Lessons on Living Well, From Nick Offerman

Nick Offerman is best known for his role as Ron Swanson, the mustachioed, libertarian outdoorsman who led the Pawnee, Ind., Parks and Recreation Department on the beloved show “Parks and Recreation.” But there’s more to Offerman than Swanson: His new book, “Where the Deer and the Antelope Play,” was inspired in part by his conversation with the agrarian poet-philosopher Wendell Berry, and a hiking trip he took with the writer George Saunders and the musician Jeff Tweedy (both of whom you may remember from past episodes of this show). Offerman is fascinating. He plays, inhabits and ultimately subverts a kind of camp masculinity. Some of it is real. He really does own a woodworking shop. He really did release a whiskey with Lagavulin. But some of it is a container Offerman is using to try to get people to think about different ways to live. Like his famed character, Offerman loves the outdoors and thinks we’ve lost touch with the role it should play in our lives and the role it has played in our past. That’s the subject of his book, and to some degree, of this conversation. But Offerman is also just a wonderful storyteller and possessed of a generous, earthy wisdom. So this one is a delight. Mentioned: The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry Book Recommendations: Fidelity by Wendell Berry Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit Girls and Sex by Peggy Orenstein Boys and Sex by Peggy Orenstein 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]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin. Love listening to New York Times podcasts? Help us test a new audio product in beta and give us your thoughts to shape what it becomes. Visit nytimes.com/audio to join the beta.

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.

• 0:20Ezra Klein?

  I'm a big Nick Offerman fan, in the sense that I'm a big Ron Swanson fan. And if you don't know who Ron Swanson is, he's the head of the Pawnee, Indiana Parks and Recreation Department on the show Parks and Recreation, which I have watched many times. I've watched it so many times because I am nothing if not a parody of myself, and I enjoy gentle comedies about government bureaucracies. But Swanson is a fascinating character who turned Offerman into something of a human meme. He's a libertarian naturalist who's got this almost camp masculinity, got a big mustache, and he only eats red meat, and he lives off the grid, and he's a privacy nut.

• 1:04Ezra Klein?

  But he's also ultimately sweet and vulnerable, and he sees other people really clearly. And people loved that character. And Offerman, as a human, began to play into it. Famously, he released this long video of himself just drinking whiskey next to a fire. But Offerman also has a woodworking shop. He had that before the show, to be fair. But he really does make furniture there. You can buy it online. And then in The Good Place, another show, he appeared in one of the finale episodes as a heavenly woodworker. It's really recursive in an interesting way. And there's always been something fascinating to me about the version of masculinity, a version of throwback masculinity even, that Offerman is playing, inhabiting,

• 1:48Ezra Klein?

  and then in some ways, subverting. And then I got this email that Offerman had a new book coming out called Where the Deer and the Antelope Play. And in the email, his publicist said the book was partly conceived on a hiking trip with the writer George Saunders, who I just really admire, and he's been on this show. And the musician Jeff Tweedy, the frontman of Wilco, who I also admire, and who has also been on this show. You should look up both of those episodes. They are great. Anyway, the three of them, Saunders, Tweedy, and Offerman are all close friends who go hiking together, which melted my mind a little bit. And so this book, which partially comes out of their hiking trip, is all about the American outdoors and how it's interwoven in our history, what we have done to it,

• 2:30Ezra Klein?

  the role it does and can play in our lives, how we should think about it maybe differently than we currently do. A lot of the book, to my surprise, is inspired by conversations Offerman has had with the great agrarian philosopher and poet Wendell Berry. I did not see that turn coming here, which is all to say Nick Offerman contains multitudes that I had no idea about. He's got a wonderful, earthy, self-deprecating wisdom, and this conversation was just a lot of fun. As always, my email, [email protected].

• 3:10Ezra Klein?

  Nick Offerman, welcome to the show.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Thank you very much for having me.

• 3:15Ezra Klein?

  So what was your relationship with the outdoors like as a child?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  It was pretty tempestuous. I grew up in a bit of a cultural vacuum, small-town Illinois, 70s and 80s. And so, you know, we had the three channels of television and Top 40 Radio, which didn't leave a lot to draw a young Nick Offerman in, but I did have a bicycle and siblings and cousins and friends and cornfields and the woods and a creek and a treehouse and a hammer and some nails. And so you put all those in a toolbox and I didn't have very many pairs of jeans that weren't dirty most of the time.

• 3:59Ezra Klein?

  And did that change as you got older? I mean, at some point, you developed this vibe as the outdoorsman of our generation, which is partially put on, but this is a whole book about the outdoors. It's a whole book about your relationship with it. So what changed?

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Well, I'd say all through my childhood, it never occurred to me. And it's poignantly interesting that my family, who are wonderful, gentle, good-hearted people who are farmers, by and large, even those that aren't farmers, we all sprung from farm families within like an eight-mile radius. And some go on to be schoolteachers or librarians or paramedics, but we all... Come from this sort of bucolic upbringing and even so, there's not an agrarian sensibility. There's not a particular focus on how are we treating the natural resources so much as

• 4:55Speaker 01

  how can we use the seed we're given by the corporation to create the greatest yield to earn profit for our family? And when you do that with machinery and with, you know, out in the elements and so forth, I, I do think it's incredibly charismatic and I find my family really heroic. I always saw my uncles as sort of Han Solo because like their Millennium Falcons never were brand new off the showroom floor, but they could always keep them running through the harvest season. And so, growing up, I, I had this great appreciation for being outside. We also love boats in my family.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  We love fishing and it wasn't until I was a young man that somebody gave me some Wendell Berry's stories and I mean, it was a really specific, almost violent epiphany. When I read his stories and particularly a description of a farmer and his hired hand fixing some fencing and Wendell describes it as though he's seen the most magnificent performance of Swan Lake or something where the reverence that he gave to the honest, hard work of humanity with our hands and, and what we can do with our resources to better our lives for ourselves and our children knocked me on my ass and, and brought tears

• 6:19Speaker 01

  to my eyes and said, this guy has made kings of me and my family. And that made me just pay attention to the rest of his writing and that was whatever 25 years ago and I'm just still a student of that saying, you know, how are we going wrong in our society and how can, how can we ask the right questions to try and put us back on the right track?

