just a real model of how clear, precise,

• 1:01Ezra Klein?

  philosophical thinking can illuminate topics we already think we know well. I just really get a lot out of it. So it's a joy to get to have her on the show. And this is one of those ones, I know it's a cliche in podcasting or interviews, we cover a lot of ground, but she writes about so many things that there's just vast territory that we range over in this conversation. But I do want to start and set you up for topics that we've covered before on the show, which is how we define and communicate status, and what are the merits of and the problems with this so-called meritocracy. Callard has really shaped how I view both of those topics, how I hear myself and others in conversation, and what the sort of meta level of what we're saying is doing. And then how to try and parse the tension in the meritocracy debate between believing we're not really responsible for

• 1:42Ezra Klein?

  most of how our lives turn out, and so a philosophical or moral structure that blames us particularly for our failures is unjust. And yet, it's also indispensable to have an idea in our own minds of excellence, to have something to strive for, a way to shape our efforts to sharpen the instruments of ourselves. And she just has a wonderful way of working through this debate. So I think you're really going to enjoy it. As well as my email, [email protected]. Here's Agnes Callard.

• 2:15Ezra Klein?

  So you have this fascinating column on status, and I want to start with how you define it. What is status to you?

• 2:21Speaker 01

  It's how much value other people accord you.

• 2:24Ezra Klein?

  That's a good way of putting it. So then you talk about the way we work through this in our everyday interactions. And you talk about the basic game and the importance game and the leveling game. Can you talk me through them?

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Sure. So the basic game is an attempt to find some common ground with a new person that you meet in terms of interests or a place that you come from or people that you know. It establishes that we care about at least some of the same things. The importance game is a game of jockeying for status in which you try to be recognized by your interlocutor at sort of the maximum importance level that they can recognize you at. So you want to give them all the facts that they would need to see how important you are.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  And the leveling game is a game of finding common ground in feeling unimportant. So you find a way to talk to someone in such a way that you can both share an experience of powerlessness or struggle. And in a way, it's a way of defecting from the importance game.

• 3:38Ezra Klein?

  So model out a conversation for me. Let's say you and I just met. What might be things that one would say in a conversation that would establish each of these?

• 3:47Speaker 01

  So I think one thing that's hard is that with both the sort of importance game and the leveling game, there is an element of disguise. We don't play them explicitly. We do play the basic game explicitly. Like, we come pretty close to just being like, hey, let's find out what we have, what we're both interested in. Do you like this movie? Right? But the other two are disguised. And so anytime they show up in a conversation, they kind of show up in... You can't, like, actually just say to someone, I'm going to explain to you why I'm important. And you can't actually just say to someone, like, let's empathize with one another, something like that. You have to kind of do it by way of doing something else. And so a way that I see this show up often in I'm an academic in academic

• 4:31Speaker 01

  context is sort of talking about busyness. Academics talk a lot about how busy they are. And for a long time, this sort of puzzled me because I don't think we're the busiest people, but I think we talk about being busy more than any other group of people that I encounter. And I think that what busyness allows you to do is it's a sort of, it's a way of playing both games at the same time. So if I tell you that I'm really busy, I'm telling you that I feel stressed, I feel overworked, I feel like I'm not in control of my life, I have all these demands being made on me so you can empathize with me. But at the same time, I'm also telling you that, look at all these people who want a piece of me, I'm pretty important, right? And so I think that that's a big part of what makes the busyness an attractive topic

• 5:16Speaker 01

  for people, is that it allows them to play both those games at the same time.

• 5:19Ezra Klein?

  And so how do you distinguish when these are about assessing relative status and when they're just about creating common grounded conversations? So if we're chatting, and I did not go to Harvard, but you know, we're talking and I let slip that I went to Harvard, you know, maybe I'm saying, hey, hey, I went to Harvard. Or maybe I'm just saying like, that's where, where in fact I went to college. Or on the flip, if we're then talking later and I say, oh, you know, I'm just totally overwhelmed lately, you know, or I'm a really anxious person, or I just find, I just can't even do simple things in my life and get them done lately. Maybe I'm saying, you know, don't worry, even though I went to Harvard, I'm just like you. Or maybe I'm just trying to, trying to create a space for us to have a conversation.

• 6:00Ezra Klein?

  So when is this a status game and when is it just, you know, human beings assessing their own experience, you know, in concert with each other?

• 6:07Speaker 01

  I think it is just deeply indeterminate all the time. And it kind of has to be, right? So one thing you can do is you can be sort of a very charitable listener to people and you can always try to hear. Only the basic game in the conversation. And I know people who sort of do this, right? Or you can be very, very attuned to these other two games, right? And always be responding to that in the conversation. And I think that often, in fact, what we do is we combine the expectation of being heard in the basic way with interpreting others in one of the other two ways. So like, it's easy for me to think of myself, oh, I just happened to mention that I went

• 6:50Speaker 01

  to the University of Chicago or something like that. That is, to hear in my own speech, only the basic game, right? Which is a kind of charitable interpretation of myself. But then to be hypersensitized to the other person. And I think that there's always going to be an interpretative ambiguity because the leveling game and the importance game are always disguised.

• 7:12Ezra Klein?

  So you argue that we do all of these games and all this status jockeying in part because we've left, to put it in your terms, important ethical theorizing undone. What is the ethical theorizing here that is undone?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  It's a question of what makes a human being valuable? I mean, you can say, what makes a cup valuable? Well, I can drink from it. What makes a work of art valuable? It's beautiful. What makes some weather valuable or something? It might be, well, it's pleasant to be in, or it might be, it's good for the environment or whatever. There are all kinds of ways of talking about why something is valuable. But a human being is a special case, right? And we're very interested in what makes us valuable. And I think that we have two basic answers to that question that we give, like, at a philosophical level, but we're all giving those answers, which is, on the one hand, what makes a human being valuable is a certain kind of dignity or inner worth that everyone has simply in virtue of being human.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  You have it from the moment that you're born, or depending on your theory, maybe even before you're born. And nothing you do can lose it. You can't lose it, no matter what you do. And everyone has it equally. Right? So that's like one kind of worth. The other conception of value is of something acquired. And in, you know, some of the philosophy that I work on, ancient Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, the word that's sometimes used for this is virtue. Right? So a virtue is a kind of excellence of a human being that they have to do stuff to get. So you're not born with virtues. You're not born being courageous. You're not born with knowledge.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  So the other account of what makes a human being valuable is like, well, it's the value that they worked to acquire. And you either acquire it or you don't. And if you don't, you don't have it. And so the first conception of value, you could think of it as like a moral safety net that catches everybody. Right? And the second one is one where it's possible to lack it and it's possible to have it to a greater or lesser degree.

• 9:16Ezra Klein?

  Past societies have had much clearer status hierarchies. And recently in America, you might say that we have a very intense one and it's hard to have social mobility, but we also try to hide it in all kinds of ways. We have very complicated feelings towards it. You have a great quote in this piece where you say, "A recent acquaintance told me that the least stressful new interactions in his life were in the army because status relations were immediately evident and common knowledge." You just looked at how many stripes a person had on a shoulder and that was that. Status negotiations complete. By contrast, in the extramilitary world, confusion reigns. Is there something about the way we relate to status hierarchies, like right now, today in modernity, that's created an unusual level of confusion? And is that a good or a bad thing? If so?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  I think the more social mobility you have, the more of this tension you'll have. So if you think about Plato's Republic, okay? So in Plato's Republic, he creates this ideal society. And in the society, there's this thing he calls the noble lie. The noble lie is that certain people have metals in their soul, bronze, or silver, or gold. And depending on which you have in your soul, you can either be like in the ruling class, or in the guardian class, or in the sort of artisan class. And what's so interesting to me about this is that Plato inverts the modern, the idea that genetics is the hard truth.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Namely, he thinks the lie is that we have a kind of innate fundamental difference that underwrites our social class. The truth is that those differences aren't there, but we have to pretend that they're there. So we, in effect, we have to pretend that there are these fundamental genetic differences that determine what class we're going to be in. And why would Plato think that? Well, if you think that, you know, the fact that you're not a ruler is because of some metal in your soul that can't be changed because it's like locked in you, then you're not going to try to be one. And you're also not going to see the question of whether or not you can rule as determining your sense of worth. Your sense of worth is already there, right?

