George Saunders on the ‘Braindead Megaphone’ That Makes Our Politics So Awful

George Saunders is regarded as one of our greatest living fiction writers. He won the Booker Prize in 2017 for his novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” and has published numerous short-story collections to wide acclaim, including his most recent book, “Liberation Day.” He also happens to be one of my favorite people to read and to talk to. Saunders is an incredibly prescient and sharp observer of American political culture. Way back in 2007, he argued that our media environment was transforming politics into a competition within which the loudest voices would command the most attention and set the agenda for everyone else. With the rise of social media — and the advent of the Trump era — that observation has been more than vindicated. So as we approach the midterm elections, I wanted to have Saunders back on the show to talk about how politics and media have changed, and how those changes are shaping the way we interact, communicate and even think. We discuss how Twitter takes advantage of — even warps — our “malleable” selves, how politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene strategically manipulate our attentional environments, how Barack Obama leveraged our human desire to be seen as our best selves, whether discipline or gentleness is more effective in helping others grow, what options we have to resist anti-democratic tendencies in our politics, whether a post-scarcity future — with jobs for everyone — would leave us more or less satisfied, how the greatest evils can be committed by those trying to care for their loved ones, what attending Trump rallies taught Saunders about political violence and more. Mentioned: The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders “Host” by David Foster Wallace “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” by George Saunders Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber “What It Means to Be Kind in a Cruel World” by The Ezra Klein Show “I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medium Really Is the Message” by Ezra Klein Book Recommendations: The Storm Is Here by Luke Mogelson Sugar Street by Jonathan Dee Marlena by Julie Buntin Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. (And if you’re reaching out to recommend a guest, please write “Guest Suggestion” in the subject line.) 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. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Mary Marge Locker. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

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

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:24Ezra Klein?

  So this episode is going to come out on Election Day 2022. That's a hard episode to program for. You don't want to sit around speculating. You don't want to go so far off topic because that's where people's minds are right now, where my mind is right now. And so what do you do? Elections, they're an expression of more than just a vote, right? There are national psyche at war with itself. There are divisions and our desires, and I think they're particularly the way we think about and talk about and understand each other. I mean, elections are stories coming into collision. And so I had the thought to ask George Saunders back on the show. Saunders is one of the great storytellers of the time. He's one of my favorite writers of short fiction, of essays.

• 1:07Ezra Klein?

  He wrote the beautiful novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Booker Prize. His work has always been very political, including his nonfiction. He has covered Trump rallies for The New Yorker. He did great work back in the day on homelessness before the real turn to that in political media. He wrote an essay in the early 2000s called The Brain Dead Megaphone, which we talk about a lot here, that I think is still maybe the best thing for understanding how deranged our models of political communication are today. I had him on the podcast about a year and a half ago. We'll link that episode in the show notes. That was a really beautiful conversation around the craft of storytelling and kindness and mindfulness and meditation and consciousness. It's really one of my favorite episodes. And he's got a new collection of short stories out, Liberation Day,

• 1:52Ezra Klein?

  which are really interesting, chilling, and more, I think, directly political, particularly when you put them all together than a lot of his other collections are. In a way, I think of Saunders's entire career as revolving around this question of whether the language we use and hear can increase the quotient of compassion and understanding we bring to the world, and whether that can in turn do a bit of good. And so in this conversation, we spent some time just ambling around. I would actually say we're trying to figure out what this conversation is. And then something emerged in it, some really beautiful, difficult ideas that I think are going to linger in my mind for quite some time. As always, my email, eshrakline [email protected]. George Saunders, welcome back to the show.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Nice to be here, Ezra.

• 2:39Ezra Klein?

  Tell me about the story Love Letter. Who's writing it? Who are they writing to? What is that construct?

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Sure, it's maybe set some number of years in the future, five, 10, we don't know. And it's a grandfather writing to his grandson. And you get the sense that a big political shift has happened, and now we're living in an autocracy. And basically, the grandfather, very sweetly, kind of, you know, like a nice grandpa, is telling the story to the grandson of how things got to be this way, kind of apologetically. But his subject is, he wants this kid not to be political and to just sort of sit on his hands and enjoy life without engaging. And over the course of the story, we kind of find out that this grandson has possibly a lover who's been imprisoned by this system. So for me, at first, it was just an event, you know, before the election, and I just was kind of agitated and kind

• 3:27Speaker 01

  of boiling over with grief, really, you know, that I thought, are we really going to get this system up as easily as we seem to be, you know? And so I just felt like, ah, I gotta get this out of my system. So I just went to write kind of a screed, really, you know? And then, you know, screeds are okay, but I like to assign them to a character. So, once I had said my piece, I gave it to this grandfather. And then you kind of just let it play out. And what happened during writing it that was interesting to me was that he makes a pretty good case, you know, in a time like that to just be quiet. But even as he's making the case, he's kind of talking himself out of it. So in my reading of it, by the end of the thing, he's not quite sure. In fact, he's offering his grandson money to do whatever he needs to do, you know?

• 4:10Ezra Klein?

  There's a paragraph in that that burrowed pretty deep for me, and I've been reflecting on it. I'd like to have you read it. It's one beginning with, what would you have had us do?

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Sure. What would you have had me do? What would you have done? I know what you will say. You would have fought. But how? How would you have fought? Would you have called your senator? In those days, you could still at least record your feeble message on a senator's answering machine without reprisal, but you might as well have been singing or whistling or passing wind to it for all the good it did. Well, we did that. We called, we wrote letters. Would you have given money to certain people running for office? We did that as well. Would you have marched? For some reason, there were suddenly no marches. Organized a march? Then and now, I did not and do not know how to arrange a march. I was still working full time.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  This dental thing had just begun. That rather occupies the mind. You know where we live. Would you have had me drive down to Watsonville and harangue the officials there? They were all in agreement with us at that time. Would you have armed yourself? I would not and will not, and I do not believe you would either. I hope not. By that, all was lost.

• 5:25Ezra Klein?

  That paragraph opens a question that remains open in that piece and that honestly, I think about a lot. And I want to say very clearly here, I'm not saying that America is about to tip into autocracy and people need to pick up weaponry. That's really not what I'm saying. But it does happen to systems. They do fall apart. History is full of that. And I do wonder what you do in those moments. Well, what is the answer to that for you?

