Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show Best Of: This Conversation With Richard Powers Is a Gift About this episode Today we're revisiting one of our favorite conversations from 2021 with the novelist Richard Powers. Enjoy!
There are certain conversations I fear trying to fit into a description. There’s just more to them than I’m going to be able to convey. This is one of them.
Richard Powers is the author of 13 novels, including the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Overstory.” If you haven’t read it, you should. It’ll change you. It changed me. I haven’t walked through a forest the same way again. And I’m not alone in that. When I interviewed Barack Obama this year, he recommended “The Overstory,” saying, “It changed how I thought about the earth and our place in it.”
Powers’s new book is “Bewilderment.” You could think of it as 'The Innerstory': It is about how and whether we see the world we inhabit. It’s about the nature and limits of our empathy. It’s about refusing to die before we’re dead and taking seriously the gifts and responsibilities of being alive. It is about how we change our minds and how we change our societies. It is about how we treat delusion as normal and clarity as lunacy. It is enchanting, and it is devastating.
It is not just books through which Powers has been exploring these ideas. It is also through radical changes he’s made to how he lives his life. That’s where we start but far from where we end: This conversation touches on mortality, animism, politics, old-growth forests, extraterrestrial life, Buddhism and beyond.
Mentioned:
Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard
Book recommendations:
How to Be Animal by Melanie Challenger
Rooted by Lyanda Lynn Haupt
Ever Green by John W. Reid and Thomas E. Lovejoy
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 our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] .
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.
Transcript 12,073 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Ezra Klein? I'm Ezra Klein, and this is The Ezra Klein Show.
0:23 Ezra Klein? Sometimes I finish these conversations and I feel I've been given a gift. And this is one of them. This, this is really one of them. Richard Powers is the author of 13 novels, including famously The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. I loved The Overstory. I loved it. I've never walked through a forest the same way again. And a lot of people loved it. When I interviewed him earlier this year and asked for his three books, former President Barack Obama recommended The Overstory. And he said, quote, "It changed how I thought about the earth and our place in it." Halifan endorsement. Powers has a new book out, Bewilderment. And I think Overstory and Bewilderment should be understood as a couplet.
1:07 Ezra Klein? The Overstory is about the world beyond us, the slow, powerful life of the trees and the forests, and the way all of that shapes us. You could also call it the outer story. And Bewilderment, by contrast, is the inner story. It is about our cognition, our brainwaves, the way we can live in a time of wonders, but a time also of horrors, of climate crisis and mass extinction, and poverty that doesn't need to be there, and violence. How we can live in that time and see nothing but normalcy. Sometimes see nothing but ourselves. It's about the limits of our cognitive empathy and what it would take to change them
1:50 Ezra Klein? and what we do to those among us who aren't so limited. It is an enchanting, and my God, it is a devastating book. And it speaks, as does this conversation we have, to something I've been wrestling with on the show over the past year, and probably before that, too. Look, if you listen, you know, I don't believe in pretending that there are no limits on what our politics will accept. But I also don't believe in pretending that the limits that are there are just, that the boundaries of our politics right now trace a compassionate society or chart a wise future. They don't, they don't.
2:31 Ezra Klein? Whether your concern is climate, or it's poverty, or it's animal suffering, or it's global health, or any of a list we could keep doing, there is just a chasm between what we should do and what we will. And what makes that even worse is that often insisting on what we should do, telling people that what they're doing right now is wrong or not enough, that they need to make sacrifice or change, that can lead to tremendous political backlash. It can lead to a shrinking of what we will do. It's maddening. It is maddening, but it points to the central truth that I sometimes think gets forgotten, which is you need to change minds to change politics. You really do.
3:16 Ezra Klein? If you want radical change, you can't just impose it. So how do we change the way we see each other and the world? How do we create a richer, deeper soil for our politics? Unexpectedly to me, that is what bewilderment is all about. It takes seriously something we too often ignore, that we live in a system that is always changing us, that our current technologies, our current culture, our current economic system, the religious systems we have and don't have, are rewiring our brains and reshaping our souls, and always expanding or contracting the limits of our empathy. And right now, those systems, I would say, at least in America, are supercharging our
4:00 Ezra Klein? impulses for want, for accumulation, for fear.
4:05 Ezra Klein? And so we need technologies that push and change us in the other direction, whether it is the literal empathy machine that Powers imagines, or the cultural and religious systems that we've seen in the past, or something entirely new. But it is this project of change that must succeed if politics is to change radically. And one thing that is particularly fascinating to me about Powers is that he has been experimenting. He has been experimenting on us with his books, but he's also, in a very profound way, been experimenting on himself by changing the way he lives. And that's where we begin. As always, my email is azra kline show at nytimes.com.
4:50 Ezra Klein? Richard Powers, what a pleasure.
4:51 Speaker 01 The pleasure's all mine. I've been really looking forward to this.
4:55 Ezra Klein? So when I was doing research for this, I found a profile of you in The New York Times in 2003. And in it, you call yourself the science guy, the paper calls you the preeminent literary chronicler of the technological age. And now you've become the tree guy, you moved from Silicon Valley to the Smoky Mountains, you talk about plant consciousness. What happened, man? How do you tell the story of you over the last few decades?
5:21 Speaker 01 Oh, glory. I vaguely remember that guy back in 2003. And I seem to remember being slightly sardonic with that label. But I guess what's happened is one kind of science continued to evolve in my interest into another until I began to see science, the kinds of science that have very different kinds of focus than the ones that preoccupied me when I was younger. I think if I were to give this an oversimplification...
5:59 Speaker 01 I was concerned as a younger writer in my twenties and thirties and forties with the human sciences that amplify our ability to control and master and manipulate our situation here and to understand ourselves. And in my fifties and sixties, I've become interested in those sciences. The humbling sciences, I guess I would say, that point our attention away from ourselves and onto other living things.
6:34 Ezra Klein? I love that idea of the humbling sciences. I'm gonna, I'm gonna steal that from here on out.
6:40 Speaker 01 Yeah. And, you know, amazement and wonder are very close to humility in my own emotional wheel. You know, the, the more astonishing the world around us becomes, the more we have to share the limelight with these other things that are just mind-boggling.
7:02 Ezra Klein? I've heard you discuss Silicon Valley Dinner Party back when you lived near Stanford. That was a turning point for you. Would you mind telling that story?
7:11 Speaker 01 What I remember from dinner parties in Silicon Valley, honestly, is that you simply couldn't go there. This would have been in the mid 2010s. You simply couldn't go out to dinner with other people in the area without the question of real estate coming up.
7:28 Ezra Klein? That is still true. I'm in San Francisco, that, that hasn't changed.
7:33 Speaker 01 Only the numbers have changed as the, the basic phenomenon is the same. At the time, I would be rolling my eyes at the stories of the 1.2 million dollar teardowns. I can only imagine what they are now.
7:44 Ezra Klein? Last night I looked, the average price, the median price of a home sold in San Francisco is 1.4 million.