• 6:46Ezra Klein?

  Let's back up to who is Wendell Berry because he's a really important part of the book, going to be a big part of this conversation. Who is he?

• 6:53Speaker 01

  He is a writer by way of being a farmer in Henry County, Kentucky. His brother and his dad were both lawyers, and I forgive me, I get this mixed up. One of them was like a state representative as well, but they were these venerable agricultural, law-minded gentlemen who, his dad created a thing called the Burley Tobacco Program. There's a family story about Wendell's grandfather coming home after taking his tobacco crop to market one year, and he came home and after paying for the trip and the fees, he ended

• 7:36Speaker 01

  up breaking even. They made zero dollars and cents for the year's crop. And so the dad created this Burley Tobacco Program, which was basically a co-op by which all of the farmers were represented in a sort of union fashion, so that everybody got a parity price to prevent that from happening, to prevent people from being crushed by the market. And so Wendell grew up in this family, working on the farm, and his nature took him to study. He was a fellow of the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford. So Wendell thought he was gonna be, you know, a leading novelist of his day, but it just

• 8:18Speaker 01

  kept bugging him that he was on the wrong path, and he pretty quickly realized that he and his young wife, Tanya, should move home to the family land in Kentucky, and that's his subject matter, that's what he should write about. And he did, and he's cranked out the most prolific body of work, poetry, fiction, and essays, that have just an incredible conscience, a wonderful stewardship sensibility of a small farming operation, and how we can sustainably use nature's resources to maintain the life of a human community.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  He sort of became an agrarian rock star in about 1976 with a book of essays called The Unsettling of America. And that brought him a lot of attention, because it's a book with so much common sense that people with their heads on straight sat up and said, "Oh, hey, we should pay attention to what this guy is laying down." And he's never stopped. He's still got a new book coming out, hopefully next year, and I'm grateful for it.

• 9:28Ezra Klein?

  You used a wonderful word when you brought him up the first time, that there was a reverence in the way he wrote just about, I think it was farmers fixing a fence in that example. And I love Barry's work. Reverence, I think, is exactly the right word for it. But it's also a philosophical system. And you mentioned that, too. I think you said the agrarian sensibility. And he's often connected to agrarianism, which in your book, you define, and then you say, isn't that the most boring sentence in the world? But but give me, give me your least boring definition of agrarianism.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Well, it's using the raw ingredients that we find in nature to sustain our human species with a conscience. It's using nature's resources equitably in as fair a way as we can come up with for all the people and for Mother Nature as well.

• 10:19Ezra Klein?

  And so is that what you is that what you've learned from him? How do you? How do you go from being somebody who likes Wendell Berry's work to ending up at his dinner table with a mission from him that frames how you end up writing this whole book?

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Well, gosh, when I read in Wendell's stories, the way he lionized the commonplace, the nobility of a human work ethic with a conscience, I said, OK, if anything, I was brought up an altar boy in the Catholic Church, and I was always unmoved by the pageantry of the church itself. And among the things I read in Wendell was, he doesn't really care for churches either. He's extremely spiritual, and he loves to regurgitate lessons from the Bible and Shakespeare as well. But he doesn't really like the way people get together because things then go wrong. Once humans start using the beauty and wisdom

• 11:16Speaker 01

  and truth, somebody says, hey, we might, we might make some money doing this. And then things go south quickly. But when I read his stuff and it struck me, for me, I said, this is the closest to what I've understood a gospel to be. And so if I'm going to become a priest in anybody's teachings, it's this particular church. And I started writing him letters, saying, I'm a storyteller, I'm a performer. I would love to help spread your ideas to as many people as I can. And I don't know, I guess that it affected my decision making. As I have had the success I've had in

• 11:59Speaker 01

  the entertainment industry, it definitely affects the choices I make. It's a weird thing to try and evaluate, but I've turned down a good number of jobs, which would have probably made me more famous and more wealthy. But they didn't inspire me as evolutionary. Like, I do my best when I choose things to work on, to have a feeling that they might help us move forward. Or sometimes, it's just stupidly funny. Like, sometimes I like to just participate in the delivery of the medicine of laughter. But when I pick, you know, like a TV series,

• 12:38Speaker 01

  that's a big decision. My thought process is directly fueled, I think, by my years of reading Wendell Berry, where I think, what will this crop do, not only in the market, but what will it do in the soil, and what will it do 10 years from now, and so forth?

• 12:56Ezra Klein?

  Is there some Wendell Berry in Ron Swanson?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  I mean invariably, there must be, because there's some in me, and there's plenty of me in Ron. When I was cast as Ron, I had just a passing knowledge of libertarianism. So I did a lot of reading, and Mike Schur, who's so wonderfully smart, and such a gentle teacher as a boss. I dedicated a book to Mike and said, thank you for showing me that we can still be so funny while saying I love you. And so when Mike and I began, you know, creating Ron Swanson, there was a lot of sensibility of-

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Sort of the ideal libertarian and conservatives really want to see through their sort of solipsistic lens that he's a gun nut. They want to make him a misogynist. They want to make him a harsh conservative in a lot of ways, when in truth, he's a real libertarian, which means everybody is great in his book. Your gender, your race, your sexual situation, all of that in true libertarianism is fine. Like, that's your business and I'm not going to mess with you. And I think that the common sensibility that Ron brings to everyday problems

• 14:17Speaker 01

  comes from a sort of agrarian point of view where his systems, his sense of economy is much more invested in fishing and hunting and like, do I have enough land and/or gold to glean the protein my family needs? He may be a little confused when things get more complicated in social dealings, but when it comes to dealing with his ecosystem, I think he's on the right page.