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Well, this is where I slip out of it by being a fiction writer because, you know, Dylan said in Chronicles, he said, "Sometimes I write what I know to be true. Sometimes I write what I know to be false. Sometimes I write and I don't know whether it's true or false." So, one of the blessings of being a fiction writer, especially if you're kind of a neurotic like I am, is you can just summon up a viewpoint, like we just heard, and then you assign it. So, is that true in some absolute sense? I have no idea. It's true for this guy. And then hopefully the story in some way complicates or opposes it. So, I think reading that, I agree with him, you know, that violence is never, is not the way. I also can understand that his grandson might feel that as sort of a concept.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  You know, and as you point out, there are times when systems fall apart. And so I think that for me, the blessing of being a fiction writer is you can have it always at once. In fact, you're supposed to have it always at once. You know, Chekhov said, a story doesn't solve problems that formulate them correctly. So I enjoy the part where a voice inside me appears. And then I really enjoy the part where I make that voice hard to refute, you know. But I don't necessarily agree with the viewpoint and the way that a story starts to get complicated and to really speak to our deeper nature is when, I would say, when it's self contradicting. You know, there's a beautiful Chekhov story called Gooseberries. And, you know, there's a very persuasive argument that says that happiness is decadent.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  And it only comes at the expense of others. And Chekhov says, every happy man should have an unhappy man in his closet with a hammer. To convince him by his constant tappings that not everyone is so happy and that sooner or later, life will show him his claws. So you read this and you're like, I never thought that my happiness was a decadent act. Thank you, Mr. Chekhov for convincing me. But then in the same story, that guy who made that speech is shown joyfully, selfishly, swimming in this pond in a rainstorm, just exalting in happiness. So you hold those two things against one another. What's Chekhov saying about happiness? Is happiness good or bad? And Chekhov goes, da, you know?

• 7:52Speaker 01

  And so for me, that's the magic of fiction is that in that moment, your, your normal mind that judges so easily and so happily gets tripped really and suspended. So for a few seconds there, you really don't know what to think about happiness and therefore you see it more fully, actually. See how I'm dodging your question?

• 8:10Ezra Klein?

  I do. I see that. Yes. So I'm thinking about how to pull you back into it. A lot of your stories, here's my try. And I guess I would contrast a question it raises with another one you often raise. I think a lot of your stories are about how do people act? How should they act? And we'll talk about this in a system they should hate, but might be complicit in or might believe they have chosen to join. A lot of that systems are for you, I think, often capitalism are very extreme forms of capitalism. But this story, it seems to me to be about. When do you stop abiding by the rules and norms of a system you might love? And that's often the question of liberal democracy. I mean, you have a beautiful line in that piece.

• 8:52Ezra Klein?

  Quote, "We were not prepared to drop everything in defense of a system that was to us like oxygen, used constantly, never noted." But more than that, there's a way where defending a system of liberal toleration in ways that are illiberal or intolerant is this essential contradiction that people face all over the world, not just here and not even primarily here. And that contradiction feels very, feels very important to me, that that kind of sense that it is worth doing anything to defend this and also that the point of this system is you're not supposed to do anything. You're supposed to have rules and guidelines and norms and boundaries.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  I think it's kind of a question of which manifestation of this system are you defending? So my gut, I mean, again, this is just not a political statement, a personal statement is I really abhor violence and I think violence cross contaminates. Like when I was covering those Trump rallies, I saw exactly one woman on each side punched by someone on the other side, you know? It's sickening. The time I saw it in San Jose, there was a Trump supporter, older woman punched to her knees, you know? And I helped her up. She's almost in tears. The person who hit her is in tears. There's nothing noble about violence. It's just, you know, ugly. So I think, I agree with the grandfather in this case. If you say, "I'm defending a liberal system by illiberal means," then you're not, you know?

• 10:15Speaker 01

  And so then I think that's important to say that because then we're going to be more creative and energetic about defending it in the correct ways.

• 10:24Ezra Klein?

  The story Liberation Day, the opening story of the book, is about, well, why don't you describe what it's about? Because I'm not sure how I would describe it.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  I'm not sure I would either. You know, my story, I just, I kind of start them by just trying to get lost, you know, trying to make some world I don't recognize and then gradually fleshing it out. But in this one, the opening image for me was kind of related to an earlier story of mine called The Semco Girl Diaries. And in that story, there was a world where people were hanging up women from poor countries in their yards as lawn ornaments and they were, and they were kind of perceiving it as a win-win because they got this beautiful thing in their yard and the women were paid, you know? So. In this story, it's a sort of a similar thing, except the people hung up are in your house, in a studio, not unlike this, and their brains have been messed with so that some of them can speak at a very high level, super articulate, on command. So you, as

• 11:16Speaker 01

  the owner, can kind of dial in, "Tell me something about nautical," and the person will riff on that. "Tell me something about city." And then there's another group of people who are singers, who have sort of a similar skill. So the idea is you're kind of a suburban guy, what's a hobby, and you've got a mixing board, and you can make these people put on these incredible presentations. You know, that old trope.

• 11:36Ezra Klein?

  And the reveal of the story is that people are choosing in a way to be there. They have signed up to be memory wiped and be made into a speaker, or to be made into a singer.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:50Ezra Klein?

  They don't remember that they've done this. The person who owns them believes or is able to rationalize that they have done nothing wrong. These people voluntarily entered into this arrangement so that the money they made from it would go to somebody else. And it's this very, I think, profound question that is in a lot of your work of, what does it mean if people agree to be treated inhumanly? Because that seems to them to be their best option.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Right. Presumably, the guy was in a terrible shape, bad enough shape that he agreed to have his memory wiped, you know. Yeah, I mean, that to me is, it's, I don't really know why it's interesting to me, but it does sort of resonate with my early working years, you know, the idea that we had our kids at home, and I was so happy to have a job, you know, but it was a 10 or 12-hour-a-day job, being away from them, doing something you had very little interest in. And so just lightly, that kind of material eagles and, you know, capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body, that was just very lightly hitting me. The idea that in order to honor love, I had to be away from the object of love, doing something that didn't interest me. So I'm sure that's in there somewhere. But honestly, you know, my stuff, here's my thought is...

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Art serves a really important function, which is partly to get us temporarily free of rationality or of kind of habitual rationality. For the producer of the art, me, to do that, I really have to be clear of concepts when I'm working. So the whole game, and it sounds sort of simplistic, but is to find a voice or riff or a little tiniest bit of a notion that will confuse me and also excite me so I can keep going day after day. So you're really turning yourself over to a kind of a counter rational process in the hopes that in the end you'll produce something that will put your reader

• 13:43Speaker 01

  through something that will be fun, first of all, and I would maybe tack on be beneficial, although that's sort of an option. I hope it says something, you know, complicated and contradictory that leaves you basically in the same state you're in when you get off a roller coaster, like, sheesh, what the what, you know? Then you might afterwards talk about it. You know, that third curve was really something. But the essential thing happened in those three seconds after you got off the ride.