7:51 Speaker 01 Extraordinary, the median price. Well, that was in itself a little bit rich for my blood. But the other topics of that culture.
8:01 Speaker 01 Tend to circle back around these sorts of transhuman fascinations, ways of magnifying our throw weight and our ability and removing the last constraints to our desires. And in particular, to eliminate the single greatest enemy of meaning in the culture of the technological sublime that is itself such a strong instance of the culture of human separatism and commodity-mediated individualist capitalism. That is to say, the removal of death. And it was, you know, sitting around and listening to people
8:43 Speaker 01 talk seriously about just hanging on a little bit longer until we were able to correct this basic design flaw in life and somehow preserve ourselves in one form or another, biological if possible, if not in some kind of informational form. And, you know, all of this was happening in the shadow of my growing understanding of the more-than-human world, you know, to live in Silicon Valley, to live just underneath the Santa Cruz Mountains, which themselves carry the scars of an historical relationship with humans
9:26 Speaker 01 in the form of the regenerating redwood forests. And my increasing fascination with getting up into these mountains and hiking around and seeing these extraordinary, extraordinary creatures, even the ones that are only 100 years old, are truly mind-blowing. And when you stumble across an 1,100 or 1,200-year-old tree that's as wide as a house and as tall as a football field, it puts a different context on your dinner-table conversations with humans who are trying to escape death.
9:59 Ezra Klein? I want to hold on death for a minute. I'm going to come right back to it. But as a note on redwoods, I went to UC Santa Cruz for two years. And it is nothing against the wonderful education I got there to say that I've long thought the great gift of that time was I got to spend two years nestled in redwoods. And they don't leave you. There's something different about, I don't want to say the rest of nature is not remarkable, but there is something about that tree that is majestic. I go back to it as often as I can. They really get in your blood in a different way.
10:30 Speaker 01 So, University of Santa Cruz as featured in the overstory, I hope I didn't slander it too much. I hope it was recognizable to you. I mean, I just, I don't know how any undergraduate gets anything done there with the sea right there.
10:45 Ezra Klein? You don't.
10:45 Speaker 01 Yeah. And then, you know, Henry Cowal redwoods, Big Basin redwoods, incredible bits of set aside land. It must just feel like you're in the belly of creation there.
10:59 Ezra Klein? To go back to death, to a lot of people, including most days to me, the idea of at least forestalling mortality, sounds wondrous. Isn't that what human beings have been fighting towards forever? You had this experience, I understand, shortly after a mortality scare of your own. Why did you have a different reaction to it? Why didn't that fill you with excitement? Why did that instead send you looking for answers or comfort outside of humanity?
11:30 Speaker 01 I would start with a caveat. I wonder if it has always been a part of the human program to forestall death or to deny it. I think there have been many earthly cultures that have been much more in peace with and much more reconciled with death and that don't see it as the annihilator of all things, of all meaning. I guess to come at this from the personal standpoint, I think for most of my life, until I did kind of wake up to forests and to trees, I shared without really understanding this as a kind of concession
12:15 Speaker 01 or a kind of subscription. I did share.
12:20 Speaker 01 This cultural consensus that meaning is a private thing, that we do for ourselves and by ourselves, and that our kind of general sense of the discoveries of the 19th and 20th century have left us feeling a bit unsponsored and adrift beyond the accident of human existence. And, you know, I think I was right along with that sense that somehow we are a thing apart. We can make purpose and make meaning completely arbitrarily.
13:02 Speaker 01 It consists mostly of trying to be more in yourself, of accumulating in one form or another. And when you do subscribe to a culture like that and you are confronted with the reality of your own mortality, as I was when I was living in Stanford, that sense of stockpiling personal meaning starts to feel a little bit pointless. And I think what was happening to me at that time as I was turning outward and starting to take the non-human world seriously, is my sense of meaning was shifting from something that was entirely about me
13:46 Speaker 01 and authored by me outward into this more collaborative, reciprocal, interdependent, exterior place that involved not just me, but all these other ways of being that I could make kinship with. And when you make kinship beyond yourself, your sense of meaning gravitates outwards into that reciprocal relationship, into that interdependence. And, you know, that's... It's a little bit like scales falling off your eyes. You know, when you do turn that corner...
14:25 Speaker 01 All of the sources of anxiety that are so present and so deeply internalized, become much more identifiable. And my own sense of hope and fear gets a much larger frame of reference to operate in.
14:43 Ezra Klein? You moved in this period from Silicon Valley area to the Smoky Mountains. How has that move changed you?
14:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, and that move was prompted by these processes that we were just talking about. I was researching the book, Overstory, and kept reading that if you wanted to see what good primary old growth eastern forests look like, that the Smokies was a great place to go. You know, I should say that it really astonished me when I was doing the research for that book, to discover the numbers of the four or five great continental forests that covered North America, depending on how you count.
15:30 Speaker 01 Something only like 95 to 98% of it has been cut, and 2% to 5% of these forests remain in something like their original ecological condition. That was astonishing to me. You know, I've been in a lot of forests, and I always assumed, you know, that's what they look like. And when I first went to the Smokies and hiked up into the old growth in the southern Appalachians, it was like somebody threw a switch. You know, there was some odd filter that had just been removed, and the world sounded different and smelled different, and, you know, I could see how elevated the species count was.
16:13 Speaker 01 And it was a moving moment for me, as an Easterner, to stand up there and to say, this is what an eastern forest looks like. This is what a healthy, fully functioning forest looks like. And I'm 56 years old, and I'd never seen it. That was something. And I think that the experience was so powerful that I was still thinking about it almost a year later. And I realized that, you know, that's got to tell you something. If you're still preoccupied with the place and how you felt in that place after such a long period of time, after only a four-day exposure, that's got to tell you something. So I moved back and I've been living there ever since.
16:54 Speaker 01 And I feel like it's the luckiest decision I've ever made. And a great, great luxury to wake up every morning and to belong to a place, to feel like I'm slowly, daily, learning about the affordances of that place, what it wants to do, what its indigenous plants and animals are. And it's really the first time in my life that I have lived where I live, if that makes any sense.
17:26 Ezra Klein? I've heard you say that it has changed the way you measure a good day. Can you tell me about that?
17:31 Speaker 01 That's true.
17:34 Speaker 01 I suppose when I was still enthralled to
17:41 Speaker 01 commodity-mediated, individualist, market-driven, human exceptionalism, we need, we need a single word for this, Ezra, if you could come up with that.
17:49 Ezra Klein? Isn't it just capitalism? Is it the word you're just looking for, capitalism?
17:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, but you know, it's so loaded. You say that word and, and all of a sudden people have, you know, all these historical associations that can get in the way of seeing what's actually there.
18:02 Ezra Klein? That word's going to come up in this conversation. They're going to have to deal with it.