• 11:22Speaker 01

  So Plato's society is one that's rigidly socially immobile, right? And it does prevent a certain kind of strife.

• 11:31Ezra Klein?

  And so in a way, that's in contrast with what we have, or think we have, or talk about having, which is a meritocracy, which is the idea that where you get is a reflection of your virtue, of your work ethic, of your talents, and how you've used them. And you've done a lot of writing about this. And there's been, particularly on the left in recent years, a real questioning of meritocracy. I mean, it goes back further, but it's been, Michael Sandel's written a book on it. Daniel Markovitz has written a book on it. And there's this idea that the meritocracy blames people for their failures, which makes it in many ways immoral, given the level of responsibility we do or don't have over our life outcomes. But on the other hand, the question of, well, isn't it good to give people something to aspire to? How do you parse that?

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so one thing I've argued for is that, at least ideally, what would be nice is a non-punitive meritocracy, right? So you could think that the rewards that people get are the products of their efforts, without thinking that the people who don't get the rewards are culpable or blame worthy.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  And this is actually how we interact with people. Like, people find this weird to think about it this way politically, but it's exactly how we interact with our friends, right? So when our friends have some achievement, we don't say, oh, well, you started off lucky. You know, you, you, of course, all our friends have various forms of luck, but we don't emphasize those when they achieve something. We say things like, well, earned, you know? You deserved it. This went to a great person. I say this all the time on Twitter when I see people getting things and I'm like happy for them and I think it's great, right? On the other hand, like when I have a friend, you know, get a paper rejected from a journal or like happens to me all the time. We, we have various failures. We don't, we might try to give them suggestions about like how to improve for next time, but we don't say, well, this is your fault. It's earned, it's deserved, right?

• 13:22Speaker 01

  We treat these cases asymmetrically. In those cases, in the case of failure, we attend to all the outside influences. And I think that kind of difference in attention makes sense and it's sort of ethically justified as a good way to treat people.

• 13:39Ezra Klein?

  So when I, when I read this argument from you, it made me wonder if I'm a bad friend. It was the first take I had on it. Because you're completely right in, in how I talk to and how my friends talk to each other, right? Somebody does something great and we're like, hey, good for you. You've worked so hard. Then something bad happens to somebody. It's like, oh, my God, the, the world is cruel. And oftentimes that is my view on the situation. But I don't think that's as ubiquitously true as, as that makes it sound. I think plenty of times within a friend group, there is somebody who, you know, the friends, the various people think is like actually kind of screwing it up. You know, they're being a bad partner in their marriage or they're not working hard at their job. And then when the, the consequences eventually come, you know, you're nice to people when that happens

• 14:22Ezra Klein?

  and forgiving and sympathetic and, and there with them. But I don't think it's true that the way they often get looked at is quite so asymmetric. That may be the way they're spoken to, but, but I'm not sure that's so deeply true. And that makes me wonder if this is actually as easy a thing to do as you're talking about, that we do want to believe, maybe only because it's self-protective to ourselves, that our personal effort and personal decisions like have an outcome in life, all the way up to the way that when There's an often marked phenomenon that when you hear about somebody dying young in the news, that people immediately want to know why, right? Were they a smoker? Like, did they, you know, did they live in an unhealthy way? Because they want to say, well, I'm not doing that, so I'm not going to have this

• 15:07Ezra Klein?

  problem. And so it does seem to me there's something kind of deep in our desire to blame people, even if it's socially awkward to do it to their face, and so we try not to do that, that there is a fair amount of blame that creeps even into social relations.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Good. So I think that, I mean, like, one question is sort of, what is the correct ethical relation you have to this person whose marriage is failing or their career is failing because they're making some of the wrong choices? And I tend to think that the correct ethical relation to that person is to try to help them, right? So, you know, you might say, look, here's how I think you can do it better. So is there any role for the punitive there? Like, it's your fault, you brought this on yourself. And I tend to think the answer is just no, there isn't anything to be gained by that.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  And it might relieve a kind of psychological tension in oneself, but, you know, I don't think that the kind of meritocracy that I am trying to sketch in this piece, the non-punitive meritocracy, I don't think it's easy. So you say, is it maybe not as easy? You say, I agree with you, it's really not easy. It's super tempting to want to think that in addition to success being justified, suffering is also justified somehow. And I think it's almost unbearably painful to us to face unjustified suffering. As much as we say, like, this is the case of the young person who dies, right? As much as we might say, oh, life's not fair, bad stuff happens, that's just words. We don't accept that.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  On a deep level, we don't accept that that's possible. I don't think it's only so it won't happen to me. I think it's like, it's not permitted to happen. It's not permitted for someone to experience profound suffering in a way that is not justified. And there's something actually deeply philanthropic about being intolerant of that.

• 17:02Ezra Klein?

  I think it's a really interesting point. I mean, it makes me think of the God has a plan response to certain kinds of suffering, which is to say that even if you can't feel how it is justified now, in some way, it is justified. This is not my idea, I heard it from somebody else, but I, and I'm sorry, because I've forgotten who now. But there's this argument that the Book of Job would be more powerful if Job was not restored at the end. If at the end of his testings, God did not reward him for his steadfastness. Because like what that is saying, of course, is still like all suffering is on some level justified. There will be, there will be a reward in the end. And as you're saying, one of the difficult things about being a human being is it's not, or at least we have no

• 17:45Ezra Klein?

  way of knowing that our suffering amounts to anything much. And even our fundamental stories that try to acculturate us to the fact that suffering can be beyond our understanding, it's still like, at the end, they swerve from that a little bit and said, but we have enough understanding to say that there's somebody else with better understanding, some other force. And like that, there is a logic to that force.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think it might not matter so much that Job gets rewarded. Like, that's not the part we remember. It's not the part that speaks to us, right? Like, you know, when Jesus says, like, God, why have you forsaken me? Like, does it matter that like later presumably works out okay for Jesus in heaven or something? It's like these moments in which the cry for the suffering to be explained, to be explained right then immediately. The fact that we can even tolerate that much is amazing. And, you know, maybe, you're right about the swerve. I think that it's important to remember that the, the claim, oh, life's not fair, life's full of suffering, we just can't justify it, that's just another

• 18:53Speaker 01

  swerve. That's not actually facing up to it. The actual facing up to it is like so painful that we can at best do it for like a second under very weird circumstances of like, you know, just actually really, the only times I've ever really faced homelessness was when I was like with my middle son and he would like, there was a period in his life where we just had to go over to every homeless person we saw and not just give them money, but like, There was this elaborate negotiation, like if they had a dog, we had to give them money for the dog, and we had to explain to them how much of the money is for the dog. And like, later, he'd talk about it, like, it just wouldn't be over, you know, with a homeless person. It's like, you want to give them the money, but you want it to be over, and it would like, never be over. And I felt like I was facing this thing,

• 19:38Speaker 01

  this like, unjustified suffering, in a way that I just normally don't. I normally find a way around it, right? So we find like, 100 ways around it, even when it's right in front of us.

• 19:50Ezra Klein?

  One of the really profound and profoundly sad things in life is the way we learn to close ourselves to suffering. I find that story about your son very moving. And I think there's a pretty common thing where children have not yet been taught how to ignore what is obviously not right. If you don't mind me asking, like, how did he grow out of that? You say that was a time in the past, and like, and what did you think, watching that end? Were you, on some level, like, grateful that it was over, that you didn't have to keep going up to every homeless person on the street, or did you feel something was lost at that point, in maybe his, but also your, like, ethical relationship with the world?

• 20:31Speaker 01

  So, he is just someone of overwhelming, natural empathy. So like, I'll come home, and if there was something wrong, he'll just look at my face and be like, what happened? Right? He could just sort of read it. And I think, for me, it was a relief, because he has to learn how to, one of his projects in life is going to be to learn how to manage that empathy, that just threatens to become all that he is and consume him. But I do think that in general, yeah, there is this process by which children, it's almost like they move into, we move into a logic of what is deserved, or what is earned, or what is owed. And children are not yet in that space. You know, I'll tell a little story about

• 21:15Speaker 01

  my other son, my oldest, so this is my middle son, with the homeless person, but my oldest son, I used to actually avoid, we lived in Berkeley, California, and the playgrounds had toys, like, they were sort of covered with, you know, toys that people left there for the kids to play with. And there was a period where he never wanted to go there, except when other kids weren't there, because here's how he put it. The other kids take the toys away from me. But here's what actually happened. He'd be sitting there, he'd be digging with shovel or something. Another kid would walk up and she would maybe glance at the shovel. And he would walk up to her and hand her the shovel. And his narrative of what happened was she took the shovel away from me. Right? Now, what was going on there? Well, he could sort of see that she wanted it. Right?