• 14:09Ezra Klein?

  But I'm a horribly literal nonfiction writer who has all the concepts always at the front of my brain and just sits there arranging them like pieces on a chessboard. And the term that all, the one that often comes up to me in your work, The Semper Coeur Diaries particularly, which is one of my favorite stories of yours, is an old term that used to be very common in critiques of capitalism, which is wage slavery. And we don't talk about wage slavery anymore because we very much adopted the idea that if you consent to a job, if an employer offers you money and you have agreed to do the thing for the money, whatever your conditions are, that is a freely chosen agreement. And as such, like, we're all good in all directions.

• 14:54Ezra Klein?

  But there's a long running view, on the left particularly, that people are often not in condition to consent, that when the alternative is indigency or your daughter cannot get the health care she needs, that the things people will do should often be understood as inhumane, whether or not they will say yes to them. Maybe it's better than the alternative, but that's because the alternative is a kind of horror. And that just seems to me to be a very present concern for you, that question of when should our consent be good enough?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Right. For me, it's just interesting to watch and see what does the work do to your spirit, you know, that's really the question. If you can take joy in it, great. I know when I was working the tech writing job, I found a way to take joy in it because that was a survival mechanism. And it wasn't, you know, it wasn't the Gulag, but there was a way in which I could say, well, I would rather be elsewhere, but I thank God I'm not somewhere worse. I would say we're very, very tolerant of misery now for our workers, you know, the idea that somebody had worked three jobs and not be able to afford a house is pretty crazy, you know, and that's been a slow drift that I think was enabled in my experience in the Reagan years where, you know, you were never to complain about

• 16:03Speaker 01

  working conditions and so on. So I think that's in the stories and it's in my life. I mean, I've seen it, you know, when I was a kid, I kept a diary and I found it a few years ago. And this was during the periods when I felt so like a hippie, you know, free and easy, just traveling all over. Every page is about money, you know, I need this much money. I borrowed this much money, I have to pay it back. I borrowed this guy's shoes and I ruined them, you know, literally. So I think that's the great background story of America. And I don't think we can simply say all work is brutality, you know, but some work is more brutal than others.

• 16:39Ezra Klein?

  Have you ever read the late David Graeber's book Bullshit Jobs?

• 16:42Speaker 01

  I have not, no.

• 16:43Ezra Klein?

  So his book is about this idea of jobs that the people doing them think need not exist. There are many jobs and you can poll people and it will tell you this, where they think that what they are doing is useless. For some reason, somebody is paying them to do it. And that there is a violence to the soul to do something that even you think has no real value. And

• 17:07Ezra Klein?

  One of the things this often points to, to me, is that we seem to me to be within, let's call it 100 years, of a pretty profound rupture in what we are trying to achieve here. Which is, I think, most politics, and particularly most left politics, but not only, is actually very built around the idea that everybody should have a good job. And they should have a good job and that should be enough for a good life. And then there's this other, there's long been a strain of politics, but it's always lurking in the background of the robots and automation and AI conversation, the Star Trek politics. Maybe the point of life is not to have a job. Maybe the point of life is to get past the point. Because one of the horrors, I think, the tough things to face up to in the world is that a lot of truly terrible jobs are not bullshit jobs.

• 17:53Ezra Klein?

  Coal mining is how we built modernity. Lithium mining today is how we are building the decarbonized future, you know, many of us are hoping to see. But possibly someday, we will be able to offload a lot of work, much more so than we can even imagine now, on the robots, on the automation, on to other things. And it's a really interesting question that keeps recurring of whether or not this would be a tragedy or a triumph, a dystopia or a utopia. How do you think about that? Not as a policy question, but as a question of what role work

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting.

• 18:26Ezra Klein?

  does or has to play in our lives.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  My guess is that some people would mess that up too, you know? People are people, so if you give all of us a life of pure contemplation, some people are gonna mess it up, you know?

• 18:38Ezra Klein?

  I would go completely insane.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I would too.

• 18:40Ezra Klein?

  But is that because I was socialized to think that every day has to be... I have a derangement where if I cannot basically justify my day on my own to-do list, it's very hard for me to feel like I merited my day on earth. I'm not good at just...

• 18:56Speaker 01

  No, I'm the same.

• 18:56Ezra Klein?

  At the Sabbath.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  You know, we just sold the house upstate and I went up there and for three straight weeks, I did 15-hour days of just work, physical work. And I have not been that happy in years. It was, you know, I had a very simple to-do list every day, which is just go. Like, don't even think, just go. Went to bed, totally exhausted, and I felt so happy, you know? So, I don't know. I mean, I think that the main thing is, as you suggest, I think we have a national malaise that has to do with national purpose. What's our purpose? Why are we special? What's different about us? It's all there, you know, in the founding documents, actually. What a thing. We're gonna let every being, no matter who they are, have the dignity of being safe and free and happy. That's pretty awesome.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  But I think politics, so-called now, has become, well, in industry certainly, and somehow it's obscuring that. It's obscuring that very beautiful idea. Within that, what's the individual's purpose? I would say it's to burn through delusion. Like, try to figure out what's actually happening in this mind and this body. Why am I, for example, why am I so convinced that I exist as a person? That I exist permanently and that I'm central to everything in the world? Well, we kind of know why. You know, it's because of thinking. And it seems fairly urgent that we should get to the bottom of that because death is coming and it's gonna shock the shit out of you, you know, when it does come. So those are, you know, if you can imagine a country that, first of all, really walk

• 20:22Speaker 01

  the walk of everybody's valuable and we're gonna protect it radically, everybody, no exceptions. And second of all, somewhere in there, there was an idea that the point of all this was to come to a more profound understanding of who we are, which I think is gonna cause us to realize that we're here to have affection for one another, you know? So that would be a great setup. And whenever I see political problems, political dissent, political violence, I think it's because the system has a different goal than those. It has a goal that we, in our hearts, we know is not really in our interest. So to have a system that valued us, wanted us free and happy, and wanted us to be aspiring to the highest goal, and materially made that possible, then I think we'd all be pretty

• 21:06Speaker 01

  in sync with our system. But in so many ways, and some of them you're suggesting, the capitalist system and our current sort of cockeyed form of democracy works against these individual interests.

• 21:17Ezra Klein?

