What It Means to be Kind in a Cruel World

George Saunders is one of America’s greatest living writers. He’s the author of dozens of critically acclaimed short stories, including his 2013 collection, “Tenth of December”; his debut novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” won the 2017 Booker Prize; and his nonfiction work has empathy and insight that leave pieces from more than a decade ago ringing in my head today. His most recent book, “A Swim in A Pond in the Rain,” is a literary master class built around seven Russian short stories, analyzing how they work, and what they reveal about how we work. I’ve wanted to interview Saunders for more than 15 years. I first saw him talk when I was in college, and there was a quality of compassion and consideration in every response that was, well, strange. His voice doesn’t sound like his fiction. His fiction is bitingly satirical, manic, often unsettling. His voice is calm, kind, gracious. The dissonance stuck with me. Saunders’s central topic, literalized in his famous 2013 commencement speech, is about what it means to be kind in an unkind world. And that’s the organizing question of this conversation, too. We discuss the collisions between capitalism and human relations, the relationship between writing and meditation, Saunders’s personal editing process, the tension between empathizing with others and holding them to account, the promise of re-localizing our politics, the way our minds deceive us, Tolstoy’s unusual theory of personal transformation, and much more. What a pleasure this conversation was. So worth the wait. Recommendations: "Red Cavalry" by Isaac Babel "Stamped from the Beginning" by Ibram X. Kendi "Dispatches" by Michael Herr "Patriotic Gore" by Edmund Wilson "In Love with the World" by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche "Loving; Living; Party Going" by Henry Green "Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey" by Hayden Carruth "Tropic of Squalor" by Mary Carr "They Lift Their Wings to Cry" by Brooks Haxton "The Hundred Dresses" by Eleanor Estes and Louis Slobodkin "Caps for Sale" by Esphyr Slobodkina 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 Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.

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

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

  Hello, I'm Ezra Klein. Welcome to the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  So before we get to the conversation today, and God, what a pleasure. Today's conversation is a very quick announcement. We are hiring for an associate producer for the show. And I always like to announce this on the podcast itself because I always hope we'll get somebody from from inside the show's universe, somebody who knows what we're about and loves the show and wants to be part of it. But this is a position that's going to be involved in cutting tape on these episodes. It's going to be a position involved in researching and booking guests and putting up transcripts. It's a little bit jack of all trades. You can find the listing in the description for this episode, the show notes. You can also find it if you go to nyco.com and go to their careers page. But check it out. You do need two years of audio experience to apply. Don't apply if you don't have that because your application won't be looked at.

• 1:07Ezra Klein?

  But if you do have it, go take a look if this is a job of interest to you. So this conversation with George Saunders is long in the making. I saw George Saunders speak when I was in college and it never left me. There was such brilliance and such a deep humanity and kindness. It just, everything he said, it just infused the way he thought extemporaneously on his feet. It made this very longstanding impression on me and I've wanted to talk to him ever since. He has obviously written a slew of amazing books since then. The Brain Dead Megaphone is a book of his nonfiction essays came out long ago, but it has changed how I think about media to this very day.

• 1:49Ezra Klein?

  He's obviously written so many super powerful and influential short stories. Lincoln in the Bardo, his novel is just a remarkable piece of work. One of the things I always think about Saunders is this old Abraham Joshua Heschel quote, which is, "When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I'm old, I admire kind people." And for a long time, I had this quote wrong in my head. I thought it was, "When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I'm old, I admire wise people." And I always thought about it with people in DC, which is full of clever people and wise people, I think are in short supply. But the thing about Saunders's work to me is always that there is a kindness and a wisdom to it. It is very centrally concerned with this question of how are we kind to each other in a world that does not always create

• 2:32Ezra Klein?

  space for that? How do we take each other's perspective when that is often the hardest possible thing to do? How do we approach things with the qualities and the intentions and the processes and the mental states that will produce some level of wisdom? His new book, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, is about seven short stories by Russian masters and about what he took from them and how the stories work on a basic level. But then also what kinds of habits of mind they reflect and through that, what kinds of habits of mind fiction broadly, literature broadly reflects and cultivates. So it's very much centrally concerned with what I understand to be the main preoccupation of his work, which is how to live well and decently among each other in fellowship.

• 3:15Ezra Klein?

  And that's what this conversation is about, too. And it was a total pleasure to get to have it with him. As always, my email is [email protected]. You can email me your guest suggestions, your feedback, whatever. Here's George Saunders.

• 3:31Ezra Klein?

  Let me just begin with the basic human question. How are you?

• 3:35Speaker 01

  I'm okay. You know, I'm kind of, we're up and on to New York, kind of super isolated. And so I'm just kind of using it as an excuse to do what I like to do, which is just work all day. And so, yeah, it's a crazy sad time. But I guess I just feel like part of the job is to try to keep yourself as mentally healthy and happy as you can and then, you know, hopefully come out on the other end. How are you doing?

• 3:56Ezra Klein?

  Day by day.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:59Ezra Klein?

  I remember asking somebody on the show, actually Jenny Odell is a great artist. I remember asking her and she told me day by day. And then I said, well, how's today? And she said, it's too early to tell, which I've always liked as a way of thinking about this era.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I keep, I keep thinking that maybe part of the job is to not be any more miserable than you actually are, you know? So if you wake up and you're feeling pretty good, just, you know, go with it.

• 4:21Ezra Klein?

  I think that's actually an important and difficult point right now. On the days I feel bad, I feel bad for feeling bad because my situation is objectively fine. I'm healthy and have not lost my job and same is true for, for my family at this point. And then on the days I feel good, I feel bad for feeling good. There's a great piece by a former colleague of mine at Vox about the second arrow of suffering, which I guess is a Buddhist idea that it's important to be present in other people's suffering. But if you just add more suffering in yourself, you're just adding to the total amount of suffering and it doesn't help anybody, which I've tried to hold to, but the meta judgment of how you're feeling day in and day out can be a little tough.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was just something you wouldn't normally feel in, in a normal day. You'd just be kind of going along. But, you know, I was reading Nadeja Manostam, Hope Against Hope. It's this beautiful memoir about the Stalinist time. And that's a pretty good thing to do because yeah, you know, shit sometimes goes crazy and we're in a version of that now. But it also, you know, makes you think, wow, it could definitely be worse. It's kind of a good little proportion reestablisher.

• 5:19Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of wisdom in that. So I want to begin here with a quote of yours that I love. Kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition. Tell me why.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Well, I think basically if we look at ourselves, we're kind of set up to be these little Darwinian survivors. So we're given this really cool sensory apparatus and a brain and everything. And, you know, that stuff is there to help us propagate the species and the, you know, the intersection between our perceptions and understanding and what's actually true are pretty small and pretty occasional, you know, that there's a whole bunch of stuff out there that, that is beyond our, our grasp. So if you have any sense of that, then a kind of ritual humility would be the right, the right stance. I mean, imagine if somebody saw in all the wrong colors and all the shapes that he saw were incorrect and all of his understandings were messed up.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  You know, that person would be wise to be a little humble because the data is coming in, he's messing it up. And essentially, I think that's what human beings are doing in our little sweet pathetic way. So then if you are in that, you know, kind of flawed thinking machine, and you see another flawed thinking machine, it would seem almost crazy and irrational to start judging and fighting that person. You might more reasonably say, oh, wow, you too, you know. So I think in a lot of these eastern systems, the delusion is that, you know, we're trapped inside this little machine that thinks it's central and permanent and all important and is always thinking it's about its little victory narrative. But when you step out of it for a second, you see that it's just a temporary construction of

• 6:55Speaker 01

  neurology or karma or whatever. And so it's almost like, you know, if you're driving a really crappy car, you would want to keep that in mind in traffic, you know, something like that.

• 7:06Ezra Klein?

  Kindness is such an important word in your work. I've come across it so much in the prep for this conversation. Just how do you define it? What is kindness to you?

• 7:14Speaker 01

  I think ultimately, it would be, are you benefiting the people in proximity to you? I mean, and truly benefiting them. And that in itself is, you know, how would you know?