18:05 Speaker 01 All right, that's fine. I'm with you. Yeah, so when I was still pretty much a card-carrying member of that culture, I had this sense that, you know, to become a better person and to get ahead and to, to, to really make more of myself, I had to be as productive as possible. And, and that meant waking up every morning and getting a thousand words that I was proud of. And it's interesting that, you know, I would even settle on a quantitative target, you know, that's, that's very typical for that kind of, you know, the kind of mindset that I'm talking about. A thousand words and then you're free and then you can do what you want with the day.
18:47 Speaker 01 And since moving to the Smokies and since publishing The Overstory, my day's been entirely inverted. You know, I wake up. I go to the window and I look outside, or I step out onto the deck. If I haven't been sleeping on the deck, which I, which I try to do as, as much as I can in the course of the year, and see what's in the air. You know, gauge the temperature and the humidity and the wind and see what season it is and ask myself, you know, what's, what's happening out there now at seventeen hundred feet or four thousand feet or five thousand feet, you know? How much has it rained? How high are the rivers going to be? What's in bloom? What's fruiting? You know, what, what animals are going to be at what elevation?
19:32 Speaker 01 And I just head out. You know, I head out based on what the day has to offer. And to have that come first has really changed not only how I write, but what I've been writing. And I think it really shows in Bewilderment. It's a, it's a totally different kind of book from my previous twelve. And happily, I think if you do, as Thoreau says, you know, breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruits, live in each season as it passes and resign yourself to the influence of the earth. If you do that, the work comes. My goodness, you know, I can't really be out for more than two or three miles before
20:13 Speaker 01 my head just fills with associations and ideas and scenes and, and character sketches. And I usually have to rush back home to, to keep it all in my head, uh, long enough to get it down on paper.
20:29 Ezra Klein? I want to ensure that I don't do you an injustice here because one way of reading this is sciency, techie fiction writer turns away from science and tech into, into nature. But that's really not been the nature of these books. It seems to me your relationship with technology and the technologies you're interested in has changed. Overstory has a central character who has a mystical experience with a redwood and then is building a virtual reality world to try to make that legible. We're going to speak about the, the neurofeedback devices of Bewildered, but a technological way of changing the way humans think and potentially bringing them into greater empathy with the natural world is central to that book.
21:12 Ezra Klein? So how has your relationship with technology changed?
21:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think you're absolutely right in what you started out with, being a little bit cautious about that thumbnail sketch of "science guy becomes nature guy." I think there is nothing more science-inflected than being out in the living world, in the more-than-human world, and trying to understand what's happening. And the sciences of dendrology and biology and ecology, you know, all of these have made startling advances in recent years, and, you know, I hope we get a little chance to come back to this, that have moved our conception of what the living world is
22:02 Speaker 01 from one that's totally dominated by evolution through competition to one that begins to acknowledge just how important cooperation and hybrids of competition and cooperation are for evolution and for ecology, how new and stunning insight into true interdependence among living things, how there is symbiosis everywhere. But I would say, from my journey, the way to characterize this transition is from being fascinated with technologies of mastery and control, and what they're doing to us as human beings, how they're changing what the capacities and affordances of humanity are
22:47 Speaker 01 and how we narrate ourselves, to being fascinated with technologies and sciences of interdependence and cooperation, of those sciences that increase our sense of kinship and being one of many, many neighbors.
23:08 Ezra Klein? I want to go into the book, but before we do, I want to make sure we're not too 30,000-foot about the conceptual revolution you just mentioned. So, do you want to describe just one study, one finding, that you feel helps represent or clarify the way we're starting to see this startling interdependence?
23:30 Speaker 01 Well, let me talk specifically about the work of a scientist who has herself just recently published a book. It's Dr. Suzanne Simard, and the book is "Finding the Mother Tree."
23:45 Speaker 01 Simard has been instrumental in a revolution in our way of thinking about what's happening underground at the root level in a forest. And if you had talked to old school foresters, or even some foresters still quite active, there would have been this sense that there's nothing particularly interesting happening underground, except for competitions for minerals among individual trees, and competition for water among individual trees. And the idea for the kinds of experiments that Simard set up would have been almost outside of the concept of these practitioners.
24:30 Speaker 01 And what Simard was seeing is if you take away one species from a plot of land, you often see degradation and failure to thrive in other species on that same plot of land. So she got to work very rigorously and empirically, looking at mycorrhizal connections between the roots of trees and fungal mycelium, the threads of fungus that just fill the soil underground in a forest. And she began to see that the forests were actually wired up in very complex and identifiable
25:06 Speaker 01 ways, and that there was an enormous system of resource sharing going on underground, that trees were sharing not only sugars and hydrocarbons necessary for survival, but also secondary metabolites. And these were being passed back and forth, both symbiotically between the trees and the fungus, fungi.
25:35 Speaker 01 But also across the network to other trees. So that there were actually trees in wired up, fungally connected forests, where large dominant, healthy trees were subsidizing, as it were, trees that were injured or not in favorable positions or damaged in some way or just failing to thrive. And the marvelous thing about the work, which continues to get more sophisticated and continues to turn up newer and newer astonishments, is that there was odd kind of reciprocal interdependence
26:15 Speaker 01 and cooperation across the species barrier, that Douglas firs and birches were actually involved in these sharing back and forth of essential nutrients. And that's a whole new way of looking at a forest.
26:58 Ezra Klein? So going back to something you talked about a few minutes ago, the unbelievable eradication of the old growth forests across North America, to some degree, to a large degree, across the entire world. A core theme of the book is the disconnect between the environmental horrors swirling around us and the way we act and live. And climate change is the one here that gets a lot of attention and for good reason. But in certain ways, I'm more optimistic about our future with climate change, or at least some of our potential futures with climate change, than I am about the mass extinction we've caused and are living through. These species will not come back.
27:43 Ezra Klein? These forests, maybe one day will grow back. But we are, I mean, humanity has created a tremendous die-off. The main character of the book, Robin, is a neurodivergent young kid, and he takes serious things seriously. And you write of him in this period of crisis he's having that, quote, "The question wasn't why Robin was sliding down again. The question is why the rest of us were staying so insanely sanguined."
28:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:08 Ezra Klein? So why are we?
28:11 Speaker 01 So Robin's a nine-year-old. And he is a special child. He's an intense boy who's capable of great emotion, great concentration, great joy, but also great anger and great rage. And the last two are triggered by his increasing understanding that his childhood animism, his childhood pantheism, is being dismantled by indifferent adulthood. And he takes it out on occasion on his father, Theo, who is an astrobiologist in his late 30s,
28:54 Speaker 01 who was widowed a couple of years before the start of the book. And Theo doesn't have good answers for Robin because Robin's basic indignation is well-founded. Why is it that we have known about the crisis of species extinction for at least half a century and longer? And I mean, the lay public, not just scientists. But why has this been general knowledge for a long time without a will demanding some kind of action or change?
29:38 Speaker 01 It's a very complicated question that depends on all kinds of cognitive foibles and emotional blindnesses that we humans share and that we're very good at cultivating. The largest single influence on any human being's mode of thought is other human beings. So if you are surrounded by lots of...
