Continue reading the main storyBack to The Ezra Klein ShowtranscriptWhat It Means to Be Kind in a Cruel WorldOne of America’s greatest living writers explores what it means to be kind in a cruel world.Friday, February 19th, 2021[MUSIC PLAYING]ezra kleinHello, I’m Ezra Klein. Welcome to “The Ezra Klein Show.”[MUSIC PLAYING]So before we get to the conversation today and God, what a pleasure today’s conversation is, a very quick announcement. We are hiring for an associate producer for the show. And I always like to announce this on the podcast itself because I always hope we’ll get somebody from inside the show’s universe, somebody who knows what we’re about and loves the show and wants to be part of it.But this is a position that’s going to be involved in cutting tape on these episodes. It’s going to be a position involved in researching, and booking guests, and putting up transcripts. It’s a little bit jack of all trades.You can find the listing and description for this episode, the show notes. You can also find it if you go to nytco.com, and go to their careers page. But check it out. You do need two years of audio experience to apply. Don’t apply if you don’t have that because your application won’t be looked at. But if you do have it, go take a look if this is a job of interest to you.So this conversation with George Saunders is long in the making. I saw George Saunders speak when I was in college. And it never left me. There was such brilliance and such a deep humanity and kindness in just everything he said. It’s just infused with the way he thought extemporaneously on his feet. It made this very long-standing impression on me. And I’ve wanted to talk to him ever since.He’s obviously written a slew of amazing books since then. “The Braindead Megaphone” is a book of his nonfiction essays, came out long ago. But it has changed how I think about media to this very day. He’s obviously written so many super powerful and influential short stories. “Lincoln in the Bardo,” his novel, is just a remarkable piece of work.One of the things I always say about Saunders is this old Abraham Joshua Heschel quote, which is, “When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I’m old, I admire kind people.” And for a long time, I had this quote wrong in my head. I thought it was, when I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I’m old, I admire wise people. And I always thought about it with people in DC, which is full of clever people. and wise people, I think, are in shorter supply.But the thing about Saunders’ work to me is always that there is a kindness and a wisdom to it. It is very centrally concerned with this question of how are we kind to each other in a world that does not always create space for that? How do we take each other’s perspective when that is often the hardest possible thing to do? How do we approach things with the qualities, and the intentions, and the processes, and the mental states that will produce some level of wisdom?His new book, “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain,” is about seven short stories by Russian masters and about what he took from them and how the stories work on a basic level, but then also, what kinds of habits of mind they reflect, and through that, what kinds of habits of mind fiction broadly, literature broadly reflects and cultivates. So it’s very much centrally concerned with what I understand to be the main preoccupation of his work, which is how to live well and decently among each other in fellowship.And that’s what this conversation is about too. And it was a total pleasure to get to have it with him. As always, my email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can email me your guest suggestions, your feedback, whatever. Here’s George Saunders.Let me just begin with a basic human question. How are you?george saundersI’m OK. We’re up in Oneonta, New York, super isolated. So I’m just using it as an excuse to do what I like to do, which is just work all day. And so yeah, it’s a crazy sad time. But I guess I just feel like part of the job is to try to keep yourself as mentally healthy and happy as you can and then hopefully come out on the other end. How are you doing?ezra kleinDay by day.george saundersYeah.ezra kleinI remember asking somebody on the show — actually, Jenny Odell, who’s a great artist. I remember asking her. And she told me, day by day. And then I said, well, how’s today? And she said, it’s too early to tell. And I’m always like, that’s the way of thinking about this era.george saundersYeah, I keep thinking that maybe part of the job is to not be any more miserable than you actually are. So if you wake up and you’re feeling pretty good, just go with it.ezra kleinI think that’s actually an important and difficult point right now. On the days that I feel bad, I feel bad for feeling bad because my situation is objectively fine. I’m healthy and have not lost my job. And the same is true for my family at this point. And then on the days I feel good, I feel bad for feeling good.There’s a great piece by a former colleague of mine at Vox about the second arrow of suffering, which I guess is a Buddhist idea that it’s important to be present in other people’s suffering. But if you just add more suffering in yourself, you’re just adding to the total amount of suffering, and it doesn’t help anybody, which I’ve tried to hold to. But the meta judgment of how you’re feeling day in and day out can be a little tough.george saundersYeah, which is something you wouldn’t normally feel in a normal day. You’d just be kind of going along. But I was reading Nadezhda Mandelstam, “Hope Against Hope.” It’s this beautiful memoir about the Stalinist time. And that’s a pretty good thing to do, because yeah, shit sometimes goes crazy. And we’re in a version of that now. But it also makes you think, wow, it could definitely be worse. It’s a good little proportion re-establisher.ezra kleinYeah, I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that. So I want to begin here with a quote of yours that I love. “Kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition.” Tell me why.george saundersWell, I think basically, if we look at ourselves, we’re kind of set up to be these little Darwinian survivors. So we’re given this really cool sensory apparatus, and a brain, and everything. And you know, that stuff is there to help us propagate the species. And the intersection between our perceptions, and understanding, and what’s actually true are pretty small and pretty occasional. There’s a whole bunch of stuff out there that is beyond our grasp.So if you have any sense of that, then a kind of ritual humility would be the right stance. I mean, imagine if somebody saw in all the wrong colors and all the shapes that he saw were incorrect. And all of his understandings were messed up. That person would be wise to be a little humble, because the data’s coming in, and he’s messing it up. And essentially, I think that’s what human beings are doing in our little, sweet, pathetic way.So then, if you are in that kind of flawed thinking machine, and you see another flawed thinking machine, it would seem almost crazy and irrational to start judging and fighting that person. You might more reasonably say, oh, wow, you too.So I think in a lot of these Eastern systems, the delusion is that we’re trapped inside this little machine that thinks it’s central, and permanent, and all-important and is always thinking it’s about its little victory narrative. But when you step out of it for a second, you see that it’s just a temporary construction of neurology, or karma, or whatever. And so it’s almost like, if you’re driving a really crappy car, you would want to keep that in mind in traffic, something like that.ezra kleinKindness is such an important word in your work. I’ve come across it so much in the prep for this conversation. Just, how do you define it? What is kindness to you?george saundersI think ultimately it would be, are you benefiting the people in proximity to you? And truly benefiting them. And that in itself is, how would you know?ezra kleinYeah, how would you know is, I think, often a harder problem that we give it credit for. Why in proximity?george saundersWell, I think that’s the place to start. And since I’ve never been able to even do that, I’m going to continue to work on that one. But certainly, yeah, I mean to be beneficial in the larger sense. But my pay grade, that’s an occupational hazard.Because as a quasi-public person, or if a writer can be considered that, there are bouts of grandiosity where you do a reading, and you talk to people. And then you think, oh yes, I’m benefiting the world. And I think that’s kind of a dangerous thing if you’re somebody like me, somebody with my level of understanding and capability.So yeah, I think literally, if there’s one person near you, are you doing no harm? Are you in the mental state where any interaction with that person would be neutral or beneficial? That sounds so incredibly modest. But that’s basically my deal, and I’m failing at it all the time.ezra kleinI think that focus on the mental state, which we’re going to get to also in the way you approach fiction, is really important. I think it’s something that I’ve come to understand better myself as I’ve gotten a little bit older, and particularly as I’ve become a parent.If I am in a good mental state when I’m parenting, if I walk into it with energy, if I walk into it having gotten enough sleep, I can be so much more present and so much more kind than if not. And I’ve come to think a lot more of life is managing the mental state you have before an event, an interaction, a challenge than it is on simply having knowledge of how you want to respond to such things rattling around in your head.george saunders100 percent, I agree with that so much. It’s like if someone said, I aspire to be a marathon runner, so I will go out and run 24 miles. That’s not going to work so well. And what you’re saying to me is really the essence of what I would consider a spiritual life, which is to say, there have been so many states of mind that I’ve occupied that I have at that time mistaken for George.If I step back at this age of 62 and look at all those states, first of all, none of them abided for very long. Second of all, I could say that I really prefer mindstate 6D to this other one. There were some that were more centered. They were more loving, they were more capacious, whatever you want to say.So to my way of thinking, once you say, oh yeah, I’ve been in at least two different mindstates, and they weren’t identical, that’s kind of the whole thing. Because really, that’s all that we have is the possible control over the mindstate that we find ourselves in. Which is both terrifying and exciting.But I first got interested in meditation through my wife. And she’s a brilliant person and writer. And she went into it first. And I noticed suddenly how, in a marriage, you have certain fights all the time or tussles or whatever. Suddenly, she was just beautifully, skillfully guiding us around them, after only a couple of weeks of meditation.And when I first started, I had maybe an experience like you did. Our kids were little. And there was just a split second of delay between a thought and word, which was really helpful. You could just in a split second say, do I really want to say that? Or am I just saying this out of some kind of anxiety? And it’s kind of mind-blowing that that’s actually the whole game in life, I think.ezra kleinYou said that for you there’s a very deep, you called it a beautiful conversation, between fiction and meditation. They work on the same level. I’ve meditated, but I’ve never really written fiction. So tell me about that.george saundersI guess to me the common thing, and again, this is all from my beginner perspective. But there’s something about the falling away of rumination in both those states. So my usual state is running around the house with my little monkey mind talking about my latest experience, or aspiring to some victory, or defending myself.When I sit down to write fiction, because my attention is focused on an object, which is a paragraph or something. And it’s done in what I would call almost an athletic stance, where I’m not theorizing or conceptualizing. I’m just in it. Like, I’m hearing it a little bit my head. And I’m messing around with it a little bit. But the monkey mind goes quiet because I think the neural energy is being all channelled to that the concentration on the prose, about which I have very strong opinions.So in that experience, the ruminating mind goes somewhat more quiet. And that’s great. Now, in meditation, I think something similar happens. And I’m not experienced enough exactly to say what that is. But the common thing would be a concentration on a task, and then a related reduction in rumination.The mind is so busy all the time. And what it’s really doing is it’s basically creating yourself, it’s creating you, this illusory thing called you. And when the thoughts die down, then that self creation gets a little less energetic. And in my experience, something else happens or something else rises up in that space that you’ve created. And that’s true, I think, in meditation and in writing.ezra kleinI always thought, or I came to meditation with the idea that it would quiet rumination for me. Certainly, it can do that. But more often, it forces me to confront how much rumination is actually happening, which can be a bit of a intimidating thing. I’ll often have this moment where I will ask myself, this is what is happening all the time? Like, this is how loud it is in there?And I’m just constantly trying to distract myself from that noise with Twitter, and with, as you put it, thoughts of my of my victories, and having a whiskey, and whatever it might be. So that’s partially why there are periods I find meditation hard. If my mind is unsettled, it can sometimes be hard for me to just simply see, on the cushion, just how loud it is.george saundersYeah, but I think, I mean, from my point of view, that’s a huge thing. Because it’s sort of meditation as cracking open the owner’s manual. For all my life, for much of my life, I had a mental fog going on, a monkey mind, that for me was just an identity with me.That was not anything created, or external, or weird. It was just me. And I think that anything that can make you realize that that thing is just a sort of a freak of your birth, it’s a series of brain farts essentially.Now they’re systematic, they’re similar to the brain farts you were having when you were 10. But they’re not you. So when I was first starting to meditate I noticed, almost exactly like what you’re saying, I noticed a certain pessimistic or snarky cast to my default mind. I walk into a party, and I was just looking for things to kind of lightly make fun of. Probably a defense mechanism, but also it was fun. So what was really useful about that was to say, oh, wait a minute, that’s not me. And it’s certainly not true of the party. It’s just a feature of this particular mind. And writing does the same thing for me. If I put out a first draft and there’s a certain writer represented therein, and then you start rewriting it. And for me, it’s a really long process. But by the end, there’s a different person represented. And it’s a person that I like it better.So in other words, the mind that appeared in the first draft was just some mind. It doesn’t have to be identified with me. The process of working through it, suddenly you see, oh, there’s a lot of minds along the way. And that to me is a really beautiful and kind of addicting experience. I don’t ever want to be the person who speaks or thinks in first-draft mind.ezra kleinSomething that I want to key in on there that you’ve talked about elsewhere is this idea of intuition as being an important part of writing. It is a very strange experience, at least for me, to have a thought emerge seemingly out of nowhere that is more insightful and deeper than I tend to think I am. And then it’s similarly a little bit strange to have thoughts emerging constantly that are about things I don’t want to be thinking about.And I do think about meditation, but also about the fiction writing process as you’ve described it, as about trying to hear quieter voices in your own mind and make more space for them. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the role of intuition, what you understand intuition to be, and how you open yourself up to it.george saundersSure, for me intuition is kind of like, let’s say you’re at the park. And some people nearby are playing Frisbee. And they misthrow, and it’s coming right at you, and you could catch it, and you do. There’s no thought in that. It’s just kind of a, oh, that’ll be interesting. In writing what it means to me is that, so if you’re a language person, you have a bunch of micro-opinions about prose that are available to you all the time. You’ve been using them all your life since you were a little kid.So for me, part of the sort of trajectory of becoming a better writer is to just start listening to those little opinions, believing in their existence, getting better at discerning them, and then getting better at instantaneously acting on them. And none of that really involves a lot of thinking, or a lot of deciding, or thematic conceptualization. It’s literally just like catching that Frisbee or like going to the optometrist. Do I like this choice better or that choice better?So the kind of amazing truth, in my experience, is that that’s the whole game for a writer is you have a lot of opinions that most of the time you override or miss. Can you slow down a little bit in your revision process and find out what those are?And then radically honor them. That’s what makes a writer distinctive, I would say. So there’s not much to that really, except cultivating that state of mind.ezra kleinYeah, I want to push on that a little bit. Because the Frisbee analogy strikes me is interestingly different. The thing about catching the Frisbee, I would think of that is as a reflex, because I don’t need to think about it. It’ll happen almost whether I wanted to or not.Whereas it strikes me, or I think that what you’re talking about requires some real energy and space to hear that. It’d be very easy to miss that voice. You have a line in the new book, there you say, “that’s what craft is. A way to open ourselves up to the super personal wisdom within us.” And I want to see if you could talk a bit about that. How does craft, or how do other practices create the space to notice those intuitions? To notice those new thoughts? To notice the things that are happening on that more micro level?george saundersSure, the analogy would be, you’re reading a phrase of yours, and something hits you as being a happier phrasing. In other words, the impulse to catch a Frisbee was present and you honored it. And when you’re hitting a phrase that you don’t like of yours, it’s the same feeling.I’ll just say for me, I have cultivated a revision practice that is 100 percent dependent on this kind of moment we’re talking about, the state of mind we’re talking about. If I do that over time, I think that’s the conduit for what Kundera called the super personal wisdom to come in. And it’s kind of a fancy way of saying that your stories start making more sense.With revision, over the course of a document, thousands of times you’re deciding what is truer, what’s more vivid, what has less deception in it. And over the course of revising it, the whole story comes up and it starts to become a more intense, honest investigation or whatever you’re looking at. That’s kind of what I think happens.And again, I’m really kind of slippery on this subject, because I don’t really understand why it should be that way. But I just have the experience that an early story of mine will be kind of facile, and probably politically charged