  A lot of your stories seem to me to posit another tension or reason that politics and people go awry, which is a conflict that often emerges between the care we have for those in here to us. And the consequences that might have for those far from us. So to go back to the Semper Fi Girl Diaries, that is built as a diary of a father who is intensely concerned with his daughter's happiness.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:46Ezra Klein?

  And she wants to be seen as cool and rich and like she comes from a successful family and he is basically trying to assemble these doll slaves to help her. And, and he sees himself as functionally failing her as a father when he's not able to do that. In liberation day, you have a story that is about, you know, this guy wants to create art for his neighbors and be an artist. And again and again, it seems to me that you posit this question of when is our concern for those near to us, a path to a deep immorality? When is that the tool that a system can use or we can use to get us to rationalize some, some, some truly horrible things?

• 22:31Ezra Klein?

  You have another story in there about a mother whose son is lightly, but nevertheless assaulted. And her desire to have justice for him in a way that, you know, doesn't go great. You've said some of the most moving things I have heard on, on fatherhood. So I'm curious about, about this particular obsession of yours. This, this fear that love of family, love of those near to you can become a disconnection and instrumentalization of those far from you.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I read somewhere when, when we first had our kids, I can't remember who said it, but it was a very beautiful statement about how maybe the best we can do is imagine a little pod and the people we love are in it. And it would be a very noble work of a lifetime just to keep that pod safe. And I thought, that's so true. And then I thought, except it kind of isn't, you know? What you actually have to do is imagine that your pod is just as real as my pod. And, you know, the people of value in your pod are exactly equal to mine. And if not, we're going to get into the situation you're talking about where I'm going to say, you know, we really need X. Now it's going to come out of your pie, but it's my family, you know? So that's something that I've, I've struggled with a lot because the realest thing in my

• 23:42Speaker 01

  life has been the love for my wife and kids and extended family. And like, I think so many Western people, you do have that slight feeling of piggishness sometimes when you've realized that. You know, you've erred on the side of protecting your pod. And, you know, you can look around and you can see that other pods are affected. So that's definitely, you know, something I, I think about. And I don't think, you know, one of the, the things I tend to write about are things that concern me and that I don't really see a simple answer to. You know, I think it's totally natural for people to protect them and theirs. That's Darwinianism 101. It's also perfectly natural to feel guilty about it because you see that it is a little bit selfish. And I guess my thought with, with fiction, with writing it and with reading it,

• 24:27Speaker 01

  you don't get to an answer. But if the story is well told, you sort of increase the, um, the power of the opposition in your own mind. You, you know, you, you have, the two forces are now both very strongly represented as they are, I think, in that simple girl's diaries. And at the end, you don't have an answer, but you have new respect for the question.

• 25:12Ezra Klein?

  So a lot of the stories in the new book are about the role of language. Or at least a central feature in them is people are losing language or they can only use language when they're turned on in a certain way. That there is something that controls or binds their language. They're not allowed to say things. If they do say things, they'll be violently punished. Tell me about that preoccupation for you in this collection.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  So I think these days, you know, it seems like we are having languages imposed on us. Even the fact that you have a, a social media that tell you how many characters to use. You know, this is language imposition. You have to wonder about the agenda there. Why does anyone want to restrict the full range of my language? What's the game there? Say with social media, we are receiving stories in a different way than we've received them in the past. I think, you know, for hundreds of thousands of years, we received stories at a certain frequency, let's say. Now they're coming in faster, more staccato. They're malformed in their syntax because of the method of delivery. They're designed to agitate, to attract attention in this kind of strange way.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  So all these things are happening and as those stories come in, I don't think we're quite able to process them. And so we are, in a sense, having languages imposed on us that are not necessarily the best language to get to truth. They're languages that are essentially designed to get us to do something. And it's a kind of a new rhetoric, actually, you know?

• 26:42Ezra Klein?

  Imposed is a really interesting word there because there are these constraints imposed on us. And then we work within them and feel that we are the one in control of them. And you get into this very Marshall McLuhan-esque territory of whether or not the medium is changing our message or whether or not we use mediums for our own purposes. I've become like a very big McLuhanite in recent years. And I've seen you say that, quote, "These days, it's 100% true that the medium is the message." So tell me how you understand the medium is the message idea and why you've come to feel more strongly about it?

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Okay, I mean, I can talk from the vantage point of somebody who's spent my whole life working with these six and seven page literary texts, you know, that were typically composed over many months. The process is to go in to the first draft, micro edit it over and over and over again. And the article of faith is that by doing that, I'm doing two things. One is I'm infusing more myself into the text in a way that I'm not planning. Second of all, the whole document is elevating in its rhetoric to become more nuanced, more ambiguous, hopefully funnier, more persuasive, surprising. So that's something I really love because it gets me... To be somebody other than this guy. The end result of eight months of work on a short story is that there's a presence there

• 27:58Speaker 01

  behind it that's more intelligent than I am. So that's pretty cool. All right, now, we compare that to this new form of storytelling that we're being subjected to. It's obviously got wonderful features and all that. But if you have a form of storytelling that has a constraint imposed on it in terms of the number of characters, or and/or it has a hidden agenda, which is to attract likes or whatever, it has another hidden agenda, which is to agitate, to get a sort of facile superficial attention. It's written quickly and so on. You know, the familiar suite of things.

• 28:31Ezra Klein?

  You can't edit it.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:33Ezra Klein?

  These are all decisions.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Right. So my thing is just look at your mind when you're doing the one and when you're looking at the other. Look at your mind when you begin a Chekhov story and when you finish it. What kind of things have been evoked? Go on Twitter for 40 minutes, same time it takes to read a Chekhov. Where's your mind there? The medium is a message because if I have said to you, here's the way in which you can communicate, that's going to limit what you can say. It's going to limit the state of your mind while you're saying it. If you think about the sheer volume of our social media interactions, it's got to change the national moment. I mean, we can see that it is kind of an affable toxin, really, you know?

• 29:14Ezra Klein?

  I spent a lot of my twenties, maybe even some of my early thirties, like building up a social media presence. And it's sort of point at a million Facebook followers and 2.7 million Twitter followers. And it's very-

• 29:24Speaker 01

  That's pretty good.

• 29:25Ezra Klein?

  Thank you. Yeah, no, I'm amazing. And slowly I've left both platforms. And people always assume I did it because somebody said something mean to me. And I'll get emails from people I really like and really respect and they'll say, you know, I hope you come back. I found your work there of value. You know, I'm sorry. They'll just assume somebody offended me. And the reason I left wasn't because somebody said something mean to me. It's that I became more and more sure I would say something mean to somebody. That there's a way in which my thinking would become more and more like the averaged out. System, medium, maybe it's a weakness on my part. There are certainly people who are there and do not seem to fall prey to this.