• 7:23Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, how would you know is, I think, often a harder problem that we give it credit for. Why in proximity?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Well, that's, I think that's the place to start. And since I've never been able to even do that, I'm going to continue to work on that one. But certainly, yeah, I mean, to be beneficial in the larger sense. But from my, at my pay grade, that's an occupational hazard, because as a quasi-public person, or, you know, if a writer can be considered that, there are bouts of grandiosity where, you know, you do a reading and you talk to people, and then you think, ah, yes, I'm benefiting the world. And I think that's kind of a dangerous thing, if you're somebody like me, you know, somebody with my level of understanding and capability. So, yeah, I think, really, I mean, literally, you know, if you're, if you're, there's one person near you, are you doing no harm? Are you in the mental state where any interaction with that person would be neutral or beneficial?

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Now, that, that sounds so incredibly modest, but that's basically my deal, and I, and I'm failing at it all the time.

• 8:17Ezra Klein?

  I think that focus on the, the mental state, which we're going to get to also in the way you approach fiction, is really important. I think it's something that I've come to understand better myself as I've gotten a little bit older, and particularly as I've become a parent. If I am in a good mental state when I'm parenting, if I walk into it with energy, if I walk into it having gotten enough sleep, I can be so much more present and so much more kind than if not. And I've come to think a lot more of life as managing the mental state you have before an event, an interaction, a challenge than it is on simply having knowledge of how you want to respond to such things rattling around in your head.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. I agree with that so much. You know, it's kind of like if someone said, I aspire to be a marathon runner, so I will go out and run 24 miles. That's not going to work so well. And you know, what you're saying to me is really the essence of what I would consider a spiritual life, which is to say, there have been so many states of mind that I've occupied, that I have at that time mistaken for George. If I step back at this age of 62 and look at all those states, first of all, none of them abided for very long. Second of all, I could say that I really prefer, you know, mind state 6D to this other one. You know, there were some that were more centered, they were more loving, they were more capacious, whatever you want to say. So to my way of thinking, once you say, oh yeah, I've been in at least two different mind states and

• 9:40Speaker 01

  they weren't identical, that's kind of the whole thing. Because really, that's all that we have is the possible control over the mind state that we find ourselves in, which is both terrifying and exciting. But that's how, you know, I first got interested in meditation through my wife. And she's a brilliant person and writer, and she went into it first. And I noticed suddenly, you know, how in a marriage, you have certain fights all the time, you know, or tussles or whatever. Suddenly she was just beautifully, skillfully guiding us around them after only a couple of weeks of meditation. And when I first started, I had maybe an experience like you did, our kids were little, and there was just a split second of delay between a thought and word, which was really helpful. You know, you could

• 10:24Speaker 01

  just in a split second say, do I really want to say that? Or am I just saying this out of some kind of anxiety? And, and it's kind of mind blowing that that's actually the whole, the whole game in life, I think.

• 10:35Ezra Klein?

  You said that for you, there's a very deep, you called it a beautiful conversation between fiction and meditation. They work on the same level. I've meditated, but I've never really written fiction. So tell me about that.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  I guess for me, the common thing, and again, this is all from my beginner perspective, but there's something about the falling away of rumination in both those states. So, you know, my usual state is running around the house with my little monkey mind, talking about my latest experience, or aspiring to some victory, or defending myself. When I sit down to write fiction, because my attention is focused on an object, which is a paragraph or something, and it's done in what I would call like almost an athletic stance, where I'm not theorizing or conceptualizing, I'm just in it. Like, I'm hearing it a little bit in my head, and I'm messing around with it a little bit. But the monkey mind goes quiet, because I think the neural energy is being all channeled to that, the concentration

• 11:31Speaker 01

  on the prose, about which I have very strong opinions. So in that experience, the ruminating mind goes somewhat more quiet, and that's great. And now, in meditation, I think something similar happens. And I'm not experienced enough exactly to say what that is. But the common thing would be a concentration on a task, and then a related reduction in rumination. You know, the mind is so busy all the time. And what it's really doing is it's basically creating yourself. It's creating you, this illusory thing called you. And when the thoughts die down, then that self-creation gets a little less energetic. And in my experience, something else happens, or something else rises up in that space that you've created. And that's true, I think, in meditation and in writing.

• 12:17Ezra Klein?

  I always thought, or I came to meditation with the idea that it would quiet rumination for me. Certainly, it can do that. But more often, it forces me to confront how much rumination is actually happening, which can be a bit of an intimidating thing. I'll often have this moment where I realize to myself, this is what is happening all the time? Like, this is how loud it is in there?

• 12:45Ezra Klein?

  And I'm just constantly trying to distract myself from that noise with Twitter and with, as you put it, you know, thoughts of my, thoughts of my victories and, you know, having a whiskey and whatever it might be. So I, that's partially why there are periods I find meditation hard. If my mind is unsettled, it is, it can sometimes be hard for me to just simply see on the cushion just how loud it is.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think that's, I mean, from my point of view, that's a huge thing because basically you, it's sort of meditation as cracking open the owner's manual. For all my life, for much of my life, I had a mental fog going on, a monkey mind that for me was just an identity with me. That was not anything created or external or weird. It was just me. And I think that anything that can make you realize that that thing is just a sort of a freak of your birth, you know, it's like a series of brain farts essentially. Now they're systematic, they, you know, they're, they're similar to the brain farts you were having when you were 10, but they're not you. So when I was first starting to meditate, I noticed, almost exactly like what you're saying,

• 13:51Speaker 01

  I noticed a certain pessimistic or snarky cast to my default mind, you know, I'd walk into a party and I was just looking for things to kind of lightly make fun of, probably a defense mechanism, but also it was fun, you know? So what was really useful about that was to say, oh, wait a minute, that's not me. And it's certainly not true of the party. It's just a feature of this particular mind, you know? And writing does the same thing for me. If I put out a first draft and there's a certain writer represented therein, and then you start rewriting it. And for me, it's a really long process, but by the end, there's a different person represented and it's, it's a person that I like better. So in other words, that first, the mind that appeared in the first draft was just some mind, you know? It doesn't have

• 14:35Speaker 01

  to be identified with me. The process of working through it, suddenly you see, oh, there's, there's a lot of minds along the way. And that to me is a really beautiful and kind of addicting experience. You know, you don't, you don't, I don't ever want to be the person who speaks or thinks in first draft mind.

• 14:50Ezra Klein?

  Something that I want to key in on there that you've talked about elsewhere is this idea of intuition as being an important part of writing. It is a very strange experience, at least for me, to have a thought emerge seemingly out of nowhere that is more insightful and deeper than I tend to think I am. And then it's similarly a little bit strange to have thoughts emerging constantly that are about things I don't want to be thinking about. And I do think about meditation, but also about the fiction writing process, as you've described it, as about trying to hear quieter voices in your own mind and make more space for them. So it's wondering if you could talk a little bit about the role of intuition, what you understand intuition to be and how you open yourself up to it.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Sure. For me, intuition is kind of like, let's say you're at the park and some people nearby are playing frisbee and they miss throw and it's coming right at you and you could catch it and you do. There's no thought in that. It's just kind of a, oh, that'll be interesting, you know? In writing, what it means to me is that, so if you're a language person, you have a bunch of microopinions about prose that are available to you all the time. You've been, you've been using them all your life since you were a little kid. So for me, part of the sort of trajectory of becoming a better writer is to just start listening to those little opinions, you know, believing in their existence, getting better at discerning them, and then getting better at instantaneously acting on them. And none of that really involves a lot of thinking or a lot of deciding or thematic conceptualization.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  It's literally just like catching that frisbee. Do I, or like going to the optometrist, you know, do I like this choice better or that choice better? So the kind of amazing truth in my experience is that that's the whole game for a writer is you have a lot of opinions that most of the time you override or miss. Can you slow down a little bit in your revision process and, and find out what those are and then radically honor them? That's what makes a writer distinctive, I would say. So there's not much to that really, except cultivating that state of mind.

• 16:52Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I want to, I want to push on that a little bit because the frisbee analogy strikes me as interestingly different. The thing about catching the frisbee, I would think of that as a, as a reflex because I don't need to think about it. It'll happen almost whether I wanted to or not. Whereas it strikes me, or I think that what you're talking about requires some real

• 17:12Ezra Klein?