with a lot of obvious liberal conceits. And the basic mechanism is me and the reader are mocking somebody down below us. And then over the many, many drafts, the thing actually changes and becomes fairer, and funnier, and smarter, and so on.ezra kleinTell me about that revision process. So you begin with that draft, you have that draft which has its obvious opinions, and it’s punching down. And then what happens, both just literally — like, there are eight drafts and you work on them all in the mornings before 10:00 AM — and then it feels to you internally between there and the product I end up reading.george saundersYeah, I mean, it’s different every time. But mostly it’s I’ll print out a nice clean copy the day before. And then just by hook or crook, sit down in front of it. And start reading it with a pen in hand, a pencil in hand.And then in the book I describe this kind of metaphor, which isn’t of course, literally true but it’s pretty close. There’s a meter in my head with P on one side for positive and N for negative. My idea is that the meter responds when I read prose. Just like when you’re in a bookstore and you pick up a book, you’re either still reading an hour later or you toss it aside.So the whole thing for me is to be reading my work as if I didn’t write it. As if I just found it on a bus seat or something. And then all the time, another part of the mind is watching that meter, basically saying, what would a first time reader be feeling right now? In or out, in or out? And it’s all happening in a split second. None of that, the meter is not there. But in a split second I’m going, ah. So there’s a certain feeling I’m hoping for, which is a kind of amused engagement like, yeah, yeah, OK, sure, sure.Then you hit a bit of ice. It’s something that’s suddenly like, ugh, the needle goes into the negative. Or something about this sentence just feels like it isn’t right. Sometimes it’s a feeling that it’s too banal. It’s a sentence anybody else could have written. Or sometimes the logic goes off. You’re saying something that is forced or isn’t true.And then part of this process that might relate back to meditation is that at that point, you’ve got some choices. One is to say to your internal needle, bullshit, you’re wrong. It was perfect yesterday. That’s not the best response.The other thing is to sort of say gently, OK, all right, duly noted. How about if I just go past you, and I’ll read it again in an hour or so and see if I still agree with you. If so, I’ll make a change.Or the best thing is when you just, in an instant like that Frisbee, you go oh, I could just cut this phrase. And if I cut that phrase, that moment of resistance would be less. So it’s that.And then practically speaking in a good writing day, I might get through a seven page story two or three times in that spirit. And I’ll make the changes, put them in, print it out, read it again. And then at that time, I can feel something start to go a little bit loose in my head where I’m not really as discerning as I should be. And I’m starting to make changes just for the sake of it. And then I’ll quit.So the act of faith is that if I do that thing that I just described for many, many days, and weeks, and months, at some point I can get through the whole thing with the needle up in the positive area. Another way of saying it is you basically brought many different yous to the table. You brought the anal retentive you, and the self-celebrating you, and the grouchy you.And the funny thing is over time, it does kind of stabilize into something that you can read over and over with mostly positive feelings. And that, weirdly, and I can’t explain it, is related to this thing we talked about earlier. That the person who’s present in that 900th draft is somewhat above me on the intelligence scale, and on the compassion scale, and on the wit scale.ezra kleinSo I think that’s actually a good bridge to the new book. And so people for people who haven’t read it yet, and people should it, it is built around seven Russian short stories that you teach. And you’re working through the logic and I would also say, in different ways, the message of them. And so I wanted to look at a couple of them more closely.So let’s begin with the “Master and the Man,” which I have to say, I never read. It’s by Tolstoy. It just rocked me. It is such an incredible story. Can you summarize it, or do you think that that’s too much violence to it to do?george saundersNo, no, I think it’s basically, like a lot of these stories, it’s really kind of almost like a joke. The thing is a rich man and his servant go out to close a business deal at the rich man’s probably unreasonable insistence. And they drive right into a snowstorm.And then, I guess without giving it away, I would say this story quickly tells us that what it’s about is, can that rich guy who’s an arrogant, oppressive, mansplaining, imperialist pig, can he change? And then Tolstoy takes it up one more level and says, OK, if he can change, how exactly? What’s the mechanism?And then the feeling for the reader is that it’s a reflection on, can anybody change? Can any of us change? And if so, how might that happen?ezra kleinSomething you write in your commentary on that story is that Tolstoy is proposing something radical. Moral transformation, when it happens, happens not through the total remaking of the sinner or the replacement of his habitual energy with some pure new energy, but by a redirection of his same old energy. And I love that idea, that we are as we are on some level. And the question isn’t, I think, the one we often ask, which is how can we fundamentally change.But it’s, how do we redirect that nature constructively, or that energy constructively? Or how do we put ourselves in a context where the things that make us up are adaptive, as opposed to maladaptive?george saundersRight, I mean, so it’s like earlier when we were talking about our respective energetic monkey minds. I don’t think that’s going to stop. I’ve had it my whole life. So the question is, what do you do with that feature?One thing that I kind of associate with maybe traditional religions is, cut it out. Just stop it, disavow it, eradicate it. That seems to me not right. So then the alternative is, well, you’ve got this rushing river. If you route it through a kindergarten, that’s not so good. If you route it through a dam with a generator, that’s good.So to me, that’s sort of a hopeful thing is to say, we aren’t going to change our fundamental energies. Everybody’s born with hunger. And you could disavow it, which seems kind of babyish to me. Or you could say, OK, given that I’m hungry, there are lots of possibilities. I could become a complete overeater to the detriment of my health. I could eat nails. I could whatever. Or I could become an incredible chef who uses that propensity for good. Or I could just moderate it and try —So in that story, he’s got some really nice qualities the he’s always channeled to egotism, basically. And in the final moments of his life, something very magical happens. And he just slightly makes his gait a little wider and includes this one other person in that.And so he goes sort of immediately from a bad person to somebody who’s actually almost saintly. But he doesn’t really change, actually. His fundamental nature doesn’t change.ezra kleinYou wrote about that. You gave this example that stuck with me for a reason that would become obvious in a second. Where you wrote, look, say you’re a world class worrier. If that worry energy gets directed at extreme personal hygiene, you’re neurotic. If it gets directed at climate change, you’re an intense visionary activist.And it reminded me of something that my wife once said to me, that actually, there are very few moments like this. But it completely changed my view of my own nature, and my own history, and the story I told about it. I was a pretty bad hypochondriac when I was younger. And I told her that I was glad she didn’t meet me then, because I was just always worrying. And who’d like that guy? And she said to me, oh, you haven’t changed at all. You just hadn’t found work yet. And now you just put all that worry and energy there.george saundersThat’s beautiful. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m —ezra kleinAnd I was totally floored by that. Because it made total sense. It’s the same energy, but now it makes me, by society standards, successful rather than neurotic.george saundersYeah.ezra kleinBut it is a lot of neurotic energy.george saundersYeah.ezra kleinIt’s just being channeled differently.george saundersWhat a lovely way for her to see you too. That’s really a gift. Because when you talk about acceptance, that’s really what we’re talking about, is you’re born a certain way. And nobody chooses the packaging with which they’re born. And then the question is, OK, given this, you do have some choice in how you disperse it, I guess.[MUSIC PLAYING]ezra kleinSo I read an old interview with you where you said that the best thing that happened to you is you worked for engineering companies. And that’s where you found your material, and I’m quoting you here, “in the everyday struggle between capitalism and grace.” I’d like to hear more about that.But particularly from this perspective that capitalism is a system, that it directs the energies we already have in some directions and not others. It pulls out parts of our psyche, desire for status, desire for positional status, desire to achieve. And it’s able to do some productive things with them.And then maybe also some more dangerous things with them. And so I’d like to hear a little bit about how you see capitalism as channeling this sort of natural human nature. How does it change us? How does it affect us?george saundersWhat it makes me think is that we always have to be asking, which capitalism are we subscribing to? So you could imagine one model that’s quite generous. And that sort of builds into itself some humanistic values. And just by a slight turn of the dial, which by the way I think has happened during my lifetime, that capitalism becomes more rapacious and more neglectful of the individual.So I think for me, the interesting thing is how do we set that dial? How does the discourse that we engage in as a country cause that adjustment of the dial to go in the direction of actual goodness? I don’t think there’s anything implicitly wrong with capitalism. But it’s where you set the dial.In my experience what happened was we had our daughters, and Paula and I got married pretty quickly and had children right away. And we had no money.So in a very babyish, bourgeois way, I could just see or I could feel the way that the society was pressuring me. And was kind of causing a lot of my qualities like anxiety and perfectionism to torment me a little bit. And was undercutting my grace, my ability to be joyful and rise to the occasion.So really it was just an extrapolation that if me, a guy with a relatively OK job, and a relatively OK mind, and good health, and so on was feeling that pressure. Suddenly I looked up and like, oh my god, this is what cultural discontent is about. Is that the capitalist dragon has its claw on everybody’s throat and is pressing down at different levels to everybody.So that became very important to me. I should have had that realization immediately in my life. But it took a bit of difficulty to bring it out.ezra kleinThis is such a rich subject right here that I’ve been thinking about it bit myself, which is capitalism and kids, and having kids in this context. So I have a two-year-old, so it doesn’t feel so new anymore, but a newish parent. And I guess I’ll approach it this way.I read something, it’s actually the same interview that you said, that “the big turning point in my artistic life was when my wife and I had our kids. The world got infused with morality again. Every person in the world should theoretically be loved as much as I love my daughters.”And on the one hand, I really feel that. I found becoming a parent to be a really startling window into how I treat other people, and to how other people deserve to be treated. And at the same time, I notice how easily it can tip the other way, that the particularistic love we feel or maybe I should just say that I feel for my children, or those close to me, it can close you off to the world. And make you more intent on protecting them, and getting what they need in ways that hurt others.You have a super haunting story, “The Semplica-Girl Diaries,” that to me reads as all about this. Where this father, he’s so concerned about his daughter’s status concerns, and paying at school, that he doesn’t notice in many ways this whole society can’t see what they’re doing to others.But I’d be interested to hear you talk a bit about that. Because it does seem to me that positional capitalism, and the way it interacts with, it allows us to justify a lot on the basis of what we need to protect our children when you might think that the feelings we have towards our children would actually open us up more to other people’s children.george saundersYeah, that’s a brilliant point, Ezra. And I think, yeah, OK, I’m going to cornily invoke a Buddhist fable here. The Buddha had a wonderful student who was a musician. And the student was trying to figure out if when meditating, a person should be really, like, taught with attention and really almost militantly attentive. Or he’d also heard that it was relaxing.So which one was it? And the Buddha said something like, well, when you’re tuning up your guitar or your stringed instrument, do you want it to be too tight or too loose? And of course, he said, well, you want it to be just right. And like, yeah.So in so many things in life and in our culture, it would be nice if we could just settle on one extreme or the other. And have one autopilot setting, put your kids above everything else. That would be nice.But the experience tells us that the pisser is we have to always be setting the dial. And not just, like, once every three years. Like, every moment, you have to be resetting the dial.And this is another kind of thing I learned from fiction is, the truths that you might say that are separate from questions of to whom, under what conditions, on what day, those truths are not that interesting to me. In other words, am I for assisted suicide, say.I really feel there’s a certain wisdom in saying, by whom, on what day, under what conditions. And almost, like, reflexively asking that. It keeps us out of the danger of generalization, which I think in our public discourse is so pervasive. And it results in so much agitation when we’re asking people to decide general conditions.And fiction reminds us that you can’t really write a good story without specifying who it’s happening to, under what conditions, on what day. So that would be kind of my long-winded answer to your question about child raising, which is, yeah, you’re exactly right. And that’s what we have to sort of titrate every day.ezra kleinI like that. And we are very much going to come back to that, who, under what conditions, at what times question. Because it’s something that is laced through, I think, your work but also in a very different way, mine. And I want to get it that interface.But I actually want to talk about one of the other short stories you discuss in the new book, which is “The Nose.” That one’s a more fun one to summarize. So do you mind doing it?george saundersYeah, a guy wakes up and he finds a nose in his breakfast. He doesn’t know where it came from. And we cut away to the guy whose nose it is, who goes in search of it. And then it shows up as a kind of like 6’2’’ nose that gets out of a carriage. And the guy runs around trying to get his nose back on his face, basically. When you put it that way, it sounds so crazy.ezra kleinWell, you write about it that Gogol, who’s the author is sometimes — and whose name I probably just mispronounced — is sometimes referred to as an absurdist. His work meant to communicate that we live in a world without meaning.But to me, Gogol is a supreme realist, looking past the way things seem to how they really are. So why is a story about a 6’2’’ nose running around and getting in and out of carriages a story about the way things really are?george saundersRight, I think it goes back to what we were discussing earlier. We come out of the womb with a bunch of really amazing sensory apparatuses. And with this brain at the top of it all.And instantly, we are there. George is there, and Ezra’s there. I can remember even as a three-year-old, like, oh, I’m in a movie. And I’m the star of it. And I’ll be in this movie forever.So that feeling is not right. It’s incorrect. And we can look down the line and see people that are a little older than us dying. So it should be obvious, but it isn’t.So what do we do? Well, we take that little thinking apparatus, which is so woefully inadequate to reality. And what else are we going to do? We assume that it’s giving us good data. And we think. We were thinking all the time. And the thinking makes us and it makes a world. And we blunder out into that. And then we meet somebody else who’s doing the same exact thing on the sidewalk.And hilarity ensues, because the constructed worlds that we both have made aren’t in agreement often. They might be in agreement broadly. We might both agree that that’s a duck there on the sidewalk with us.But the more nuanced parts of that construction are not in agreement. So that’s scary, but it’s also really funny. It’s what causes, basically, funny shit to happen. And it’s also what causes genocided to happen, and divorces, and beautiful weekend in the Poconos.So to me, Gogol is somebody who is able to say, when we look at two people in a room, we’re basically looking at two insane entities who both think they’re not only sane, but preeminent. It’s a totally natural result of the physicality. And both of them are trying to do this very human thing, which is to assert control over their environment.Like, I’m a husband, a father, a professor, and a writer. You’ve got your constructed view of yourself. Usually that view puts you at the top of the heap in any situation you’re in. But because all of that’s false, it leads to the drama of human life.And I think Gogol somehow, by starting with that precept, and the way he does it is even his narrator is a screw up. His narrator is really subjective, and a little bit unskilful in the way he expresses himself. So that guy’s messed up.The characters also reason badly. And they reason very selfishly. So you have, at any given time, two, or three, or four machines that aren’t reasoning very well and that are positioning themselves as little gods in the world. And it’s crazy, it’s funny. But in a certain way, it seems like the most accurate assessment of what’s actually going on here that I’ve ever read.ezra kleinThere’s another thing you draw out of that story that you gestured at there, which is the way in which everybody in that story — but then I think of this is characterizing a lot of your work. And then I think of this is characterizing all of our world. Will treat the most insane happenings as normal, so long as everybody else is treating them as normal.The human capacity to baseline whatever is going on around, no matter how extreme, no matter how grotesque, no matter how bizarre is just really, really high. And that’s one of the really profound forces, on the one hand, holding society together. But on the other hand, often protecting some of the worst elements of society from attention and maybe reform.george saundersYeah, I think it’s true. You could see — I mean, the Trump era is an obvious example where what would have been absolutely unimaginable becomes normalized really quickly. And then it takes a lot of work, I think, to stay in a state of alertness where you’re seeing a certain behavior correctly relative to the previous baseline.But as you’re