• 14:47Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, what struck me when you said that meeting and thinking about Wendell Berry changed the course of your work, none of my questions coming to this were, was Wendell Berry responsible for Ron Swanson? But it immediately made me think that I've watched Parks and Rec more times than I should probably admit on this show. And it always seems to me that Swanson's libertarianism is played for laughs, but his reverence for the natural world isn't. The idea that it is he's a person who actually finds peace on the weekend in a hut in the woods, that's just the character. It's not a joke. And so do the idea of finding roles that root a little bit of Berry into the popular consciousness. I mean, he's somebody

• 15:29Ezra Klein?

  who lives, or at least seems to want to live, orients towards living a little bit more of an agrarian life.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Something that I was very affected by, you know, getting into the world of popular culture immediately at the University of Illinois in the theater program, I just was slapped across the face with how far behind all my peers I was culturally. I was a hayseed. I was, I was a slow talking country kid and they were all cool as hell. They were all from the suburbs. They had done Glengarry Glen Ross by the time they were 18 and I was just hearing of Mamet. And so it took me some years to begin to understand the simplicity that Wendell Berry and his ilk promote.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Just saying walking is better than driving. That sensibility really soaked in where I came to realize that my upbringing and my sense of values actually were profoundly important and that not only were they not to be shunned, they would become the foundation of my life's work.

• 16:39Ezra Klein?

  And so when you go and have dinner with Berry, he tells you to examine nature, not through the lens of John Muir, which is how everybody looks at it, but instead through the lens of Aldo Leopold. So what does that mean?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  It means that, you know, when you think of terms like nature and conservation and activism, when you sort of get into that kind of thought process that brings to mind greenpeace and the Sierra Club and tree hugging and so forth and images of Yosemite and the giant sequoias and the Everglades and, you know, the pinnacles of what we've come to know as natural beauty in our country. And then when you bring up Aldo Leopold, originally from Iowa, but is known mainly for his work in Wisconsin and specifically his understanding that it was wrong of us

• 17:35Speaker 01

  to completely eradicate the grasslands of the Midwest and replace them with monoculture crops. It's that idea of wherever you are, looking at what Mother Nature has created. And this tips into some of the great stuff I heard in your interview with Richard Powers, where he hit on these themes that I feel like a lot of the themes are similar to what's in my book, except I was like, I feel like I'm. Composing not not quite a twinkle twinkle, but maybe obla di obla da. But here I'm listening to Tchaikovsky talk about it. And it's true, we're all playing music.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  But I could absolutely identify the difference in complexity. That said, that's the the notion that um it all the simplicity that it all drives me towards is being able to recognize through the lens of Alder Leopold that we must be able to look around at whatever piece of land we're trying to live upon and say, how are we, how is our living affecting the health of this natural area? And is is it going to be sustainable? You know, will our, we want our species to survive. That's that's hardwired in us. And so part of that must be, what plants are we using?

• 19:03Speaker 01

  What animals, what what minerals, et cetera, are we using? How are we using the water? Is the way we're using it going to bring more usable water back to us, et cetera? If we can't wrap our heads around that, we can't last, you know? Uh, and so instead of looking at nature as some sort of like separate other destination, it's understanding that we're actually, you and I are are looking at each other on a Zoom thing right now. And we're part of nature at the moment, you know? This this crazy sci fi conversation is as much a part of nature as a beautiful giant redwood.

• 19:45Ezra Klein?

  I I always, I mean, this is something I brought up in in the conversation with the powers, but I actually always think that is an important thing to keep in mind. I mean, a redwood is a reorganization of the molecules here into one form, driven by life. And this laptop on which I'm looking at a pixelated version of you on Zoom. Is a reorganization of molecules in the world driven by another form of life in the laptop isn't alive. But I always think we've got it into a weird space where we've come to think of what we're doing is not nature. It's sort of like when we talk about global warming, you say, we need to save the world, save the planet. And the planet is going to be here no matter what. The question is, will we? And will a lot of other, a lot

• 20:28Ezra Klein?

  of other species were driving to extinction. But we're part of it. It doesn't, we don't actually get to hold that, hold that separation. There's no us without it. And in some ways, some of our death drives come at least from some of the natural impulse that we've managed to supercharge without any of the things to keep it in harmony.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  I couldn't agree more. And, and further, the organization of molecules that is you and I in this conversation right now, may very well become a redwood.

• 20:58Ezra Klein?

  One can only hope.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, may we please be so promoted. But both Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold say some beautiful things about this. Leopold comes to understand, there's a famous story about him where he kills a she wolf as a young United States forestry official. And by killing off the apex predators, they allow the deer population, among others, to thrive and overthrive to the point where they denude the mountain of all of its greenery. And then they starve. There's, there's too many deer, they eat all the food, they die. And so, basically, knocking Mother Nature's balance out of whack, just by one ingredient, the wolf, kills everything.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  And Aldo Leopold talks about how every bit of nature that we can see, and, and even those we can't, they're all cogs and wheels in this grand mechanism. And only an idiot would throw away the parts. He said, you know, the genius tinkerer saves every cog and wheel because we understand they're all necessary. And that's what I always come back to. That's why I always open with fallibility.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  And say, let's just remember as we get into any conversation that we will never have all the information. And this is, this is part of our ongoing project to understand and respect and treat the knowledge we do have with reverence, instead of simply greed and, you know, avarice.

• 22:34Ezra Klein?

  I want to be careful as I frame this question because I don't know John Muir's writings deeply enough to say every view he held. But at least in the ways come to stand in in the culture, I think that story you tell about Leopold, which you, you tell in the book too, strikes me as as important that I think Muir has come to stand in for, we should conserve and appreciate nature. We should treat nature like it was put here for us and it would be a waste to get rid of it before everybody's gotten to see it. And nothing wrong with that. Natural, national parks are good. We should do more set aside land. But the, the Leopold idea, at least as you frame it in, in the book, and I think the Berry idea is that there's a genius to nature that we need to recognize we don't understand, that it is smarter than we are, that it operates at a time scale we can't

• 23:19Ezra Klein?

  even fathom. And so this isn't just about preserving it, it's about recognizing and learning from it, about knowing that we can't know what we are doing. And as such, we had best be, best be careful, be alert and be open to the idea that the world was doing it better without our massive interventions. Is that how you understand them?