  Energy and space to hear that. It'd be very easy to miss that voice. You have a line in the new book there where you say, "That's what craft is, a way to open ourselves up to the super personal wisdom within us." And I want to see if you could talk a bit about that. How do you, how does craft or how do other practices create the space to notice those intuitions, to notice those new thoughts, to notice the things that are happening on that more micro level?

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Sure. The analogy would be you're reading a phrase of yours and something hits you as being a happier phrasing. In other words, the impulse to catch a frisbee was present and you honored it. And when you're hitting a phrase that you don't like of yours, it's the same feeling. I'll just say for me, I have cultivated a revision practice that is 100% dependent on this kind of moment we're talking, or the state of mind we're talking about. If I do that over time, I think that's the conduit for this, what Kundalini called the super personal wisdom to come in. So all, I mean, it's kind of a fancy way of saying that your stories start making more sense. With revision, over the course of a document, thousands of times, you're deciding what is truer, what's more vivid,

• 18:24Speaker 01

  what has less deception in it. And over the course of revising it, the whole story comes up and it starts to become a more intense, honest investigation of whatever you're, you're looking at. That's kind of what I think happens. And again, I'm really kind of slippery on this subject because I don't really understand why it should be that way. But I just have the experience that, you know, an early story of mine will be kind of facile and probably politically charged with a lot of obvious liberal conceits. And the, the basic mechanism is me and the, me and the reader are mocking somebody down below us. And then over the many, many drafts, the thing actually changes and becomes fairer and funnier and smarter and so on.

• 19:06Ezra Klein?

  Tell me about that revision process. So you begin with that draft, you have that draft, which has its obvious opinions and its punching down. And then what happens, both just literally, like there are eight drafts and you walk on them all in the mornings before 10 a.m. and then it feels to you internally between there and the product I end up reading?

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, mostly, I mean, you know, it's different every time, but mostly it's I'll print out a nice clean copy the day before and then, you know, just by hook or crook, sit down in front of it and start reading it with a pen in hand, pencil in hand. And then in the book, I described this kind of metaphor, which isn't of course, literally true, but it's pretty close. There's a like meter in my head with P on one side for positive and for negative. My idea is that the meter responds when I read prose, just like when you're in a bookstore and you pick up a book, you're either still reading an hour later or you toss it aside. So the whole thing for me is to be reading my work as if I didn't write it, you know, as if I just found it on a bus seat or something. And then all the time, another part of the mind is watching that meter, basically saying,

• 20:07Speaker 01

  what would a first time reader be feeling right now, in or out, in or out? And it's all happening in a split second, none of that, the meter is not there, but in a split second, I'm going, ah. So there's a certain feeling I'm hoping for, which is a kind of a amused engagement, like, yeah, yeah, okay, sure, sure. Then you hit a bit of ice, you know, it's something, it's something like, ugh, the needle goes into the negative or something about the sentence just feels like it isn't right. Sometimes it's a feeling that it's too banal, it's a sentence anybody else could have written, or sometimes the logic goes off, you know, you're, you're saying something that is forced or isn't true. And then part of this process that might relate back to meditation is that at that point, you've got some choices.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  One is to say to your internal needle, needle, bullshit, you're wrong, it was perfect yesterday. You know, that's not the best response. The other thing is to sort of say gently, okay, all right, duly noted, how about if I just go past you and I'll read it again in an hour or so and see if I still agree with you? If so, I'll make a change. Or the best thing is when you just, in an instant, like that frisbee, you go, oh, I can just cut this phrase. And if I cut that phrase, that moment of resistance would be less, you know? So it's that. And then practically speaking, in a, in a good writing day, I might get through, you know, like a seven page story. Two or three times in that spirit and I'll make the changes, put them in, print it out,

• 21:28Speaker 01

  read it again. And then at that time, I can feel something start to go a little bit loose in my head where I'm not really as discerning as I should be. And I'm starting to make changes just for the sake of it. And then I'll, I'll quit. So the, the act of faith is that if I do that thing that I just described for many, many days and weeks and months, at some point, I can get through the whole thing with the needle up in the positive area. Another way of saying it is you, you know, you've basically brought many different yous to the table. You brought the, you know, the anal retentive you and the self celebrating you and the grouchy you and the, uh, and the funny thing is over time, it does kind of stabilize into something that you can read over and over with mostly positive feelings. And that weirdly, and I can't explain

• 22:10Speaker 01

  it, is related to this thing we talked about earlier, that the person who's present in that 900th draft is somewhat above me on the intelligence scale and on the compassion scale and on the wit scale.

• 22:23Ezra Klein?

  So I think that's actually a good bridge to the new book. And, and so for people who haven't read it yet, and people should, it is built around seven Russian short stories that, that you teach and you're working through the logic. And I would also say, um, in different ways, the message of them. And so I wanted to look at a couple of them more closely. So, uh, let's begin with the master and the man, which I have to say, I never read, it's by Tolstoy. It just rocked me. It is such an incredible story. Can you summarize it? Or do you think that does too much violence to it to do?

• 22:51Speaker 01

  No, no, I think it's, you know, basically, uh, like a lot of these stories, it's really kind of almost like a joke. Cause you know, the, the thing is a, um, a rich man and his servant go out to close a business deal at the rich man's probably unreasonable insistence and they drive right into a snowstorm. And then I guess without giving away, I would say the story quickly tells us that what it's about is can that rich guy who's a, you know, arrogant, oppressive, mansplaining, imperialist pig, can he change? And then Tolstoy takes it up one more level and says, okay, if he can change, how exactly, you know, what's the mechanism? And then the, the feeling for the reader is that it's a reflection on. Can anybody change? You know, can any of us change? And if so, how might that happen?

• 23:35Ezra Klein?

  Something you write in your commentary on that story is that Tolstoy is proposing something radical, moral transformation, when it happens, happens not through the total remaking of the sinner or the replacement of his habitual energy with some pure new energy, but by a redirection of his same old energy. And I love that idea, that we are as we are on some level. And the question isn't, I think, the one we often ask, which is how can we fundamentally change? But it's how do we redirect that nature constructively or that energy constructively? Or how do we put ourselves in a context where the things that make us up are adaptive as opposed to maladaptive?

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, so it's like earlier when we were talking about our respective energetic monkey minds. I don't think that's gonna stop. I've had it my whole life. So the question is, what do you do with that, you know, that feature? One thing that I, you know, kind of associate with maybe traditional religions is cut it out. Just stop it, you know, disavow it, eradicate it. That seems to me not right. So then the alternative is, well, let's, you know, you've got this rushing river. If you route it through a kindergarten, that's not so good. If you route it through a dam with a generator, that's good. So to me, that's sort of a hopeful thing is to say, we, we aren't going to change our fundamental energies. You know, everybody's born with hunger and you could disavow it, you know, which seems kind of babyish to me.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Or you could say, okay, given that I'm hungry, there are lots of possibilities. I could become a complete overeater to the detriment of my health. I could eat nails. I could, you know, whatever. Or I could become an incredible chef who uses that propensity for good. Or I could just moderate it and try, you know. So in that story, he's got some really nice qualities that he's always channeled to egotism, basically. And in the final moments of his life, something very magical happens and he just slightly makes his gate a little wider and includes this one other person in that. And so he goes sort of immediately from a bad person to somebody who's actually almost saintly. But, but he doesn't really change, actually. His fundamental nature doesn't change.

• 25:39Ezra Klein?

  You wrote about that. You gave this example that stuck with me for a reason that will become obvious in a second, where you wrote, Look, say you're a world-class warrior. If that worry energy gets directed at extreme personal hygiene, you're neurotic. If it gets directed at climate change, you're an intense visionary activist. And it reminded me of something that my wife once said to me, that it actually, there are very few moments like this, but it completely changed my view of my own nature and my own history and the story I told about it. I was a pretty bad hypochondriac when I was younger. And I told her that I was glad she didn't meet me then because I was just always worrying and who'd like that guy. And she said to me, oh, you haven't changed it at all. You just hadn't found work yet. And now you just put all that worry and energy there.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  That's beautiful. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

• 26:25Ezra Klein?