saying, it’s probably necessary. I mean, look how quickly we learned to live in quarantine. And now I have a hard time imagining not being in it. So I guess like so many things, it’s kind of a double-edged sword.It’s appalling that we would have somebody we care about die. And then within a couple of months, basically be back to normal. That’s crazy, but it’s also absolutely necessary.ezra kleinYeah, that’s a really lovely example. I’m going to take us to the Trump era in a second. But in some ways I feel like the Trump era is too easy of an example, because too many people believe it. Too many people looked at it, and I want to talk to you about this, and said this is wild what is happening here.I’m a vegan. And so one of the examples I’ll give is I find this to be very true about animal suffering. In a previous podcast I called it the green pill. That once you start taking the suffering of tens of billions of animals that we raise for food seriously, the world becomes really gruesome looking.That people you love and respect are constantly partaking in a terrible system of cruelty. But you seem like the weird one if you point it out. And before anybody thinks I’m just up on a high horse about this, although obviously I am a little bit, you could make this argument about me on, say, climate change.Before the pandemic I took flights different places, right? And then I certainly don’t live a low carbon lifestyle compared to people around this world.Or there’s this very famous thought experiment by the ethical philosopher Peter Singer about, would you jump in a pond to save a drowning child? Well, what if it would make your suit messed up? And you say, of course, I’d get my suit dry cleaned. Who cares? And they says, well, why won’t you spend that dry cleaning money to save a child on another continent? What is the difference between them being in the pond and being in another country?And to just move through the world day by day, you have to abide such a high level of moral outrage. And on the one hand, if you open yourself up to it, it’s paralyzing. But if you close yourself down to it, it’s deadening.george saundersYeah, I totally agree with you. And I feel that. In Buddhism, sometimes they talk about absolute versus relative.So in a relative sense, that’s exactly right. And I think we all suffer from that, we all feel that. Whether we know we’re feeling it or not, we feel that contradiction.On the absolute sense, I don’t know. Or maybe this is more like, as an artist. I think, well, it’s a version of the poor have always been with us.Like, yeah, that’s true. It’s terrible and in a relative sense I want to work as hard as I can to not participate in any system that’s corrupt. And yet, what state of mind are you left in, since you can’t actually do that?I’m going to become tormented, neurotic, and a little bitter, constantly noticing only the most horrible things. So I guess that part of my mind that says yeah, OK, we want to notice that. We want to do everything we can in a relative frame. And then at some higher level, you want to go oh, interesting that that’s the way it looks to us.And I would say, my own judgmental, moral perfectionism, if I really look at it, it has a lot to do with illusion of control. It has to do with me somewhat overestimating my place in this world. So there’s an element of ego in it that says, I’m going to destroy my life with regret. As opposed to saying, yeah, you’re just a little speck that came here quickly and in a very big system that you don’t understand.And there’s some value in acceptance or kind of, like — I don’t know. I’m not really being very clear on this. But I hear what you’re saying. I think it’s one of the tenets of that show “The Good Place.” If a person takes it as his responsibility to right every wrong, that’s a big — I don’t know. I’m not really sure.ezra kleinI love that show. I love that show so much. But I don’t know, I always thought that last move they ran — and I’m sorry there are good place spoilers here. The point system has become totally destroyed by the world being too complex to actually correctly assess any actions.It’s a little bit of a copout, like a little bit too utilitarian where, I will say this is particularly an issue on the left in my view. There is, or certainly has become, such a dominant argument against individualizing any systemic problems. Like, if you talk at all about anybody’s individual responsibility on something like climate change, you’ll immediately be told, well no, the real question here is what do we do with the top corporate polluters. And I agree on some level. The real question, I mean, I’ve spent my life doing policy journalism. I obviously agree that systemic solutions are the ones we need. But there’s another part of me that thinks, you don’t get systemic solutions if people let themselves too off the hook for their individual responsibility and problems. Like, people don’t certainly vote to tax themselves on things that they don’t think are wrong. They can’t ask anybody to be perfect. And I had Peter Singer on the show a while back. And even he didn’t say, donate 80 percent of your income to global poverty, or even of 50 percent of your income to global poverty.But I think there is something difficult in the question of, what does it mean that we can be OK with how much of this there is? And that saying that, well, we can’t change at all can be a little bit too much letting ourselves off the hook.george saundersSo as a writer, what I’m interested in is how might I change my inner state so that I would understand the world in such a way that I would do less harm? That’s, for me, the starting place. And then to the extent that I’m not doing that, I think I’m skipping ahead a couple of steps, maybe.But I think what you’re saying really is true. And it’s one of the crazy dilemmas of this life. I used to work in a slaughterhouse. And that was amazing, amazing that I could do that and still be a sporadic meat eater.And that suffering was real, for sure. Not only the animals, but the other workers, that was real suffering. So I don’t know.I mean, maybe the question is, how are if we can’t come up with an answer? What do the days look like? Can we learn to live in a world where there is a lot of that kind of evil going around, and at the same time, not make monsters of ourselves? Honestly, there are times where I’m just sort of beyond my pay grade. And this is why I tend to think a little more in the terms of stories, I guess.ezra kleinI totally hear that. But that’s actually why I use Gogol as the direction into this. And I’ll take this in a slightly different direction now, which is that I thought your insight both about his fiction, but I also think this is true about your fiction. I would really recommend that people read that story of your “Semplica-Girl Diaries,” because I think it does this beautifully.And I think something that it makes me think about in my own work is that it’s really important not to let things become normal just because they are wrapped in normal language. So you brought up the Trump presidency here, and that was the direction I’d wanted to go, which is I’ve written — I don’t know — hundreds of thousands of words on that presidency, maybe more. But in a way, I think simply being forced into the language of political journalism, I’ve never been able to and I will never be able to convey how truly weird and disturbing it was.And somehow for everyone to talk about it all at once, it normalizes it almost by definition. Because anything that happens at that scale is normal almost by definition. And yet there’s this part of me that wants to insist that it isn’t. So I guess how does the novelist in you read this era? How would you try to convey what it felt like?george saundersWell, one of the things that I have noticed is that our leftist shock at Trump was valid, absolutely correct. And yet, it happened. And it is still happening. So the novelist in me says, OK, duly noted. A left wing person of this era would have a certain quality of shock. That could go in a book.Well, on the other side, you go over there and there are 60 million people for whom this is not shocking but lovely. It’s almost like if somebody — you see a caveman and he picks up a grenade and he thinks it’s a pineapple. And it blows up. It’s kind of on the cavemen. He misunderstood that grenade.So I think for me, just personally, I covered the Trump campaign in 2016. And I was totally shocked and didn’t have the vocabulary. And realized there was all kinds of subterranean things going on I had no clue about on the right. And now what I’ve been trying to do since then is just get over the shock. And start to try to understand the system that existed before Trump in such a way that it makes sense.Not to say that I approve of it, or that I won’t resist it. But that it makes holistic sense, because cause and effect never takes a break. So whatever happened there in 2016, and is still happening, it’s got an organic cause. And I think for me, the version of me that was hand-wringing and, I can’t believe it, that part it needs to be over.And I’m trying to be a scientist about it, and understand it in a deeper way. Which is both a way of finding a way to write about it. But also it’s actually a way to find the best way to push against it, is to diagnose it is a really important — and diagnosis from inside, with some kind of psychological insight into it, and a novelistic insight is, in my way of thinking, the best way to position oneself for resistance.ezra kleinSomeone once told me that whenever you think, huh, that doesn’t make sense, that what it means is your model of the world doesn’t make sense.george saundersExactly.ezra kleinThe world always makes sense on its own terms. It’s you who is missing something. And so that’s always a starting point for inquiry. And so I actually want to go back, because one thing I will say about your nonfiction is that there is a really powerful, predictive dimension in it, to this era.You wrote a piece many, many, many years ago now on the Minutemen, who were this militia this, sort of right wing militia but also kind of cosplay militia, that would stand in border towns with guns and hang out waiting to see immigrants crossing the border. And then try to get them picked up by the border patrol.And at the time, it all looked very weird. It was people who seemed to be pretending they were somehow soldiers in some grand war. And there’s an absurdity in the piece. But you read it now and it is so predictive of Trump. It was so predictive of what was really happening on the right, and the power of the immigration narrative. And he just comes up a couple of years later and picks that up. And I’m curious how you think back on the people you met then, on that piece, on just that whole moment.george saundersYeah, it’s what I love about writing non-fiction, is you blunder into a situation. And usually your conceptual apparatus isn’t prepared. Like, I didn’t even know what to make of those guys. So in that situation, what you have to resort to is just observing. Usually, I go into those pieces with kind of an agenda, an idea for what the piece will look like. And within the first couple of days, it gets totally destroyed by reality.So I love that feeling of, like, sitting out there with them. We staked out the border for a whole night. The six of us, or 12 of us, or whatever. And they were all heavily armed. And it was funny, it was a comical evening that could have been a tragic evening. It almost was at one point. But what I love to say, holy shit, I really don’t know what’s going on here.And in a way, that’s another example of the ruminating mind going quiet. Because since all your rumination-based concepts are totally wrong, totally at odds with what’s happening in front of you, you have to put those away. And then you’re all eyes, ears, nose, and notetaking. So that’s why I think those pieces, if they have any value, it’s that in those moments, all my circa, whatever it was, 2006 liberal ideas had to be shut down for a minute. And it was just observing what they actually said and did.Yeah, it was a very wild piece. Because they were certainly affable with me. And I think I say in the piece four or five of them is a lot of fun. But you put 400 or 500, and it’s a different ballgame. And now we see the Capitol being stormed.ezra kleinThere is this way right now in which things that seem comic very quickly tip into things that are dangerous or tragic. And people keep experiencing that as some kind of surprise, that there’s a contradiction or tension there. When, certainly, I’ve come to believe that those things are related.They’re more causal, actually. That the comic nature allows things to spread, to not be seen as dangerous. And then they become dangerous. But you see that in the capital insurrectionists, right?There’s a sort of ridiculousness to this guy in the shaman hat running in. But there’s also a bunch of people with guns. You see it in the Minutemen. You see it in the Tea Party. But of course you see it going way back, right? Fascism is a bunch of friends dressing up in similar outfits to sing songs together, but then it’s fascism.And I’m curious, to somebody who often uses comedy to try to get at what is truer and sometimes more destructive in the world, just how you read that.george saundersI always think of that movie “Fargo” as a great example of that. Those killers are so inept, and so stupid, and yet they really kill. I think of myself really in an honorable tradition of Shakespearean fools, who come into a situation. And they’re not that well-informed or that well-read, necessarily. They’re just kind of riffing.And the power of the Shakespearean fool is that he riffs really well. And he blunders into the truth in the spirit of trying to entertain, or trying to captivate. So for me the trick is, try to live my life in such a way that I’m not preshaping experiences too much.Try to go with the places that make me uncomfortable, or that I think I’m sure about. But including some really just boring old, banal places. And always keep my eyes and ears open. And then, in a certain way, to try not to build up a view of the world. Now, you do, of course you do. But try not to.And then when I get in front of a story that I’m writing, this subconscious thing we were talking about kicks in. And it produces all kinds of weird gems, and weird juxtapositions, and tonalities that I could never have thought of in advance. So again, it’s that idea that it’s intuition as this conduit that provides a level of complexity that might have a sort of super-truth in it. It’s not necessarily linear truth or everyday truth but there’s a kind of overcharged quality that allows it to sometimes be predictive.Or what I’m working on now is sort of trying to write a piece that feels like right now. And you’re sort of taking different valences that are in the culture and putting them in action. And sometimes if you do that, they will inadvertently do something that leads you to a higher understanding of things.But again, not a rational understanding, I think. There’s kind of a magic in it. And I don’t really even know what the function is. Except I think if you read something in that spirit, something that as you’re saying, combines the comic and the tragic, there’s an instantaneous coming alive of something in your consciousness that I think is what’s fun. And I suppose you could argue that it’s beneficial.[MUSIC PLAYING]ezra kleinThis gets us back to something I’d put a pin in earlier, when you talked about the key question of fiction being under what conditions, at what time, in which place, right? The conditions that bring out certain versions of us rather than others. And obviously see this in your fiction.But it is almost pathological in your nonfiction, like, the effort to inhabit other perspectives. It’s in every piece I’ve read from you. It’s in your remarkable 2016 piece in The New Yorker on Trump rallies. But I want to read some quotes here from this Minuteman piece you write that everyone’s pissed, oppositional, less empathetic, and articulate and well-mannered than they would be at any other moment in their actual lives.And then in your piece on the Trump rallies, you talk about trying to present people with the specifics of the folks they want to deport. And you say, in the face of specificity, my interviewees began trying, really trying to think of what would be fairest and most humane for this real person we had imaginatively conjured up. It wasn’t that we suddenly agreed, but the tone changed. But then of course, a couple of minutes later, you’re in a crowd of counterprotesters and the guy’s screaming, Hillary is going to be locked up. She won’t be president. This feels like a really important practice to me. And then also there sometimes feels like there’s a way of searching so determinedly for the multitudes we carry inside of ourselves. That it can almost blind us to the people we are being right now when it matters most.And it could become exculpatory when we actually need to be forced to be responsible for who we are in this moment. And I’m curious how you think about that tension.george saundersYeah, that’s a beautifully made point. First of all, we have to say that each of us has different bandwidth, or different inclinations, or super powers. So I would never advocate for a general anything. But for me, what I find is if I’m in the face of somebody with who I don’t agree, I’m pretty comfortable with the moment when I have to fight them. I don’t really have a big problem with that. I’m usually pretty clear on where my lines are and when somebody needs to be forcibly pushed back.So I think what that does is it gives me a little bit of an option to engage another interest of mine, which is to say, huh, how does the world look through that person’s eyes? He sounds insane. He sounds aggressive. He sounds irrational. He sounds racist.But to him, it feels differently. Now, usually when people advocate going into consciousness, they’re saying something like be empathetic, and be loving, and you can change the person, or whatever. There’s also a kind of a power in it to say, if I want you to stop doing something, and I’m confident that at the moment I need you, I can and will fight you, then I have a little side corridor. Which is to try to imagine what the world looks like to you.If I can do that, that gives me a range of persuasive options that are more powerful than if I didn’t think about you. Now again, for a lot of people I think that’s just weird, and they don’t want to do it. But for me, ever since I was a little kid, I’ve had that interest. And that person seems to be other than me.And yet to her, she seems like the central story. So maybe that’s why I became a fiction writer. But I like doing that. And I think it’s powerful. And I think I have maybe more bandwidth for it than a lot of people do. But you have to be very careful that it can easily morph over into enabling.If I understand why somebody does something, it doesn’t permit it. So yeah, so to me, it’s a natural thing. I enjoy it. Yeah, it’s tricky. And by the way, I’ve never persuaded anybody. That whole Trump rally I talked to everybody.I have all kinds of people in my extended social circle that are Trumpees. I’ve never budged anybody. But it makes me feel less insane if I can somehow, at least for little brief moments, see things from their point of view.ezra kleinOne reason I connect to this is it makes me feel less insane too. It’s, in many ways, my most natural mode. And then I find that there’s a part of me that wants to believe in the least insane, or to put it differently than that, the least offensive to me version of the person in front of me. And I’m a political reporter so I spend a lot of my time talking with Republican members of Congress and Republican staffers in Congress.And a constant theme for me in recent