30:07 Speaker 01 Terrified but wishful thinking people who want to believe that somehow the cavalry is going to come at the last minute and that we don't really have to look inwards and change our belief in where meaning comes from, that we will somehow be able to get over the finish line with all our stuff and that we'll avert this disaster as we have other kinds of disasters in the past. And that's an almost impossible persuasion to rouse yourself from if you don't have allies. And I think the one hopeful thing about the present
30:50 Speaker 01 is the number of people trying to challenge that consensual understanding and break away into a new way of looking at human standing is growing. And there will be a threshold, as there had been for these other great social transformations that we've witnessed in the last couple of decades, where somehow it goes from an outsider position to absolutely mainstream and common sense. But for now, why is it that we have been able to wage war against the non-human world for so long with such impunity? Because, I will call it capitalism, sees the non-human world
31:35 Speaker 01 as not really interesting, not really alive, certainly not sacred in the way that we think of human beings, and instead really just resources for the human project.
31:47 Ezra Klein? I want to put a pin in the question of whether or not we would consider other human beings sacred, because I think that's worth looking at. But let's talk about the role neurodivergence in the brain play in this book. Because I began to think of this book as in relationship to your last book, The Overstory, which was about the story and the world outside of humanity, operating on a different timescale than humanity. This book seemed to me like the inner story. This was very much a book about the way humanity perceives the world around it. And in addition to the main character being Nerdar Virgin, there is a Greta Thunberg-like character who he's inspired by and who is leading a sort of similar movement
32:31 Ezra Klein? to the one Greta Thunberg leads in this world and talks about autism as being a superpower for her. And you're making the point, in different ways throughout the book, that it is the minds we think of as unusual that we would diagnose as having some kind of problem or dysfunction that are, in some cases, responding, are the only ones responding to the moment in the most common sense way it deserves. It is almost everybody else's brain that has been broken. So can you talk a bit about how you're thinking about the mind in this and the relationship between the mind and the world?
33:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, I very beautifully articulated what you just said. This idea of the normative and this idea of medicine as a corrective of difference and the unusual. I mean, this is a plague in the West, and we've been living with it for a long time, and not just in mental health. And we are waking from that. But it isn't surprising, you know, if you think of the characteristics of this dominant culture that we've been talking about, you know, the fixation on control, the fixation on mastery, the fixation on management and accumulation and the resistance of decay.
33:56 Speaker 01 It isn't surprising that that culture is also threatened by difference and divergence. It seeks out old, stable hierarchies of clear, you know, clear hierarchies of control and anything that's not quite exploitable or leverageable in the way that the normal is, is terrifying and threatening. And to come as far from that as possible to the point, the position that you just articulated, which is if we want to stay around much longer, if we want to begin this process of rehabilitation and transformation of consciousness
34:40 Speaker 01 that we are going to need in order to become, you know, part of the living earth, it is going to be other kinds of minds. That give us that clarity and strength and diversity and alternative way of thinking that could free us from this stranglehold of thought that looks only to the maximizing return on investment in very, very leverageable ways.
35:08 Ezra Klein? There's a tremendous amount in there that I want to come at from a number of directions in our conversation. But let's start this part by talking about some of the relationships, conceptual philosophical relationships, we imagine ourselves as having with nature. Under capitalism, you mentioned there tends to be a view of nature as a resource to be extracted, something you can use to build the world you're creating. You have a quote in the book from Ali, the late wife of Theo and late mother of Robin. She says in a testimony, "The creatures of this state do not belong to us. We hold them in our trust.
35:50 Ezra Klein? The first people who lived here knew, all animals are our relatives." And what struck me about that when I read it is that it seemed to put together two different classic conceptions of humanity's relationship to nature. There's the Western Judeo-Christian idea of dominion over the natural world, holding it in trust it has been given to us to lead. And then there's also this idea you see in many indigenous cultures, which is that there's a familial relationship with nature, that it is full of our relatives. And I wanted to hear you talk a bit about the idea of putting them together, or even if you think this is a reasonable interpretation of what you're doing.
36:30 Speaker 01 Yeah. In human exceptionalism, we may be completely aware of evolutionary continuity. We may understand that we have a literal kinship with the rest of creation, that all life on earth employs the same genetic code, that there is a very small core of core genes and core proteins that is shared across all the kingdoms and phyla of life. But conceptually, we still have this demented idea that somehow consciousness...
37:11 Speaker 01 Creates a sanctity and a separation that almost nullifies the continuous elements of evolution and biology that we've come to understand. Look, you know, I'm sixty-four years old. I can remember sitting in psychology class as an undergraduate and having my professor declare that, no, of course, animals don't have emotions because they don't have an internal life. They don't have conscious awareness. And so what looks to you like your dog being extremely happy or being extremely guilty, which dogs do so beautifully,
37:55 Speaker 01 is just your projection, your anthropomorphizing of those other creatures. And this prohibition against anthropomorphism created an artificial gulf between even those animals that are ridiculously near of kin to us genetically. And of course, once we, you know, we can combine this with what we were talking about earlier with death. If we see all of evolution as somehow leading up to us, all of human cultural evolution leading up to neoliberalism, you know, and here we are, you know, just trying, busily trying to accumulate and make meaning for ourselves, death becomes the enemy.
38:37 Speaker 01 When we enter into or recover this sense of kinship that was absolutely fundamental to so many indigenous cultures everywhere around the world at many, many different points in history, that there is no radical break between us and our kin, that even consciousness is shared to some degree, to a large degree, with a lot of other creatures, then death stops seeming like the enemy and it starts seeming like one of the most ingenious kinds of design for keeping evolution circulating and keeping the experiment running and recombining.
39:16 Speaker 01 And to go from terror to interbeing and to that sense that the experiment is sacred, not this one outcome of the experiment.
39:33 Speaker 01 Is to immediately transform the way that you think even about very fundamental, social and economic and cultural things. If the experiment is sacred, how can we possibly justify our food systems? For instance, you know, it's only the belief that we share no significant kinds of mentation or emotional life with cows that allow us to run the kind of food system that we run.
40:03 Ezra Klein? I love the line there, if the experiment is sacred. I'm gonna have to spend some time thinking about that. But it's interesting to me you brought up death in that answer because the other dominant historical conception of this is the more eastern ideas, although not only, of course, of reincarnation. And I spent a lot of time reading literature on animal suffering and animal rights because I'm pretty involved in those issues. And I've seen it argued that it is the Western idea of dominion versus the Eastern idea of reincarnation that has created a lot of the modern food system, at least as it relates
40:40 Ezra Klein? to animals, because you have to have a somewhat kinder relationship to animals and even plants if you literally think you could be one, or someone you loved could be one, or you will one day be one, that that's a very, that that also creates a very different way of understanding the world. That includes death, but it but is also a little bit to the side of it. And I'm curious if you've if you've reflected on that as a model of thinking about nature.