  And I was totally floored by that because it made total sense. It's the same energy, but now it makes me by society's standards, successful rather than neurotic.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:34Ezra Klein?

  But it is a lot of neurotic energy.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:37Ezra Klein?

  It's just being channeled somewhere.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  What a lovely way for her to see you too. That's really a gift, you know, that's, because when you talk about acceptance, that's really what we're talking about is you're born a certain way. And, you know, we didn't, nobody chooses the packaging with which they're born. And then the question is, okay, given this, you know, you do have some choice in how you disperse it, I guess.

• 27:19Ezra Klein?

  So I read an old interview with you where you said, the best thing that happened to you is you worked for engineering companies and that's where you found your material. And I'm quoting you here, "In the everyday struggle between capitalism and grace." I'd like to hear more about that, but particularly from this perspective, that capitalism is a system that it directs the energies we already have in some directions and not others. It pulls out parts of our psyche, desire for status, desire for positional status, desire to achieve. And it's able to do some productive things with them and then maybe also some more dangerous things with them. And so I'd like to hear a little bit about how you see, how you see capitalism as channeling

• 28:03Ezra Klein?

  the sort of natural human, human nature. How does it change us? How does it affect us?

• 28:08Speaker 01

  What it makes me think is that we always have to be asking, which capitalism are we subscribing to? So. You could imagine one model that's quite generous and that that sort of builds into itself some humanistic values. And just by a slight turn of the dial, which by the way, I think has happened during my lifetime, that capitalism becomes more rapacious and more neglectful of the individual. So I think for me, the interesting thing is how do we set that dial? How does the discourse that we engage in as a country cause that adjustment of the dial to go in the direction of actual goodness? You know, there's not, I don't think there's anything implicitly wrong with with capitalism, but it's where you set the dial.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  In my experience, what happened was, you know, we had our daughters and we were, Paul and I got married pretty quickly and had children right away. And we had no money. So in a very babyish bourgeois way, I could just see I could feel that the way that the society was pressuring me and was kind of causing a lot of my qualities like anxiety and perfectionism to torment me a little bit and was undercutting my grace, you know, my ability to be joyful and rise to the occasion. So really, it was just an extrapolation that if me, you know, a guy with a relatively okay job and a relatively okay mind and good health and so on, was feeling that pressure. Suddenly I looked up and like, oh, my God, this is what cultural discontent is about.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Is that the capitalist dragon has its claw on everybody's throat and it's pressing down at different levels to everybody. So that that became very important to me. It's a very small, you know, real, I should have had that realization immediately in my life, but it took a bit of of difficulty to to bring it out.

• 29:47Ezra Klein?

  This is such a rich subject right here that I've been thinking about a bit myself, which is capitalism and kids and having kids in this context. So I'm a, I have a two year old, so I'm a, doesn't feel so new anymore, but but a newish parent. And I guess I'll approach it this way. I read something, it's actually in the same interview that you said, that the big turning point in my artistic life was when my wife and I had our kids, the world got infused with morality again. Every person in the world should theoretically be loved as much as I love my daughters. And on the one hand, I really feel that I I found becoming a parent to be a really startling window into how I treat other people and how other people deserve to be treated.

• 30:29Ezra Klein?

  And at the same time, I notice how easily it can tip the other way, that the particularistic love. We feel, or maybe I should just say that I feel for my children or those close to me, it can close you off to the world and make you more intent on protecting them and getting what they need and in ways that hurt others. You have this super haunting story, the Semperco Girls' Diaries, that to me reads as all about this, where this father can, he is so concerned about his daughter's status concerns and pain at school that he doesn't notice and in many ways, this whole society can't see what they're doing to others. But I'd be interested to hear you, you talk a bit about that because it does seem to me that positional capitalism and the way it

• 31:13Ezra Klein?

  interacts with, it allows us to justify a lot on the basis of what we need to protect our children, when you might think that the feelings we have towards our children would actually open us up more to other people's children.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's a brilliant point, Azar. And I think, yeah, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna cornily invoke a Buddhist fable here. You know, the Buddha had a wonderful student who was a musician. And the student was trying to figure out if when meditating, a person should be really like taught with attention and really almost militantly attentive, or he'd also heard that it was relaxing, you know, so which one was it? And the Buddha said something like, well, when you're tuning up your guitar, your stringed instrument, do you want it to be too tight or too loose? And of course, he said, well, you know, you want it to be just right. Yeah. So in so many things in life and in our culture, it would be nice if we could just settle on one extreme or

• 32:07Speaker 01

  the other and have one autopilot setting, put your kids above everything else. That would be nice. But the experience tells us that the pisser is we have to always be setting the dial and not just like once every three years, like every moment, you have to be resetting the dial. And this is another kind of thing I learned from fiction is the truths that you might say that are separate from questions of To whom, under what conditions, on what day? Those truths are not that interesting to me. In other words, am I for assisted suicide, say? I really feel there's a certain wisdom in saying, by whom, on what day, under what conditions? And almost like reflexively asking that, it keeps us out of the danger of generalization,

• 32:52Speaker 01

  which I think in our public discourse is so pervasive and it's, uh, it results in so much agitation when we're asking people to decide general conditions. Uh, and fiction reminds us that you can't really write a good story without specifying who it's happening to, under what conditions, on what day. So that would be kind of my long-winded answer to your question about child raising, which is, yeah, you're exactly right. And that's what we have to sort of titrate, you know, that every day.

• 33:18Ezra Klein?

  I like that and, and we are very much going to come back to that who, under what conditions, at what times question, because it's something that is laced through, I think, your work, but also in a very different way of mine. And I wanna, I wanna get at that, that interface. Um, but I actually want to talk about one of the other short stories you discuss in the new book, which is the nose. That, that one's a more fun one to summarize. So, so do you mind doing it?

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, a guy wakes up and he finds a nose in his breakfast. He doesn't know where it came from. And we cut away to the guy whose nose it is, who goes in search of it. And then it shows up as a kind of like six foot two nose that gets out of a carriage. And, uh, the guy, you know, runs around trying to get his nose back on his face, basically. When you put it that way, it sounds so crazy.

• 34:02Ezra Klein?

  Well, you write about it, that Gogol, who's the author, is sometimes, and whose name I probably just mispronounced, is sometimes referred to as an absurdist. His work meant to communicate that we live in a world without meaning. But to me, Gogol is a supreme realist, looking past the way things seem to how they really are. So, so why is a story about a six foot two nose running around, getting in and out of carriages, a story about the way things really are?

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Right. I think it goes back to what we were discussing earlier. You know, we come out of the womb with a bunch of really amazing sensory apparatuses and with this brain at the top of it all. And instantly we are there, you know? George is there, Ezra is there. I can remember even as a three-year-old, like, oh, I'm in a movie and I'm the star of it, you know? And I'll be in this movie forever. So that feeling is not right, you know? It's incorrect. And we can look down the line and see people that we, that are a little older than us dying, you know? And so it should be obvious, but it isn't. So what do we do? Well, we take that little thinking apparatus, which is so woefully inadequate to reality. And what else are we going to do? We have, we assume that it's giving us good data.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  And we think we're thinking all the time and the thinking makes us and it makes a world. And we blunder out into that. And then we meet somebody else who's doing the same exact thing on the sidewalk. And hilarity ensues because the constructed worlds that we both have made aren't in agreement often. They might be in agreement broadly, you know, we might both agree that that's a duck there on the sidewalk with us. But the more nuanced parts of that construction are not in agreement. So that's scary, but it's also really funny. It's what causes basically funny shit to happen. And it's also what causes genocides to happen and divorces and beautiful weekends in the Poconos. So to me, that Gogol is somebody who is able to say,

• 35:54Speaker 01

  when we look at two people in a room, we're basically looking at two insane entities who both think they're not only sane, but preeminent. It's a totally natural result of the physicality. And both of them are trying to do this very human thing, which is to assert control over their environment. Like I'm a husband, a father, a professor and a writer. You know, you've got your constructed view of yourself. Usually that view puts you at the top of the heap in any situation you're in. But because all of that's false, it leads to the drama of of human life. And I think Gogol somehow, by starting with that precept, and the way he does it is he has,

• 36:35Speaker 01

  even his narrator is a screw up. His narrator is really subjective and a little bit unskillful in the way he expresses himself. So that guy's messed up. The characters also reason badly, and they reason very selfishly. So you have at any given time, two or three or four machines that aren't reasoning very well, and that are positioning themselves as little gods in the world. And it's crazy. It's funny. But in a certain way, it seems like the most accurate assessment of what's actually going on here that I've ever read.