years — and there are a lot of Republicans who I don’t agree with them on things, but I respect their differences and the way they think about things, and I learn a lot from them. But they’re also straying from the party right now, just to be blunt about where I think things are, that has gone off the rails. And one of the things I would see all the time is members of Congress who would be reasoned, and cautious, and many minded in their private conversations with me.And then would turn out to vote to reject the results of the election or to rip health care away from poor people, or would lie about covering pre-existing conditions. And it just raises a very hard question for me, not of who we really are, because I don’t think that has an answer.I think that, as you put it, who we are is situational. But of which of ourselves really matters. And of what do you do sometimes with the desire to believe the best in people when they’re particularly not going to be in a system that is going to bring out their best self at the end of the day?george saundersAnd how do you explain that, having been in the position of seeing that, the reasonable person on a small level and then the unreasonable public thing. How do you explain or understand that?ezra kleinI think there are a lot of possible explanations. One is that the reasonable person is trying to convince me of their reasonableness, that it’s not even that true of a self. So that’s one version.I always notice that people who I’ll sometimes have on the show are much more reasonable or gentle than they are on Twitter. Because when they’re talking to me, they want to have like a nice social interaction, and on Twitter they want to dunk on people.So different contexts bring out different things in us. And that’s, by the way, very much true for me. Another thing is that we live in a zero-sum political system. And so I wrote this book “Why We’re Polarized,” which is very much all about this question. It’s very much about why it is, on some basic level, rational for even a Republican who didn’t like Donald Trump on a personal level to have voted for him, certainly in 2016.And even in 2020, that the choice between the two parties has become so wide for people that particularly once you then add in media ecosystems that give people a very different view of what the reality is, that the choice makes sense from their perspective. But in terms of those members of Congress, I often think that at the end of the day, everything in Congress is a binary question, a yes or no on this bill.And then behind that yes or no on this bill, a who do you want to see win the next election. And so conversations are positive-sum. There are a lot of ways to act in a conversation that make everybody better off. But when you end up in zero-sum choices, well then in some ways, you really see what people’s values are, right?And what they’re willing to risk. And which part of them was lying at bedrock. Because on the one hand, I can explain the rational reason people make these decisions. But I also don’t want to let people too much off the hook for making careerist, rational decisions.But I want people to do, particularly in positions of leadership the moral thing, even if it’s hard. And so I really struggle with this. I think there’s a kind of cognitive illusion that can emerge from trying too hard to steel man people’s positions. Then you’re surprised when they act in less reasonable ways and out side of themselves.george saundersYeah, and I agree. And I think that’s one of the values of great literature. If you read Shakespeare, or there’s a beautiful Chekhov story called “In the Ravine,” which is about one of the most unbelievably evil people, a woman who scalds a baby to death at one point because it would help her in some way.And those great writers don’t flinch about the idea that, OK, we have capabilities of empathy and understanding. And so in other words, you could, a great mind could get inside the mind of that woman and be her for a couple of seconds. But that doesn’t have anything to do with our response to her. Or you don’t want to enable her. Or you don’t want to even — understanding and forgiving our kind of two different things.So I think one of the things that literature does is it reminds us that for all of our honorable desire to empathize and soften boundaries, there are outrageous occasions where there are people who are just, from our perspective, unremittingly evil. And there they are. So in other words, you wouldn’t want empathy, or some kind of construction about empathy to start lopping off pieces of reality and making them inadmissible.ezra kleinAnd I’ll add one thing to this. Because it’s something I find really difficult about this political era, when virtue’s become vices, or virtues can become enabling. Because I will say that I feel that this political era does not bring out the best in me. Sometimes the choices I have to make or the answers I have to come to are not what I wish they were.And you have a really nice moment in the Trump rally piece of wrestling with this. You write, “a bully shows up, is hateful, says things so crude we liberals are taken aback. We respond moderately. We keep waiting for supporters helped along by how compassionately and measuredly we are responding to be persuaded. For the bully, this is perfect.”And I’ve been thinking a little bit about that with the sudden calls for unity after the election from Republicans who voted to reject the election. I don’t want to put this exactly all on them. But even that right there is that little voice inside being like, show some virtue coming out when, I mean, voting to reject the election was on them.And so this moment where it feels some of the temperamental virtues of liberal democracy are weaponized by those who don’t believe in it feels really tough. Because you want to be your best self in politics. But then there are certain kinds of people who can find the flaw in that. And bullies, put aside the unremittingly evil, I mean, that is the nature of the bully, to turn the system against the people who are operating within it.george saundersYeah, I mean, I think one of the things that the left has to do is recognize that we really are, at a very basic level, defending virtues like kindness, and decency, and equality. To me that’s the thing we have to concentrate on, that actually we’re the true defenders of the constitutional ideas that say we really are hopeful that we’ll have a beautiful country where everybody is equal. That’s actually what we’re working for. And don’t get too distracted by the small storms on the inside.To me, if we think about unity, here’s the one idea I have about this. And I’m not a very astute political thinker. But here’s a sort of a hopeful metaphor.If you take 20,000 Americans and send them down to a baseball stadium and say, look Republicans, you guys wear red. Democrats you wear blue. We file into the stadium.And on second base is a podium. And a guy starts talking in an inflammatory way about immigration. Well, there’s no doubt about what’s going to happen. There’s going to be fights.OK, so now rewind and say, first of all, dress however you want. Same people come in. And then at the critical moment, the Yankees and the Red Sox run out.So suddenly there’s a polarity shift there. You’re going to have Red Sox fans who are liberal, and conservative, and so on. The tenor of this discussion is going to change. Because we’ve been trained, we know how to amiably argue at baseball games.So my only kind of light thought is, we have to get off the preconceived axis that tells us what political discourse consists of and what it sounds like. Now, here we go back to the local. What would that look like?I think the move is to sort of somehow destabilize the idea that politics is always national and start looking locally. How does my life actually look to me as I experienced it in the next 24 hours? How much of my political agitation is around things that are basically distant, unknowable, or mostly unknowable and conceptual?So I’m feeling that a lot of the anger comes from a feeling of disconnection. And that feeling of disconnection is actually correct. We’re fighting like hell with people we care about in what’s largely a predetermined discourse. Does that make any sense at all?ezra kleinIt makes a ton of sense. In fact, one reason I’m happy to hear you say it is one of the places my book ends is in a call for relocalizing a lot of politics for almost exactly that reason. That argues that the nationalization of politics has become a huge polarization driver.But I to make this — this is about your book, not mine. But I can’t really agree with that more. And I will say on one piece of that, even as I’m at the New York Times now and I live in California. One thing I always tell people is that if you don’t consume any political media that is local, that you’re making a terrible mistake in which of your political identities you’re strengthening.That our national political identities have become way too strong. And our local political identities have weakened, have withered. And that’s often because we don’t consume media that attaches us to local fights, local questions. You read the New York Times living in San Francisco.And so, like, that’s one. Like, there’s an actionable thing you can do there. But you have to work on your own informational ecosystem to attach yourself to things that are local. But it’s a much healthier way of experiencing politics. And you can have much more effect on it.george saundersWell, and also the idea that when we start working on local issues, we can move from the conceptual to the practical. And once people get into positions of solving individual problems, a lot of the agitation goes away.So if you, and me, and two conservatives are sitting down to try to address the pothole problem, and we’re $2,000 short, there’s going to be a discussion. But it’s not and they have to do with the culture wars. It’s a very practical thing.And the more we know about it, the more it’s going to become very technical and scientific, which then takes all of the kind of bombast out of the thing. And afterwards, it makes us feel that we participated in something democratic, and communal, and positive.I mean, that’s of course obviously way too simple. But I think if I look at my life and the people I know, I think a lot of the angst and the agitation of the moment has to do with the feeling that their actions don’t actually matter all that much or that they’re spending a lot of energy, a lot of emotional energy and neurological energy in discussions that somehow should be about important things. And they kind of seem like they are, but they don’t lead to anything.When I was covering those Trump rallies, there was so much talk about immigration. And so one of the tropes I kept enacting was to talk to a Trump supporter and say, I see that this immigration is a big issue for you. Can you tell me about when it started for you? And what was the inciting incident with an undocumented person that caused you to have these strong opinions?And it was almost comical that there was never an incident. Or if there was, they misunderstood it. There was an accent, that was mistaken as proof of undocumented status. So it was really made dramatically clear to me that this agitation about immigration was largely a projection that flourished in the absence of experience.And again, this might take us back to fiction. Fiction is a great discipline of saying, if you start a story, a bunch of people were somewhere, that story is not going anywhere. But if you say, there were four Presbyterians in a bomb cellar, suddenly there’s something.And it’s all because the story has been grounded in a particular place, with particular people, under certain conditions. And the wisdom, or the knowledge, the understanding is going to come out of that situation is directly related to how specifically it’s been enumerated.ezra kleinI think that’s a wonderful bridge to the final section here where I’m going to ask you for some fiction among other book recommendations. And so let me begin with this one. What book have you reread the most times?george saundersI think it was probably “Red Cavalry” by the Russian writer Isaac Babel. It was a book of short stories that’s really insane about when the Russians invaded Poland after the revolution. And it’s just kind of even in translation, just a stylistic masterpiece.And so when I was young, it really was a touchstone for me of what an intense short story would look like. And then also I go back to Gogol’s “Dead Souls” a lot, just because I love it so much. And I have never been able to figure out why.It feels to me like a book that really gets the feeling of being alive right. But I’ve never been quite able to put my finger on why. So I just drop into that every now and then just to remind myself.ezra kleinWhat book do you give to others most often?george saundersI don’t give books that often because I always feel a little bit like it’s sort of imposing. But I did give out “Stamped from the Beginning” by Ibram X. Kendi quite a few times. For me, it was a life changer for me. And I think that book was a great book and kind of a great act of generosity and insight. So I have given that one out a few times.ezra kleinThat really is a great book. What’s your favorite work of nonfiction?george saundersI really love “Dispatches” by Michael Herr, which is the great Vietnam work. He was a friend of ours. And the book is so beautifully open to different mindstates. He’s in Vietnam. And sometimes he’s celebrating it, and sometimes he’s horrified. And he’s got this amazing prose style that just lets him get into so many really cool places.And then Michael actually, when I was writing “Lincoln in the Bardo,” he recommended this book called “Patriotic Gore” by Edmund Wilson, which is a series of sketches of the literary lights of the 19th century, most of whom we’ve never heard of. And it’s a really beautiful evocation of a world that was totally as real as ours that has vanished. We don’t know these people. It’s really, really hard to recreate their mindsets. And of course, they were very passionate about it. And people wrote 30, 40 novels. And so for me, it was kind of a great book just to say, oh yeah, this cultural moment that we’re in is sort of a beautiful illusion. It seems real to us. You and I could talk for hours about different cultural references. And in another 100 years, it’ll all seem kind of like beautiful nonsense.ezra kleinWhat’s your favorite work on Buddhism?george saundersThere’s so many. I mean, the one I read most recently that I really loved, and I loved it because it did that work of kind of jolting me to attention, was a book Mingyur Rinpoche called “In Love with the World.” And it starts out just with a narrative description of a pilgrimage he made. And he so skillfully works in all the basic ideas about Buddhism. And does it in a way that makes them seem really alive and really urgent.ezra kleinWhat’s a book you go back to for just the sheer beauty of the writing, that inspires you as a writer?george saundersWell, there’s a British writer named Henry Green that I think people don’t read quite as much anymore. But he had a series of short novels, all with one-word titles like “Loving,” “Living,” “Party Going,” “Concluding.” And I’ll just drop into him. Because I don’t know anybody who writes more beautiful sentences in English, just more sculpted, and deliberate, and purposeful.So it’s almost like just drinking a little bit of a potion to make you love language again, just because he’s taken so much care with it. And also there’s some of these big scenes in Huck Finn, like the scene where the guy talks the mob down from a lynching. And some of those big — I think of them as aerial scenes that I’ve been reading.Just because I tend to get a little bit obsessive over sentences, which I think is a good quality as with Henry Green. But also I’m a little worried as I get older that that lapidary quality can sometimes cause you to forfeit the big picture, the kind of thrilling summaries, and the bird’s eye view. So Twain is such a natural writer, it sounds just like conversation. But when you actually start looking at it or copying it out, it’s really incredibly high-level English prose.ezra kleinWhat book of poetry would you recommend to somebody who doesn’t often read poetry?george saundersWell, I think these are going to be Syracuse writers. But one of our teachers was named Hayden Carruth. And he has a beautiful book called “Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey.” Just real accessible, emotional, funny poems. And then I think I would also recommend the work of two of my colleagues. Mary Karr has a lovely book called “Tropic of Squalor,” and then Brooks Haxton has one called “They Lift Their Wings to Cry.”So what I’m always looking for is well, like with what we saw with Amanda Gorman the other day, that the quality that the poetry is talking to me directly. It’s talking to my experience. And the poetic qualities of it are not for show. They’re there to communicate higher level things more efficiently.ezra kleinAnd I’ll end on this one, which is I mentioned earlier I have a two-year-old. I know you’ve written a wonderful children’s book. Are there any children’s books you love or that you would recommend that I read to my son?george saundersHave you read “The Hundreds Dresses“?ezra kleinNo.george saundersWell, you talk about empathy. I won’t spoil it. But it’s a great story. It’s a great short story, actually, about a little girl who’s perceived one way. And then we find out that it was very different, actually, behind the scenes.I also like, I used to love this book with our kids called “Caps for Sale.” A simple little book about this guy who’s just for some reason out selling caps. He’s got a big pile of, like, 200 caps on his head. And it’s just really playful, and goofy, and kind of poetic. And anything by Seuss, I love Dr. Seuss.ezra kleinIt is really true that children’s books, they take a delight in language. And it’s often lost in adult literature. And it’s actually been one of the really fun things about parenthood is just rediscovering some of that baseline delight.george saundersYeah, or when you find a kid’s book that doesn’t take that delight, and it’s a torment.ezra kleinYeah, that is very true. Your book is “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.” George Saunders, it’s been such a pleasure to get to spend this time with you. Thank you.george saundersA total pleasure for me too, Ezra. Thank you for what you do.[MUSIC PLAYING]ezra klein“The Ezra Klein Show” is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Roge Karma and Jeff Geld, fact checked by Michelle Harris, original music by Isaac Jones. And the mixing is by Jeff Geld.[MUSIC PLAYING]The Ezra Klein ShowBack to The Ezra Klein ShowtranscriptWhat It Means to Be Kind in a Cruel WorldOne of America’s greatest living writers explores what it means to be kind in a cruel world.Friday, February 19th, 2021[MUSIC PLAYING]ezra kleinHello, I’m Ezra Klein. Welcome to “The Ezra Klein Show.”