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, I am very aware of the flaws in myself as a human animal. And so I always approach new experiments and projects with caution. I can just talk about making a new table in my wood shop. If I'm building a new table, I order enough wood, knowing that I'm going to screw up the first three things I try. It's common practice in woodworking. If, if you're building a new design, you start with cheap scrap wood and you make your mistakes on that cheap wood before you start cutting into the, to the good oak. And in the same way, you know, that's how I think we should address our relationship

• 24:29Speaker 01

  in all of our natural transactions is to say, Rachel Carson touches on it powerfully in Silent Spring, where in Northern California, they want to wipe out a certain species of gnat on a lake. And so they come in with a version of DDT to eradicate these gnats when they hatch. Of course, the poison, you know, sinks into the water, the plankton and the the microorganisms eat the DDT, then the fish eat those microorganisms. They die, the fish die, then the birds that eat the fish, they continue to compound the poison, destroying a bunch of species. And then come the next year, the gnats are back anyway.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  And that's just such a great human lesson of our ability to blindly think, we, we would know better than what Mother Nature could do, or that we could outsmart her in any way. And so, you know, I sort of developed a refrain in the book where we continue to make these mistakes as a society because money. It's always, the end result is like, well, sure, we could wait and see how the poison works on the ecosystem, but nobody's going to make any money off that. Like, we're trying to get rich here. What's the matter with you? And it's, you know, I'm trying to add to the chorus of voices saying, there are, there are better riches than, than commerce.

• 26:15Ezra Klein?

  The first part of the book is a long hike you take with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco and George Saunders, who's an author. And they've both been on the show, and I'm a huge fan of both of them. How did you, Jeff Tweedy and George Saunders, who, I guess I could see the similarities, but in pretty different fields, how did you all become a trio?

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Total serendipity. I, you know, was such a massive fan of Jeff and Uncle Tupelo, his first band, and Wilco, his second and lifelong band.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  I mean, since the mid nineties and miraculously in a later episode of Parks and Recreation that I happen to be directing, I was able to cast Jeff as Scott Tanner, this local like washed up rock musician. And so I got to meet my hero by hiring him. And I was just absolutely terrified to meet him because people who influence you that powerfully, it's really scary, especially because of the fear that they won't be as cool as you imagine. And we were shooting at a house in the in San Fernando Valley and Jeff arrived on set and

• 27:27Speaker 01

  walked down the sidewalk and we hugged each other and I immediately knew, oh my God, we're like, we're in love. Uh, we're, we will be together forever. And we are and our wives know about it and they're cool, they're friends. But we, we did, we literally announced that we were now husbands. You know, I just, I can't say enough about him. I love him so much. He so talented and funny and a wonderfully humanistic person like he's, he's openly flawed. He's, he's very vocal about the troubles he's had in his life and the way he turns that back into his work. I just really admire. And then

• 28:12Speaker 01

  the same year, I happened to be writing my second book, which is called Gumption and it's profiles of 21 different heroes from George Washington to Conan O'Brien across history, just a collection of- The, the George Washington of our age. That's right. Washington and O'Brien, the two greats. Yes. But it's muckrakers across the ages that inspire me and two of them on the list were Jeff and George. So I sent an email to George through his editor, my editor sent it through his editor that said, you know, hey, I- I'm a huge fan of your work. I would love to lionize you in this book. That's a sort of humorous look at my heroes.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  And he agreed to it. Luckily, Parks and Recreation has been a powerful calling card. In places where with someone like George, you know, it's thrilling to hear that he was familiar with Parks and Rec because if you found out that he never owned a television like Wendell, for example, you wouldn't be surprised. So we met in New York on a cold day in the same year, which I think was 2014. And George walked up, same damn thing, gave me a big hug. And I just said, oh, okay, we're gonna be together forever. And then that same year, he and Jeff met backstage at the final taping of The Colbert Report.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Stephen Colbert's show previous to his current manifestation. And we all reported back to one another. Hey, I met George. Hey, I met Jeff. And since then, we started a three-way text thread. And it was nobody's idea. We just naturally became a three-way bromance. And as I say in the book, I'm a little younger than those two. And I really, I mean, in every way, I feel like I'm the lucky little brother riding in the backseat of their Trans Am and they're turning me on to Frank Zappa. Because there's something about their work

• 30:22Speaker 01

  that's more tangible. You can have a record, album, you can have, you know, George's books. Whereas what they appreciate in me, I would consider more ephemeral. It's, you know, it's a way that I acted, which I'm down with. I'm happy that I have that ability. But I think just through human, like natural self-efficacy, I'm like, yeah.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  There's nothing I could do that would ever equal Lincoln in the Bardo or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but I will keep trying. And thank you to my big brothers for taking me to get ice cream every time.

• 31:04Ezra Klein?

  I think it's fair to say that there's nothing any of us are going to do likely to match Lincoln in the Bardo. I always wonder about this with George Saunders, who I'm a huge fanboy of. He's been on the show. It's one of my favorite episodes. People should go back and listen to it. But I've listened to probably 10 or 12 interviews with him. I've read most of his books. He has a quality of gentle wisdom that is very distinctive. And I always wonder if he's like that in private, if this is like a public guru act and in private, he's just cursing and, you know, only wants to watch Real Housewives of New York or like, is it, does it just turn, is it on all the time?