• 37:04Ezra Klein?

  There's another thing you draw to that story that you gestured out there, which is the way in which everybody in that story, but then I think of this as characterizing a lot of your work, and then I think of this as characterizing a lot of our world, will treat the most insane happenings as normal, so long as everybody else is treating them as normal. That the human capacity to baseline whatever is going on around, no matter how extreme, no matter how grotesque, no matter how bizarre, is just really, really high. And that's one of the really profound forces, on the one hand, holding society together, but on the other hand, often protecting some of the worst elements of society from attention and maybe reform?

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's true. You know, you could see, I mean, the Trump era is an obvious example where what would have been absolutely unimaginable becomes normalized really quickly. And then it takes a lot of work, I think, to stay in a state of alertness where you're seeing a certain behavior correctly relative to the previous baseline. But as you're saying, it's probably necessary. I mean, look how quickly we learned to live in quarantine. And now I have a hard time imagining not being in it, you know? So I guess, like so many things, it's kind of a double edged sword. It's appalling that we would have somebody we care about die and then within a couple of months, basically be back to normal. That's crazy, but it's also, you know, absolutely necessary.

• 38:27Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, that's a really lovely example. I'm gonna take us to the Trump era in a second, but in some ways, I feel like the Trump era is too easy of an example because too many people believe it. Too many people looked at it, and I want to talk to you about this, and said, "This is wild, what is happening here." I'm a vegan, and so one of the examples I'll give is I find this to be very true about animal suffering. In a previous podcast, I called it "the green pill", that once you start taking the suffering of tens of billions of animals that we raise for food seriously, the world becomes really gruesome looking, that people you love and respect are constantly partaking in a terrible system of cruelty, but you seem like the weird one, if you pointed out. And before anybody thinks I'm just up on a high horse about this,

• 39:12Ezra Klein?

  although obviously I am a little bit, you could make this argument about me on, say, climate change. Before the pandemic, I took flights different places, right? And then I certainly don't live a low-carbon lifestyle compared to people around this world, or... There's this very famous thought experiment by the ethical philosopher Peter Singer about, you know, would you jump in a pond to save a drowning child? Well, what if it would make your suit messed up? And you say, of course, I'd get my suit dry cleaned. Who cares? And then he says, well, why won't you spend that dry clean money to save a child on another continent? What is the difference between them being in the pond and being in another country? And to just move through the world day by day, you have to abide such a high level of moral outrage. And on the one hand, if you open yourself up to it, it's paralyzing.

• 39:55Ezra Klein?

  But if you close yourself down to it, it's deadening.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I totally agree with you and I feel that in Buddhism, sometimes they talk about absolute versus relative. So in a relative sense, that's exactly right. And I think we all suffer from that. We all feel that whether we know we're feeling it or not, we feel that contradiction. On the absolute sense, I don't know, or maybe this is more like as an artist, I think, well, it's a version of the poor have always been with us. Like, yeah, that's true. It's terrible. And in a relative sense, I want to work as hard as I can to not participate in any system that's corrupt. And yet, what state of mind are you left in? Since you can't actually do that, I'm going to become tormented, neurotic and a little bitter, constantly noticing only the most horrible things.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  So I guess a part of my mind that says, yeah, okay, we want to notice that. We want to do everything we can in a relative frame. And then at some higher level, you want to go, oh, interesting that that's the way it looks to us. And I would say my own judgmental moral perfectionism, if I really look at it, it has a lot to do with illusion of control. It has to do with me somewhat overestimating my place in this world. So there's an element of ego in it that says, I'm gonna destroy my life with regret. As opposed to saying, yeah, you know, you're, you're just a little speck that came here quickly. And in a very big system that you don't understand. And there's some value in.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Acceptance or kind of like, I don't know, I'm not really being very clear on this, but I hear what you're saying. It's kind of, I think it's one of the tenants of that show, The Good Place, you know, like if a person takes it as his responsibility to right every wrong, that's a big, I don't know, I'm not really sure.

• 41:39Ezra Klein?

  I love that show. That show so much. But I don't know, I always thought that last move they ran, and I'm sorry, they're Good Place spoilers here, the point system has become totally destroyed by the world being too complex to actually correctly assess any actions. It's a little bit of a cop out, like a little bit too utilitarian, where I will say this is particularly an issue on the left, in my view. There is, or certainly has become, such a dominant argument against individualizing any systemic problems. Like, if you talk at all about anybody's individual responsibility on something like climate change, you'll immediately be told, well, no, the real question here is what do we do with the top corporate polluters? And I agree on some level, the real question,

• 42:22Ezra Klein?

  I mean, I spend my life doing policy journalism, I obviously agree that systemic solutions are the ones we need. But I do, there's another part of me that thinks you don't get systemic solutions if people let themselves too off the hook for their individual responsibility and problems. Like, people don't certainly vote to tax themselves on things that they don't think are wrong. Now, you can't ask anybody to be perfect, and I had Peter Singer show a while back, and even he didn't say, you know, donate 80% of your income to global poverty, or even 50% of your income to global poverty. But I think there is something difficult in the question of, what does it mean that we can be okay with how much of this there is? And that, you know, saying that, well, we can't change at all can be a little bit too much letting ourselves off the hook.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  So as a writer, what I'm interested in is, how might I change my inner state so that I would understand the world in such a way that I would do less harm? That's, for me, the starting place. And then- To the extent that I'm not doing that, I think I'm skipping ahead a couple of steps maybe. But I think, I think what you're saying really is true. And it's one of the crazy dilemmas of this life. I used to work in a slaughterhouse, you know, and, and that was amazing, amazing that, that I could do that and, and still be a sporadic meat eater. And that suffering was real for sure, you know, not only the animals, but the other workers. That was real suffering. So I don't know.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  I mean, maybe, maybe the question is, how are we if we can't come up with an answer? You know, how do we, what do the days look like? Can we learn to live in a, in a world where there is a lot of that kind of evil going around? And at the same time, not make monsters of ourselves. You know, honestly, there's, there are times where I'm just sort of beyond my pay grade. And, and this is why I tend to think a little more in the terms of stories, I guess.

• 44:11Ezra Klein?

  I totally hear that. But that's actually why I use Google as the, as a direction into this. And I'll take this in a slightly different direction now, which is that I thought your insight, both about his fiction, but I also think this is true about your fiction. I would really recommend that people read that story of yours, Assemble Co Girl Diaries, because I think it does this beautifully. And I think something that, that it makes me think about in my own work is that it's really important not to let things become normal just because they are wrapped in, in, in normal language. So you brought up the Trump presidency here, and that was the direction I'd wanted to go, which is, I've written, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of words on that presidency, maybe more.

• 44:50Ezra Klein?

  But in a way, I think simply being forced into the language of political journalism, I've never been able to, and I will never be able to convey how truly weird and disturbing it was. And somehow for everyone to talk about it all at once, it, it normalizes it almost by definition, because anything that happens at the scale is normal almost by definition. And yet there's this part of me that wants to insist that it, that it isn't. So I guess, how does a novelist, and you read this era, how would you try to convey what it felt like?

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Well, you know, one of the things that I have noticed is that our leftist shock at Trump was valid, you know, absolutely correct. And yet, you know, it happened and it is still happening. So the novelist in me says, okay, duly noted, a left wing person of this era would have a certain quality of shock that could go in a book. Well, on the other side, you you go over there and there are 60 million people for whom this is not shocking, but lovely. It's almost like if somebody, you know, you see a caveman and he picks up a grenade, you know, and he thinks it's a pineapple and it blows up. It's kind of on the caveman, you know, he he he misunderstood that that grenade.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  So I think for me, just personally, I covered the Trump campaign in 2016 and I was totally shocked and didn't have a vocabulary and realized there was all kinds of subterranean things going on I had no clue about on the right. And now what I've been trying to do since then is just get over the shock and start to try to understand the system that existed before Trump in such a way that it's makes sense. Not not to say that I approve of it or that I won't resist it, but that it makes holistic sense because cause and effect never takes a break. So whatever happened there in 2016 and is still happening, it's got an organic cause. And I think for me, the the version of me that was hand wringing and I can't believe it, that part it needs to be over.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  And I I'm trying to be a scientist about it and understand it in a in a deeper way, which is both a way of finding a way to write about it, but also it's actually a way to find the best way to push against it. It's to diagnosis is a really important and diagnosis from inside with some kind of psychological insight into it and a novelistic insight is is a, in my way of thinking, the best way to position oneself for resistance.