[MUSIC PLAYING]So before we get to the conversation today and God, what a pleasure today’s conversation is, a very quick announcement. We are hiring for an associate producer for the show. And I always like to announce this on the podcast itself because I always hope we’ll get somebody from inside the show’s universe, somebody who knows what we’re about and loves the show and wants to be part of it.But this is a position that’s going to be involved in cutting tape on these episodes. It’s going to be a position involved in researching, and booking guests, and putting up transcripts. It’s a little bit jack of all trades.You can find the listing and description for this episode, the show notes. You can also find it if you go to nytco.com, and go to their careers page. But check it out. You do need two years of audio experience to apply. Don’t apply if you don’t have that because your application won’t be looked at. But if you do have it, go take a look if this is a job of interest to you.So this conversation with George Saunders is long in the making. I saw George Saunders speak when I was in college. And it never left me. There was such brilliance and such a deep humanity and kindness in just everything he said. It’s just infused with the way he thought extemporaneously on his feet. It made this very long-standing impression on me. And I’ve wanted to talk to him ever since.He’s obviously written a slew of amazing books since then. “The Braindead Megaphone” is a book of his nonfiction essays, came out long ago. But it has changed how I think about media to this very day. He’s obviously written so many super powerful and influential short stories. “Lincoln in the Bardo,” his novel, is just a remarkable piece of work.One of the things I always say about Saunders is this old Abraham Joshua Heschel quote, which is, “When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I’m old, I admire kind people.” And for a long time, I had this quote wrong in my head. I thought it was, when I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I’m old, I admire wise people. And I always thought about it with people in DC, which is full of clever people. and wise people, I think, are in shorter supply.But the thing about Saunders’ work to me is always that there is a kindness and a wisdom to it. It is very centrally concerned with this question of how are we kind to each other in a world that does not always create space for that? How do we take each other’s perspective when that is often the hardest possible thing to do? How do we approach things with the qualities, and the intentions, and the processes, and the mental states that will produce some level of wisdom?His new book, “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain,” is about seven short stories by Russian masters and about what he took from them and how the stories work on a basic level, but then also, what kinds of habits of mind they reflect, and through that, what kinds of habits of mind fiction broadly, literature broadly reflects and cultivates. So it’s very much centrally concerned with what I understand to be the main preoccupation of his work, which is how to live well and decently among each other in fellowship.And that’s what this conversation is about too. And it was a total pleasure to get to have it with him. As always, my email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can email me your guest suggestions, your feedback, whatever. Here’s George Saunders.Let me just begin with a basic human question. How are you?george saundersI’m OK. We’re up in Oneonta, New York, super isolated. So I’m just using it as an excuse to do what I like to do, which is just work all day. And so yeah, it’s a crazy sad time. But I guess I just feel like part of the job is to try to keep yourself as mentally healthy and happy as you can and then hopefully come out on the other end. How are you doing?ezra kleinDay by day.george saundersYeah.ezra kleinI remember asking somebody on the show — actually, Jenny Odell, who’s a great artist. I remember asking her. And she told me, day by day. And then I said, well, how’s today? And she said, it’s too early to tell. And I’m always like, that’s the way of thinking about this era.george saundersYeah, I keep thinking that maybe part of the job is to not be any more miserable than you actually are. So if you wake up and you’re feeling pretty good, just go with it.ezra kleinI think that’s actually an important and difficult point right now. On the days that I feel bad, I feel bad for feeling bad because my situation is objectively fine. I’m healthy and have not lost my job. And the same is true for my family at this point. And then on the days I feel good, I feel bad for feeling good.There’s a great piece by a former colleague of mine at Vox about the second arrow of suffering, which I guess is a Buddhist idea that it’s important to be present in other people’s suffering. But if you just add more suffering in yourself, you’re just adding to the total amount of suffering, and it doesn’t help anybody, which I’ve tried to hold to. But the meta judgment of how you’re feeling day in and day out can be a little tough.george saundersYeah, which is something you wouldn’t normally feel in a normal day. You’d just be kind of going along. But I was reading Nadezhda Mandelstam, “Hope Against Hope.” It’s this beautiful memoir about the Stalinist time. And that’s a pretty good thing to do, because yeah, shit sometimes goes crazy. And we’re in a version of that now. But it also makes you think, wow, it could definitely be worse. It’s a good little proportion re-establisher.ezra kleinYeah, I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that. So I want to begin here with a quote of yours that I love. “Kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition.” Tell me why.george saundersWell, I think basically, if we look at ourselves, we’re kind of set up to be these little Darwinian survivors. So we’re given this really cool sensory apparatus, and a brain, and everything. And you know, that stuff is there to help us propagate the species. And the intersection between our perceptions, and understanding, and what’s actually true are pretty small and pretty occasional. There’s a whole bunch of stuff out there that is beyond our grasp.So if you have any sense of that, then a kind of ritual humility would be the right stance. I mean, imagine if somebody saw in all the wrong colors and all the shapes that he saw were incorrect. And all of his understandings were messed up. That person would be wise to be a little humble, because the data’s coming in, and he’s messing it up. And essentially, I think that’s what human beings are doing in our little, sweet, pathetic way.So then, if you are in that kind of flawed thinking machine, and you see another flawed thinking machine, it would seem almost crazy and irrational to start judging and fighting that person. You might more reasonably say, oh, wow, you too.So I think in a lot of these Eastern systems, the delusion is that we’re trapped inside this little machine that thinks it’s central, and permanent, and all-important and is always thinking it’s about its little victory narrative. But when you step out of it for a second, you see that it’s just a temporary construction of neurology, or karma, or whatever. And so it’s almost like, if you’re driving a really crappy car, you would want to keep that in mind in traffic, something like that.ezra kleinKindness is such an important word in your work. I’ve come across it so much in the prep for this conversation. Just, how do you define it? What is kindness to you?george saundersI think ultimately it would be, are you benefiting the people in proximity to you? And truly benefiting them. And that in itself is, how would you know?ezra kleinYeah, how would you know is, I think, often a harder problem that we give it credit for. Why in proximity?george saundersWell, I think that’s the place to start. And since I’ve never been able to even do that, I’m going to continue to work on that one. But certainly, yeah, I mean to be beneficial in the larger sense. But my pay grade, that’s an occupational hazard.Because as a quasi-public person, or if a writer can be considered that, there are bouts of grandiosity where you do a reading, and you talk to people. And then you think, oh yes, I’m benefiting the world. And I think that’s kind of a dangerous thing if you’re somebody like me, somebody with my level of understanding and capability.So yeah, I think literally, if there’s one person near you, are you doing no harm? Are you in the mental state where any interaction with that person would be neutral or beneficial? That sounds so incredibly modest. But that’s basically my deal, and I’m failing at it all the time.ezra kleinI think that focus on the mental state, which we’re going to get to also in the way you approach fiction, is really important. I think it’s something that I’ve come to understand better myself as I’ve gotten a little bit older, and particularly as I’ve become a parent.If I am in a good mental state when I’m parenting, if I walk into it with energy, if I walk into it having gotten enough sleep, I can be so much more present and so much more kind than if not. And I’ve come to think a lot more of life is managing the mental state you have before an event, an interaction, a challenge than it is on simply having knowledge of how you want to respond to such things rattling around in your head.george saunders100 percent, I agree with that so much. It’s like if someone said, I aspire to be a marathon runner, so I will go out and run 24 miles. That’s not going to work so well. And what you’re saying to me is really the essence of what I would consider a spiritual life, which is to say, there have been so many states of mind that I’ve occupied that I have at that time mistaken for George.If I step back at this age of 62 and look at all those states, first of all, none of them abided for very long. Second of all, I could say that I really prefer mindstate 6D to this other one. There were some that were more centered. They were more loving, they were more capacious, whatever you want to say.So to my way of thinking, once you say, oh yeah, I’ve been in at least two different mindstates, and they weren’t identical, that’s kind of the whole thing. Because really, that’s all that we have is the possible control over the mindstate that we find ourselves in. Which is both terrifying and exciting.But I first got interested in meditation through my wife. And she’s a brilliant person and writer. And she went into it first. And I noticed suddenly how, in a marriage, you have certain fights all the time or tussles or whatever. Suddenly, she was just beautifully, skillfully guiding us around them, after only a couple of weeks of meditation.And when I first started, I had maybe an experience like you did. Our kids were little. And there was just a split second of delay between a thought and word, which was really helpful. You could just in a split second say, do I really want to say that? Or am I just saying this out of some kind of anxiety? And it’s kind of mind-blowing that that’s actually the whole game in life, I think.ezra kleinYou said that for you there’s a very deep, you called it a beautiful conversation, between fiction and meditation. They work on the same level. I’ve meditated, but I’ve never really written fiction. So tell me about that.george saundersI guess to me the common thing, and again, this is all from my beginner perspective. But there’s something about the falling away of rumination in both those states. So my usual state is running around the house with my little monkey mind talking about my latest experience, or aspiring to some victory, or defending myself.When I sit down to write fiction, because my attention is focused on an object, which is a paragraph or something. And it’s done in what I would call almost an athletic stance, where I’m not theorizing or conceptualizing. I’m just in it. Like, I’m hearing it a little bit my head. And I’m messing around with it a little bit. But the monkey mind goes quiet because I think the neural energy is being all channelled to that the concentration on the prose, about which I have very strong opinions.So in that experience, the ruminating mind goes somewhat more quiet. And that’s great. Now, in meditation, I think something similar happens. And I’m not experienced enough exactly to say what that is. But the common thing would be a concentration on a task, and then a related reduction in rumination.The mind is so busy all the time. And what it’s really doing is it’s basically creating yourself, it’s creating you, this illusory thing called you. And when the thoughts die down, then that self creation gets a little less energetic. And in my experience, something else happens or something else rises up in that space that you’ve created. And that’s true, I think, in meditation and in writing.ezra kleinI always thought, or I came to meditation with the idea that it would quiet rumination for me. Certainly, it can do that. But more often, it forces me to confront how much rumination is actually happening, which can be a bit of a intimidating thing. I’ll often have this moment where I will ask myself, this is what is happening all the time? Like, this is how loud it is in there?And I’m just constantly trying to distract myself from that noise with Twitter, and with, as you put it, thoughts of my of my victories, and having a whiskey, and whatever it might be. So that’s partially why there are periods I find meditation hard. If my mind is unsettled, it can sometimes be hard for me to just simply see, on the cushion, just how loud it is.george saundersYeah, but I think, I mean, from my point of view, that’s a huge thing. Because it’s sort of meditation as cracking open the owner’s manual. For all my life, for much of my life, I had a mental fog going on, a monkey mind, that for me was just an identity with me.That was not anything created, or external, or weird. It was just me. And I think that anything that can make you realize that that thing is just a sort of a freak of your birth, it’s a series of brain farts essentially.Now they’re systematic, they’re similar to the brain farts you were having when you were 10. But they’re not you. So when I was first starting to meditate I noticed, almost exactly like what you’re saying, I noticed a certain pessimistic or snarky cast to my default mind. I walk into a party, and I was just looking for things to kind of lightly make fun of. Probably a defense mechanism, but also it was fun. So what was really useful about that was to say, oh, wait a minute, that’s not me. And it’s certainly not true of the party. It’s just a feature of this particular mind. And writing does the same thing for me. If I put out a first draft and there’s a certain writer represented therein, and then you start rewriting it. And for me, it’s a really long process. But by the end, there’s a different person represented. And it’s a person that I like it better.So in other words, the mind that appeared in the first draft was just some mind. It doesn’t have to be identified with me. The process of working through it, suddenly you see, oh, there’s a lot of minds along the way. And that to me is a really beautiful and kind of addicting experience. I don’t ever want to be the person who speaks or thinks in first-draft mind.ezra kleinSomething that I want to key in on there that you’ve talked about elsewhere is this idea of intuition as being an important part of writing. It is a very strange experience, at least for me, to have a thought emerge seemingly out of nowhere that is more insightful and deeper than I tend to think I am. And then it’s similarly a little bit strange to have thoughts emerging constantly that are about things I don’t want to be thinking about.And I do think about meditation, but also about the fiction writing process as you’ve described it, as about trying to hear quieter voices in your own mind and make more space for them. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the role of intuition, what you understand intuition to be, and how you open yourself up to it.george saundersSure, for me intuition is kind of like, let’s say you’re at the park. And some people nearby are playing Frisbee. And they misthrow, and it’s coming right at you, and you could catch it, and you do. There’s no thought in that. It’s just kind of a, oh, that’ll be interesting. In writing what it means to me is that, so if you’re a language person, you have a bunch of micro-opinions about prose that are available to you all the time. You’ve been using them all your life since you were a little kid.So for me, part of the sort of trajectory of becoming a better writer is to just start listening to those little opinions, believing in their existence, getting better at discerning them, and then getting better at instantaneously acting on them. And none of that really involves a lot of thinking, or a lot of deciding, or thematic conceptualization. It’s literally just like catching that Frisbee or like going to the optometrist. Do I like this choice better or that choice better?So the kind of amazing truth, in my experience, is that that’s the whole game for a writer is you have a lot of opinions that most of the time you override or miss. Can you slow down a little bit in your revision process and find out what those are?And then radically honor them. That’s what makes a writer distinctive, I would say. So there’s not much to that really, except cultivating that state of mind.ezra kleinYeah, I want to push on that a little bit. Because the Frisbee analogy strikes me is interestingly different. The thing about catching the Frisbee, I would think of that is as a reflex, because I don’t need to think about it. It’ll happen almost whether I wanted to or not.Whereas it strikes me, or I think that what you’re talking about requires some real energy and space to hear that. It’d be very easy to miss that voice. You have a line in the new book, there you say, “that’s what craft is. A way to open ourselves up to the super personal wisdom within us.” And I want to see if you could talk a bit about that. How does craft, or how do other practices create the space to notice those intuitions? To notice those new thoughts? To notice the things that are happening on that more micro level?george saundersSure, the analogy would be, you’re reading a phrase of yours, and something hits you as being a happier phrasing. In other words, the impulse to catch a Frisbee was present and you honored it. And when you’re hitting a phrase that you don’t like of yours, it’s the same feeling.I’ll just say for me, I have cultivated a revision practice that is 100 percent dependent on this kind of moment we’re talking about, the state of mind we’re talking about. If I do that over time, I think that’s the conduit for what Kundera called the super personal wisdom to come in. And it’s kind of a fancy way of saying that your stories start making more sense.With revision, over the course of a document, thousands of times you’re deciding what is truer, what’s more vivid, what has less deception in it. And over the course of revising it, the whole story comes up and it starts to become a more intense, honest investigation or whatever you’re looking at. That’s kind of what I think happens.And again, I’m really kind of slippery on this subject, because I don’t really understand why it should be that way. But I just have the experience that an early story of mine will be kind of facile, and probably politically charged with a lot of obvious liberal conceits. And the basic mechanism is me and the reader are mocking somebody down below us. And then over the many, many drafts, the thing actually changes and becomes fairer, and funnier, and smarter, and so on.ezra kleinTell me about that revision process. So you begin with that draft, you have that draft which has its obvious opinions, and it’s punching down. And then what happens, both just literally — like, there are eight drafts and you work on them all in the mornings before 10:00 AM — and then it feels to you internally between there and the product I end up reading.george saundersYeah, I mean, it’s different every time. But mostly it’s I’ll print out a nice clean copy the day before. And then just by hook or crook, sit down in front of it. And start reading it with a pen in hand, a pencil in hand.And then in the book I describe this kind of metaphor, which isn’t of course, literally true but it’s pretty close. There’s a meter in my head with P on one side for positive and N for negative. My idea is that the meter responds when I