41:09 Speaker 01 It amazed me to get to the end of the first draft of Bewilderment and to realize how much Buddhism was in the book. I mean, you know, from from the simplest things, like Theo and Robin have a nightly ritual where they say, A prayer that Alyssa, the deceased wife and mother, taught them. "May all sentient beings be free from needless suffering." That prayer itself comes from the four measurables in the Buddhist tradition. And the more I looked for it, the more it pervaded the book. And, you know, you've emphasized this notion of we need to give up domination
41:52 Speaker 01 and we need to become one of a community. But, you know, I think the shift in consciousness also has to do with giving up a kind of separatism that may be driven by an anxiety about our own animal nature. And it may be precisely that weird sense of being caught between two worlds that is so part of our profound, basic discomfort that we pass the blame outwards, as it were, and denigrate animals for being that thing that we are afraid of in our own nature. I don't know if that sounds too complicated, but the point is, it's not just giving up domination,
42:37 Speaker 01 it's giving up this sense of separateness in favor of a sense of kinship. And those people who do often wonder how they failed to see how much continuity there is in the more-than-human world with the human world. And I just, I don't know if you saw this yesterday, a study that was looking at golden squirrels and is actually among the first to make a consistent study of personality and the stability of personality among individual squirrels.
43:18 Speaker 01 And that's research that would have seemed commonsensical and obvious to an animal lover in the middle of the 19th century, but somewhere along the line, that kind of thinking that an animal could have a stable personality became anathema. And I think largely because of the over-application of the prohibition against anthropomorphizing. But, you know, I think once you do make the leap, there's more pain in coming to understand how much pain and suffering we are inflicting upon our kin.
43:54 Speaker 01 But there's also more possibility. There's less anxiety when our fate becomes tied up with the fate of other living things than this horrible depressing sense of where exactly is it that we're going. You know, this Carnegie sense of how much money is enough, just a little bit more. I think that that depressing sense of, well, let's just press this human game of accumulation just a little bit more and see if it starts to work. You know, we've been carrying around that for a long time. Once we give that up, turn outwards, it is almost like a black and white world becoming infused with deep color.
44:32 Ezra Klein? You are, to my delight, very much predicting where I'm about to go, but I'm going to go there in a darker way than than you did. Because one of my critiques, or one of the places I wonder about this conversation when we begin saying we hold ourselves too separate and what if we recognize we are part of nature, it would bring us into kinship, is I actually think that's still a way of separating us. Because another way of looking, I'm looking out my window at all these buildings right across San Francisco. And aren't we nature? Aren't human beings animals? And in a way, isn't our relentless growth and takeover and our buildings and our habitats
45:16 Ezra Klein? and our destruction, it is in its own way just more nature. I mean, it's a different way of arranging molecules in a tree or a forest, but it is part of the life force growing all the same. And I'm not saying it's good and I'm not saying it's wise, but I at least want to question the idea that it's unnatural, that if human beings spread a wild techno-society through the stars, that would on some level be an extraordinary triumph for that single-celled organism that began replicating at one point here on Earth. That nature is not just kindness and kinship. I mean, it's also consumptive and it eats itself to survive and there's pain and brutality. And just the concepts of good and bad, of kind and cruel, don't really apply to it.
46:01 Ezra Klein? And sometimes I think that we are too quick to set ourselves apart from that, to create this distinction between the natural world and our world. But we're just the natural world doing more rearranging of stuff. We can have a different relationship to that, but I think it's a I think it's a different way of seeing it.
46:18 Speaker 01 No argument here. I am persuaded by those scholars who have showed the degree to which the concept of nature is itself an artificial construction that's born of cultures of human separatism. I believe that everything that life does is part of the living enterprise, and that includes the construction of cities. And there is no question at all that the warning that you just gave about nostalgizing or creating a false binary between the built world and the true natural world is itself a form of cultural isolation.
47:03 Speaker 01 But there is, in mental constructs of people, whether they have in mind this distinction between the natural and the built and the human, or whether they simply have a less ability to see or grant kinship, less ability to locate the sacred outside of our own species. There is in the mind of those people a division between the value placed on a human life and the value placed on all other kinds of lives
47:48 Speaker 01 in connection with each other. And there is, in the culture that we've been exploring, this idea that we don't need to look at cyclical or biological regenerative processes and live within the constraints of those things, to go back to Thoreau's dictum of "live in each season as it passes." There is, in this culture of separatism, the belief that we can subdue the cycles of the biological world and turn them to our benefit without repercussion or without considering the consequences. So, you know, to go back to your sense
48:32 Speaker 01 of one kind of religion formulating...
48:37 Speaker 01 A certain sense of the human location in this grander network and neighborhood versus another kind, those religions that emphasize interbeing and seeing yourself in other people and in other creatures. What I believe is necessary for recovery, if we do intend to stick around for much longer, is that etymological sense of religion, you know, religio, to ligate back together, to tie back together, our fates. So, you know, we don't have to think about preserving nature in a sort of artificial
49:19 Speaker 01 wild way, so that we can go on and live in our built environments and continue to treat so many plants and animals as large-scale factory inputs into our built environment. What has to break down is our sense that we can deform and force the living world to conform to our sense of maximal efficiency, maximal return on investment.
49:43 Ezra Klein? What I always think is clarifying about that, and the reason I bring up this question of nature and the natural, is that I think it is important for human beings to recognize there's a lot in our natures. I'm enough of a Buddhist to believe very deeply independent arising and the basic emptiness of self. And so I think that the idea that we are as stable as we think, either individually or in any given cultural moment, is poppycock. But you made a point a minute ago about the relative value we place on life, a human life versus a non-human life.
50:22 Ezra Klein? And this is a way in which human beings can stand outside their nature. From a certain perspective, from talking about accepting nature, the natural world, a mountain lion doesn't place an equal value on the deer's life as on its own. Species, species try to-
50:42 Speaker 01 It could be complicated.
50:43 Ezra Klein? Well, I'd like to hear you complicate it, but certainly my view of it is that species expand till something stops them. And the fundamental thing is that for human beings, we've often been better at evading some of those limits for a time. But that we have to be able to, that we can stand outside and begin to reweight our understanding of the world. But you clearly disagree with me on this, so tell me, give me your complications.
51:08 Speaker 01 Not profoundly, yes, or just more semantically, I think the predator-prey relationship is an interdependent relationship. It is a symbiotic relationship of sorts. The predator population that simply expands until it's checked is gonna crash and burn. Right? And there is a kind of cultivation and reciprocal behavior between predator and prey that keeps them dependent on each other in both directions. And I don't think, you know, I don't think the models that we've constructed culturally to think about resources apply.
51:52 Speaker 01 I don't, in the absence of an empathy machine like the one in bewilderment, I will not presume to say what it feels like to be a mountain lion. So I won't necessarily say that the mountain lion holds its prey sacred or make any great analogical extrapolation of the position that I'm trying to make. But I do believe that the mountain lion has evolved with all kinds of adaptive advantages to take seriously the sense of the well-being of the animal that it preys upon and to know how that animal lives and to know when and where that relationship can be tapped.