• 47:11Ezra Klein?

  Someone once told me that whenever you think, huh, that doesn't make sense, that what it means is your model of the world doesn't make sense, that the world always makes sense on its own terms. It's you who who is missing something. And so that's always a starting point for for inquiry. And so I actually want to go back because one thing I will say about your nonfiction is that there is a really powerful predictive dimension in it to to this era. You wrote a piece many, many, many years ago now on the Minutemen, who were these This militia, this sort of right wing militia, but also kind of cosplay militia that would stand in border towns with guns and hang out waiting for to see immigrants crossing the border and then try to, you know, get them picked up by the, by the border patrol.

• 47:56Ezra Klein?

  And at the time, it all looked very weird. It was, you know, people who seemed to be pretending they were in, they were somehow soldiers in some grand war. And there's an absurdity in the piece, but you read it now and it is so predictive of Trump. It was so predictive of what was really happening on the right and the power of the immigration narrative. And he just comes up a couple of years later and picks that up. And I'm curious how you think back on, on the people you met then, on that piece, on, on just that whole, that whole moment.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's what I love about writing on fiction is you blunder into a situation and usually your conceptual apparatus isn't prepared. Like I didn't even know what to make of those guys, you know? So in that situation, what you have to resort to is just observing. Usually I go into those pieces with a kind of an agenda and idea for what the piece will look like. And within the first couple of days, it gets totally destroyed by, you know, reality. So I love that feeling of like sitting out there with them. We, you know, we staked out the border for a whole night, this six of us or 12 of us or whatever, and they were all heavily armed. And it was funny. It was, it was a comical evening that could have been a tragic evening. It almost was at one point, but what I love to say, holy shit, I really don't know what's going on here.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  And in a way, that's another example of the ruminating mind going quiet because since all your rumination based concepts are totally wrong, totally at odds with what's happening in front of you, you have to put those away and then you're all eyes, ears, nose and note taking. So that's why I think those pieces, if they have any value, it's that in those moments, all my circa whatever it was, 2006 liberal ideas had to be shut down for a minute. And it was just observing what they actually said and did. Yeah, it was, it was a very, very wild piece because they were certainly affable with me, you know? And I think I say in the piece, four or five of them is a lot of fun, but you put four or 500 and it's a different ballgame. And now we see the Capitol being stormed.

• 49:52Ezra Klein?

  There is this way right now in which.

• 49:57Ezra Klein?

  Things that seem comic very quickly tip into things that are dangerous or tragic. And people keep experiencing that as some kind of surprise, that there's a contradiction or a tension there, when certainly I've come to believe that those things are related, they're more causal, actually, that the comic nature allows things to spread to not be seen as dangerous and then they they become dangerous. But you see that in the capital insurrectionists, right? There's a sort of ridiculousness to, you know, this guy in the shaman hat running in, but there's also a bunch of people with guns. You see it in the Minutemen, you see it in the Tea Party. But of course, you see it going way back, right? Fascism is a bunch of friends dressing up in similar outfits to sing songs together.

• 50:40Ezra Klein?

  But then it's fascism. And I'm curious, as somebody who often uses comedy to try to get at what is truer and sometimes more destructive in the world, just how you read that?

• 50:51Speaker 01

  You know, I always think of that movie Fargo as a great example of that. You know, those killers are so inept and so stupid, and yet they really kill, you know? I think of myself really in an honorable tradition of Shakespearean fools, you know, who come into a situation and they're not, you know, that well informed or that well read necessarily. They're they're just kind of riffing. And the power of the Shakespearean fool is that he riffs really well, and he blunders into the truth in the spirit of trying to entertain or trying to captivate. So for me, the trick is, you know, try to live my life in such a way that I'm not pre-shaping experiences too much. Try to go with places that make me uncomfortable or that I think I'm sure about, but including some really just boring old banal places, you know, that are that are and always keep my eyes and ears open.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  And then, in a certain way, to try not to build up a view of the world. Now, you do, of course you do, but try not to. And then, when I get in front of a story that I'm writing, this subconscious thing we were talking about kicks in, and it produces all kinds of weird gems and weird juxtapositions and tonalities that I could never have thought of in advance. So again, it's that idea that you it's intuition as this conduit that provides a level of complexity that might have a sort of super truth in it. You know, it's not necessarily linear truth or everyday truth, but there's a kind of overcharged quality that allows it to sometimes be predictive. Or what I'm working on now is sort of trying

• 52:19Speaker 01

  to write a piece that feels like, right now,

• 52:24Speaker 01

  And you know, you're sort of taking different valences that are in the culture and putting them in action. And sometimes if you do that, they will inadvertently do something that leads you to a higher understanding of things. But again, not a rational understanding. I think it's more of a, there's a kind of a magic in it. And I don't really even know what the function is, except I think if you, if you read something in that spirit, something that, as you were saying, combines the comic and the tragic, there's this instantaneous coming alive of something in your consciousness that I think is what's fun. And I suppose you could argue that it's beneficial.

• 53:21Ezra Klein?

  This gets us back to something I had put a pin in earlier. When you talked about the, the key question of fiction being, under what conditions, at what time, in which place, right? The conditions that bring out certain versions of, of us rather than others. And I obviously see this in your fiction, but it is almost pathological in your nonfiction, like the effort to inhabit other perspectives. It's in every piece I've read from you. It's in your remarkable 2016 piece in the New Yorker on, on Trump rallies. But, but I want to read some quotes here from this Minuteman piece. You write that, "Everyone's pissed, oppositional, less empathetic and articulate and well-mannered than they would be at any other moment in their actual lives." And then in your piece on the Trump rallies,

• 54:02Ezra Klein?

  you, you talk about trying to present people the specifics of, of the folks they want to deport. And you say, "In the face of specificity, my interviewees began trying, really trying, to think of what would be fairest and most humane for this real person we had imaginatively conjured up. It wasn't that we suddenly agreed, but the tone changed." But then, of course, a couple of minutes later, you're in a crowd of, of counter protesters and the guy's screaming, Hillary's going to be locked up, she won't be president. This feels like a really important practice to me. And then also, there sometimes feels like there's a way of searching so determinedly for the multitudes we carry inside of ourselves that it can almost blind us to the people we are being right now when it matters most. That it could become exculpatory

• 54:45Ezra Klein?

  when we actually need to be forced to be responsible for who we are in this moment. And I'm curious how you think about that tension.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a beautifully made point. First of all, we have to say that each of us has different bandwidth or different inclinations of superpowers. So I would never advocate for a general anything. But for me, what I find is if I'm in the face of somebody with whom I don't agree, I'm pretty comfortable with the moment when I have to fight them. I don't really have a big problem with that. I'm usually pretty clear on where my lines are and when somebody needs to be forcibly pushed back. So I think what that does is it gives me a little bit of an option to engage another interest of the mind, which is to say, huh, how does the world look through that person's eyes? He sounds insane. He sounds aggressive. He sounds irrational.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  He sounds racist. But to him, it feels differently. Now, usually when people advocate going into consciousness, they're saying something like, be empathetic and be loving and you can change the person or whatever. There's also a kind of a power in it to say, if I want you to stop doing something, and I'm confident that at the moment I need to, I can and will fight you, then I have a little side corridor, which is to try to imagine what the world looks like to you. If I can do that, that gives me a range of persuasive options that are more powerful than if I didn't think about you. Now, again, for a lot of people, I think that's just weird, and they don't want to do it. But for me, ever since I was a little kid, I've had that interest

• 56:18Speaker 01

  in how that person seems to be other than me, and yet to her, she seems like the central story. So maybe that's why I became a fiction writer. But I like doing that. And I think it's powerful, and I think I have maybe more bandwidth for it than a lot of people do. But you have to be very careful that it can easily morph over into enabling. If I understand why somebody does something, it doesn't permit it. So to me, it's a natural thing. I enjoy it. Yeah, it's tricky. And by the way, I've never persuaded anybody. That whole Trump rally, I talked to everybody. I have all kinds of people in my extended social circle that are Trumpies. I've never budged anybody. But it makes me feel less insane if I can somehow,

• 57:02Speaker 01

  at least for little brief moments, see things from their point of view.