read prose. Just like when you’re in a bookstore and you pick up a book, you’re either still reading an hour later or you toss it aside.So the whole thing for me is to be reading my work as if I didn’t write it. As if I just found it on a bus seat or something. And then all the time, another part of the mind is watching that meter, basically saying, what would a first time reader be feeling right now? In or out, in or out? And it’s all happening in a split second. None of that, the meter is not there. But in a split second I’m going, ah. So there’s a certain feeling I’m hoping for, which is a kind of amused engagement like, yeah, yeah, OK, sure, sure.Then you hit a bit of ice. It’s something that’s suddenly like, ugh, the needle goes into the negative. Or something about this sentence just feels like it isn’t right. Sometimes it’s a feeling that it’s too banal. It’s a sentence anybody else could have written. Or sometimes the logic goes off. You’re saying something that is forced or isn’t true.And then part of this process that might relate back to meditation is that at that point, you’ve got some choices. One is to say to your internal needle, bullshit, you’re wrong. It was perfect yesterday. That’s not the best response.The other thing is to sort of say gently, OK, all right, duly noted. How about if I just go past you, and I’ll read it again in an hour or so and see if I still agree with you. If so, I’ll make a change.Or the best thing is when you just, in an instant like that Frisbee, you go oh, I could just cut this phrase. And if I cut that phrase, that moment of resistance would be less. So it’s that.And then practically speaking in a good writing day, I might get through a seven page story two or three times in that spirit. And I’ll make the changes, put them in, print it out, read it again. And then at that time, I can feel something start to go a little bit loose in my head where I’m not really as discerning as I should be. And I’m starting to make changes just for the sake of it. And then I’ll quit.So the act of faith is that if I do that thing that I just described for many, many days, and weeks, and months, at some point I can get through the whole thing with the needle up in the positive area. Another way of saying it is you basically brought many different yous to the table. You brought the anal retentive you, and the self-celebrating you, and the grouchy you.And the funny thing is over time, it does kind of stabilize into something that you can read over and over with mostly positive feelings. And that, weirdly, and I can’t explain it, is related to this thing we talked about earlier. That the person who’s present in that 900th draft is somewhat above me on the intelligence scale, and on the compassion scale, and on the wit scale.ezra kleinSo I think that’s actually a good bridge to the new book. And so people for people who haven’t read it yet, and people should it, it is built around seven Russian short stories that you teach. And you’re working through the logic and I would also say, in different ways, the message of them. And so I wanted to look at a couple of them more closely.So let’s begin with the “Master and the Man,” which I have to say, I never read. It’s by Tolstoy. It just rocked me. It is such an incredible story. Can you summarize it, or do you think that that’s too much violence to it to do?george saundersNo, no, I think it’s basically, like a lot of these stories, it’s really kind of almost like a joke. The thing is a rich man and his servant go out to close a business deal at the rich man’s probably unreasonable insistence. And they drive right into a snowstorm.And then, I guess without giving it away, I would say this story quickly tells us that what it’s about is, can that rich guy who’s an arrogant, oppressive, mansplaining, imperialist pig, can he change? And then Tolstoy takes it up one more level and says, OK, if he can change, how exactly? What’s the mechanism?And then the feeling for the reader is that it’s a reflection on, can anybody change? Can any of us change? And if so, how might that happen?ezra kleinSomething you write in your commentary on that story is that Tolstoy is proposing something radical. Moral transformation, when it happens, happens not through the total remaking of the sinner or the replacement of his habitual energy with some pure new energy, but by a redirection of his same old energy. And I love that idea, that we are as we are on some level. And the question isn’t, I think, the one we often ask, which is how can we fundamentally change.But it’s, how do we redirect that nature constructively, or that energy constructively? Or how do we put ourselves in a context where the things that make us up are adaptive, as opposed to maladaptive?george saundersRight, I mean, so it’s like earlier when we were talking about our respective energetic monkey minds. I don’t think that’s going to stop. I’ve had it my whole life. So the question is, what do you do with that feature?One thing that I kind of associate with maybe traditional religions is, cut it out. Just stop it, disavow it, eradicate it. That seems to me not right. So then the alternative is, well, you’ve got this rushing river. If you route it through a kindergarten, that’s not so good. If you route it through a dam with a generator, that’s good.So to me, that’s sort of a hopeful thing is to say, we aren’t going to change our fundamental energies. Everybody’s born with hunger. And you could disavow it, which seems kind of babyish to me. Or you could say, OK, given that I’m hungry, there are lots of possibilities. I could become a complete overeater to the detriment of my health. I could eat nails. I could whatever. Or I could become an incredible chef who uses that propensity for good. Or I could just moderate it and try —So in that story, he’s got some really nice qualities the he’s always channeled to egotism, basically. And in the final moments of his life, something very magical happens. And he just slightly makes his gait a little wider and includes this one other person in that.And so he goes sort of immediately from a bad person to somebody who’s actually almost saintly. But he doesn’t really change, actually. His fundamental nature doesn’t change.ezra kleinYou wrote about that. You gave this example that stuck with me for a reason that would become obvious in a second. Where you wrote, look, say you’re a world class worrier. If that worry energy gets directed at extreme personal hygiene, you’re neurotic. If it gets directed at climate change, you’re an intense visionary activist.And it reminded me of something that my wife once said to me, that actually, there are very few moments like this. But it completely changed my view of my own nature, and my own history, and the story I told about it. I was a pretty bad hypochondriac when I was younger. And I told her that I was glad she didn’t meet me then, because I was just always worrying. And who’d like that guy? And she said to me, oh, you haven’t changed at all. You just hadn’t found work yet. And now you just put all that worry and energy there.george saundersThat’s beautiful. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m —ezra kleinAnd I was totally floored by that. Because it made total sense. It’s the same energy, but now it makes me, by society standards, successful rather than neurotic.george saundersYeah.ezra kleinBut it is a lot of neurotic energy.george saundersYeah.ezra kleinIt’s just being channeled differently.george saundersWhat a lovely way for her to see you too. That’s really a gift. Because when you talk about acceptance, that’s really what we’re talking about, is you’re born a certain way. And nobody chooses the packaging with which they’re born. And then the question is, OK, given this, you do have some choice in how you disperse it, I guess.[MUSIC PLAYING]ezra kleinSo I read an old interview with you where you said that the best thing that happened to you is you worked for engineering companies. And that’s where you found your material, and I’m quoting you here, “in the everyday struggle between capitalism and grace.” I’d like to hear more about that.But particularly from this perspective that capitalism is a system, that it directs the energies we already have in some directions and not others. It pulls out parts of our psyche, desire for status, desire for positional status, desire to achieve. And it’s able to do some productive things with them.And then maybe also some more dangerous things with them. And so I’d like to hear a little bit about how you see capitalism as channeling this sort of natural human nature. How does it change us? How does it affect us?george saundersWhat it makes me think is that we always have to be asking, which capitalism are we subscribing to? So you could imagine one model that’s quite generous. And that sort of builds into itself some humanistic values. And just by a slight turn of the dial, which by the way I think has happened during my lifetime, that capitalism becomes more rapacious and more neglectful of the individual.So I think for me, the interesting thing is how do we set that dial? How does the discourse that we engage in as a country cause that adjustment of the dial to go in the direction of actual goodness? I don’t think there’s anything implicitly wrong with capitalism. But it’s where you set the dial.In my experience what happened was we had our daughters, and Paula and I got married pretty quickly and had children right away. And we had no money.So in a very babyish, bourgeois way, I could just see or I could feel the way that the society was pressuring me. And was kind of causing a lot of my qualities like anxiety and perfectionism to torment me a little bit. And was undercutting my grace, my ability to be joyful and rise to the occasion.So really it was just an extrapolation that if me, a guy with a relatively OK job, and a relatively OK mind, and good health, and so on was feeling that pressure. Suddenly I looked up and like, oh my god, this is what cultural discontent is about. Is that the capitalist dragon has its claw on everybody’s throat and is pressing down at different levels to everybody.So that became very important to me. I should have had that realization immediately in my life. But it took a bit of difficulty to bring it out.ezra kleinThis is such a rich subject right here that I’ve been thinking about it bit myself, which is capitalism and kids, and having kids in this context. So I have a two-year-old, so it doesn’t feel so new anymore, but a newish parent. And I guess I’ll approach it this way.I read something, it’s actually the same interview that you said, that “the big turning point in my artistic life was when my wife and I had our kids. The world got infused with morality again. Every person in the world should theoretically be loved as much as I love my daughters.”And on the one hand, I really feel that. I found becoming a parent to be a really startling window into how I treat other people, and to how other people deserve to be treated. And at the same time, I notice how easily it can tip the other way, that the particularistic love we feel or maybe I should just say that I feel for my children, or those close to me, it can close you off to the world. And make you more intent on protecting them, and getting what they need in ways that hurt others.You have a super haunting story, “The Semplica-Girl Diaries,” that to me reads as all about this. Where this father, he’s so concerned about his daughter’s status concerns, and paying at school, that he doesn’t notice in many ways this whole society can’t see what they’re doing to others.But I’d be interested to hear you talk a bit about that. Because it does seem to me that positional capitalism, and the way it interacts with, it allows us to justify a lot on the basis of what we need to protect our children when you might think that the feelings we have towards our children would actually open us up more to other people’s children.george saundersYeah, that’s a brilliant point, Ezra. And I think, yeah, OK, I’m going to cornily invoke a Buddhist fable here. The Buddha had a wonderful student who was a musician. And the student was trying to figure out if when meditating, a person should be really, like, taught with attention and really almost militantly attentive. Or he’d also heard that it was relaxing.So which one was it? And the Buddha said something like, well, when you’re tuning up your guitar or your stringed instrument, do you want it to be too tight or too loose? And of course, he said, well, you want it to be just right. And like, yeah.So in so many things in life and in our culture, it would be nice if we could just settle on one extreme or the other. And have one autopilot setting, put your kids above everything else. That would be nice.But the experience tells us that the pisser is we have to always be setting the dial. And not just, like, once every three years. Like, every moment, you have to be resetting the dial.And this is another kind of thing I learned from fiction is, the truths that you might say that are separate from questions of to whom, under what conditions, on what day, those truths are not that interesting to me. In other words, am I for assisted suicide, say.I really feel there’s a certain wisdom in saying, by whom, on what day, under what conditions. And almost, like, reflexively asking that. It keeps us out of the danger of generalization, which I think in our public discourse is so pervasive. And it results in so much agitation when we’re asking people to decide general conditions.And fiction reminds us that you can’t really write a good story without specifying who it’s happening to, under what conditions, on what day. So that would be kind of my long-winded answer to your question about child raising, which is, yeah, you’re exactly right. And that’s what we have to sort of titrate every day.ezra kleinI like that. And we are very much going to come back to that, who, under what conditions, at what times question. Because it’s something that is laced through, I think, your work but also in a very different way, mine. And I want to get it that interface.But I actually want to talk about one of the other short stories you discuss in the new book, which is “The Nose.” That one’s a more fun one to summarize. So do you mind doing it?george saundersYeah, a guy wakes up and he finds a nose in his breakfast. He doesn’t know where it came from. And we cut away to the guy whose nose it is, who goes in search of it. And then it shows up as a kind of like 6’2’’ nose that gets out of a carriage. And the guy runs around trying to get his nose back on his face, basically. When you put it that way, it sounds so crazy.ezra kleinWell, you write about it that Gogol, who’s the author is sometimes — and whose name I probably just mispronounced — is sometimes referred to as an absurdist. His work meant to communicate that we live in a world without meaning.But to me, Gogol is a supreme realist, looking past the way things seem to how they really are. So why is a story about a 6’2’’ nose running around and getting in and out of carriages a story about the way things really are?george saundersRight, I think it goes back to what we were discussing earlier. We come out of the womb with a bunch of really amazing sensory apparatuses. And with this brain at the top of it all.And instantly, we are there. George is there, and Ezra’s there. I can remember even as a three-year-old, like, oh, I’m in a movie. And I’m the star of it. And I’ll be in this movie forever.So that feeling is not right. It’s incorrect. And we can look down the line and see people that are a little older than us dying. So it should be obvious, but it isn’t.So what do we do? Well, we take that little thinking apparatus, which is so woefully inadequate to reality. And what else are we going to do? We assume that it’s giving us good data. And we think. We were thinking all the time. And the thinking makes us and it makes a world. And we blunder out into that. And then we meet somebody else who’s doing the same exact thing on the sidewalk.And hilarity ensues, because the constructed worlds that we both have made aren’t in agreement often. They might be in agreement broadly. We might both agree that that’s a duck there on the sidewalk with us.But the more nuanced parts of that construction are not in agreement. So that’s scary, but it’s also really funny. It’s what causes, basically, funny shit to happen. And it’s also what causes genocided to happen, and divorces, and beautiful weekend in the Poconos.So to me, Gogol is somebody who is able to say, when we look at two people in a room, we’re basically looking at two insane entities who both think they’re not only sane, but preeminent. It’s a totally natural result of the physicality. And both of them are trying to do this very human thing, which is to assert control over their environment.Like, I’m a husband, a father, a professor, and a writer. You’ve got your constructed view of yourself. Usually that view puts you at the top of the heap in any situation you’re in. But because all of that’s false, it leads to the drama of human life.And I think Gogol somehow, by starting with that precept, and the way he does it is even his narrator is a screw up. His narrator is really subjective, and a little bit unskilful in the way he expresses himself. So that guy’s messed up.The characters also reason badly. And they reason very selfishly. So you have, at any given time, two, or three, or four machines that aren’t reasoning very well and that are positioning themselves as little gods in the world. And it’s crazy, it’s funny. But in a certain way, it seems like the most accurate assessment of what’s actually going on here that I’ve ever read.ezra kleinThere’s another thing you draw out of that story that you gestured at there, which is the way in which everybody in that story — but then I think of this is characterizing a lot of your work. And then I think of this is characterizing all of our world. Will treat the most insane happenings as normal, so long as everybody else is treating them as normal.The human capacity to baseline whatever is going on around, no matter how extreme, no matter how grotesque, no matter how bizarre is just really, really high. And that’s one of the really profound forces, on the one hand, holding society together. But on the other hand, often protecting some of the worst elements of society from attention and maybe reform.george saundersYeah, I think it’s true. You could see — I mean, the Trump era is an obvious example where what would have been absolutely unimaginable becomes normalized really quickly. And then it takes a lot of work, I think, to stay in a state of alertness where you’re seeing a certain behavior correctly relative to the previous baseline.But as you’re saying, it’s probably necessary. I mean, look how quickly we learned to live in quarantine. And now I have a hard time imagining not being in it. So I guess like so many things, it’s kind of a double-edged sword.It’s appalling that we would have somebody we care about die. And then within a couple of months, basically be back to normal. That’s crazy, but it’s also absolutely necessary.ezra kleinYeah, that’s a really lovely example. I’m going to take us to the Trump era in a second. But in some ways I feel like the Trump era is too easy of an example, because too many people believe it. Too many people looked at it, and I want to talk to you about this, and said this is wild what is happening here.I’m a vegan. And so one of the examples I’ll give is I find this to be very true about animal suffering. In a previous podcast I called it the green pill. That once you start taking the suffering of tens of billions of animals that we raise for food seriously, the world becomes really gruesome looking.That people you love and respect are constantly partaking in a terrible system