• 30:08Ezra Klein?

  But I feel like the great insight of McLuhan is this question of, do you want to be acted upon like this? That we're always told that we act upon the mediums, right? You know, we can put whatever we want on Instagram, we can put whatever we want on Twitter, we can put whatever we want on Facebook. But that in fact, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, whatever, are in those periods putting what they want on you. They're making you more like them. And so the question of, do you want to be more like them?

• 30:36Speaker 01

  That's beautiful.

• 30:37Ezra Klein?

  Do you want that attention span, whatever it might be, becomes a really, and this is true for cable news, I mean, it's true for everything, right? There's nothing it isn't true for. But the question of, do you feel well changed?

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 30:49Ezra Klein?

  I always think about a lot of media literacy, there's constantly talk now about media literacy, and it's all about how to evaluate typically sources and what you're seeing. And I don't feel much of it gets at this question often enough of being attentive to how you are becoming, right? Understanding yourself as like malleable.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  That's beautiful. And you know, this is in this Russian book, The Swimming Upon the Rain. The reading model that I find myself using is simply this, you start the story in a neutral state and just watch, watch the inflection of your mind, you know? Then at the end, you get spit out and you're in a different place. Then on the second read, you can go back and you can be pretty precise about where your mind inflected. That is kind of an exercise that works for everything. Certainly would work for social media, you know, just start with a nice happy mind, go into it and see. And I think as you're pointing out, it's not necessarily that you come out vitriolic, but it's an interesting exercise to kind of see, because that's one thing we can really control is where our minds are.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  You know, we can put ourselves into different, through different things that elevate or de-elevate the mind.

• 31:55Ezra Klein?

  You wrote this essay some time ago that I think about a lot called The Brain-Ded Megaphone, and in it you have this, the central metaphor and image of a party. And then a person at a party with a megaphone. Can you just talk a bit about the setup there?

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the idea is if you're at a party and everybody is, you know, having nice human interactions and talking from their own experience and exploring, mutually exploring. And then somebody comes in with the megaphone and starts talking about anything. The bushes outside the house, for example. The voice is loud, it's overpowering, and it presumes a kind of a frame of reference. It assumes that these bushes outside the house are very important. And soon we're going to see that people start responding to that. They're noticing it, then they themselves start having opinions about this megaphone. So basically, this person who's got a loud, perhaps not entirely intelligent

• 32:50Speaker 01

  and perhaps agenda-laced program is going to sort of distort the ongoing conversations.

• 32:58Ezra Klein?

  The reason that essay has really stuck with me is that I think it ends up being very prescient about something that was not as true when you wrote it as it would become true later. It was hard to get that much volume before the algorithms. Before you could get 200,000 retweets on something, or you could get a million readers for it on Facebook. That we actually created this megaphone. And what's even weirder, though, is it's like, we like set up a megaphone at the front of the National Room. And it's a competition to get it. And so it's not just that there's somebody with a megaphone. But then now everybody wants the megaphone. And you have to do what the megaphone wants you to do to be megaphone.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:42Ezra Klein?

  And then everybody else who wants to compete for the megaphone learns from what the last person said. And let's just say something a little bit more like that in tone and volume. And I think of the central feature of like the social media age as this kind of recognition or this reality that what matters is how often you are behind the megaphone. And what people think of you behind the megaphone doesn't matter. In some cases, everybody hating you behind the megaphone just gives you more turns at the megaphone. And ultimately, then everybody knows your name and everybody's talking about you. And just that, that fully separate dimensionality of volume is just, to me, a very defining feature of our communications era.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  That's really, and it's interesting because it's, it's anti-nuance. And in fiction, you know, the beautiful thing is you write yourself always into a state of higher level confusion or, you know, ambiguity. So the power, I would allege, is that you become less certain. You're making a finer and finer point. And the result of that is, is the person might just sort of feel a state of sort of holy befuddlement. Like, yeah, I, it's really hard to be good in this world. It's hard to be in the right position. It's hard to be affectionate enough. It's hard to stick by one's values. So fiction is a quiet, it's a very quiet thing. You know, you, you put two people in a room, you give one of them a slight problem, you go into each other's heads, you follow them around.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  At the end of it, you have something maybe that doesn't look like power, which is uncertainty. But I think for all of the moments in my life, I would rather be a little uncertain, actually. You know, I'd rather be a little less certain and less powerful. Because, you know, in the world that you're describing, these tremendous power of that megaphone means you could make a small mistake and cause a great disaster.

• 35:31Ezra Klein?

  I read you say in a recent interview that, that you feel, I mean, that essay coming out when it did now quite long ago, that it's missing a lot. And you've been kicking around ideas for a sequel. And I wanted to see, what are some of those ideas? What are those intuitions towards a sequel?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Well, I'll, I'll tell you a thought experiment. And I haven't thought through this all the way through, but it feels ripe to me. All right, so let's imagine that you had a baseball stadium and you sent out invitations and you said, okay, if you're a Republican, wear red. If you're a Democrat, wear blue. Come to the stadium. Everybody comes, there's a podium in the middle, and there's a guy up there who's going to make a very incendiary speech about immigration, pro or con, doesn't matter. So you know how that's going to turn out. People are going to fight. It's going to be maybe physical violence, lots of rancor. Okay, now rewind, same people, forget the costuming, come to the baseball stadium. Same people come, they sit in the same seats, instead of a podium, there's a game, you know, Pirates and the Reds or whatever. Those same people

• 36:26Speaker 01

  are behaving in completely different ways. Why? Well, social cues partly. We know how to behave at a baseball game. You know, we might joke a little bit, but it's nothing serious. So then I want to kind of work backwards and say, all right, so same people, same day, fights, no fights. Why? So to my way of thinking, one is you prioritize the red versus blue identity. You told a person to think that way about themselves. Then in their path or in their view, you put what you knew would agitate them, and they responded to the cue. Also, you sort of implicitly said, this is political. And by the way, political has to do with immigration, abortion, you named four or five other things, you know. And

• 37:10Speaker 01

  the other one, the context was baseball. We know how to be civil in baseball. So I'm just trying to think how it can be, what is the culture doing that is causing the partisanship? There's something that model that's valuable because these aren't different people. They're manifesting differently. The people in the second stadium are somehow, through some means, they're manifesting a different version of the multitude they contain to make a happier circumstance. So I guess I'm just thinking about what we are doing culturally to encourage the first model and discourage the second, if that makes sense?