52:36 Speaker 01 And the fate of the mountain lion depends upon the fate of the prey. And that's also built into the evolution of the mountain lion.
52:46 Ezra Klein? I think I probably agree with part of that. And the part I, the place where I'd get off, but not in, I think, a profound way is just that I don't know that that is a way an individual mouth the line can think as opposed to an ecosystem evolves into balance. And when we say bring in invasive species, you see things get very out of balance. All of this you know much better than me, but I actually am bringing it up to make a bridge to the empathy machine you just mentioned. Because one of the things I think that we have to take seriously is that we have created technologies to supercharge some parts of our natural impulse. That capitalism, I think, should be understood as a technology to supercharge the growth impulse.
53:29 Ezra Klein? And it creates some wonders out of that and some horrors out of that. But there are lots of technologies like this. Religion, which we're going to talk more about, religion is a technology to discipline, to discipline certain parts of the human impulse. A lot of the book revolves around the decoded neurofeedback machine, which is a very real literalization of a technology of changing the way we think. So can you talk a bit about that machine and the role it plays in the book?
53:57 Speaker 01 Sure. I base my machine on existing technology. Decoded neurofeedback is a kind of nascent field of exploration. You can read about it. It's been publishing results for a decade. I first came across it in 2013. It involves using FMRI to record the brain activity of a human being who is learning a process, interacting with an object, or engaged in a certain emotional state. That neural activity is recorded and stored as a data structure.
54:41 Speaker 01 A second subsequent human being is then also scanned in real time and fed kinds of feedback based on their own internal neural activity as determined by a kind of software analysis of their FMRI data structures. And they are cued little by little to approximate, to learn how to approximate the recorded states of the original subject. When I first read about this, I did get a little bit of a revelation. I did feel my skin pucker and think, you know, if pushed far enough, this would be something like a telepathy conduit.
55:25 Speaker 01 It would be a first big step in answering that age-old question of what does it feel like to be something other than we are? And in the book, I simply take that basic concept and extend it, juke it up a little bit, blur the line between, you know, what the reader might think is possible right now and what they might wonder about, and maybe even introduce possibilities for this empathetic transference that we might see in a few years down the line.
55:55 Ezra Klein? One thing I loved about the role this played in the book is that it's highlighting its inverse. So a reader might look at this and say, wow, wouldn't that be cool if we had a machine that could in real time change how we think and change our neural pathways and change our mental state in a particular direction? But of course, all of society is that machine. And there's this really wonderful scene where Robbie and Thea are in an airport. And you've got TVs everywhere playing the news, which is to say, playing a constant loop of outrage and disaster and calamity.
56:37 Ezra Klein? And Robbie, who's going through these neural feedback sessions during this period, turns to his dad and says, Dad, you know how the training's rewiring my brain? This is what is rewiring everybody else. Tell me about that idea.
56:52 Speaker 01 Yeah. Oh, glory. You know, not to keep harping on my age, but you know, when I was Robbie's age, you know, TV was in its early years and radio was maturing. And the America that was made out of kids like us was made through those technologies. The sense of...
57:21 Speaker 01 It's comical even to think of, you know, whether there might have been some science fiction writer writing in 67 or 68 or 69, getting a little glimpse of Facebook or Instagram. You know, to my knowledge, nobody even came close.
57:36 Ezra Klein? I think Marshall McLuhan knew it all. I really do. Not exactly what it would look like.
57:40 Speaker 01 Oh, no kidding.
57:41 Ezra Klein? But his view and Postman's view that we are creating a digital global nervous system is the way they put it.
57:47 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
57:47 Ezra Klein? It was exactly right. A nervous system. It was such the exact right metaphor. And he didn't.
57:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
57:52 Ezra Klein? It's not that they saw it exactly, but I really love those mid-century media critics because they saw something happening clearer than we see it now. And it is a nervous system. I'm a huge Marshall McLuhan stan.
58:04 Speaker 01 Yeah. Do you know of any fiction folks who were picking up on that and telling dramas that narrated that?
58:13 Ezra Klein? That's a good question. I don't.
58:14 Speaker 01 Yeah. I mean, if it was happening, it was happening in the incredibly fecund and prolific and inventive genre of science fiction, which was, by practitioners of literary fiction, was considered a kind of poor relation back then in my boyhood. And I think literary fiction has since been repeatedly humbled by all the things that this supposedly inferior genre was putting on the table long before literary fiction ever considered it. So I suspect there may be people out there, you know, McLuhan, his profile was just too high for the fiction writers to have totally ignored, that sense of an accretion world, nervous system.
58:56 Ezra Klein? But how do you understand the way modern technology, modern media, modern society is rewiring the human brain? So let me, I know I'm going to ramble on this for a second, but the great insight of McLuhan, to me. What now gets called the medium is a message is this idea that the way media acts upon us is not in the content it delivers. The point of Twitter is not the link that you click or even the tweet that you read. It is that the nature and structure of the Twitter system itself begins to act on your system and you become more like it. If you watch a lot of TV, you become more like TV. If you watch a lot of Twitter, you become more like Twitter.
59:41 Ezra Klein? Facebook, more like Facebook. Your identities become more important to you, that the content is distraction from the medium and the medium changes you. And what Robbie sees in that moment is that the mediums are changing us. Everybody's sitting there doom scrolling and thinking about disaster and he's being changed in this intentional way, right? A scientist taking him into a room where he does neural feedback, but it is happening to all of us in ways that at least we are not engaging in intentionally, not at that level of how do we want to be transformed? And you had a very clear view of it in the book, that we are being transformed and then you moved away from it, right? You live in the Smokies now. So I'm very curious about your sense of how technology, of how this society is transforming us, the self it is bringing out.
1:00:26 Speaker 01 I believe that the digital neural system is now so comprehensive that the idea that you could escape it somewhere, certainly not in the Smokies, even more remotely, I think, becomes more and more laughable. Yeah, and to build on this idea of the medium being the message, not, you know, the way in which we become more like the forms and affordances of the medium is that we begin to expect that those affordances, the method in which those media are used, the physiological dependencies and casts of behavior and thought that are required to operate them and interact
1:01:10 Speaker 01 with them are actual, that they're real somehow and that they're, you know, that we just take them into human nature and say, no, this is what we've always wanted and we've simply been able to become more like our true selves. Well, the warpage in our sense of time. The warpage in our sense of place are profound. You know, the ways in which digital feedback and the affordances of social media and all the rest have changed our expectations with regard to what we need to concentrate on, what we need to learn for ourselves are changing profoundly.
1:01:51 Speaker 01 Now, you know, to be devil's advocate, Ezra, in the way that you were earlier about this, you know, the vision of domination and exceptionalism and the problems that are contained in that. The visions of the alteration upon the human condition that our technologies create is not a new thing. And, you know, this quote, "We shape our buildings and ever afterward they shape us." It's an earlier version of what McLuhan was talking about. If you look far enough back, you can find Socrates expressing great anxiety and suspicion about the ways in which writing is going to transform the human brain and human expectation.