• 31:43Speaker 01

  I mean, no, I think with, you know, naturally with all three of us, like people often ask my wife, Megan Mullally, who played Karen on Will and Grace, for those that don't know, and also Tammy too, on Parks and Rec. We often get asked, you know, are you guys just cracking each other up around the house, you know? And I say, no, we're not Ron and Karen at home. We make each other laugh quite a bit, but just like normal people do. And George, I would say the same. He's very funny, but in a dorky way. And Jeff too. All three of us, the content that we put out into the world has been generally edited and refined.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  And you're seeing the finest work. We're sending the cream to be evaluated, but there's a whole lot of milk that we're tossing at each other. That said, our hikes and our conversations in the Glacier National Park trip were full of just dorky conversation and things we like. And George has always been an aspiring musician himself. In fact, when I interviewed him for my book, Gumption, he eventually mentioned, oh, by the way, I've set a Wendell Berry poem to music. Which he then let me record for the audiobook of that book in the credits.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  There's this crazy peanut butter in the chocolate of George Saunders setting a Wendell Berry poem to music sung by me. And so, you know, there is a great humanity to all of us, meaning there's lots of misses to our hits, but we kind of are always steering our conversations toward that sensibility. And I think that's why we like to be together, because we catch each other out and say, okay, guys, here's something that happened to me in traffic today, or here's something that I'm pissed off about. And I know that's what we're trying to, you know, we're trying to find the better side of ourselves. So let's put this into

• 33:48Speaker 01

  our three man workshop. And so each one of us brings something to the table. And George specifically has his Buddhist learnings that are so gorgeous. And Jeff is just a brainiac. I mean, they both have encyclopedic minds that I've learned to nod at. And I'm like, yeah, you guys talk really great. And I'm, I'll listen, I'll carry these bags so you guys can keep talking.

• 34:16Ezra Klein?

  So what did you take from Glacier National Park?

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Gosh, I mean, the great thing was, and I think it's what Wendell was trying to do when he sort of gave me the challenge that's within the book, going there and seeing one of the rock star parks that John Muir turned Teddy Roosevelt on to the idea of preserving these public lands because of the grandeur of their beauty, seeing that in person and experiencing it and saying, okay, I get it. You're right. But let's just take a step back. It's like eating the most incredible meal of veal when veal used to be produced in a very brutal way.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Saying, "Okay, this is incredibly delicious. You made it. What now? You did what to the calves?" And seeing Glacier Park and having a well-read guide with us, who knew a lot about the history of the land, and saying, basically, you know, the simple transaction of, "Look at this pristine wilderness untouched by human hands." "Oh, wait, there were humans here? Oh, that's how we got them out of... Oh, shit." And so, basically, stepping back and doing that math of, "What is this piece of nature that we have sort of falsely set up as, as Teddy Roosevelt called them, as our crown jewels?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  We've sort of taken this acreage and put it on a shelf and said, you know, 'This is for us. This is our fancy hat. You can see it on parade, but don't ask us about the millinery. Don't ask us about the haberdashery, because there's a lot of blood involved.'" So, I mean, you know, that was a great foundation through which to talk to George and Jeff about us people, how we treat each other, and how that is inextricably linked to how, as you said, the way we treat each other. If I mistreat you, I very well could be mistreating a future Redwood, and so forth and so on.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  So, that's what I came out of Glacier with, was the beginnings, the sort of springboard of this book. And the sort of, in the way that like John Wayne is what I used to think of, of the type of manhood to which to aspire. And then, growing up and learning about misogyny and empathy, and racism and homophobia and everything else, and saying, "Oh, okay, that's not the type of manhood to which to aspire." And the national parks... I think initially are the John Wayne of perhaps Conservation Lands and saying, "Oh, no, no, no, there's, there's so much more nuance to the conversation. So let's start there and see what we can improve upon."

• 37:15Ezra Klein?

  I want to hold on the word manhood for a second here because it always seems to me that your great topic is manhood, that you have a somewhat camp masculinity that you play in public, the, you know, the long video sipping whiskey by the fire. And obviously, a lot of it's real. You really do have a woodworking shop. But how would you describe your relationship to the thing of manhood or masculinity?

• 37:38Speaker 01

  It's a great question because I never set out, um, I always said, "Don't ask the clown behind the makeup why the children are crying." I knew I loved my mustache because my Uncle Don and Uncle Dan had mustaches when I was a kid and I wanted to grow up and be like the Han Solos in my family. But I wasn't aware that I would be considered particularly manly by popular culture. And so it wasn't my idea, I guess, is where I would start. It's something that I feel was hung upon me. And I said, "Okay, I guess

• 38:18Speaker 01

  I see where that's coming from and I'll try to do my best to use that accusation of manliness to maybe try and bend the conversation and say, "Okay, yeah, I do these things that are traditionally considered manly, but I also think it's okay to kiss whoever you want to," or any other number of sort of open-minded notions that aren't associated with manhood. I developed the slogan hug before punch. You know, I don't promote the idea of violence. I promote the idea of common sense and talking to one another and, and

• 38:59Speaker 01

  listening and, and the idea of, you know, men aren't supposed to cry. Well, of course we're supposed to cry. All of those things. In fact, at my woodshop, I got into the habit of not hiring men because that's one of the places where I almost immediately, people in conversations would say, "Oh, that's for guys." Or, you know, "You really appeal to the male audience," they would say to me. And I would say, "I think that's the John Wayne thinking because..."

• 39:28Speaker 01

  There are as many women that are amazing woodworkers as men. And so I love trying to take the gender out of things as best I can. And I think it's I've been given the opportunity by being accused of being manly.

• 39:44Ezra Klein?

  One of the things that often seems to me you're doing is cleaving the aesthetics of being manly from maybe some of the more traditionally not great content. So, you know, I'm talking to you now, you're in a you're in like a plaid flannel shirt. You got your wood shop, you've just released or are releasing a new lack of woolen, which is an awesome thing to get to do. And in the book too, I mean, there's a lot of, you know, moving firewood around and rebuilding a farm and it's all there. But then the things you are saying and thinking at the center of that are more subversive. You're going through Glacier National Park and reflecting on the destruction of the indigenous cultures there.

• 40:25Ezra Klein?