• 37:46Ezra Klein?

  Let me, let me offer a thought, maybe. Go back to the megaphone, right? So, one of the things in the original story is that the megaphone is neutral in the sense that it's held by a guy. The megaphone doesn't have any thoughts about the situation. And that feels to me like what changed and speaks to that second thought experiment. So imagine that in the stadium, different people get to choose what happens at the floor, right? And somebody goes out and there's a baseball game and somebody and runs a baseball game and somebody goes out and gives an incendiary speech about immigration and so

• 38:26Ezra Klein?

  on and so forth. But that somehow whoever it is or whatever it is, it is letting you out, that is giving you access to the megaphone or access to the field, it really cares what the audience response is, but it doesn't care about the audience. All it feels is how much the audience feels, how angry, how happy, how funny, how sad. And all it has a preference for is extreme. All it has a preference for is a lot. And I think in general, it's easier to make people really pissed off quickly than it is to make them really pleased. And so a preference begins to emerge. If you get people really upset,

• 39:08Ezra Klein?

  you get to come back and back and back and back and back. And that it's about, to me, this feedback loop we've created as a society between somebody making you mad and that's somebody being in your face more often. Marjorie Taylor Greene, she is not a particularly powerful member of the House of Representatives. She's in the minority party at this moment, anyway. She does not chair any committees. She's not well liked by her colleagues. I cover the House, I have for years. She is not internally influential as a legislator. When I say her name, virtually everybody listening will know who she is. And they will know who she is because she's extremely, extremely agitating to a lot of people. And

• 39:49Ezra Klein?

  because she is agitating, unlike some of her colleagues who, like, I'm not a Republican, I disagree with many of her colleagues on many things, but there are members of the Republican House minority who just like show up to work and they try to do things that they believe in. And they're maybe not what I believe in, but you know, they work with their colleagues and you know, they whatever, they show up and they do their jobs. They're not trying to make everybody else infuriated. So their names are functionally unknown. And that's the trick here now, that we've gotten ourselves locked in this game of

• 40:26Ezra Klein?

  If I can arouse you in some way or another, you will see me more. And a really, really fast path to arousal is annoyance. So that that seems to me to be the the twist, that the megaphone is a preference. And you get more turns at it if you're really, really enraged people. And so we are just being fed a constant sense of what specifically enrages us. And we don't like it and yet are somehow locked in this relationship to it. It's very, very maddening. It's very weird, too.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  You know that David Fussball, this essay from years ago, and he was the first person to sense this. He covered, I can't remember the name of the piece, but he covered a right wing political radio host in the early days of talk radio. And he, his conclusion was that it wasn't the politics that people were tuning in for, but it was the agitation and the suspended narratives that would provoke outrage. You know, the kindergarten teacher who stomped on the American flag, more tomorrow. And so you're, oh, you can't believe she stomped on the American flag. You come back tomorrow. So it was clearly commerce. The listenership went up every time they would put a cliff hanging agitation or outrage story on us. So, so to me, it's interesting, you know, of course, it's all money. And I, and I think this is where I don't know enough to really speak, but it seems

• 41:39Speaker 01

  to me that the world is lavishing a lot of money on the partisan divide. It's lucrative. It's a quick, easy narrative. It's very lucrative and it's very damaging. I have no idea how you back out of it. Maybe, maybe you do, but I don't, you know, it's, it seems that it's, it's at the core of it, there's a lot of people who are making very, very nice livelihoods to stoke that fire. And the other fire, which is about nuance and ambiguity and curiosity about the way things actually work and actually improving the lives of individual citizens, that maybe is less sexy, you know, it's less lucrative.

• 42:12Ezra Klein?

  The reason I love McLuhan and the reason I was interested, um, you know, when he came up in your work is that I think he understood something pretty upsetting, which is that we are very fundamentally malleable and that we change. And to the very interesting, I think, um, thought experiment of the stadium. The more we are confronted with things that upset us, the more upset we become. The more we see things that make us angry, the more angry we become. I think sometimes there's an illusion that our political selves are not our real selves. But I don't really believe we have real selves.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  For me, it comes down to storytelling. And you're absolutely right, there no self is solid and exists. But we can, we can force different selves to the fore. So in traditional storytelling, literary storytelling, the reader is agreeing to go through something, which is to first of all, assume that the character in the story is on a continuum with her, no matter who the character might be. Then also that the writer is on a continuum with her. So the three of us are going to join together. We're going to contemplate this imaginary being. And in doing that, we're going to get more interested in her. We're going to make an identification between ourselves and that person. The stance is always leaning in, like, is there anything else I need to know about this person? This is just me on a different day.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  So that, that whole process brings out a self that I would say it's more generous, it's more interested, it's more open, it's less sure of what's actually happening. And since the world itself is so fundamentally unknowable to us, you know, the mind is always just making little scale models. For my money, to work at that kind of storytelling, to immerse ourselves in it, almost as a ritual or as a sacrament, is a way to become more realistic about what's actually happening. Whereas this megaphone type thing, it's strange, in its system, it bears very little resemblance to what's actually happening. As you, as you pointed out, it's just a thing that thrives on power. We respect the power because the power is powerful, kind of thing. So I, I mean, I don't know what the answer is.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  For me personally, I'm watching the mind and saying, if I spend a few hours with Chekhov or Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, there are things woken up in me that I want to be active. That the self that comes forward then is the self that feels actually more powerful than, than any other self. So, yeah.

• 44:35Ezra Klein?

  You have a beautiful story in the book that I think hinted an answer to this, which is the sparrow. Can you talk a bit about what's happening in the sparrow?

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I started that story, a little voice came to me, literally when I was sleeping and I, it was the first few lines of the story. And I found myself narrating this woman who, at least in the words of the story, she's kind of nothing. She's not very interesting. She's never original. She only says the things that, you know, that are expected. And so the narrative voice that I was in was kind of looking down on her quite a bit and getting some laughs out of her. And then about halfway through the story, I wrote the line, and then, of course, a fall had to come for her. It's funny because the brain just divides and part of me just went, does it really? Does it really have to? Or is that just a habit of yours as a writer? So I just started subtly trying to do something else.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  And in the end, it becomes kind of a, maybe the first love story I've ever written where, you know, she is kind of a dull person and she meets this guy who is kind of an egomaniac. And yet the two of them kind of bind, you know? So that early voice that was mocking her, I assigned to the community, basically, which then left me and the reader to figure out who she really was. It was an example of this story showing my own mind to me, you know? I was in the habit of starting off with a character and then knocking down the stairs, the end. And the mind, my mind said, you know, you've done that a lot. Is there some way we could have her not go down the stairs? Which then opened up a whole kind of world of possibilities for her.