• 21:58Speaker 01

  And he didn't want to give it to her, but he kind of felt like he had to, or he didn't know. What's the rule for like, when you have to? Right? He didn't know about property rights, you know? And I would be saying things to him like, it's your shovel. You don't have to share. The other parents would be looking at me like, it's obviously a playground shovel. You know, I'd be like, just keep digging. You can ignore her. Like, I would be saying things like that. Right? What am I trying to do there? Like, I'm trying to give him a sense of the boundaries between himself and other people. And I think children have to learn that. And then it's really only when we're adults that we can sort of, I think, confront the problem or the profundity of there being such a boundary.

• 22:37Ezra Klein?

  That is such an interesting way to put it. I just sometimes wonder if what we think of as a more mature, realistic way that adults look at the world is just much less true to the reality that we live in. Your story reminds me of this Louis C.K. riff, where he talks about walking down the street in New York with a cousin of one of his friends. And she sees somebody just in terrible shape. The person is homeless and they're in rags and they're ill and they're just not well, right? A person obviously in need of terrible. And she says, we should help them. Like, what should we do here? He says, no, no, no, no, no. Like, that person is fine, right? That person is exactly where they need to be. And I mean, he knows what's going on here, right? This is a point of his riff.

• 23:19Ezra Klein?

  But he is correcting, like, her correct empathetic impulse to help, her correct understanding that what's going on there is unjust, and she has some moral responsibility towards it. And it sometimes seems to me that a lot of becoming an adult is learning or being taught to shut down that intuition of moral responsibility. I know this is like a big question in ethical philosophy broadly. It's Peter Singer's parable about the pond, that if you would walk by a child who seemed to be drowning in a pond and jump in and ruin your suit and your shoes to save them, well, why wouldn't you send the equivalent amount of money to save children in another country, who we know right now you could save by making that donation? And there's like a real tension here between the filtering you need to do

• 24:00Ezra Klein?

  just to live in this world. But also, you know, you can really overfilter that. And then all of a sudden, somebody who's simply on the wrong side of a line that means nothing except that, you know, 200 years ago, there was a war and one side won and the other didn't, like, they just lose all moral value to you. Obviously, this is a pretty deep question in philosophy, but I'm curious like how you try to draw your line to somebody who thinks about this quite a bit.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that maybe one way to think about it is to sort of reverse the standard, almost like, you know, Hobbesian story about the state of nature being basic selfishness and egoism. Like, I don't see that when looking at children. That is, so here's the story. Okay, prior to entering into civil society, each of us is egoistic and cares only about our own needs, and to such a degree that we're willing to do great violence to other people in order to get what we want. But we form this kind of agreement with other people to kind of respect their basic rights, at least, so that they'll respect ours, and so that we can have mutually beneficial agreements through trade. And we might set

• 25:05Speaker 01

  a sovereign over us to regulate that whole process. So there's this, in effect, politics is overcoming the problem of egoism. That's one story, right? And a lot of political philosophy comes out of that and just believes that. But sometimes I think it's exactly the wrong story. That politics is overcoming the problem of altruism, that at some basic level, we respond to the suffering of other people viscerally, and we see it as just as much of a problem as our own suffering. And the problem of causing suffering to others? My husband once said to me, he got into a lot of fights as a teenager, and he said, You know, what I learned was that it wasn't the strongest person who won the fight, it was the one who was willing to do the worst kind of damage. If you'll stick your finger in someone else's eye, you can win almost any fight with a 16

• 25:50Speaker 01

  year old, right? So we don't want to be brutal. We don't want to act brutally towards one another. We don't find it easy to ignore another person's suffering, right? And civil society in some ways like creating a structure in which each of us can be individuals and can limit the extent to which we attend the suffering of others.

• 26:13Ezra Klein?

  Oh, that is a very provocative thought. So do you think that is an optimistic or a pessimistic way of thinking about civil society?

• 26:20Speaker 01

  I think that it's optimistic because I think that the idea would be that as society progresses, in effect, we can accommodate more and more of our natural altruism. So, you know, the thing you spoke of where like we have wars and we view the other side as an enemy, it's sort of like, well, you know, we have this thought that it's a condition on the survival of our society that we close off our humanity to that group, right? But as that becomes less of a condition on survival, we then just permit ourselves to, in effect, activate our natural concern for one another.

• 27:04Ezra Klein?

  So that's actually a very nice bridge back to meritocracy, which we've gone a little bit afield of, but it brings up this idea of the sort of principled versus the instrumental case for the meritocracy. So the principled case for meritocracy might be that that is the right way to structure society, is right to reward people and the people who are getting rewarded are the right ones. But the instrumental case is this idea that we are trying to improve society, that we, the best thing to do is to give people something to aspire to, that we've structured the things they aspire to in the correct way, and that by rewarding them for that and blaming on some level those who don't, we are driving society forward, getting technological innovations, managerial innovations, maybe even ethical innovations.

• 27:47Ezra Klein?

  And so, generation to generation, we are being able to help more people and build something better. I think this has fallen very much out of favor on the left. A lot of the critiques of meritocracy come at the idea that this doesn't work and it's not principled and it hurts the people who fail out. I do think there's something valuable to giving people ways to aspire to personal excellence.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  I do think there's a deep point here that has to be the ultimate justification of meritocracy, if there is one, which is this: you don't want people to be too happy with who they are too early in their lives, right? Like, a two-year-old should not be happy to remain a two-year-old. Like, they're great, you know, but they haven't encountered most of the really valuable things in life yet, right? So, a really big part of life is coming to care about new things that you didn't even know were valuable beforehand. And we want people to do that. And there's a, there's a kind of problem with how people can do it, because it's like, it doesn't seem valuable to them, so why are they, how are they going to start valuing

• 28:52Speaker 01

  it? And competition is a really powerful psychological mechanism for that, right? And so you see it in schools. People want to get a good grade, and because they want to get a good grade, they study. And because they're studying, they sort of become immersed in a world. And so, we use competition to sort of leverage ourselves out of what would have been an impoverished point of view on value. And I think that that's got to be the ultimate justification of meritocracy. But that justification is a justification only of meritocracy as being in a way to motivate people. It's not a justification

• 29:36Speaker 01

  of meritocracy as being a way to ultimately assess the value of your life or what you care about. It's sort of a theory of transition, not a theory of the endpoint. And I think one of the really deep ways in which meritocracy gets corrupted is when people take it to be a theory of the endpoint. In effect, my view is, if you are comparing yourself negatively to someone else, which is, I think, a perfectly fine thing and a very useful thing to do, you better be in the process of trying to become better. If you're done in that respect, like, suppose you look at your neighbor and they're wealthier than you. If that motivates you to try to become more wealthy, great. But if all it does is create bitterness, then you've perverted meritocracy. That is, you've taken something whose function was

• 30:22Speaker 01

  to motivate you to become better, and you have applied it in a situation where, which is static.

• 30:29Ezra Klein?

  Well, wealth is, I think, a really important idea to draw in here because there's obviously the question in any hierarchy or in anything you want to call a meritocracy, which is, well, what is the merit? How are you measuring the merit? And I think that if you asked people conceptually, how do we measure merit? You might get all kinds of answers. And then I think if you actually look at it, it's just money. And so the way the meritocracy works is like you have won the meritocracy. If you are a high up engineer at Facebook or you're at a high up position at McKinsey, and you might say to somebody, do you think a high up engineer at Facebook or a high up, you know, executive at McKinsey is doing more good for the world than a social worker who works with hardcore addicts? And you'd say, no, of course not, right?

• 31:12Ezra Klein?