1:02:35 Speaker 01 You know, he was worried that somehow it was going to ruin our memories. Well, it did, up to a point. Nothing like the way the digital technologies have ruined our memories. But I just want, you know, I want to put this on a long continuum and, you know, as you did earlier, to open up this notion of technology so that we're not just thinking of semiconductor devices, but we're thinking of everything that we have added to the repertoire of human expertise, you know, from the beginning.
1:03:06 Ezra Klein? I think that's really important because when we talk about changing the way human beings relate to the world around them. I think that can sound impossible. And in my view, if you're talking about on the three or five year timeframe, it probably is impossible en masse without something unbelievably horrifying happening. But it is not at all impossible over time. And that's why I always make a point, and I've tried to do so in this conversation, of saying that religion is a technology. I'm not making a truth claim one way or the other about it. It just, the set of strictures around it, my tradition is Jewish. The Sabbath is a technology, right?
1:03:50 Ezra Klein? It's a technology to create a different relationship between the human being and time and growth and productive society than you would have without the Sabbath, which is framed in terms of godliness, but is also a way of creating separation from the other impulses of the week. Governments are a technology. Monogamy is a technology, a religiously driven technology, but now one that is culturally driven. And these things do good and they do bad. I'm not making an argument for any one of them in particular. But the idea that we would need to invent something wholly new to come up with a way to change the way human beings act is ridiculous.
1:04:32 Ezra Klein? In my view, we were talking earlier about capitalism and neoliberal capitalism. My view of the story of this era is that capitalism was one of many forces and it has become in many societies functionally the only one. That it was in relationship with religion. It was in relationship with more rooted communities. And in some ways because of it, in some ways just because of other changes in technology, it is much less restrained by those. And so it has become not just an economic system, but a belief system, and it's a little bit untraveled. I'm not an anti-capitalist person, but I believe it needs countervailing forces. And my basic view is that it doesn't have them anymore.
1:05:13 Speaker 01 Gosh, now there are so many beautiful paths through this forest that you've just pointed us toward, I hardly know which way to duck down. But you know, the book does introduce this kind of fable, this kind of thought experiment about the way the affordances that a new and slightly stronger technology of empathy might deflect, first of all, the story of a little boy, and then the story of his father who's scrambling to be a responsible single parent. And then beyond that, the community of people who hear about this boy and become fascinated with him as a narrative, which again ripples outward through these digital technologies
1:05:54 Speaker 01 in ways that can't be controlled or whose consequences can't be foreseen. The use of the thought experiment of introducing a slightly more powerful machine, as we've just concurred, every new machine changes who we think we are and what we think we're here to do or deserve to be able to do. The book becomes a meditation on that, but it also, I think, plays out against this background of political and social volatility and environmental catastrophe that does show the futility of trying to externalize or export the costs of this transformation in consciousness that
1:06:39 Speaker 01 I've been advocating for. I don't know if I heard you say correctly that you're not sure that revolutions in thought on that scale can happen quickly or in the absence of other kinds of proximal causes, is that?
1:06:54 Ezra Klein? Yeah, I did say that. And what I'm alluding to there is that when people say, I've been thinking in this conversation about the Degrowth Movement a little bit, which I have some points of sympathy with and then real points of divergence with. And when I've talked about it before, something I've said is that I think a push against functionally materialism and want is an important weight in our society that we need. And when people say it is the way we'll deal with climate change in the three to five year timeframe, I become much more skeptical because to the point of things like the the technology you have in the book with neural feedback, I do think one of the questions you have to ask is socially and culturally, how do you move people's
1:07:37 Ezra Klein? minds so you can then move their politics? And it's that that middle space that I think is very undefined. How do you, you know, if there was, if Greta Thunberg had started a revivalist religion that was sweeping across the world by the millions, which to some degree she is a bit, but but not, I think, in the way I am describing it, that's the kind of thing you need. You're going to need something, it seems to be outside of politics. It changes humans' sense of themselves more fundamentally. And that that takes a minute at the scale of billions.
1:08:09 Speaker 01 Well, you are correct. And I don't think it's giving away any great reveal in the book to say that a reader who gets far enough into the story probably has this moment of recursive awareness where they, he or she comes to understand that what Robin is doing in this gradual training on the the cast of mind of some other person is precisely what they're doing in the act of reading the novel Bewilderment, you know, by by living this act of active empathy for these two characters, they are undergoing their own kind of neurofeedback. And I do believe that the arts are absolutely instrumental
1:08:52 Speaker 01 in any kind of of cultural transformation unfolding on any scale. I mean, if I had asked you, you know, back when you were 20, what the prospects for same sex marriage in the United States were, what would your answer have been?
1:09:09 Ezra Klein? My answer would have been that it would have taken somewhat longer than it did, but I would have told you at 20, I thought that would happen.
1:09:15 Speaker 01 Interesting.
1:09:16 Ezra Klein? I believe. I think I would have told you that. But I was a young man at UC Santa Cruz at 20. So remember that I have my own context for these things.
1:09:24 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:09:25 Ezra Klein? When you were 20, it would have looked very different.
1:09:27 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. It was not a reachable place, nor was having a black man as president of the United States a reachable place. And those transformations did happen relatively quickly. The trigger point at which the outsider group became the consensual or commonly shared belief, I don't know at what point that happened, but I think it happens lower than people think. And I do believe that the material catastrophes that we've unleashed with regard to the derangement and the diminishment of the systems of the living planet and the climate systems of the
1:10:03 Speaker 01 planet are going to greatly accelerate this understanding that people have, that something more than a little bit of sacrifice, but otherwise business as usual, is going to be required on our part. But I think if the arts somehow takes up this story of kinship, connectivity, the relocation of meaning outward into a shared process of rehabilitation, what seems like a depressive set of sacrifices to very little end could instead begin to be represented as a kind
1:10:47 Speaker 01 of joyful assertion of purpose, a kind of leverage of diversity and difference that we've already begun to undertake in so many other cultural sides.
1:11:24 Ezra Klein? You bring up the arts, and I think people typically do. And I will say, of course, that you are a quite profound practitioner of this. I don't think anybody who reads the overstory ever looks at a forest quite the same way again. But I also want to go back to your idea of the humble sciences, or the humbling sciences. I've heard you say before that you've become something of an animist. But I don't get the sense that you mean an animist in the way you've had that in some religious traditions. You seem to me to be something of a scientific animist. And I'd like to hear you reflect on that, because there are a lot of people like me who yearn for a religion-like force, despite not themselves being personally religious.
1:12:08 Ezra Klein? You can't just will yourself to believe in things. But I've been struck that your path has been simultaneously quite spiritual and scientific. And I think people sometimes note things like scientism as a belief system. But it's not really a constructed one in an intentional way. But I've begun to see people beginning to build out of the humbling sciences, a worldview that seems quite spiritual. And as you're somebody who seems to me to have done that, and it has changed your life, would you reflect on that a bit?
1:12:41 Speaker 01 Well, sure.