  You are on the farm and thinking about what it means to eat meat the way a lot of people do, where it's factory farm and grows up in these terrible conditions. There's a lot in your book and a lot frankly, in your acting about kind of empathy and being able to listen at the end of the day. And I think that's part of the project that I'm curious about, the the maintenance of the symbols and even finding value in some of these older symbolic things, working with your hands, et cetera. But the recognition that you could still attach that to maybe new content.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Gosh, I knew that you were gonna blow me away with your thoughtful questioning. You've done it. I'm so grateful for this. So because this is something I've never thought about, but now you're making me think about it. And I think my instincts have basically taken the gifts I was given, the visibility that Parks and Recreation brought me with the conception that I'm somehow the trope of American manhood in any way. Taking that and saying, okay, guys, that's cool. I can split firewood. Check this out. But also, let's think about how we're using our natural resources while I'm a lumberjack.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  And I know you're very vocal and fascinated with veganism and with our food culture in general and things like that, you know? Often people will approach me after like a show and say,

• 41:54Speaker 01

  I'm so excited to meet you. My wife really wanted to come meet you, but she's a vegetarian. And she was scared. She was scared to meet you, as though I was going to punch her or something. And I always say, no, no, that's totally part of the comedy. Like, Ron Swanson also hated Canada and Europe. And that's all for a laugh. Like, of course, Canada and Europe and vegetarians and vegans, they all are as great as anything else, and all of those require nuance. And so, I narrated a documentary called Sacred Cow, about the problems with particularly the beef industry.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  And one of the things it dives into is how vegetarianism or veganism, none of these food systems are achievable without killing animal life. In the case of a plant-based diet, it gets down into the soil or the insects or the snails, but we have not achieved a way of creating food without killing some kind of animals somewhere. And so, it's a conversation that, all I'm saying is, so far, I seem to still love eating a steak or a cheeseburger, but I've become incredibly staunch about saying there's an incredibly right way

• 43:18Speaker 01

  to create and provide this beef, and then there's 99.9% of the rest of the beef we're creating. So I'm kind of on the side, I think, of the sensitivity of a vegan lifestyle that has the welfare of animals in mind. Even though, in my case, they're being raised to be consumed. Wendell Berry has something nice to say about it, where he's like, I want these animals to live a happy life. And that, to me, is part of the message where I could say, look, everyone, I am a red meat-eating American, but

• 43:59Speaker 01

  what we've been sold as being okay as to how this food is provided is so not okay. So let's dig deep and deeper into that.

• 44:10Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, there is no way to eat or live in this world without violence. You're crushing the field mice to make corn. There's not a, there's not an option here that does not include violence. It's funny because I read the discussion of meat eating in the book and I really liked it. Something I always tried to tell people on this is for the most part vegetarians, vegans, and people who believe animals should be raised to have good lives and only killed and eaten then, which you have a beautiful quote from Wendell Berry to that effect, are much closer in the food system they're imagining than anyone okay with the food system that we have now. The truth is, if that was the food system we have, I am not sure in any way that I'd be vegan. I loved meat.

• 44:56Ezra Klein?

  I still miss meat. I still think it's delicious. I just, at this point, it's been a long time since I ate it, so it just feels a little weird to me to eat. But one of the reasons when I was making this transition to the way I eat now that I did it, is it, it was so hard to truly know what you were being served. It was so hard to know, you actually have a quick discussion in the book, of the little labels that get put on eggs and how many of them are just straight bullshit. How many of them are just something there to make the consumer feel better? And then there would be occasionally these scandals that would come out where, you know, the fancy markets were selling commodity beef under the, you know, under the wrapping of being pasture raised. And in a world where there was the ethic of care, you wouldn't have to worry about this.

• 45:40Ezra Klein?

  It's a world where the ethic of care is operating on the margin, then it becomes very hard to know what's actually in front of you. And in certain ways, if you don't want to participate in it, safer to abstain altogether.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  It's absolutely true. I mean, the eggs are a great example, you know? It's legal in our food system. Among the myriad things you can put on your egg labels includes the options of organic or 100% organic.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Which, you know, if you go to the Rebank's Family Farm in England, they just call them eggs. They raise their own eggs, but their neighbors also get their eggs from each other. And many people in town get their eggs. So we've globalized our food system so profoundly that through Michael Pollan's research, we've learned that someone with as great of a superficial reputation as Whole Foods is flying in your blueberries. You know, the carbon footprint wasn't taken into consideration when they created their their business model. And so reining in our food system from the global back to the extremely

• 46:53Speaker 01

  local is one of the most important things we can do for national security. I mean, when it comes down to it, like when the pandemic hit, there was such a run on on so many grocery items because we live in fear because we don't know where these things come from. If you know who's providing even just your eggs and dairy and meat and produce, that just creates such a more profound sense of security and health for you and your family.

• 47:24Ezra Klein?

  Are you a local eater?

• 47:26Speaker 01

  As much as I can. I mean, I live in Los Angeles, which is not near much good agriculture, so to speak, but we have great farmers markets that we utilize. And one thing between that's similar with me and Ron is a great love of eggs. And so I'm always fascinated to find out where my eggs come from and how they're raised. But it's it's an ongoing thing, you know, farmers come and go from the farmer's market during the pandemic, it got really strange with markets being on and off. So it's it's a constant thing and it always will be. That's, you know, something I just always try to remember. My sensei, which

• 48:11Speaker 01

  is a whole other story. From book one, who taught me Kabuki theater in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. This Zen master told me, always maintain the attitude of a student. He told me that when I was nineteen and I was a college student and I was like, uh, okay. That's doesn't seem that that wise, but pretty quickly it sank in where part of what it means is our lives are a subject of study that should never be considered finished because the circumstances will always be evolving. Just like a relationship, you have to maintain it and be vigilant for changes and and health and and supply of resources and so forth.

• 48:56Ezra Klein?

  Let me turn this question around because one way of hearing this conversation is Nick Offerman, rich famous actor and Ezra Klein, you know, rich famous journalist are sitting around talking about how everybody should eat expensive food. And there is something to that. If you never want to get your blueberries flown in, like the farmer's market can be pretty expensive. The good meat, it is pricey. It is pricey to have meat done through regenerative agriculture. It just is. It breaks my heart a little bit, but but it is. And I always think the hardest part of of this whole conversation is recognizing that, you know, part of the pressure here is people are strapped and they want to spend less on their food and they also want the the full range of choices.

• 49:40Ezra Klein?