  The social worker who works with hardcore addicts, like, that's a wonderful person, almost a saint. Then you might say, well, you know, just like, look at society. Which do we value more? Like, who has more respect? Who's going to have an easier time on the dating market? Who's going to have an easier time, you know, having the things they want in life? And of course, it's the people at the top of these, these big companies. And to your point earlier about ethical theorizing left undone, I think we've really lost any kind of critical conversation of like, what we are trying to incentivize people to change towards? And then how we do it, we've just left it a little bit to the market.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Good. So first of all, I disagree with you about wealth being the only measure of merit or even the main one. I think it is a big one. So I think that with the advent of social media, like, just like number of Twitter followers is for some people a measure of merit. I think honors in academia, I can tell you that like, people care a lot about honors. Like, you know, it's a very big deal to get tenure. But then after you have tenure, this amazing thing happens, which is that there are these still, these promotion levels that sort of don't mean anything, but people still care about them, right? They're like, oh, I want to be promoted to full professor. I want to be promoted to university professor, right? Yes, you make a little more money when you're promoted in those ways, but I don't think it's the money that motivates people. I think it's the honor. And I think the social worker gets a certain kind of honor, too.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  I think that they know that they're chosen in examples, like the one you just gave, right? And they get to present themselves as a social worker. And I do think that that's, there is a certain cachet to that. I agree with you. It isn't of the same order as the banker. Why do so many students go into those lucrative professions? Partly, it's that money is a measure of merit. Partly, it is fear. I think it isn't all them wanting the most honor. I think, or... You know, wanting to win the top of meritocracy. I think that students are worried about their survival and they feel they need to make prudent choices or they won't survive. And they feel like, so there's a certain amount, actually, I think, of risk aversion in some

• 33:15Speaker 01

  of the choices that are sort of guaranteed to lead to financial success. Like, on the one hand, there are questions about who do we want to be personally and like, what is it to have value as a human being? And then there's a question, how do you organize society so that in effect, the right things end up at the top? And I don't think that we are crazy off with respect to that, but I think there's a lot of room for improvement.

• 33:39Ezra Klein?

  Money has this weird way, it is a transferable form of achievement. So there are honors within industries or Twitter followers, and they really work in their sort of local space, but money kind of works everywhere. And so that gives it, I think, a distinctive power. And it's one reason I wish we could attach money to things I think are a little bit more socially valuable. Like, that's my fundamental critique of the market. I just think it often rewards the wrong things because we leave it too much to its own devices. I don't think scarcity is always the right way to measure these things. This is in many ways a left-wing critique of the way the meritocracy works. But when I read the left-wing critiques of the way the meritocracy works, a place I

• 34:19Ezra Klein?

  feel uncomfortable is that I feel like the left, in trying to critique the meritocracy so much, has sort of lost an idea of excellence, of what is it you're supposed to be striving for. There's a sort of negative version of it. You want to rid yourself of racist ideas and bias and toxic misogyny and so on. And that's good, and we should rid ourselves of that, of those things. But you also need the positive version, right? Who are you trying to become? You know, to your point about aspiration. And I guess I'll frame it this way. I think a lot about what does a left-wing version of Jordan Peterson look like? You know, or at least Jordan Peterson from a couple of years ago. You know, what would that look like? Because I think you do need that. I think he speaks to something deep in people.

• 35:01Ezra Klein?

  You're not good enough yet, and you need to get better, and here's how you do it. So let me ask out of you, like, what would a left-wing Jordan Peterson be?

• 35:08Speaker 01

  One version of it is sort of the... The idea that anti-racism could be turned into an excellence. I think we used to think, well, there's just not being racist. And like, being racist is horrible. And so it's sort of like being like a murderer or something. And like, just don't do that. And then you're fine. Right? But I think that, so one, this is one version, is already sort of exists. And it is the idea that like, concern for the oppressed and the powerless is itself something that can be perfected and that you can be competitive at and be better at than other people.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  It's not super attractive as a vision, I think, but it is something like that. In effect, Jordan Peterson's a really interesting case because he is dealing with this sort of problem of the zero-sum game of self-respect, right? Where it's like, people feel like they're losers. And he is pushing that in a left-wing direction by saying, everyone can have self-respect. You can, yes, improve yourself, but you can do it by cleaning your room or something that everyone can do. So that's how he incorporates a certain kind of egalitarianism into his approach. And similarly, I think that the left-wing version of that would incorporate a certain kind of competitiveness.

• 36:51Ezra Klein?

  So the core of this conversation, as you said earlier, is the way we give people incentives to shape themselves. And you have a line that's always struck with me, which is that "The process of self-creation involved a fair amount of violence to myself." When we're creating ourselves and changing ourselves, what is the nature of that violence?

• 37:09Speaker 01

  I think it's that you have certain instinctive responses.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  And you can't trust them and you even have to sometimes silence them. And the sort of very mundane version of that is like cases of weakness of will where you're like, I shouldn't eat this extra cookie or whatever, right? There is just a thing that we do to ourselves kind of all the time where we, it's like we're whipping ourselves into shape, right? Where we are denying our own desires. Those desires are judgments about goodness, right? So some part of me is saying, this cookie is good. And I'm telling her, you're lying. That's a kind of violence to the self, I think. And, and, and in the cookie case, maybe it's not so serious, right?

• 37:55Speaker 01

  But in the case of, you know, like, I don't know, early teenage sexual desires. And the kind, if you think about the kind of self-monitoring and self-criticism that we do about that, you know, certainly more so if somebody is homosexual and living in a less tolerant community, but I think it's just true of everyone, that there's a kind of being grossed out by your own desires and there's a kind of feeling of needing to hide them and needing to shape them and needing to tell them that they're making false judgments.

• 38:27Ezra Klein?

  I think it's really interesting, this question of what is our desire? Like the voice in our head saying, we don't want to eat the cookie, or I don't want to spend today on Twitter, or, you know, I want to work out more, I want to spend an hour every morning reading books. Or the more guttural intuitive, like, I do want to look at Twitter. I want to sleep in, I don't want to read the book. How do you think about that conflict between like what that voice in our head says we want and then what we do?

• 38:58Speaker 01

  I think we're way too quick to identify ourselves with the long-term goals, especially when we're not in the moment of being tempted. So we can say, look, I know how I should really live. I know that I should really read those books and I should not eat the cookies and I should be less stressed about these things and I should spend more time with my family. These are things I know. And I think the truth is that I do not know any of them. I believe them and then I also believe the opposite. And there are, some of my beliefs are in a way like more presentable to other people, right?

• 39:38Speaker 01

  So I am more presentable to you if I say, yeah, I know I should really spend more time with my kids than if I say, I have a profound need to escape my kids. But both of those things are true of me. And I think that the violence to the self occurs as long as they are both true of you. I think, but this is sort of me just agreeing with Socrates about something, which is that if you had knowledge, you would not have that conflict. And a lot of people have the goal of mastering themselves, which is to say of exerting enough violence over themselves to silence, to quiet that other voice because they know, they say they know the other thing, right?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  But the truth is that the fact that the other voice is there means you don't know it. And the violence over yourself is the kind of trying to quiet it when it's really there. And knowledge would mean that you unanimously and obviously and in a very simple way did the thing you thought you should.

• 40:39Ezra Klein?

  So I'm trying to think through the implicit definition of knowledge or knowing something here. It seems like a much more embodied way of knowing something than our typical way of talking about knowledge.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Weirdly, I almost feel like our typical way of talking about knowledge is very bodily, but maybe that's just my sort of Socrates-ism. So I think that maybe here's, here's why I would put it that other way. Suppose that I

• 41:04Speaker 01

  I feel like having the cookie, but I know I shouldn't. I think people are inclined to think of the feeling that you have the cookie as bodily and the knowing that you shouldn't as not being bodily. I think that's bodily too. That's just how things look to you in a bodily way when you're looking at them from far away. Right? So you are somebody who is just trapped in the images of things. And when you look at something like eating a cookie from close up, it looks really good to you. When you look at it from far away, it looks like it's not very good. And those are both bodily judgments. There's just proximate and distant bodily judgments. And what we do when we don't have knowledge is we just vacillate between these bodily judgments and we dress one of them up as though it were knowledge, namely the distant

• 41:49Speaker 01

  one. But if you actually knew in your soul, I would say, then the bodily judgments would be like a play of images that you would ignore. Right? So like if somebody says, if I say to you, well, here's two piles of money, right? This one has a thousand dollars and this one has a hundred dollars, but the hundred dollar one is like taller because it's different denominations. So it looks bigger, right? But if you know that this one's a thousand dollars, you're going to go for the thousand dollars. You won't be like, well, that one's bigger. And so there's a way in which we are fooled by images because all we're doing is like, in some sense, doing what we feel like at every moment.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  And to have knowledge would be to just not be subject to those images.