• 57:07Ezra Klein?

  One reason I connect to this is it makes me feel less insane, too. It's in many ways my...

• 57:13Ezra Klein?

  My most natural mode. And then I find that there is a part of me that wants to believe in the least insane, or to put it differently than that, the least offensive to me version of the person in front of me. And I do a lot, I'm a political reporter, so I spend a lot of my time talking with Republican members of Congress and Republican staffers in Congress. And a constant theme for me in recent years, and there are a lot of Republicans who, you know, I don't agree with them on things, but I respect their differences in the way they think about things, and I learn a lot from them. But they're also, they're also a strain of the party right now, just to be blunt about where I think things are, that has gone off the rails. And one of the things I would see all the time is members

• 57:57Ezra Klein?

  of Congress who would be reasoned and cautious and many minded in their private conversations with me, and that would turn around and vote to reject the results of the election, or to rip healthcare away from, from poor people, would lie about recovering pre-existing conditions. And it just raises this very hard question for me, not of who we really are, because I don't think that has an answer. I think that, as you put it, who we are is situational. But of which of ourselves really matters? And of what do you do sometimes with the desire to believe the best in people, when they're particularly not going to be in a system that is going to bring out their best self at the end of the day?

• 58:33Speaker 01

  And how do you explain that? Having been in the position of seeing that, you know, the reasonable person on a small level, and then the unreasonable public thing, how do you explain or understand that?

• 58:43Ezra Klein?

  I think there are a lot of possible explanations. One is that the reasonable person is trying to convince me of their reasonableness, that it's not there, it's not even that true of a self. So that's one version. I always notice that people who I will, you know, I'll sometimes have on the show, are much more reasonable or gentle than they are on Twitter, because when they're talking to me, they want to have like a nice social interaction, and on Twitter, they want to dunk on people. So different contexts bring out different things in us, and that's, by the way, very much true for me. Another thing is that we live in a zero-sum political system. And so I wrote this book, Why We're Polarized, which is very much all about this question. It's very much about why it is uns- Some basic level rational for even a Republican who didn't like Donald Trump on a

• 59:27Ezra Klein?

  personal level to have voted for him certainly in 2016 and even in 2020 that the choice between the two parties has become so wide for people that particularly once you then add in media ecosystems that give people a very different view of what the reality is that the choice makes sense from their perspective. But in terms of those members of Congress, I often think that at the end of the day, everything in Congress is a binary question, a yes or no on this bill. And then behind that yes or no on this bill, a who do you want to see win the next election? And so conversations are positive sum. There are a lot of ways to act in a conversation to make everybody better off. But when you end up in zero sum choices, well, then in some ways, you really see what

• 1:00:10Ezra Klein?

  people's values are, right? And what they're willing to risk and which part of them was lying at bedrock. Because on the one hand, I can explain the rational reason people make these decisions. But I also don't want to let people too much off the hook for making careerist rational decisions. But I want people to do particularly in positions of leadership, the moral thing, even if it's hard. And so I really struggle with this. I think there's a kind of cognitive illusion that can emerge from trying too hard to steel man people's positions. And then you're surprised when they, you know, they act in less reasonable ways and that side of themselves they showed you.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I agree. And I think that's one of the values of great literature. You know, if you read Shakespeare, or there's a beautiful Chekhov story called In the Ravine, which is about one of the most unrevealedly evil people, a woman who scalds a baby to death at one point because it would help her in some way. And you know, those great writers don't flinch about the idea that, okay, we have capabilities of empathy and understanding. And so in other words, you could, a great mind could get inside the mind of that woman and be her for a couple of seconds. But that doesn't have anything to do with our response to her, or you know, you don't want to enable her, or you don't want to even, um, you know, understanding and forgiving are kind of two different things.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  So I think one of the things that literature does is it reminds us of for all of our honorable desire to empathize and soften boundaries. There are outrageous occasions where there are people who are just from our perspective, unremittingly evil and, you know, there they are, you know? So you wouldn't, in other words, you wouldn't want empathy or some kind of construction about empathy to start lopping off pieces of reality and making them inadmissible.

• 1:01:54Ezra Klein?

  And I'll add one thing to this because it's something I find really difficult about this political era. When virtues become vices or virtues become can become enabling. Because I will say that I feel that this political era does not bring out the best in me. Sometimes the choices I have to make or the answers I have to come to are not what I wish they were. And you have a really nice moment in that Trump rally piece of wrestling with this. You write, "A bully shows up, is hateful, says things so crude we liberals are taken aback. We respond moderately. We keep waiting for supporters helped along by how compassionately and measuredly we are responding to be persuaded. For the bully, this is perfect." And I've been thinking a little bit about that with the sudden calls for unity after the election from Republicans who voted to reject the election.

• 1:02:40Ezra Klein?

  I don't want to put this exactly all on them, but even that right there is my, you know, like that little voice inside being like, show some virtue coming out when, I mean, voting to reject the election was all on them. And so this moment where it feels that some of the temperamental virtues of liberal democracy are weaponized by those who don't believe in it feels really tough because you want to be your best self in politics. But then, you know, there are certain kinds of people who can find the flaw in that and bullies, put aside the unremittingly evil. I mean, that is in nature of the bully to turn the system against the people who are who are operating within it.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that the left has to do is recognize that we really are at a very basic level, you know, defending virtues like kindness and decency and equality. That that's, to me, that's the thing we have to concentrate on, that actually, we're the true defenders of the constitutional ideas that say we really are hopeful that we'll have a beautiful country where everybody is equal. That's actually what we're working for. And don't get too distracted by the the small storms on the other side. To me, you know, if we think about unity, here's the one idea I have about this, and I'm not a very astute political thinker. But here's a sort of a hopeful metaphor. If you take 20,000 Americans and send them down to a baseball stadium and say, look,

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Republicans, you guys wear red, Democrats, you are blue, we file into the stadium, and on second base is a podium, and a guy starts talking in an inflammatory way about immigration. Well, you know, there's no doubt about what's gonna happen. There's gonna be fights. Okay, so now rewind and say, first of all, dress however you want. Same people come in, and then at the critical moment, the Yankees and the Red Sox run out. You know, so suddenly there's a there's a polarity shift there. You're gonna have Red Sox fans who are liberal and conservative and so on. The tenor of this discussion is gonna change because we've been trained. We know how to amiably argue at baseball games. So my only kind of light

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  thought is, we have to get off the preconceived axis that tells us what political discourse consists of and what it sounds like. Now, here we go back to the local. What would that look like? I think the move is to sort of somehow destabilize the idea that politics is always national, and start looking locally. What, how does my life actually look to me as I experience it in the in the next 24 hours? How much my political agitation is around things that are basically distant, unknowable, or mostly unknowable and conceptual?

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  So I'm feeling that a lot of the anger comes from a feeling of disconnection. And that feeling of disconnection is actually correct. We're fighting like hell with people we care about in what's largely a predetermined discourse. Does that make any sense at all?

• 1:05:29Ezra Klein?

  It makes a ton of sense. In fact, one reason I'm happy to hear you say it is one of the places my book ends is in a call for relocalizing a lot of politics for almost exactly that reason, that argues that the nationalization of politics has become a huge polarization driver. But I won't make this a, this is about your book, not mine, but I can't really agree with that more. And I will say on one, one piece of that, even as I'm at the New York Times now and I live in California, one thing I always tell people is that if you don't consume any political media that is local, that you're making a terrible mistake in which of your political identities are strengthening, that we've become too, our national political identities have become way too strong. And our local political identities have weakened, have withered.