• 46:07Ezra Klein?

  But the particular love story you tell, there's something very quiet about it, but quietly powerful, I thought, which is, it seemed to me to be about the way we change as people when someone else tells a nice story about us to us. She tells a story to this guy who maybe is a bit of an egomaniac, but also is a guy who works at a grocery that his mom owns and his mom's sort of an overbearing, tough person. And people are not, you know, probably that nice to him. And here's this woman who's really impressed by him and thinks he's really funny and thinks he's really great and always tells him he's right about stuff. And he flourishes under that.

• 46:50Ezra Klein?

  And he loves being adored and so he adores her and she flourishes under that. And I don't know, one of the things I was-

• 46:57Speaker 01

  That's really lovely reading, by the way. I love that.

• 46:58Ezra Klein?

  One of the things I was reflecting on it- After was how often we think we will change people by telling them what's wrong with them. And how often that doesn't work. And how often you change people by believing in what's right about them. And that's true in an individual level and it's true in a, you know, I don't want to go too far with this. And I'm not suggesting any of this is a political answer, but, but I do think there's something true about it politically too. Some of the great politicians see a better country or see a better version of ourselves than we see in ourselves. And for a minute, at least, we sort of wake up to that.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I see it in my teaching and one of the benefits of teaching a long time is you, you start to see the way it really works. So when you're a young teacher of creative writing, you think your job is to kind of circle the goiters, you know, cut this, fix this. Why'd you do that? And as I'm getting older, it's just both really valuable and really difficult to praise something precisely. Maybe the story has got some issues, but if you can find two or three places where the writer has come into her own fully and spend most of your time praising that, and not just hyperbolically, but really saying specifically what it did to you. You can see the writer light up and it gives a person something to aspire to, you know, but somehow it's harder to do that. It's a little easier to just sort of list your complaints, but you have to be very confident and very inside the material

• 48:23Speaker 01

  to go back and recreate where you were positively inflected. And I think it sort of activates certain things in your mind that wouldn't otherwise be activated.

• 48:33Ezra Klein?

  It was my wedding anniversary a couple of days ago.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Happy anniversary.

• 48:36Ezra Klein?

  Thank you. And something I've thought about as I've been married longer, something I think about in my relationships with other family members, something I think about all the time with my children. So basically every important relationship in my life is what I'm saying is that there's often this inflection point in a particular conflict, in a particular moment, where something's going wrong, at least wrong by my own lights. And you're faced with this question of, am I going to be kinder to this person?

• 49:10Ezra Klein?

  Who is doing something that is upsetting me? Or am I gonna really?

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Let him have it.

• 49:14Ezra Klein?

  Tell him what's up here. And children often force this in a really interesting and complicated way where, you know, if my three and a half year old is having a tantrum, does he need to be put on timeout? Or does he need to be hugged? If I'm hugging him, am I helping this behavior? If I put him in timeout, am I actually keeping him from being able to calm down?

• 49:40Ezra Klein?

  And I don't know, I think that I used to believe more in the curative powers of a good stern talking to. And as I'm getting a little bit older and maybe a little bit wiser,

• 49:52Ezra Klein?

  and this is true for me too, like how, you know, it seems to work to treat me, that I've become less confident in it.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  It's very perceptive because in the end, I was the one who decided to be more gentle with her because I was gonna throw to the wolves. Something held me back. And the phrase I always think about in the context of what you're saying is abide with. I think it's from my Catholic use, but you abide with somebody, which means you just don't judge yet. You know, you let them talk, you let them do whatever they have to do. The idea is that if you give someone enough rope, they'll shut the rope off, that, you know, they'll be better. So in that story, it was interesting because I resolved to be patient with her, which in a narrative sense mean I held off on making something bad happen to her for a few paragraphs, you know? But I think that I really believe in what you're saying. I think if you, it's a mark of confidence and I think sometimes of age

• 50:43Speaker 01

  to trust that things will play out, which is another way of saying that you trust the person is on a continuum with you, you know, that you don't have to correct. A person will, you know, I guess the assumption is people want the same thing. They want to be happy, they want to be loved. So to the extent that we can extend our patience, some people, some of the time will reward that. And that's in fiction, this is kind of what you're always doing. It's what rewriting is actually, is you're saying, I know how I want the story to come out. I know what I think of this character. Let me abide with it longer by rewriting it and see if there's anything deeper I want for that person. See if there's any- Anything deeper they want to do on their own, a young writer will tend to lop all that off. Because I guess they don't like the anxiety of waiting.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  But as an older writer, waiting is actually what you're doing when you're rewriting. You know, just like with your kids, you're kind of waiting with a slightly affectionate attitude.

• 51:59Ezra Klein?

  In this conversation, we've talked, and specifically, you've talked a bunch about storytelling. And something that has been in the back of my mind has been that storytelling for you and storytelling for me mean very different things. That storytelling in politics tends to be about the question of how can I tell a story? That makes you understand that I'm right, or that makes you like me. And the kind of storytelling and the craft of storytelling you're talking about is much more about a kind of story that someone else can inhabit, right? You need me to not agree with your story, you need me to want to inhabit your story.

• 52:39Ezra Klein?

  I wanted to see if you could riff a bit on the distinction there, because that question of closed and open storytelling strike me as maybe actually like the dominant theme of this conversation.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love that idea. I think with the kind of stories that I want to tell, the goal is that you become the character. You are reading it, and I've designed it so it's so intense that you can't not first sympathize with, then become the character. And I think part of that is an open-endedness about agenda.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  It's not really about you liking the character, or me, or any of that. It's about the identification with the character. And then I don't even know why. I don't know why that's a good thing. I don't know what that's gonna make you feel. But, you know, ninety-nine percent of what I do is to try to make you have that ride through this story such that you don't have any objections to it. On the contrary, you want to get back to it. You experience the curves and the dips and the drops. At the end, you're deposited out in a slightly different mindset. It's interesting, because we talked about the megaphone. I actually don't care that much what exactly you're feeling, but I care that you're feeling something intensely. And I have the faith that if I've done my job, the thing you're feeling intensely, I

• 53:57Speaker 01

  want to say it's gonna be good for you, I don't really want to say that, but it's gonna put you in a position that's elevated compared to where you started. The only agenda is connection, you know? I'm gonna start telling you this story, and I'm somehow in revision, I'm gonna be really good at anticipating your resistances, anticipating the little expectation cloud that formed over your head, and servicing that at every moment, so that you can't think of any excuse to bail, you know? And at the end, you and I are kind of bonded, you're like, oh, George, wow, how'd you do that? You got me through this whole story. You're bonded with the characters in some complicated way. And then I think, for me, I have to kind of say, that's it. Now, I don't always stop there. I have a whole shtick about the beneficial effects of fiction, but in my most honest

• 54:40Speaker 01

  place, the wild ride, the temporary bonding, and we're done, you know?