• 42:36Ezra Klein?

  Why would knowledge resolve conflict as opposed to making it clear that there's always going to be conflict? Which is to say, you know, maybe, I want to ask this question correctly. Maybe simply things in their opposite are true, which is something I see a lot in your work, actually, a kind of like recognition of living in the, in the, in the conflict of things. Why would it be true knowledge to resolve conflicts as opposed to true knowledge to say the conflicts are the truth of it?

• 43:02Speaker 01

  So I think the difference there is in just in thinking how far from knowledge we are. So I think the way I am is that I see a bunch of conflicts and I don't know how to resolve them. And that's just my ignorance. If I had knowledge, I would know how to resolve them. But what I at least try to do is to not be under the illusion that I have the knowledge already. To say knowledge would involve resolving them is to acknowledge that we are very, very, very far from that. It's not clear that it's achievable within a human lifetime. But it is. And so there's a different question, which is like, how do we make do without knowledge? Right? And we have to do some of that. But once

• 43:46Speaker 01

  you sort of see it that way, nothing can really look as attractive to you as just having knowledge. Like, you have to make do without it while you're looking for it. But I guess I think the whole, like, living with contradictions, accepting contradictions thing is just, it's a way of swerving. It's a way of dressing up your own ignorance as being somehow responsibility and realism. But I think I can see what it would be to know. And it would be something amazing. That's like way better than where I am.

• 44:17Ezra Klein?

  I like that, at least as a goal. So one way people try to get to that kind of knowledge is by asking other people for advice. And you have a wonderful column on the problems of advice. And so I want to begin with the distinction you draw between coaching and instruction and giving advice. Can you talk me through that?

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. So in this piece, I'm sort of using the word advice in a slightly limited way. I think naturally, it sort of occupies a broader territory. But I'm thinking of sort of what I was motivated by just listening to a lot of podcasts, right? And in which people are often asked to give generic advice to people who want to be like them. And the people on the podcast were always these like, really idiosyncratic, weird people who you feel sure that they did not become that person by following someone else's advice. So there was some kind of a performative contradiction there of like, why don't you give people a recipe for becoming the person who you could never have a recipe and then become that person? But here are some things I think you can do. So I think you can give people Instrumental factual knowledge about how to achieve some technical goal.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Right. So if there's something where I don't know how to do, how to do it, like, how do you get to this place? How do you operate the photocopier? Then you can explain that to someone. And the reason you can explain it to them is you don't need to know their bigger life goals and motivations and values in wanting to get to that place or wanting to operate the photocopier. You can know a relatively limited amount about them and still help them. So that's one kind of thing. Instruction. And I think coaching, what I mean by coaching is a kind of intimate, long-term relationship in which you become familiar enough with someone's goals that you're almost like an appendage of who they are. But you're a little bit better attuned to those goals

• 46:03Speaker 01

  and you can sort of nudge them in that direction. There was a wonderful piece in the New York Times, like yesterday or the day before, about gymnasts, older gymnasts, and people going back to the sport, people who've been told that they're too old and they can't do it anymore. And the relationships they have with their coaches, by contrast, with the younger gymnasts, right? Where the older gymnasts, their coaches are less tyrannical and are more like extensions of themselves. And coaching is something I do lots of in my life because I do lots of advising of different kinds of undergraduates, of graduate students, of, you know, mentoring colleagues, et cetera. So I think that's totally possible. But what I don't think is possible is that you can tell some stranger how to live, where that is understood in some very abstract way of like,

• 46:48Speaker 01

  there's, you know, a good life and you're going to help them achieve it. Because I think that in order to help someone achieve big goals, like the coaching style, you have to know who they are. And I think you can help people achieve small goals, like how do you work the photocopier? But that's not what the advice is geared to. So I see advice as in this, existing in this incoherent space between trying to help someone in a big way who you don't know.

• 47:15Ezra Klein?

  So this is really interesting to me. So is, is part of what you're saying here that for these more profound kinds of Now, don't I use it for advice or instruction this, but these more profound kinds of direction, you know, how do I become a great writer? How do I become a better person? That to make some of these changes that that are more difficult for people to make, that if it's going to happen, it has to be grounded relationally, that you have to know the person and have a thing. And what's happening in advice is you're trying to offer that kind of guidance, but non relationally. And so it's just, it's untethered from this sort of soil it needs to be rooted in to mix a metaphor in order to take hold.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. Maybe one, another way to put it would be, I don't think becoming a great writer is a coherent goal. I think what you want to become is the particular kind of great writer that you can become, whatever that is, and you don't know what it is, right? That's what your goal is. And, you know, who can help me with that? Well, like my editor, because she has some sense of who I am and of who that great writer is that I'm trying to be. But I think that trying to become a great writer in the abstract is a non-goal. One way I describe it in my book is that sort of having aspiration that is too open-ended, you'll just be flailing. Like people who go to Europe to find themselves. I mean, something fun might happen, but most likely they're not going to find anything

• 48:38Speaker 01

  at all because that goal is not concrete enough. And so I think that what coaching does is it allows people to help you with a more concrete goal, becoming sort of the best gymnast you can be, where you can be is actually filled in with a certain kind of person that is known to you and the coach.

• 48:55Ezra Klein?

  My intuition is something similar to what you said at the beginning of this part of the conversation, which is that podcasting is a unusually advice-centric form of media that compared to what happens on the television, or in a newspaper, or even in books, that like even things that you don't think are going to be about advice, they, you know, it's like everything asymptotically approaches just a bunch of advice on how to live. Why do you think podcasting has evolved in that way or lends itself so much to advice?

• 49:22Speaker 01

  I think it's because it's the leveling game part of podcasting.

• 49:27Ezra Klein?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  So podcasting, in effect, is elevating the interlocutor, right? Like, you're important enough for me to invite to a podcast. And now the whole, like, the whole world, whoever listens to the podcast is in effect elevating that person and being like, Here's this important person, right? And, you know, a huge part of the world that we live in, in the social media world, is like being approachable. Like, I think the advice part is mostly, the function of it isn't to actually give advice, it's to make the, that person seem approachable, or like wanting to help all the people who might otherwise resent them for being in some way above them.

• 50:09Ezra Klein?

  So, a lot of internet advice, although obviously not all of it, ends up revolving around relationships, which I'm gonna use as a segue to a fascinating piece you wrote about jealousy, of which you have a pretty unusual take on it, which is that you say it's a positive emotion. How is jealousy a positive emotion?

• 50:25Speaker 01

  By positive, I don't mean, say, praiseworthy or good. I mean, I leave that aside as to whether it is or not. What I mean by positive is that it is a form of desire or attraction rather than a form of aversion or fear, say, right? So, we could classify emotions into whether the emotion is pulling you towards something or whether it's pulling you away from something. And I think jealousy is pulling you towards something. What it's pulling you towards, though, is the love that someone could never have for you, the love that they have for someone else, right? So, I think that many people, me certainly, but I think maybe most people, are in some way erotically attracted to that very love,

• 51:10Speaker 01

  the very love they can never have. The love that is in some way defined as being the love for somebody else. And I think that part of why we find that so attractive is that if you love someone and you, it's like who you are for them, that's so limiting in some way, like, this is who I am and I'm loved as this. And what if I want to be loved as someone else, too? Like, what if I, like, if you see the relationship as a very central, sort of like metaphysically defining thing for who you are, then it can feel frustrating and limited to only be loved as yourself.

• 51:47Ezra Klein?

  Do you think there's a version of that too, where you want the version, not the love exactly the person has for someone else, but the version of them they are with someone else? Like, if you, if you love someone, you want to know them. And the sense that there's a part of them you cannot know, because it is a part of them that emerges in a different dynamic with a different person. And so you can never have it. That's always struck me as a very deep part of jealousy.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  That's a great point. And I don't touch on it at all in the piece that I wrote, but I think you're right. When I think about times I've been jealous, I have wanted to know about the character of the conversations that my beloved was having with his other beloved, right? Where it's like, I want access to the you that you are for them. And so it's a kind of, and what that speaks to is a kind of bottomless desire to own them. I want to own everything about you, even the parts of you that don't exist for me.