of cruelty. But you seem like the weird one if you point it out. And before anybody thinks I’m just up on a high horse about this, although obviously I am a little bit, you could make this argument about me on, say, climate change.Before the pandemic I took flights different places, right? And then I certainly don’t live a low carbon lifestyle compared to people around this world.Or there’s this very famous thought experiment by the ethical philosopher Peter Singer about, would you jump in a pond to save a drowning child? Well, what if it would make your suit messed up? And you say, of course, I’d get my suit dry cleaned. Who cares? And they says, well, why won’t you spend that dry cleaning money to save a child on another continent? What is the difference between them being in the pond and being in another country?And to just move through the world day by day, you have to abide such a high level of moral outrage. And on the one hand, if you open yourself up to it, it’s paralyzing. But if you close yourself down to it, it’s deadening.george saundersYeah, I totally agree with you. And I feel that. In Buddhism, sometimes they talk about absolute versus relative.So in a relative sense, that’s exactly right. And I think we all suffer from that, we all feel that. Whether we know we’re feeling it or not, we feel that contradiction.On the absolute sense, I don’t know. Or maybe this is more like, as an artist. I think, well, it’s a version of the poor have always been with us.Like, yeah, that’s true. It’s terrible and in a relative sense I want to work as hard as I can to not participate in any system that’s corrupt. And yet, what state of mind are you left in, since you can’t actually do that?I’m going to become tormented, neurotic, and a little bitter, constantly noticing only the most horrible things. So I guess that part of my mind that says yeah, OK, we want to notice that. We want to do everything we can in a relative frame. And then at some higher level, you want to go oh, interesting that that’s the way it looks to us.And I would say, my own judgmental, moral perfectionism, if I really look at it, it has a lot to do with illusion of control. It has to do with me somewhat overestimating my place in this world. So there’s an element of ego in it that says, I’m going to destroy my life with regret. As opposed to saying, yeah, you’re just a little speck that came here quickly and in a very big system that you don’t understand.And there’s some value in acceptance or kind of, like — I don’t know. I’m not really being very clear on this. But I hear what you’re saying. I think it’s one of the tenets of that show “The Good Place.” If a person takes it as his responsibility to right every wrong, that’s a big — I don’t know. I’m not really sure.ezra kleinI love that show. I love that show so much. But I don’t know, I always thought that last move they ran — and I’m sorry there are good place spoilers here. The point system has become totally destroyed by the world being too complex to actually correctly assess any actions.It’s a little bit of a copout, like a little bit too utilitarian where, I will say this is particularly an issue on the left in my view. There is, or certainly has become, such a dominant argument against individualizing any systemic problems. Like, if you talk at all about anybody’s individual responsibility on something like climate change, you’ll immediately be told, well no, the real question here is what do we do with the top corporate polluters. And I agree on some level. The real question, I mean, I’ve spent my life doing policy journalism. I obviously agree that systemic solutions are the ones we need. But there’s another part of me that thinks, you don’t get systemic solutions if people let themselves too off the hook for their individual responsibility and problems. Like, people don’t certainly vote to tax themselves on things that they don’t think are wrong. They can’t ask anybody to be perfect. And I had Peter Singer on the show a while back. And even he didn’t say, donate 80 percent of your income to global poverty, or even of 50 percent of your income to global poverty.But I think there is something difficult in the question of, what does it mean that we can be OK with how much of this there is? And that saying that, well, we can’t change at all can be a little bit too much letting ourselves off the hook.george saundersSo as a writer, what I’m interested in is how might I change my inner state so that I would understand the world in such a way that I would do less harm? That’s, for me, the starting place. And then to the extent that I’m not doing that, I think I’m skipping ahead a couple of steps, maybe.But I think what you’re saying really is true. And it’s one of the crazy dilemmas of this life. I used to work in a slaughterhouse. And that was amazing, amazing that I could do that and still be a sporadic meat eater.And that suffering was real, for sure. Not only the animals, but the other workers, that was real suffering. So I don’t know.I mean, maybe the question is, how are if we can’t come up with an answer? What do the days look like? Can we learn to live in a world where there is a lot of that kind of evil going around, and at the same time, not make monsters of ourselves? Honestly, there are times where I’m just sort of beyond my pay grade. And this is why I tend to think a little more in the terms of stories, I guess.ezra kleinI totally hear that. But that’s actually why I use Gogol as the direction into this. And I’ll take this in a slightly different direction now, which is that I thought your insight both about his fiction, but I also think this is true about your fiction. I would really recommend that people read that story of your “Semplica-Girl Diaries,” because I think it does this beautifully.And I think something that it makes me think about in my own work is that it’s really important not to let things become normal just because they are wrapped in normal language. So you brought up the Trump presidency here, and that was the direction I’d wanted to go, which is I’ve written — I don’t know — hundreds of thousands of words on that presidency, maybe more. But in a way, I think simply being forced into the language of political journalism, I’ve never been able to and I will never be able to convey how truly weird and disturbing it was.And somehow for everyone to talk about it all at once, it normalizes it almost by definition. Because anything that happens at that scale is normal almost by definition. And yet there’s this part of me that wants to insist that it isn’t. So I guess how does the novelist in you read this era? How would you try to convey what it felt like?george saundersWell, one of the things that I have noticed is that our leftist shock at Trump was valid, absolutely correct. And yet, it happened. And it is still happening. So the novelist in me says, OK, duly noted. A left wing person of this era would have a certain quality of shock. That could go in a book.Well, on the other side, you go over there and there are 60 million people for whom this is not shocking but lovely. It’s almost like if somebody — you see a caveman and he picks up a grenade and he thinks it’s a pineapple. And it blows up. It’s kind of on the cavemen. He misunderstood that grenade.So I think for me, just personally, I covered the Trump campaign in 2016. And I was totally shocked and didn’t have the vocabulary. And realized there was all kinds of subterranean things going on I had no clue about on the right. And now what I’ve been trying to do since then is just get over the shock. And start to try to understand the system that existed before Trump in such a way that it makes sense.Not to say that I approve of it, or that I won’t resist it. But that it makes holistic sense, because cause and effect never takes a break. So whatever happened there in 2016, and is still happening, it’s got an organic cause. And I think for me, the version of me that was hand-wringing and, I can’t believe it, that part it needs to be over.And I’m trying to be a scientist about it, and understand it in a deeper way. Which is both a way of finding a way to write about it. But also it’s actually a way to find the best way to push against it, is to diagnose it is a really important — and diagnosis from inside, with some kind of psychological insight into it, and a novelistic insight is, in my way of thinking, the best way to position oneself for resistance.ezra kleinSomeone once told me that whenever you think, huh, that doesn’t make sense, that what it means is your model of the world doesn’t make sense.george saundersExactly.ezra kleinThe world always makes sense on its own terms. It’s you who is missing something. And so that’s always a starting point for inquiry. And so I actually want to go back, because one thing I will say about your nonfiction is that there is a really powerful, predictive dimension in it, to this era.You wrote a piece many, many, many years ago now on the Minutemen, who were this militia this, sort of right wing militia but also kind of cosplay militia, that would stand in border towns with guns and hang out waiting to see immigrants crossing the border. And then try to get them picked up by the border patrol.And at the time, it all looked very weird. It was people who seemed to be pretending they were somehow soldiers in some grand war. And there’s an absurdity in the piece. But you read it now and it is so predictive of Trump. It was so predictive of what was really happening on the right, and the power of the immigration narrative. And he just comes up a couple of years later and picks that up. And I’m curious how you think back on the people you met then, on that piece, on just that whole moment.george saundersYeah, it’s what I love about writing non-fiction, is you blunder into a situation. And usually your conceptual apparatus isn’t prepared. Like, I didn’t even know what to make of those guys. So in that situation, what you have to resort to is just observing. Usually, I go into those pieces with kind of an agenda, an idea for what the piece will look like. And within the first couple of days, it gets totally destroyed by reality.So I love that feeling of, like, sitting out there with them. We staked out the border for a whole night. The six of us, or 12 of us, or whatever. And they were all heavily armed. And it was funny, it was a comical evening that could have been a tragic evening. It almost was at one point. But what I love to say, holy shit, I really don’t know what’s going on here.And in a way, that’s another example of the ruminating mind going quiet. Because since all your rumination-based concepts are totally wrong, totally at odds with what’s happening in front of you, you have to put those away. And then you’re all eyes, ears, nose, and notetaking. So that’s why I think those pieces, if they have any value, it’s that in those moments, all my circa, whatever it was, 2006 liberal ideas had to be shut down for a minute. And it was just observing what they actually said and did.Yeah, it was a very wild piece. Because they were certainly affable with me. And I think I say in the piece four or five of them is a lot of fun. But you put 400 or 500, and it’s a different ballgame. And now we see the Capitol being stormed.ezra kleinThere is this way right now in which things that seem comic very quickly tip into things that are dangerous or tragic. And people keep experiencing that as some kind of surprise, that there’s a contradiction or tension there. When, certainly, I’ve come to believe that those things are related.They’re more causal, actually. That the comic nature allows things to spread, to not be seen as dangerous. And then they become dangerous. But you see that in the capital insurrectionists, right?There’s a sort of ridiculousness to this guy in the shaman hat running in. But there’s also a bunch of people with guns. You see it in the Minutemen. You see it in the Tea Party. But of course you see it going way back, right? Fascism is a bunch of friends dressing up in similar outfits to sing songs together, but then it’s fascism.And I’m curious, to somebody who often uses comedy to try to get at what is truer and sometimes more destructive in the world, just how you read that.george saundersI always think of that movie “Fargo” as a great example of that. Those killers are so inept, and so stupid, and yet they really kill. I think of myself really in an honorable tradition of Shakespearean fools, who come into a situation. And they’re not that well-informed or that well-read, necessarily. They’re just kind of riffing.And the power of the Shakespearean fool is that he riffs really well. And he blunders into the truth in the spirit of trying to entertain, or trying to captivate. So for me the trick is, try to live my life in such a way that I’m not preshaping experiences too much.Try to go with the places that make me uncomfortable, or that I think I’m sure about. But including some really just boring old, banal places. And always keep my eyes and ears open. And then, in a certain way, to try not to build up a view of the world. Now, you do, of course you do. But try not to.And then when I get in front of a story that I’m writing, this subconscious thing we were talking about kicks in. And it produces all kinds of weird gems, and weird juxtapositions, and tonalities that I could never have thought of in advance. So again, it’s that idea that it’s intuition as this conduit that provides a level of complexity that might have a sort of super-truth in it. It’s not necessarily linear truth or everyday truth but there’s a kind of overcharged quality that allows it to sometimes be predictive.Or what I’m working on now is sort of trying to write a piece that feels like right now. And you’re sort of taking different valences that are in the culture and putting them in action. And sometimes if you do that, they will inadvertently do something that leads you to a higher understanding of things.But again, not a rational understanding, I think. There’s kind of a magic in it. And I don’t really even know what the function is. Except I think if you read something in that spirit, something that as you’re saying, combines the comic and the tragic, there’s an instantaneous coming alive of something in your consciousness that I think is what’s fun. And I suppose you could argue that it’s beneficial.[MUSIC PLAYING]ezra kleinThis gets us back to something I’d put a pin in earlier, when you talked about the key question of fiction being under what conditions, at what time, in which place, right? The conditions that bring out certain versions of us rather than others. And obviously see this in your fiction.But it is almost pathological in your nonfiction, like, the effort to inhabit other perspectives. It’s in every piece I’ve read from you. It’s in your remarkable 2016 piece in The New Yorker on Trump rallies. But I want to read some quotes here from this Minuteman piece you write that everyone’s pissed, oppositional, less empathetic, and articulate and well-mannered than they would be at any other moment in their actual lives.And then in your piece on the Trump rallies, you talk about trying to present people with the specifics of the folks they want to deport. And you say, in the face of specificity, my interviewees began trying, really trying to think of what would be fairest and most humane for this real person we had imaginatively conjured up. It wasn’t that we suddenly agreed, but the tone changed. But then of course, a couple of minutes later, you’re in a crowd of counterprotesters and the guy’s screaming, Hillary is going to be locked up. She won’t be president. This feels like a really important practice to me. And then also there sometimes feels like there’s a way of searching so determinedly for the multitudes we carry inside of ourselves. That it can almost blind us to the people we are being right now when it matters most.And it could become exculpatory when we actually need to be forced to be responsible for who we are in this moment. And I’m curious how you think about that tension.george saundersYeah, that’s a beautifully made point. First of all, we have to say that each of us has different bandwidth, or different inclinations, or super powers. So I would never advocate for a general anything. But for me, what I find is if I’m in the face of somebody with who I don’t agree, I’m pretty comfortable with the moment when I have to fight them. I don’t really have a big problem with that. I’m usually pretty clear on where my lines are and when somebody needs to be forcibly pushed back.So I think what that does is it gives me a little bit of an option to engage another interest of mine, which is to say, huh, how does the world look through that person’s eyes? He sounds insane. He sounds aggressive. He sounds irrational. He sounds racist.But to him, it feels differently. Now, usually when people advocate going into consciousness, they’re saying something like be empathetic, and be loving, and you can change the person, or whatever. There’s also a kind of a power in it to say, if I want you to stop doing something, and I’m confident that at the moment I need you, I can and will fight you, then I have a little side corridor. Which is to try to imagine what the world looks like to you.If I can do that, that gives me a range of persuasive options that are more powerful than if I didn’t think about you. Now again, for a lot of people I think that’s just weird, and they don’t want to do it. But for me, ever since I was a little kid, I’ve had that interest. And that person seems to be other than me.And yet to her, she seems like the central story. So maybe that’s why I became a fiction writer. But I like doing that. And I think it’s powerful. And I think I have maybe more bandwidth for it than a lot of people do. But you have to be very careful that it can easily morph over into enabling.If I understand why somebody does something, it doesn’t permit it. So yeah, so to me, it’s a natural thing. I enjoy it. Yeah, it’s tricky. And by the way, I’ve never persuaded anybody. That whole Trump rally I talked to everybody.I have all kinds of people in my extended social circle that are Trumpees. I’ve never budged anybody. But it makes me feel less insane if I can somehow, at least for little brief moments, see things from their point of view.ezra kleinOne reason I connect to this is it makes me feel less insane too. It’s, in many ways, my most natural mode. And then I find that there’s a part of me that wants to believe in the least insane, or to put it differently than that, the least offensive to me version of the person in front of me. And I’m a political reporter so I spend a lot of my time talking with Republican members of Congress and Republican staffers in Congress.And a constant theme for me in recent years — and there are a lot of Republicans who I don’t agree with them on things, but I respect their differences and the way they think about things, and I learn a lot from them. But they’re also straying from the party right now, just to be blunt about where I think things are, that has gone off the rails. And one of the things I would see all the time is members of Congress who would be reasoned, and cautious, and many minded in their private conversations with me.And then would turn out to vote to reject the results of the election or to rip health care away from poor people, or would lie about covering pre-existing conditions. And it just raises a very hard question for me, not of who we really are, because I don’t think that has an answer.I think that, as you put it, who we are is situational. But of which of ourselves really matters. And of what do you do sometimes with the desire to believe the best in people when they’re particularly not going to be in a system that is going to bring out their best self at the end of the day?george saundersAnd how do you