  And so you end up in a system that optimizes for the lowest possible price at the grocery store, even if there are incredible costs that are imposed elsewhere. And so how do you think about that? Because you spend a lot of time on this farm. It's a working farm with people who are doing the daily work. You talked a bit about scale as being the difficulty in our food system, but a lot of that is in order to feed a lot of people, at least what looks like cheaply. And there can be a sense of this whole conversation being a luxury good for people who can afford the goods it is serving up.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Two things come to mind. One is I just try to continue to engender the conversation.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  By pointing people to things like the Wendell Berry Farming Program and they have a beef program called Our Home Place Meat. There are operations that I admire that are making a living at sustainably farming with rotational grazing, doing it right. So there's that idea, just encouraging people to go to the farmer's market, just saying to them, do you know who's making your food and what is in it and for the health of you and your kids, et cetera. So that's the sort of local point of view. You know, it's also incredibly satisfying, if you're not growing any food, start with a basil plant on a windowsill, start with some herbs, grow some tomatoes, it'll blow your mind.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  It's, it feels like a superpower if you aren't into it. Once you make a meal where you're like, uh, know where this garlic came from, and if the answer is you grew it, that garlic is the most delicious thing you'll ever eat. The macro sensibility gets into politics and I have a hard time wrapping my head around it, which is why I'm glad to be a foot soldier in this conversation. But what I focus on is how early on in our government, we were admonished by people like Theodore Roosevelt, who said, you know, if you ever let the corporate money into politics, we're screwed.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Well, cut to our lifetimes and our parents' lifetimes where by now, our government seems to be largely shaped and steered by corporate interests. And I use as my example, the sensibilities of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who among other things, are very vocal about saying, all of these politicians, Republican and Democrat and in between. Are all taking corporate money. If those two politicians, Elizabeth and Bernie, are anomalous in being vocal about that subject, that's terrifying.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  If they're the only ones standing up and saying, "We're never going to get anywhere as long as the government is scratching the backs of the corporate interests that are paying the government to scratch the backs of corporate interests." And so with regard to this conversation, it's the food corporations who are being serviced. It's the people not doing the right thing food-wise that are receiving government subsidies. And so by continuing to shine a light on this conversation, the only answer I can wrap my head around is bringing our voting power to reflect upon medium and small-sized farming.

• 53:14Ezra Klein?

  But see, I think it's also very deeply a cultural challenge. And this is one of the reasons I'm interested in your kind of public aesthetic of reverent masculinity, maybe we'll call it, which is the corporations are responsible for all kinds of ills in our life, and goods do, but they're not the only reason people want things to be cheap at the grocery store. And one of the hardest conversations to have, I think, is the conversation, I see this in politics, where you say, "There are certain things in life that should be more expensive than they are because how cheap they are right now is an illusion." Fossil fuels are like that, but so is meat. Meat should be more expensive.

• 53:58Ezra Klein?

  Through most of our history as a species, it costs a lot to get an animal. It costs a lot of calories for a long time, or then later it costs a lot in terms of how long it took you to raise the animal. I mean, and so there was a reverence that came in through that. It was expensive, and so you treated it as expensive. You treated it with respect. This is, I think, a theme of some of your book. You have a very lovely chapter on, or section on work. And how the work that goes into something is often the point and becoming detached from that, becoming detached from that linkage can undermine what the thing is in your relationship. You give this with a story from your wood shop where your business agent comes and says,

• 54:39Ezra Klein?

  can we just pick one thing you make and put it into mass production and put it in SkyMall? And you say that, no, that the labor involved in the crafting of a table or chair or canoe was the whole point. So can you tell me a bit about that and the relationship between the labor that goes into an object and its value?

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's a lot of the answer to where we as a species have gotten off on the wrong fork lies in that. The consumerist powers that be have learned that they can sell us human nature. And again, this initially comes from a couple of different pieces of Wendell Berry writing, that we've been sold a bill of goods, that work is dirty or beneath us. And that if we can, the good life or making it big or when our ship comes in, then we'll no longer have to work, that that's something to aspire to. And I had a seminal moment early on in my, my relationship with Meghan, when she

• 55:41Speaker 01

  was on Will and Grace, we lived in a beautiful little house in the hills with a little swimming pool. And one day I thought, I think I was about 30, 31, and I thought, oh, I've made it. I'm now living the life of Riley. I'm going to smoke a joint, put on some Neil Young on my outdoor speakers because I've made it. And I'm going to float in the pool. And I did that for about a song and a half. And then I thought, well, what are you going to do? Just lay here all day? Like, and I was like, oh, yeah, like, how is this good? I'm not going to get anything done. That sounds like a recipe for depression and addiction. Whereas if I take the tools I've been given and apply them. So that's when it really hit

• 56:24Speaker 01

  home for me that it's another version of it's the journey, not the destination. By making things at my woodshop, or by writing a book, or by writing funny songs and touring the country and singing them to audiences, those are all ways in which I'm not drinking too much beer, or powering a massive yacht to the Virgin Islands, or so forth and so on. Jeff Tweedy has always said, he just tries to live in a way where he creates more things than he destroys. And it's that sensibility of, in the same way, the simple act of walking is such a profound

• 57:09Speaker 01

  practice, a profound discipline, that, A, it foments so much creativity in me, like, and so many of the people I admire, the writers and creative heads, they go for a walk. That's how George thinks about the bananas, exquisite ideas that he comes up with. Jeff goes for a walk. Wendell Berry goes for a walk. And he says this great thing about the pace and setting limits for yourself. Once we got two vehicles, we no longer see the countryside around us. And if my book is about paying attention to the nature, precisely where we exist,

• 57:54Speaker 01

  like, the actual watershed that we are taking part in, the faster your car goes, the less you see of it. And he says, back when you had to walk, or at least go at the pace of a horse, not only then did you notice the leaves on the trees, the health of the stream, the health of your neighbor's house, oh, that needs a paint job, oh, they've done a nice job, oh, they, look, they've built a milk house, they're doing well, et cetera. That sensibility, at my woodshop, I don't know, it just really hit home, where, first I became a woodworker by myself, because I was obsessed with it, and then it became a little business, and I hired employees. And I said, you know, we're not here to make as much money as we can.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Like, we might as well go work at a factory, or pour concrete, neither of which are super fun. Like, I want you guys to have a good life. I want your input in what we make and how we make it, so that...