• 52:46Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, it's, it's, I think there's something very real there. Always has been for me at least. And you get a small taste of it when you go out in public with your partner. You go to a dinner party and you see a version of them. You're like, wait, like yesterday, we were just hanging out and where was this version of you? And then you realize like, wherever it was, it wasn't their part because of me. And like, that's a terrible feeling.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  So I think it's a big part of why people like going to dinner parties with their partners. Like, I think jealousy is integrated at a low level into most romantic relationships. And it brings people pleasure. Like to see their partner being desired by others, kept at a certain simmer or something. Like even though they feel jealousy and even though there's some kind of painful emotion, they want that pain, they want some of that pain.

• 53:30Ezra Klein?

  I think that's a very real point. I'm not a very jealous person, but to the extent I sometimes get a bit jealous, I definitely find it to be a pleasurable emotion. Now, that might be because it's happening within an overall context of security. It would not be pleasurable. And I've had other relationships where it's not been pleasurable because it was happening outside of a context of security. But inside a context of security, I find it to just be a little exciting, right? This recognition of unexplored vistas, this recognition that there's something unknown that is like changing my, my relationship with my partner. It can be fun. And it gets to another line you have in that same piece where you write, "I've never understood how polyamory is supposed to survive erotic rivalry, but I have exactly the same objection to monogamy." Tell me why those aren't more different for you.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, because in some sense, the problem is the same, namely, in the case of polyamory, you're always going to want the love that, let me just throw some genders in there, right? So that he has for another woman, right? You, you want that love, right? And so that's the jealousy that threatens to undermine the system. But in the case of monogamy, you also want the love that he has for another. It may not be embodied in another person, right? At the moment, though, it threatens to be at every moment. And at every dinner party, there's that potential, right? And so if you want the love that he has for another, whether or not that slot is filled, that's a problem.

• 54:59Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, in some, I, I know polyamorous couples. And one of the things I will sometimes hear from them is that it's demystifying of that love, that in some ways, it is less threatening to see your partner go out and then watch them come back and they're just the same person. And in some cases, like a little dissatisfied and tired the next morning, as opposed to wondering what it is they want that you cannot give them, right? That it is a, like that acculturation removes it of some of its mystical power.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, good. And I mean, I would sort of think then that, that you'd have to find some way to remystify. That is, if I'm right, that jealousy is kind of written in some deep way into the erotic relationship, right? That it's not just, like, we kind of need jealousy. There's a kind of flatness to love without the possibility of it, right? And so you'd almost worry that the polyamorous relationship that got too demystified would sort of be like the monogamous relationship in which nothing could even get noticed at the dinner party.

• 55:58Ezra Klein?

  Let me ask about this from, from the other side, which is, what makes for a good divorce?

• 56:03Speaker 01

  I mean, I think most divorces are probably good divorces in the sense that very few people get divorced out of compulsion or necessity. Almost everyone chooses it because it's the best course, right? But that doesn't mean that they're always pursued as well as possible.

• 56:18Ezra Klein?

  Well, sometimes one of the partners doesn't want to get divorced.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  I'm not sure how to think about that sort of case. I mean, I suppose you're right, that there could be a relationship, you could be in a relationship where the other person, where someone doesn't want to be with you, but you still want to be with them. And it could be that, given a set of bad options, that's somehow still your best option. But that would be like a very bad case. I would think that it would be hard to persistently want to be with somebody who really didn't want to be with you.

• 56:49Ezra Klein?

  I think in those cases, and I'm no expert on divorce, but I think in those cases, it's more that you are shocked and on some level disbelieving that the person doesn't want to be with you. You either wish it weren't true, or you think it will become untrue again.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:04Ezra Klein?

  Right? You think they're going through a thing.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:06Ezra Klein?

  And this is a bad idea. And like, let's just like, take a breath here and give it five or 10 or 15 or 50 years and see how you feel then.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Yes. I got that advice a lot when I got divorced. Because I did it very quickly. And people are like, wait, let's deliberate. So I think that that's a very good point. So one person might just think like, over time, we can figure this out. And the other person thinks that we can't figure this out. I think you're right. That's a real case where there's a disagreement over whether we can sort of work something through or not. And the person who thinks that we could, the divorce would just be a genuine loss. But even in the case where there's agreement, which is most of the divorces I know of, that at the end of the day, there's sort of agreement on that question. I guess I think that maybe there's actually little more to a good divorce than the ability to continue

• 57:56Speaker 01

  to proceed by agreement. So like, marriage is proceeding by agreement, right? It's like you deliberate together with your spouse about how to live. And I think you can continue to do that through a divorce and after a divorce. And the question might just be how much of your lives continue to be shared, which like, if you shared kids, it's going to be a fair amount. But I think that there is this thought that, and maybe it's rooted in the very problem that you just described about the person who wants to keep trying and the person who doesn't, that divorce marks the end of deliberating together. And I think if it does, then that's going to cause a lot of pain. Because if, in some

• 58:38Speaker 01

  sense, we deliberating together is how we act together with one another's consent.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  And if we can't do that, we're going to be sort of routinely doing certain kinds of violence to one another and and we're going to be operating using sort of threats and incentives. So yeah, I would say it's the ability to deliberate together.

• 58:57Ezra Klein?

  So I ask you this because from what I can tell on social media and podcasting, you have an unusually successful divorce. You celebrate your divorceversary, or at least some of them. I obviously cannot, given our earlier conversation, ask you for your advice for divorcing couples. But there's a specific thing you said, which is about creating space for deliberation. So I'm curious what have been for you the successful spaces for for post marriage deliberation?

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Well, so one thing is like, I talk to my ex husband a lot about philosophy. He's one of my best interlocutors. And that is important because it's not the case that we're always deliberating together. Like, there's another thing we do together that isn't deliberating together. It's inquiring together. And maybe that creates a certain kind of backdrop of goodwill, I guess, that is relevant to deliberating together. But I think that it's something like, suppose there's some important decision that needs to be made about kids' school, or about, let's, let's pick that, right? Something about the kids. I think the key to deliberating well with him has been not to think that I can settle that

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  question on my own in my head, and then try to sell him that plan as being the right plan. It's immediately obvious to someone when you're doing that. That is, persuasion is not the right tactic. Persuasion is much less commonly the right tactic than people suppose, I think. So it's not, I should actually figure out what we should do with his help, where I think there are important pieces of the puzzle that are unavailable to me until I talk to him.

• 1:00:33Ezra Klein?

  That's just good. Oh, man, I can't say good life advice. That's good life instruction. This is a very specific thing that one could put into practice. Often between marriage and divorce, although often outside of marriage too, people have kids. I have a two-year-old. And you wrote an essay, it was not that long after I had a child, about the panic of parenting, which I love and I've sent to other people of children. But you talk in there about something that has just felt truer and truer to me every day, which is that it really shouldn't be called parenting, it should be called childing. Can you tell me why?

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think maybe the core thought there is that parenting suggests that you make your child into something. And that's just not the truth. It's more like your child is trying to figure out who they should be. And you're trying to help them without knowing what that is. And I think that it's hard before you, before I became a parent anyway. Like, I didn't get how sort of psychologically difficult it would be to, in some sense, like, stand by and watch. And it means every time you have an expectation for your child, and you cannot avoid having expectations, you also question it and say, am I having the right expectation for him?

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Is this the expectation I should be having? Because you want, it's not one direction of fit. It's not like your child should meet your expectations, right? You want to have the ones that are the right ones for him. And so there's this direction of fit from you to your child that means that you are constantly second guessing and questioning yourself as a parent.

• 1:02:10Ezra Klein?

  And that it feels like, I mean, my kid's a little bit young for this at this point, but, but from the older parents I know, times for my own parents, and that it feels like a failure, that you have failed them if their lives, or even in a local way, their year, their month, doesn't turn out the way they want it to, right? It does seem to me that the agony of parenting is believing that you can control things you cannot control. But also, it would be very agonizing to think I was doing this without any control, right? Any influence. You know, how do you, how do you think about that? That desire to, like, what do you do in parenting? What's the point of all this?