explain that, having been in the position of seeing that, the reasonable person on a small level and then the unreasonable public thing. How do you explain or understand that?ezra kleinI think there are a lot of possible explanations. One is that the reasonable person is trying to convince me of their reasonableness, that it’s not even that true of a self. So that’s one version.I always notice that people who I’ll sometimes have on the show are much more reasonable or gentle than they are on Twitter. Because when they’re talking to me, they want to have like a nice social interaction, and on Twitter they want to dunk on people.So different contexts bring out different things in us. And that’s, by the way, very much true for me. Another thing is that we live in a zero-sum political system. And so I wrote this book “Why We’re Polarized,” which is very much all about this question. It’s very much about why it is, on some basic level, rational for even a Republican who didn’t like Donald Trump on a personal level to have voted for him, certainly in 2016.And even in 2020, that the choice between the two parties has become so wide for people that particularly once you then add in media ecosystems that give people a very different view of what the reality is, that the choice makes sense from their perspective. But in terms of those members of Congress, I often think that at the end of the day, everything in Congress is a binary question, a yes or no on this bill.And then behind that yes or no on this bill, a who do you want to see win the next election. And so conversations are positive-sum. There are a lot of ways to act in a conversation that make everybody better off. But when you end up in zero-sum choices, well then in some ways, you really see what people’s values are, right?And what they’re willing to risk. And which part of them was lying at bedrock. Because on the one hand, I can explain the rational reason people make these decisions. But I also don’t want to let people too much off the hook for making careerist, rational decisions.But I want people to do, particularly in positions of leadership the moral thing, even if it’s hard. And so I really struggle with this. I think there’s a kind of cognitive illusion that can emerge from trying too hard to steel man people’s positions. Then you’re surprised when they act in less reasonable ways and out side of themselves.george saundersYeah, and I agree. And I think that’s one of the values of great literature. If you read Shakespeare, or there’s a beautiful Chekhov story called “In the Ravine,” which is about one of the most unbelievably evil people, a woman who scalds a baby to death at one point because it would help her in some way.And those great writers don’t flinch about the idea that, OK, we have capabilities of empathy and understanding. And so in other words, you could, a great mind could get inside the mind of that woman and be her for a couple of seconds. But that doesn’t have anything to do with our response to her. Or you don’t want to enable her. Or you don’t want to even — understanding and forgiving our kind of two different things.So I think one of the things that literature does is it reminds us that for all of our honorable desire to empathize and soften boundaries, there are outrageous occasions where there are people who are just, from our perspective, unremittingly evil. And there they are. So in other words, you wouldn’t want empathy, or some kind of construction about empathy to start lopping off pieces of reality and making them inadmissible.ezra kleinAnd I’ll add one thing to this. Because it’s something I find really difficult about this political era, when virtue’s become vices, or virtues can become enabling. Because I will say that I feel that this political era does not bring out the best in me. Sometimes the choices I have to make or the answers I have to come to are not what I wish they were.And you have a really nice moment in the Trump rally piece of wrestling with this. You write, “a bully shows up, is hateful, says things so crude we liberals are taken aback. We respond moderately. We keep waiting for supporters helped along by how compassionately and measuredly we are responding to be persuaded. For the bully, this is perfect.”And I’ve been thinking a little bit about that with the sudden calls for unity after the election from Republicans who voted to reject the election. I don’t want to put this exactly all on them. But even that right there is that little voice inside being like, show some virtue coming out when, I mean, voting to reject the election was on them.And so this moment where it feels some of the temperamental virtues of liberal democracy are weaponized by those who don’t believe in it feels really tough. Because you want to be your best self in politics. But then there are certain kinds of people who can find the flaw in that. And bullies, put aside the unremittingly evil, I mean, that is the nature of the bully, to turn the system against the people who are operating within it.george saundersYeah, I mean, I think one of the things that the left has to do is recognize that we really are, at a very basic level, defending virtues like kindness, and decency, and equality. To me that’s the thing we have to concentrate on, that actually we’re the true defenders of the constitutional ideas that say we really are hopeful that we’ll have a beautiful country where everybody is equal. That’s actually what we’re working for. And don’t get too distracted by the small storms on the inside.To me, if we think about unity, here’s the one idea I have about this. And I’m not a very astute political thinker. But here’s a sort of a hopeful metaphor.If you take 20,000 Americans and send them down to a baseball stadium and say, look Republicans, you guys wear red. Democrats you wear blue. We file into the stadium.And on second base is a podium. And a guy starts talking in an inflammatory way about immigration. Well, there’s no doubt about what’s going to happen. There’s going to be fights.OK, so now rewind and say, first of all, dress however you want. Same people come in. And then at the critical moment, the Yankees and the Red Sox run out.So suddenly there’s a polarity shift there. You’re going to have Red Sox fans who are liberal, and conservative, and so on. The tenor of this discussion is going to change. Because we’ve been trained, we know how to amiably argue at baseball games.So my only kind of light thought is, we have to get off the preconceived axis that tells us what political discourse consists of and what it sounds like. Now, here we go back to the local. What would that look like?I think the move is to sort of somehow destabilize the idea that politics is always national and start looking locally. How does my life actually look to me as I experienced it in the next 24 hours? How much of my political agitation is around things that are basically distant, unknowable, or mostly unknowable and conceptual?So I’m feeling that a lot of the anger comes from a feeling of disconnection. And that feeling of disconnection is actually correct. We’re fighting like hell with people we care about in what’s largely a predetermined discourse. Does that make any sense at all?ezra kleinIt makes a ton of sense. In fact, one reason I’m happy to hear you say it is one of the places my book ends is in a call for relocalizing a lot of politics for almost exactly that reason. That argues that the nationalization of politics has become a huge polarization driver.But I to make this — this is about your book, not mine. But I can’t really agree with that more. And I will say on one piece of that, even as I’m at the New York Times now and I live in California. One thing I always tell people is that if you don’t consume any political media that is local, that you’re making a terrible mistake in which of your political identities you’re strengthening.That our national political identities have become way too strong. And our local political identities have weakened, have withered. And that’s often because we don’t consume media that attaches us to local fights, local questions. You read the New York Times living in San Francisco.And so, like, that’s one. Like, there’s an actionable thing you can do there. But you have to work on your own informational ecosystem to attach yourself to things that are local. But it’s a much healthier way of experiencing politics. And you can have much more effect on it.george saundersWell, and also the idea that when we start working on local issues, we can move from the conceptual to the practical. And once people get into positions of solving individual problems, a lot of the agitation goes away.So if you, and me, and two conservatives are sitting down to try to address the pothole problem, and we’re $2,000 short, there’s going to be a discussion. But it’s not and they have to do with the culture wars. It’s a very practical thing.And the more we know about it, the more it’s going to become very technical and scientific, which then takes all of the kind of bombast out of the thing. And afterwards, it makes us feel that we participated in something democratic, and communal, and positive.I mean, that’s of course obviously way too simple. But I think if I look at my life and the people I know, I think a lot of the angst and the agitation of the moment has to do with the feeling that their actions don’t actually matter all that much or that they’re spending a lot of energy, a lot of emotional energy and neurological energy in discussions that somehow should be about important things. And they kind of seem like they are, but they don’t lead to anything.When I was covering those Trump rallies, there was so much talk about immigration. And so one of the tropes I kept enacting was to talk to a Trump supporter and say, I see that this immigration is a big issue for you. Can you tell me about when it started for you? And what was the inciting incident with an undocumented person that caused you to have these strong opinions?And it was almost comical that there was never an incident. Or if there was, they misunderstood it. There was an accent, that was mistaken as proof of undocumented status. So it was really made dramatically clear to me that this agitation about immigration was largely a projection that flourished in the absence of experience.And again, this might take us back to fiction. Fiction is a great discipline of saying, if you start a story, a bunch of people were somewhere, that story is not going anywhere. But if you say, there were four Presbyterians in a bomb cellar, suddenly there’s something.And it’s all because the story has been grounded in a particular place, with particular people, under certain conditions. And the wisdom, or the knowledge, the understanding is going to come out of that situation is directly related to how specifically it’s been enumerated.ezra kleinI think that’s a wonderful bridge to the final section here where I’m going to ask you for some fiction among other book recommendations. And so let me begin with this one. What book have you reread the most times?george saundersI think it was probably “Red Cavalry” by the Russian writer Isaac Babel. It was a book of short stories that’s really insane about when the Russians invaded Poland after the revolution. And it’s just kind of even in translation, just a stylistic masterpiece.And so when I was young, it really was a touchstone for me of what an intense short story would look like. And then also I go back to Gogol’s “Dead Souls” a lot, just because I love it so much. And I have never been able to figure out why.It feels to me like a book that really gets the feeling of being alive right. But I’ve never been quite able to put my finger on why. So I just drop into that every now and then just to remind myself.ezra kleinWhat book do you give to others most often?george saundersI don’t give books that often because I always feel a little bit like it’s sort of imposing. But I did give out “Stamped from the Beginning” by Ibram X. Kendi quite a few times. For me, it was a life changer for me. And I think that book was a great book and kind of a great act of generosity and insight. So I have given that one out a few times.ezra kleinThat really is a great book. What’s your favorite work of nonfiction?george saundersI really love “Dispatches” by Michael Herr, which is the great Vietnam work. He was a friend of ours. And the book is so beautifully open to different mindstates. He’s in Vietnam. And sometimes he’s celebrating it, and sometimes he’s horrified. And he’s got this amazing prose style that just lets him get into so many really cool places.And then Michael actually, when I was writing “Lincoln in the Bardo,” he recommended this book called “Patriotic Gore” by Edmund Wilson, which is a series of sketches of the literary lights of the 19th century, most of whom we’ve never heard of. And it’s a really beautiful evocation of a world that was totally as real as ours that has vanished. We don’t know these people. It’s really, really hard to recreate their mindsets. And of course, they were very passionate about it. And people wrote 30, 40 novels. And so for me, it was kind of a great book just to say, oh yeah, this cultural moment that we’re in is sort of a beautiful illusion. It seems real to us. You and I could talk for hours about different cultural references. And in another 100 years, it’ll all seem kind of like beautiful nonsense.ezra kleinWhat’s your favorite work on Buddhism?george saundersThere’s so many. I mean, the one I read most recently that I really loved, and I loved it because it did that work of kind of jolting me to attention, was a book Mingyur Rinpoche called “In Love with the World.” And it starts out just with a narrative description of a pilgrimage he made. And he so skillfully works in all the basic ideas about Buddhism. And does it in a way that makes them seem really alive and really urgent.ezra kleinWhat’s a book you go back to for just the sheer beauty of the writing, that inspires you as a writer?george saundersWell, there’s a British writer named Henry Green that I think people don’t read quite as much anymore. But he had a series of short novels, all with one-word titles like “Loving,” “Living,” “Party Going,” “Concluding.” And I’ll just drop into him. Because I don’t know anybody who writes more beautiful sentences in English, just more sculpted, and deliberate, and purposeful.So it’s almost like just drinking a little bit of a potion to make you love language again, just because he’s taken so much care with it. And also there’s some of these big scenes in Huck Finn, like the scene where the guy talks the mob down from a lynching. And some of those big — I think of them as aerial scenes that I’ve been reading.Just because I tend to get a little bit obsessive over sentences, which I think is a good quality as with Henry Green. But also I’m a little worried as I get older that that lapidary quality can sometimes cause you to forfeit the big picture, the kind of thrilling summaries, and the bird’s eye view. So Twain is such a natural writer, it sounds just like conversation. But when you actually start looking at it or copying it out, it’s really incredibly high-level English prose.ezra kleinWhat book of poetry would you recommend to somebody who doesn’t often read poetry?george saundersWell, I think these are going to be Syracuse writers. But one of our teachers was named Hayden Carruth. And he has a beautiful book called “Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey.” Just real accessible, emotional, funny poems. And then I think I would also recommend the work of two of my colleagues. Mary Karr has a lovely book called “Tropic of Squalor,” and then Brooks Haxton has one called “They Lift Their Wings to Cry.”So what I’m always looking for is well, like with what we saw with Amanda Gorman the other day, that the quality that the poetry is talking to me directly. It’s talking to my experience. And the poetic qualities of it are not for show. They’re there to communicate higher level things more efficiently.ezra kleinAnd I’ll end on this one, which is I mentioned earlier I have a two-year-old. I know you’ve written a wonderful children’s book. Are there any children’s books you love or that you would recommend that I read to my son?george saundersHave you read “The Hundreds Dresses“?ezra kleinNo.george saundersWell, you talk about empathy. I won’t spoil it. But it’s a great story. It’s a great short story, actually, about a little girl who’s perceived one way. And then we find out that it was very different, actually, behind the scenes.I also like, I used to love this book with our kids called “Caps for Sale.” A simple little book about this guy who’s just for some reason out selling caps. He’s got a big pile of, like, 200 caps on his head. And it’s just really playful, and goofy, and kind of poetic. And anything by Seuss, I love Dr. Seuss.ezra kleinIt is really true that children’s books, they take a delight in language. And it’s often lost in adult literature. And it’s actually been one of the really fun things about parenthood is just rediscovering some of that baseline delight.george saundersYeah, or when you find a kid’s book that doesn’t take that delight, and it’s a torment.ezra kleinYeah, that is very true. Your book is “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.” George Saunders, it’s been such a pleasure to get to spend this time with you. Thank you.george saundersA total pleasure for me too, Ezra. Thank you for what you do.[MUSIC PLAYING]ezra klein“The Ezra Klein Show” is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Roge Karma and Jeff Geld, fact checked by Michelle Harris, original music by Isaac Jones. And the mixing is by Jeff Geld.[MUSIC PLAYING]More episodes ofThe Ezra Klein ShowOctober 14, 2022  •  1:23:35Rachel Maddow Looks Back on a Wild 14 YearsOctober 7, 2022  •  1:25:57How the Fed Is ‘Shaking the Entire System’See All Episodes ofThe Ezra Klein ShowFeb. 19, 2021Send any friend a storyAs a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.Give this articleGive this articleGive this articleProduced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’George Saunders is one of America’s greatest living writers. He’s the author of dozens of critically acclaimed short stories, including his 2013 collection, “Tenth of December”; his debut novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” won the 2017 Booker Prize; and his nonfiction work has empathy and insight that leave pieces from more than a decade ago ringing in my head today. His most recent book, “A Swim in A Pond in the Rain,” is a literary master class built around seven Russian short stories, analyzing how they work, and what they reveal about how we work.[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]I’ve wanted to interview Saunders for more than 15 years. I first saw him talk when I was in college, and there was a quality of compassion and consideration in every response that was, well, strange. His voice doesn’t sound like his fiction. His fiction is bitingly satirical, manic, often unsettling. His voice is calm, kind, gracious. The dissonance stuck with me.Saunders’s central topic, literalized in his famous 2013 commencement speech, is about what it means to be kind in an unkind world. And that’s also the organizing question of this conversation on my podcast “The Ezra Klein Show.” We discuss the collisions between capitalism and human relations, the relationship between writing and meditation, Saunders’s personal editing process, the tension between empathizing with others and holding them to account, the promise of re-localizing our politics, the way our minds deceive us, Tolstoy’s unusual theory of personal transformation, and much more.ImageCredit...Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Chris Jackson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.