• 58:55Speaker 01

  We make enough money to, you know, stay out of the red, but also have a happy life together. And so that's my third book, which is my woodworking book. But it also is full of like recipes for our cookouts. And I had everybody in the shop write a chapter of the book because it's about how a community of inputs creates a much better recompense in life, whether it's a family or a theater company or a wood shop. I had a line that I loved that was like, eight people with one beer each is so much better than one guy with eight beers. And, and so it's all about that.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  It's, I, I had the gift of growing up with the eight people with one beer and understanding that if we could all work together to make something, it's the together and the work that is even more important than the pay you receive at the end of it. And if you turn that into a lifetime, I think cumulatively, we end up, you know, with a much better grasp on a lot of these problems of scale that we're talking about. And I just, you know, I'm so grateful as the person that I grew up as, that somehow my parents and my family and community gave me the tools to have the ears and eyes to cotton to

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  what people like Wendell and Richard Powers and George and Jeff and James Rebanks and so forth are laying down because I'm 51, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to work and like try to make a living and keep those around me happy and behave like a human being. And I'm so grateful that I've been shown by the, the wisdom of calmer heads than mine, that one can do that while trying to say, I love you.

• 1:00:50Ezra Klein?

  I'm not 100% sure if this is a related or unrelated thought, but something I was thinking about while you said that was as I've gotten a little older, one of the unexpected ambitions of my life has been to become a great appreciator. Now you have, I mean, I was a good consumer when I was young. I wanted stuff and to some degree I got some of it and I collected certain things and but it was about the acquisition and then you'd be on to the next. And something I've come to respect more in other people when I see it now and tried to cultivate more in myself is it really is the case. You can listen to any music functionally in the world now. You can read every book to a first approximation published

• 1:01:30Ezra Klein?

  in the last couple hundred years and cultivating in yourself an ability to actually go out there and appreciate, including things that are not naturally the things you already know. The people can do that, who have the ears to do that, the attention to do that, are the ones who seem to me to end up becoming wise and fulfilled. And the people who can't have a lot more trouble walking that path.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I hope to be on that path myself. And I think that you hit an important point, which is given the incredible amount of content available, basically all content. I mean, it's fallen to us now to become curators of our life experience. Limits are no longer placed on us by locality or corporate broadcast abilities. We can now generally consume any content whenever we want. And so the curation of that has made it all to me profoundly more important, you know? I feel like 20, 30 years ago, I may have just ended up being

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  a pretty happy guy with a furniture shop. But because I somehow so far have been able to successfully navigate listening to these fonts of empathy and of conscience, it allows me to then recognize

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  The chasms in my own abilities as a human being and say, okay, great. If I can keep my head on my shoulders, if I, if I can continue to find my ass with both hands, then I might end up making more than I destroy as well, just like the people I aspire to.

• 1:03:16Ezra Klein?

  But maybe there's a place where you are just a, a happy guy with a furniture shop. And I, I bring that up to ask, what is literally my favorite question, ask anybody, but because you did the show Devs, I can practically ask it of you, which is, do you believe in the many universes interpretation of quantum mechanics? Do you believe we're constantly splitting off into parallel worlds?

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Well, I love science fiction and I love fiction and I love that notion. I love all those things. I love the human imagination and that someone like Alex Garland can successfully explain that to me and I can grasp it. I love all of that and I relish thinking about it. I was asked questions like this a lot when we were promoting that show and I can't begin to really grasp it because if we are in a simulation right now, which if you talk to, to these, these quantum physicists, they can pretty quickly convince you that it's disprovable if we are or not.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  If this is just reality or if we're simulation number 1,027, there's no discernible way for us to ever know. And I was like, okay, you, you got me. Uh, so I mean, I'm open to the possibility of things that I can't prove. That makes a lot more sense to me than manmade religious texts that involve any sort of magic realism where I'm like, nah. I mean, I get, I get that your heart's in the right place and I, I understand the values in your allegory, but this was written by some dudes, you know? That is the difference between the many worlds theories where I'm like, okay, there's

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  no way we can prove that this is or isn't the case. So great. I mean, I'll happily accept the idea that there are an infinite number of, of me's and you's and outcomes.

• 1:05:16Ezra Klein?

  I think that is a good place to, to come to a close here. So always our final question, what are three books you would recommend in this universe or any other?

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Well, I'm always amazed when I say to people, "Do you know Wendell Berry?" And they say, "No." And I'm like, "Son of a bitch." All right, so I've already mentioned, uh, the unsettling of America. And I think a great place to hook people is how I was hooked, which is through his prolific body of fiction. And so the book, the book I started with is called Fidelity. It's a collection of short stories. And I'm telling you, it's a farmer's common sense. The, the women and men, his fictional community have taught me so much about love and forgiveness and values.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  So that's a great deal of, of what fuels my writing and thinking. My second book would be Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit. Because it's a book, it's on point. It's all about walking. It's how walking is so intrinsic to the good work of human beings in so many ways. In particular, maintaining an awareness of what's going on with nature. The absolute delight that one can experience just by being in weather. I have never seen a movie in a theater, and I love to see movies in theaters,

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  that remotely approaches the feel of being out in a storm with the proper gear. That feels like an incredible human triumph. But beyond that, it's the, it's the history of walking. It's all of the great thinkers and their, uh, the effect of, of walking upon them. She's a wonderful brain that I greatly admire. And then finally, I'm gonna take a hard left to, uh, Peggy Orenstein.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  And it's a two for one because it's a book called Girls and Sex, but there's a twin called Boys and Sex. And they're they're just these unvarnished looks at our young people and the the sort of calcified cultural ruts concerning our sexual behavior toward one another that I wish I had been handed as a manual to puberty. And I recommend it to everyone I know with or without kids. Like, if you would like to get kissed, you should read these books. And if you would like to equitably and favorably kiss people, you should read these books. They're so wonderful. They would have saved me a great deal of of clumsy fumbling.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  So please give that opportunity to your young people.

• 1:08:09Ezra Klein?

  Nick Offerman, thank you very much.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Ezra.

• 1:08:26Ezra Klein?

  The Israel Clown Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Roji Karma, and Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.