1:12:43 Speaker 01 If we turn back to the new forestry again, and researchers like Suzanne Simbert, who were showing the literal interconnectivity across species boundaries and the cooperation of resource sharing between different species in a forest, that is rigorous science, rigorous, reproducible science. And it does participate in that central principle of practice or collection of practices, which always requires the renunciation of personal wish and ego and prior belief in favor of empirical reproduction.
1:13:25 Speaker 01 At the same time, the vision that results, the new understanding of what's happening in the forest floor.
1:13:35 Speaker 01 Profoundly increases my sense of that system having agency and having power and subtlety and anima in a way that seems less metaphorical than it did before. The more we understand about the complexities of living systems, of organisms, and the evolution of organisms, the more capable it is to feel a kind of spiritual awe. And that certainly makes it easier to have reverence
1:14:14 Speaker 01 for the experiment beyond me and beyond my species. I don't think those are incomprehensible or incompatible ways of knowing the world. In fact, I think, you know, to invoke one last time that Buddhist precept of interbeing, I think there is a kind of interbeing between the desire, the true selfless desire to understand the world out there through presence, care, measurement, attention, reproduction of experiment, and the desire to have a spiritual affinity
1:14:57 Speaker 01 and shared fate with the world out there. They're really the same project.
1:15:04 Ezra Klein? I want to, as we come to a close here, look way out, because one of the features of the book is that it does. It has these wonderful vignettes of other planets that might exist. It is obsessed with the Fermi paradox. So much of the book is about the possibility of life beyond Earth. Tell me a bit about the role that's playing. Why did you make the possibility of alien life and the way it might look and feel and evolve and act so central in a book about protecting and cherishing life here?
1:15:37 Speaker 01 I'm glad that we're slipping this in at the end because, yes, this framing of the book around this question of are we alone or does the universe want life is really important. You know, Theo Robbins' father is an astrobiologist. You get a little hint of the ways in which the crises and calamities and insecurities of his own childhood found their outlet, first in science fiction and then in science fact. And, you know, he very luckily comes of age when the first exoplanets are being discovered, which is a real watershed in human intellectual history.
1:16:21 Speaker 01 You know, up to this moment, there were, you know, the planets of our solar system and then a lot of guesswork and reasoning from one case, as Theo puts it in the book. The first exoplanet was discovered when I was 35. There were probably a lot of astronomers at that point who would have told you just shortly before that they would probably not see anything like that being determined in their lifetime. So it's a real transformation in human thought. And this question that gets opened up with the Great Revolution in astronomy and the creation of this nascent field astrobiology is another way of getting at this question of human meaning.
1:17:06 Speaker 01 Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? If we look outward, as we have from the very beginning, and look for evidence that we aren't alone, if we Get nothing but silence forever, even as our instruments get more and more powerful, more and more capable. That would force us increasingly into thinking very differently about this earth and our custodial relationship to it. If, however, we woke up tomorrow morning with very definitive biosignatures of living organisms, as evidenced by the atmosphere of an exoplanet,
1:17:51 Speaker 01 that would also force us to rethink who we are and where we're going. For the purposes of the book, Robin, who desperately believes in the sanctity of life beyond himself, begs his father for these nighttime bedtime stories, and Theo gives him easy travel to other planets. Father and son going to a new planet based on the kinds of planets that the science is turning up, and asking this question: "What would life look like if it was able to get started here? And what would that change in our sense of who we are
1:18:35 Speaker 01 and where we've been dropped down?" And they make this journey across the universe through all kinds of incubators, all kinds of Petri dishes for life and the possibilities of life. And rather than answer the question, "So where is everybody?", it keeps deferring the question. It keeps making that question more subtle and stranger. And, you know, I wasn't sure where I would go with this ultimately in the book. And, you know, one thing I kept thinking about that didn't make it into the final book, but exists as a kind of parallel story in my own head, is the father and son on some very distant planet, in some very distant star,
1:19:20 Speaker 01 many light-years from here, playing that same game. And the father saying, "Okay, now imagine a world..." That's just the right size. And it has plate tectonics. And it has water. And it has a nearby moon to stabilize its rotation. And it has, you know, incredible security and safety from asteroids because of other large planets in its solar system. Imagine that everything happens just right. So that every square inch of this place is colonized by new forms of experiments, new kinds of life. And, you know, the father trying to entertain his son
1:20:05 Speaker 01 with the story of this remarkable place. And the son just stopping him and saying, Dad, come on. That's asking too much. That, you know, get real. That's science fiction. You know, that's the vision that I had when I finished the book. An absolutely limitless sense of just how lucky we've had it here.
1:20:26 Ezra Klein? Sometimes, you know, as a podcast host, that even if you have more questions, you're not going to get a better ending than that one. So I'm going to end this here. We always ask as our final question for three books that if it influenced you, that you would recommend to the audience.
1:20:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, I have three new works of nonfiction for you. And each of them is in some way about the things that we discussed today, the search for kinship and connection between the human and the more than human. The first is a book that was published just this spring by the British environmental historian Melanie Challengers called How to Be Animal. And it's a remarkable combination of biology, genetics, zoology, evolutionary psychology, and philosophy. And I think it's one of the better explorations and refutations of human exceptionalism that I've read.
1:21:22 Speaker 01 Challenger actually raises this suggestion that it may be our own discomfort and denial of our own animal nature that makes it so easy to denigrate our fellow citizens. I think that her reflections on the relations between humans and non-humans belong on the shelf next to people like Peter Singer and David Abram. The second is a book that just appeared this summer, is called Rooted, and it's by Lianderlin Haupt, who's a naturalist and an eco-philosopher who has written numerous Meditations on the Living World, including Crow Planet and Mozart Starling, both of which I also enjoyed.
1:22:04 Speaker 01 Rooted is a personal series of short meditations, very intimate, but her lyricism is in the service of the kinds of science and the new sciences of interdependence, biological interdependence, that we've been talking about today. And so I put this book in the kind of tradition, or sharing the spirit of Robin Wall Kimmerer's great book, Braiding Sweetgrass. They are both, in different ways, attempts to weave together scientific and spiritual knowledge. And finally, a book that's not going to be published until next spring, I think March, but it deserves to have you keep an eye out for, is called Evergreen.
1:22:48 Speaker 01 It's by the economist John Reed and the conservation biologist Thomas Lovejoy. The subtitle of the book is Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet. And in it, Reed and Lovejoy make the case that five remaining great primary forests left on Earth, which are the Taiga, the North American boreal, the Amazon, the Congo, and New Guinea, are keys to preserving biodiversity and indigenous cultures and also a stable climate. And the authors present a very clear-eyed, practical, and persuasive plan for how to save these forests and maybe the rest of us in the process.
1:23:35 Ezra Klein? Richard Powers, your new book is Bewildered. It will stay with me for a very long time, and I've so appreciated this conversation. Thank you.
1:23:43 Speaker 01 Thank you, Ezra.
1:23:55 Ezra Klein? The Astra Clancho is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Roja Karma and Jeff Geld, fact checked by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.
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