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  So I like that point about failure. Like I gave that example earlier about my kid not wanting to go to the playground to play because the other kids took the toys away from him. And, you know, I struggled with him and I would give him these speeches about how it's yours, don't share it. But eventually I just gave in and we would just go to the playground really early when there weren't any other kids. There was like a year when we just did that, right? Just to avoid the conflict, right? And I was thinking to myself, I'm not like educating him. I'm not teaching him that he's supposed to hold on to stuff. And I saw it as a failure, but I'm like, this is my compromise. I'm just gonna not get into this situation. And of course, it worked out fine, right? But I think that that failure is necessary as part of the story.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  And I think what you're doing as a parent is you're coming up with goals for your kid constantly, and you're just making them up. And you're making them up partly on the basis of like stuff you hear from other people and, you know, stuff you hear from your parents and stuff you read in some book. But you're like, here's how his life should be, right? And then you, insofar as you fall short of that, you feel bad and you readjust and you come up with some new goal. And you're constantly doing that. You're constantly making up fake goals. And I think it's because if you didn't do that, you wouldn't know what else to do, right? It's like the way you can see that so clearly is with infants, right? It's amazing. If you look at the way people deal with infants, they treat a bunch of stuff that isn't, is

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  obviously not important as being super important, right? Whether the child is fed with breast milk or formula, whether the child, how they sleep, how often they sleep, even what kind of, whether their clothing is organic or not, whether they, you know, when they are toilet trained. There are all these details about infant life that parents obsess over. And you might look at that saying, I looked at it actually, saying like, people are nuts. Like, none of these things are important. They just don't matter at all, right? But you have to care about something, right? You need some kind of goal. And I think that parenting is this process where slowly you learn to have the right goal for your kid, to have the goal that actually matters. You have to start out with dumb goals that don't matter, like how they're born and how

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  they're swaddled and et cetera. But you're almost like triangulating until you come to the goal for them that is their goal.

• 1:05:08Ezra Klein?

  That's such an interesting way of putting it. What I was thinking about while you were saying that was... So I did very poorly in school, starting in seventh grade. Like, it was junior high. Like, I remember the class where I got my first D. And from there through to when I was, so I'm probably 13 there, something like that. From there to sort of the end of high school, like until my senior year, my grades, for whatever reason, get a little bit better. And also, it's over, one way or the other. It was just a constant source of really difficult tension between me and my parents and disappointment for them. They wanted me to get better grades. Frankly, I wanted me to get better grades, and I just couldn't, for whatever reason. It was not a lack of trying. And the strange thing is, it all worked out, right?

• 1:05:51Ezra Klein?

  Looking back from where I am now, like, I'm a New York Times columnist. I have a job. It's all fine. Like, I went to college. It all worked out. But of course, they couldn't have known that, and I couldn't have known that. And so, in a way, the goal was wrong at that time, and it caused everybody a lot of cirrus, to use the Yiddish word. But it's not like I can fault, like, the goal seemed right. Like, it's not like I thought they were wrong about being mad at me about my terrible grades. And so, sometimes with this kind of way of looking at parenting, it becomes this real difficult question of like, how do you, like, how do you rate tension? You know? I think about this with, again, like, I have a very young toddler, so he can't learn much from me in discipline yet. So it's like, okay, like, I'm just trying to avoid tension. And I sometimes succeed and failed this morning because we did not have the right kind of

• 1:06:36Ezra Klein?

  juice. And there's nothing I could do about it. But, you know, to what you're saying, like, one way of looking at it is like, yeah, just like chill a little bit as a parent. Do you, do you believe that to be true? Or do you think that it's actually good to take your best guess of the goal? And, and that the tension, you know, creates something valuable in the conflict?

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  I think it's very hard to know. I'm reflexively averse to the goal of chill. Like, I think nobody ever believes that. People say it. Nobody believes it. Nobody acts upon it. I do think it's important for your kid to see that you care who they become. And having that tension is a way for that care to manifest itself. Part of what you're doing is like, you know, being your kid's superego in some way. You're maintaining, you're, you're, you're, you're holding a place for their conception of who they're going to be. And you want that to be big and expansive. And you want it to be much bigger than a toddler or an eight-year-old or a 12-year-old or 17-year-old, as my kids are, can imagine. You want it to take up more space than that. Right? You want them to expect a lot of themselves.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  And part of how you're doing that is by expecting a lot of them.

• 1:08:02Ezra Klein?

  How do you think about the question of setting good goals for oneself or anyone else? A through line of our whole conversation here is about goals. Right? The goals the meritocracy sets for us, the goals we set for ourselves aspirationally, the goals we set for our children. And then also how often those goals can be wrong. They're not true to who we really are or how things actually work out. So you've clearly done a lot of thinking about goals. Like, how do you set goals for yourself?

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  So, I mean, one thought that I have about goals in general is that you can get much less far ahead of yourself than you think you can. So that's part of the illusion of what I said, the sort of, um, the fact that the judgment from a distance is also a bodily judgment. It's like, if I have this goal of like, I want to, I don't know, read a lot of more books or something, then I, I can almost convince myself that I'm already the person who cares about that. Right? But if I were, then I would be doing it. And so I think in myself, the way that I live that out is that there's a lot of randomness in what I do.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  I'm like constantly exploring new avenues that where this might be me trying to become a different person, but I never really know because if I were, this would just be the first step and I would be confused about it. So I think that's like taking up a lot of hobbies and like, kind of starting new projects. And then a lot of them fail where like, I don't have big abstract, long-term goals, except insofar as it's something like.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  I have philosophical projects and I want to like bring it to a conclusion wherever that will be. So there's, yeah, there's a lot of like random movement.

• 1:09:48Ezra Klein?

  That makes sense to me. Let me ask you a question I did not realize I'd be asking, but, but now that I'm actually able to see you here and, and the audience can't, but you have a lot of color on behind you is one of the most colorful walls I've ever seen. And I see a lot of cacti with eyes, flowers, possibly real, I can't actually tell. What is your relationship with color and like visual stimulation?

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  I need a lot of visual stimulation all the time. So actually, my office hasn't always looked like this. It actually used to, like when I first got my job, this is my university office, it was like a regular office.

• 1:10:24Ezra Klein?

  This is your university office I'm looking at?

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:27Ezra Klein?

  Oh, wow. I thought this was at your home.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:10:30Ezra Klein?

  It's very cool. And people can actually find pictures of this online, I realize now.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  Yes, it's on my, actually my Twitter page. It's like the background photo or something.

• 1:10:38Ezra Klein?

  Got it.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, when, um, we, we, we actually had a fire in the philosophy department a few years ago. So this is the second instantiation because it was destroyed. But when they came in here, the, the, whatever insurance people came in here after the fire, they were so confused by the room and they were like, is this some kind of therapy room?

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'm actually puzzled by other people who don't have a lot of color, like, like the clothing with a lot of color on it pretty much costs the same as the clothing with very little color on it. So I'm confused by why people aren't making what to me is the obviously superior choice. But I just, color is amazing. It's one of the most amazing features of the world. We could have lived in an uncolored world, right? A lot of the features of our world would still be in place, but there's just this element of beauty that is out there of beauty and order and pattern and contrast. And it's like, I want to experience it all the time. And I was starting to say that I, my office used to be normal. And I found myself actually Googling colors, Googling the word color on my computer just to look at colors. And I'm like, this is ridiculous. I should like have some color in my office.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  So I like, I had like one of these tapestries, actually not these ones, but the pre-fire versions. And then I was like, oh, this is awesome. Let me add something else. Let me add something. I have the ceiling, my whole ceiling is covered too. You can't see it. And yeah, my, my like, my husband, my kids would come in and they'd be like, okay, but now you're done, right? They'd keep saying that. And I, but I keep finding new spots where I can add stuff. And to me, it's like one of the most obvious arenas in which maximization makes sense. Like most things, you shouldn't try to maximize. You shouldn't try to maximize how much money you make. You shouldn't try to maximize how much honor you get. But I don't see why you shouldn't try to maximize how much color is in your life.

• 1:12:18Ezra Klein?

  So there's color and then there's like visual stimulation. And I think the thing you'd normally hear from people, the thing I would immediately think is that it would be distracting. You'd be looking around and like, you'd always be like caught on something. And I end up, when I'm writing, I have to clean my desk really intensely and you know, there's nothing on it. And I would actually like more color in my room, but, but I tend to have very clean workspaces. So do you find that it like leads to a different quality of thinking? Or is it just the context in which you think best? Like you clearly don't find like busyness in the visual field to be distracting, but, but what is it for you?