• 1:06:11Ezra Klein?

  And that's often because we don't consume media that attaches us to local fights, local questions, you know, you read the New York Times living in San Francisco. And so like, that's one, like, there's an actionable thing you can do there, but you have to work on your own informational ecosystem to attach yourself to things that are, that are local, but it's a much healthier way of experiencing politics and you can have much more effect on it.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Well, and also the idea that when you, when we start working on local issues, we can move from the conceptual to the practical. And once people get into positions of solving individual problems, a lot of the agitation goes away. So if you and me and two conservatives are sitting down to try to address the pothole problem and we're $2,000 short, there's going to be a discussion, but it's not going to have to do with the culture wars, you know? It's a very practical thing. And the more we know about it, the more it's going to become very technical and scientific. Which then takes all of the kind of bombast out of the, out of the thing. And then, and afterwards, it makes us feel that we participated in something democratic and communal and, and, and positive. I mean, that's of course, obviously way too simple.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  But I think if I, you know, if I look at my life and the people I know, I think a lot of the angst and the agitation of the moment has to do with the feeling that their actions don't actually matter all that much, or that they're spending a lot of energy, a lot of emotional energy and neurological energy in discussions that somehow should be about important things and they kind of seem like they are, but they don't lead to anything. You know, when I was covering those Trump rallies, I, there was so much talk about immigration. And so one of the tropes I kept enacting was to talk to a Trump supporter and say, I see that this is a, immigration is a big issue for you. Can you tell me about when that started for you and what was the inciting incident with an undocumented person that caused you to have these strong opinions?

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  And it was almost comical that there was never an incident, you know? Or if there was, they misunderstood it, there was an accent that was, you know, mistaken as proof of undocumented status. So it was really made dramatically clear to me that this agitation about immigration was largely a projection that flourished in the absence of, of experience. And again, this might take us back to fiction, you know? Fiction is a great discipline of saying, you know, you, you can't, if you start a story, a, a bunch of people were somewhere, that story's not going anywhere. But if you say, there were four Presbyterians in a bomb cellar, suddenly there's something, you know?

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  And it's all because the story's been grounded in a particular place with particular people at us, under certain conditions. And the wisdom or the knowledge or the understanding that's going to come out of that situation is directly related to how specifically it's been enumerated.

• 1:08:57Ezra Klein?

  I think it's a wonderful bridge to the final section here where I'm going to ask you for some fiction, among other book recommendations. And so let me begin with this one. What book have you reread the most times?

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  I think it was probably Red Cavalry by the Russian writer Isaac Bobo. It was a book of short stories that's really insane about when the Russians invaded Poland after the revolution. And it's just a kind of, even in translation, just a stylistic masterpiece. And so when I was young, it really was a touchstone for me of what an intense short story would look like. And then also, I go back to Gogol's Dead Souls a lot, just because I love it so much. And I have never been able to figure out why. It feels to me like a book that really gets the feeling of being alive, right. But I've never been, you know, quite able to put my finger on why. So I just drop into that every now and then, just to remind myself.

• 1:09:49Ezra Klein?

  What book do you give to others most often?

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  I don't get books that often because I always feel a little bit, you know, like it's sort of imposing. But I did give out Stamp From the Beginning by Iremex Kendi quite a few times. For me, it was a life changer for me. And I think it's a, that book is a great book and kind of a great act of generosity and insight. So I have given that one out a few times.

• 1:10:12Ezra Klein?

  That really is a great book. What's your favorite work of nonfiction?

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  I really love Dispatches by Michael Hare, which is the great Vietnam work. He was a friend of ours. And the book is so beautifully open to different mind states. You know, he's in Vietnam, and sometimes he's sort of celebrating it, and sometimes he's horrified. And he's got this amazing pro style that just lets him get into so many, you know, really cool places. And then he, Michael, actually, when I was writing Lincoln and the Barto, he recommended this book called Patriotic Gore by Edmund Wilson, which is a series of sketches of the literary lights of the 19th century, most of whom we've never heard of. And it's just, it's a really beautiful evocation of a world that was totally as real as ours. That has vanished. You know, we don't know these people. We don't, it's really, really

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  hard to recreate their mindsets. And of course, they were very passionate about it and they, you know, people wrote thirty, forty novels. And so for me, it was kind of a great book that just to sort of say, oh, yeah, this cultural moment that we're in is sort of a beautiful illusion, you know, it seems real to us. You and I could talk for hours about different cultural references. And in another hundred years, it'll all seem kind of like beautiful nonsense.

• 1:11:26Ezra Klein?

  What's your favorite work on Buddhism?

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  Oh, there's so many. I mean, the one I read most recently that I really loved, and I loved it because it did that work of kind of jolting me to attention, was a book by Mingyur Rinpoche called In Love With The World. And it starts out just with kind of a narrative description of it, of a sort of pilgrimage he made. And he so skillfully works in all the kind of basic ideas about Buddhism that and does it in a way that makes them seem really alive and really urgent.

• 1:11:55Ezra Klein?

  What's a book you go back to for just the sheer beauty of the writing that inspires you as a writer?

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Well, there's a British writer named Henry Green that I think people don't read quite as much anymore. But he had a series of short novels, all with one word titles like loving, living, party going, concluding. And I'll just drop into him because I don't know anybody who writes more beautiful sentences in English, just more sculpted and deliberate and purposeful. So it's almost like just drinking a little bit of sort of a potion to make you love language again, just because he's taken so much care with it. And also, there's some of these big, big scenes in Huck Finn, like the, the scene where the guy talks the mob down from a lynching and some of those big sort of, I think of them as aerial scenes that I've been reading is because I, I tend to get a little bit obsessive over

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  sentences, which I think is a good quality as, you know, with Henry Green. But also, I'm a little worried as, you know, I get older, that that lapidary quality can sometimes cause you to forfeit the big picture, you know, the kind of thrilling summaries and the, the bird's eye view. So, so Twain is such a natural writer, it sounds just like conversation. But when you actually start looking at it or copying it out, it's really incredibly high level English prose.

• 1:13:09Ezra Klein?

  What book of poetry would you recommend to somebody who doesn't often read poetry?

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  Well, I think these aren't going to be Syracuse writers, but one of our teachers was named Hayden Carruth, and he has a beautiful book called Scramble Legs and Whiskey, just a real, real accessible, emotional, funny poems. And then I think I would also recommend the work of two of my colleagues, Mary Carr, has a lovely book called Tropic of Squalor, and then Brooks Haxton has one called, They Lift Their Wings to Cry. So what I'm always looking for is sort of like, well, like with what we saw with Amanda Gorman the other day, the quality that the poetry is talking to me directly. It's talking to my experience and the, you know, the poetic qualities of it are not for show. They're there to communicate higher level things more efficiently.

• 1:13:58Ezra Klein?

  And I'll end on this one, which is, I mentioned earlier, I have a two-year-old. I know you've written a wonderful children's book. Are there any children's books you love or that you would recommend that I read to my son?

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  Hmm. Have you read The Hundred Dresses?

• 1:14:10Ezra Klein?

  No.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  Well, you talk about empathy, you know, it's a, I won't spoil it, but it's a, it's a great story. It's a great short story, actually, about a little girl who's, who's perceived one way, and then we find out that it was very different, actually, behind the scenes. I also like, I used to love this book with our kids called Caps for Sale, real simple little book about this guy who's just, for some reason, outselling caps. He's got a big pile of like 200 caps on his head. And it's just really playful and goofy and kind of poetic. Anything by Seuss, I love Dr. Seuss.

• 1:14:41Ezra Klein?

  It is really true that children's books, they just, they, they take a delight in language. It is often lost in adult literature, and it's actually been one of the really fun things about parenthood is, is just rediscovering some of that, some of that baseline delight.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, or when you find a kid's book that doesn't take that delight, and it's a torment.

• 1:14:58Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, that is, that is very true. Your book is A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, in which four Russians give a masterclass on writing, reading, and life. George Saunders, it's been such a pleasure to get to spend this time with you. Thank you.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  A total pleasure for me too, Ezra. Thank you for, for what you do.

• 1:15:23Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Roji Karma and Jeff Geld. Fact checked by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and the mixing is by Jeff Geld.