• 54:46Ezra Klein?

  It makes me think a bit about our earlier conversation about Love Letter, because there was no answer to that. And one of the things I think is true in politics is that there are times when you can get into a reality where there is no good answer. I mean, by the time the question is, you're looking back from autocracy, and should you have taken up arms or not? That might have been worse, it might have been better, but it could have been worse. Once you got there, you were out of good answers. Maybe there was a better one than you chose, but you're out of good answers. And I do wonder how much a way to think about this period is, there's a pretty desperate need for a story that enough people see themselves in and see enough connection in, that you

• 55:30Ezra Klein?

  don't get to the point where the question was really, should you have taken up arms or not?

• 55:35Speaker 01

  Well, here's a thought about this, I guess, literary storytelling is. Yeah. When I wrote that book about the Russians, I was really surprised to find out how much specificity had to do with it. So the move is often, you start with a broad category, bored suburban housewife. Okay. Then, just in the revision process, you're, you're assigning specific speeches and characteristics and even just hand gestures and tendencies and a history to this person. And in the process, she is still maybe bored suburban housewife, but she's also Wendy, you know? And she's got a whole bunch of often contradictory traits that you've laid in her with. The move then, for some weird reason, is the human mind confronted with specificity grows, let's say, fond. It doesn't mean you necessarily like, but you're kind of fond of this person.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  So that move to take a broad indicator and then specify it, you see more clearly, you feel more fond, but there's another thing that happens, which is you understand her problems with more nuance. You might be able to imagine turning the axis slightly. Okay, you're a bored suburban housewife, but you're also an aspiring choreographer with a bad left foot, you know, whatever. Okay. This now makes me manifest differently towards you. It's just the adjustment in the concepts. So if we adjust our concepts, our, our projection about somebody else from a broad and in politics,

• 57:02Speaker 01

  often at least somewhat dismissive position, we place that with increasing levels of nuance. My contention is that actually makes you certainly more affectionate. It's probably a happier place to be from your point of view, to, to feel affection. But also, if there is a political issue, what we call a political issue, my contention is you're actually in a more powerful place to make a change because you've abandoned the conceptual projections that made the trap so rigid in the first place. So in our country now, if someone says, you know, I mean, I'm left, left of Gandhi, you know, if someone says to me, what should we do about those Trump supporters? Well, I have a pretty limited answer to that, you know. Now, if we start specifying an individual person, then possibilities is I don't think

• 57:46Speaker 01

  they necessarily work. I mean, I covered the Trump rallies and I persuaded exactly zero people. But somehow in my gut, I feel like there's more, it's more open. The more specific you can be, the more you can abide with somebody, then I think you actually become more powerful politically because you're actually responding to things as they are. Reality and all this complicated dimensionality as opposed to your perhaps too simplistic projection of it, which is not going to budge at some point.

• 58:13Ezra Klein?

  Well, isn't this always what Barack Obama's particular storytelling genius was? I mean, you go back to the oh four Boston DNC speech. The line that always lingers in my mind from that, which I'll get wrong in memory a bit, but he says something like, "We worship an awesome god in blue states and we don't like federal officials poking around our libraries in red states." I always think Obama's great political genius wasn't in the fact that he got people to like him, but he was able to convince people that he liked them, which is often much more important.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:45Ezra Klein?

  There's a very, very famous political polling result that you always, the pollsters always ask it, right? Do you, you know, do you find this politician likable? And I've also thought it gets it actually backwards. It's a much more important question in politics is do you think the politician likes you?

• 58:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:58Ezra Klein?

  Like, that's the threshold condition to whether or not you're going to like them.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is another way of saying, does the politician see you?

• 59:04Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  You know, so the thing is, you know, I remember like in 2016, just being, you know, so sort of shocked and, and the world had gone insane. But actually, as a fiction writer, I finally got back to the point where I said, "The world is fine. The world is what it is. It's just an energy system that proceeding to some end, but you didn't know enough. I, I didn't know enough about the way conditions actually were, so it seemed shocking and the world was broken, that's right." So, one of the things that tears me actually, and again, having to do with being a writer is it's my job to know how things actually are, even though I never will. And I You know, even at a time like this, I take a lot of comfort in that, that, okay, I may have misunderstood everything, you know, we may, we all may have. Who would have imagined

• 59:47Speaker 01

  that we would have a big political partisan fight about a pandemic? That's incredible, you know? But the fact that I didn't see it doesn't mean it isn't true. So fiction, maybe as opposed to political thought or art, is in the full-time business of getting us to drop our deceptions and see the way things actually are, which to me is an inherently hopeful kind of thing, even if we can never actually get there, you know? So Obama, to me, is somebody who, when he's speaking to somebody and they feel seen by him, he's touching on the idea that even if he totally disagrees with you, you don't disagree with you. You know, the world makes sense from your perspective, and you're gonna make progress

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  with that person by trying to understand what to you seems irrational, and his willingness to accept that is sort of a bonding thing.

• 1:00:39Ezra Klein?

  I think it's a good place to end. Always our final question. What are the three books that have influenced you that you would recommend to the audience?

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  I have just been reading Luke Molgerson's The Storm Is Here, which I think is a tremendous insider look at the stuff leading up to January 6th, and it's just an incredible, he must be a great reporter because people talk to him, they tell him all the specifics. I'm also, I read a really wonderful novel called Sugar Street by Jonathan D., that I haven't been troubled by a novel in a long time and kind of like really, really jolted by it. And the ending of that book really did it. It's kind of a really insightful look at, I guess you'd say, conditions on the ground in working-class America. And, you know, the other book I'm really loving is Marlena by Julie Buntin, and it's just kind of a real detailed, strangely joyful look at working-class America and addiction. It really surprised me in a few places.

• 1:01:30Ezra Klein?

  George Saunders, your new story collection is Liberation Day. Thank you very much.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Thank you, Ezra.

• 1:01:47Ezra Klein?

  The Azur Clan show is produced by Amafa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, and Roja Karma. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Mary Marge Locker. Original music by Isaac Jones and Sonia Herrera. Mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta, and special thanks to Kristen Lynn and Kristina Samulewski.