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  I like being distracted, I think. That's kind of the randomness I was describing, right? You can't segregate randomness like that. It has to be available to you at every moment of your life that you might start doing something else. It creates some persistence problems with getting things done, for sure. I like patterns. I like visual patterns. I like them because they're distracting. And I suppose I think that there are forms of distraction that I would find unpleasant. So there are definitely forms of distraction I find unpleasant. Like if someone's talking while I'm trying to work or something like that. So maybe it's very, it would be interesting to think about why some forms of distraction feel pleasant and others feel unpleasant. And I would, I've never thought about this before, but I would sort of guess that there's a feeling of volunteerism.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  With the visual where I can look at it, but it doesn't like force me to look at it. Whereas a voice that is speaking, it's sort of producing meaning in a way where I cannot detach from that. I have to receive that meaning. It's like a friend of mine once told me that she used to really enjoy the way the Coca-Cola signs looked, the swirls. And then she learned how to read and she couldn't see the pattern anymore. Because she was receiving the meaning, right? And so there's this way in which a world of visual patterns is not a world that is conveying meaning to me. And that makes it feel unintrusive. It allows me to like think all the meaning thoughts I want without having them being imposed by my space.

• 1:14:16Ezra Klein?

  That's really interesting. And I found out you do something else that I do and but that I don't know that many other people do, which is always if I'm working, I'm listening to music and I'm listening to one song on repeat. And whatever I'm doing, I think I have to find, I take a lot of time when I'm beginning to write, finding the right song and then rejecting songs because they're not the right mood and they're not the right vibe. And this one's distracting me. But when I find it, it's just like, then it's just on repeat for six hours. And then we're done with the piece. And I'm curious, because you do this too. One, a little bit how you came to it. But two, how you choose the songs?

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  I'm much less systematic than you. And I often choose the wrong song and just live with it. And I actually almost sometimes I can enjoy the pain of the fact that it's the wrong song that I'm listening to over and over again. So there's a perversity to it. But I think it also depends on what I'm writing. Like if I'm writing about anger or like sadness, if I'm writing about emotions, I have to feel the emotion that I'm writing about. This is actually one of my biggest frustrations with academic writing on the emotions is that so much of that writing is has as its content, the claim that there's a distinctively emotional way of thinking where that thinking cannot be communicated except by way of the emotion. But the piece is unemotional. And it's like, well, do you believe it or not? Right? So I feel like academic writing is not well suited

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  to writing about the emotions for that because you're not allowed to write emotionally. But for me, in order to write emotionally, I have to feel to some extent the emotion. So in that case, I don't know, like, like if I'm writing about anger, like there was one time where I listened to the Nico Case song, "I'm a Man" over and over again. That's like an angry song. So or sadness especially, like if I'm writing about grief or loss or. Suffering, then I want music that expresses that. But often, it will just be pretty random.

• 1:16:08Ezra Klein?

  I like that. And I like the idea that you can, you can get into the pain of the wrong song. I'm going to try that for, for a piece. It has to be a little jarring sometimes. I think it's a good place to end. So let me ask you what is always our, our final question with one addendum, which is, what are three books you would recommend to the audience that have influenced you? And then what is one song used to feel either sadness or grief?

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  So a couple, a month ago, two months ago, I read a biography for the first time. I'd never read a biography.

• 1:16:34Ezra Klein?

  For the first time?

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  Yes, first time.

• 1:16:35Ezra Klein?

  Wow.

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  I thought I'd hate biographies because I associated them with history and I don't like history. It doesn't make sense to me. It's like a bunch of facts and I don't know how to fit them together. And then there's a story being told about them, but I'm always like, is this just one story that's chosen and could there be others? And also the story always began before it began. So I find history quite confusing. So I sort of stayed away from biographies, but then I was just reading a lot of Tolstoy and I'm like, let me try. And I read a Tolstoy biography by Rosamund Bartlett and I loved it. And I, I realized that biographies are not history. They are like voyeurism. It's like you get to peer inside someone's life and find out the things that they would not have wanted to tell you. So I'm going to recommend that. And I, I actually thought, maybe I'll never read another biography because it was so

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  perfect and maybe I'm just done. But then I got sent a new biography about Fernando Pessoa, who's someone else I'm into. And it's not out yet.

• 1:17:29Ezra Klein?

  Who, who's Fernando Pessoa?

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  He is a Portuguese philosopher, poet, master of personi. It's our early 20th century. He wrote under heteronyms, not pseudonyms, heteronyms, because he saw them as aspects of who he was. And he had, I mean, 50 to 100 of them, but there were three or four that became. Sort of prominent in his work. He published almost nothing over his life. He put all the stuff papers in a trunk. And his most famous book is called The Book of Disquiet. I'll recommend that, too. It's wonderful. It is a book about the restless mind, right? Like, what is it if you can just never fix on who you are, or fix on how to live your life? And at every moment, you're sort of shifting and thinking, what if I saw this slightly

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  differently? He calls it my factless autobiography. But anyway, I read this biography of Psoa that was also wonderful. It was like a thousand pages, and I read it in a week. I just couldn't stop reading it. So I'll recommend that, too. I started one last night. I started a biography of Augustine.

• 1:18:28Ezra Klein?

  Do you know what it's called? The Fernando Psoa biography?

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  It's called Psoa.

• 1:18:31Ezra Klein?

  Psoa.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  Zenith is the author. It's coming out in July. And last night, I started biography of Augustine by Peter Brown. That's just like a super famous biography that everyone's like, if you like biographies, you should read this one, because it's great. And it's good. I've read maybe 50 pages. But I sort of think, like, I sort of feel like now, will you pick any person who was passionate and driven and weird, you know, like Clarice Lispector, or W. B. Du Bois, or Simone Vey, or someone like that? Their biography's going to be great, right? Like, the thing about biography is that you get to see how the sincerity of someone's passion, as it drives them to develop over the course of their life. And I really didn't get that before I read one. So I recommend the genre.

• 1:19:13Ezra Klein?

  I love that.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  There's just sad songs. There are so many of them. For some reason, the one that's jumping into my head is a song called Real Death by Mount Eerie.

• 1:19:25Ezra Klein?

  That does sound sad.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  It's

• 1:19:26Ezra Klein?

  By who, you said?

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  I think it's the Mount Eerie, I think, is the name. It's about the death of someone is, makes a song about the death of his wife, and his wife has just died. And he's like, this is not art. Like, this is real life, and I'm actually really sad. And it's somehow, like, the first line is, death is real. Death is not like for making art about. And it's this sort of very sincere attempt to almost transcend the act of turning something into art and presenting it to you directly, like, telling you, like, the backpack that his wife ordered for their child, whose school days she knew she would never see, you know, arriving in the mail, and like, giving you these details, but it's almost spoken.

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  That one I can't actually like, listen to a lot. Like, if I'm writing, it's sort of almost too sad. But anyway, that's, that's what jumped into my head.

• 1:20:20Ezra Klein?

  That's an amazing recommendation. Agnes Callard, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you so much.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  Thank you. It was really fun.

• 1:20:30Ezra Klein?

  That is a show. Thank you all for listening. If you enjoyed it, please rate it in your favorite podcast app or send it to a friend. You know, I sometimes at the end of these do recommendations of my own on something related to our conversation. So we talked there about how Agnes and I both will put on individual songs over and over and over again while we're working. And I thought I'd list a few that I've been listening to recently. So this one's an album, actually not a song, but Spencer Brown's Stream of Consciousness, which is lush electronica, really, really good for work, but actually pretty sonically interesting, like really well crafted. I really enjoyed that. I've listened to it a lot recently. Actually, a Rojai Karma recommendation to me. I was kind of gutted that MF Doom died. I'm a big MF Doom fan from, from back in the day.

• 1:21:14Ezra Klein?

  And so I've been listening to a lot of, of him. But if you don't know where to start, Doomsday is just one of my favorite songs, full stop. And it's been on in the background for me, actually in the foreground for me a lot lately. And then finally, I just ran into this song, not really great for working, but just beautiful vocals. Someone Else by Bishop Briggs featuring Jacob Banks. I mean, you can turn, you can turn that one on loud and you will really feel something. The Esther Clanchow is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Rojai Karma and Jeff Geld. Fact checked by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.