Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 248: How to Be a Good and Sane Citizen in Ugly Times | Ezra Klein

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

Rest assured, this is not an episode where we're going to argue about politics. Instead, it's about how to maintain our happiness, calm, sanity, generosity, and compassion in the face of an increasingly ugly political dynamic that impacts all of us during this pandemic. Ezra Klein is the founder and editor-at-large of Vox.com, host of the Ezra Klein Show podcast, and author of the new book, Why We're Polarized. In this episode, we talk about the roots of what he calls the "Coronavirus culture war," the role of mindfulness in depolarizing ourselves, and the limited benefits of varying your media diet (and why podcasts are better than Twitter in this regard). As you'll hear, Klein acknowledges his own struggle to remain un-polarized but as a journalist he is committed to providing dispassionate analysis. Towards the end, Ezra speaks candidly about his anxiety and his struggles with his own meditation practice during this crisis. For a limited time, we're offering a 40% discount on a year-long subscription to the app. Visit tenpercent.com/podcast40 to get your discount and get support for your meditation practice today. This promotion is only available to users without a current Ten Percent Happier app subscription. Where to find Ezra Klein online: Vox: https://www.vox.com/authors/ezra-klein Twitter: Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) / https://twitter.com/ezraklein Facebook: Ezra Klein - Home / https://www.facebook.com/ezraklein/ Book Mentioned: Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein / https://www.amazon.com/Why-Were-Polarized-Ezra-Klein/dp/147670032X Other Resources Mentioned: Better Angels / https://www.thebetterangelssociety.org/ Weather Underground / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground Civil Rights Act / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 Ross Douthat / https://www.nytimes.com/by/ross-douthat Twitter's Flawed Solution to Political Polarization / https://dupri.duke.edu/news-events/news/twitters-flawed-solution-political-polarization The Weeds Podcast / https://www.vox.com/the-weeds Morning Joe / https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe Pod Save America /https://crooked.com/podcast-series/pod-save-america/ The Federalist / https://thefederalist.com/ The Ben Shapiro Show / https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-ben-shapiro-show The Argument / https://www.nytimes.com/column/the-argument Ethan D. Hersh / https://www.eitanhersh.com/ Additional Resources: Ten Percent Happier Live: https://tenpercent.com/live Coronavirus Sanity Guide: https://www.tenpercent.com/coronavirussanityguide Free App Access for Journalists, Teachers, Healthcare, Grocery and Food Delivery, and Warehouse Workers: https://tenpercent.com/care Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/ezra-klein-248 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, got a fascinating episode today. First though, want to tell you about a special offer. In my opinion, meditation is more useful and valuable now in the middle of this pandemic than perhaps ever in our lives. But I know that starting a practice can be difficult. I know that from experience, I know that from working with lots of people directly and through our company. And that's why we at 10% happier than meditation

app work with some of the best teachers in the world and create all of this content designed to get you actually meditating with some regularities so that you can access the many profound benefits. Today we're gonna do something that we don't often do on the show, which is offer a big discount. We're offering 40% off subscription to 10% happier.

This is pretty rare, but we want to recognize that times are tough and that meditation can be helpful. So if you're an existing subscriber, first of all, thank you for your ongoing support. And if you're new and want to sign up, now would be a time to do it. You can visit 10% dot com slash podcast 40 for the discount. 10% all one word spelled out dot com slash podcast 40 will put a link in the show notes. And don't forget if you're a teacher or if you're somebody who works in the food industry, food delivery or in a grocery store or if you are a health care worker, just go to 10%.com slash care for free access.

Really appreciate everybody's support now. All right, let's get into the show. I just wanna say from the outset, since you've many of you have told me many times that you don't love politics polluting your meditation. I'm not sure I agree with that, but anyway, I've heard you, and I wanna assure you from the jump here that this is not an episode where we're going to argue

about politics. Instead, this is an episode about how to maintain our happiness, calm, sanity, generosity, and compassion in the face of an increasingly ugly political dynamic that impacts all of us during this pandemic. Ezra Klein, our guest, is the founder and editor at large of Vox. He's the host of the Ezra Klein Show, which is a podcast, and he's the author of a new book or a new wish book called Why Were Polarized. In this episode, we talk about the roots of what he calls the coronavirus culture war, the role of mindfulness in depolarizing ourselves, and the limitations of varying your media diet and why podcasts are actually better than Twitter in this regard.

As you will hear, Ezra acknowledges that he comes at this from his own perspective as somebody who's on the left side of the political spectrum, but he does make an effort, he says, to approach this subject with journalistic dispassion. And one other note toward the end of the interview, you're gonna hear Ezra speak kindly about his own anxiety and his struggles with his own meditation practice during this crisis. So as I said, a fascinating episode, here we go,

as we're kind. So you wrote this book about polarization. I've just curious to you, you wrote this before as it's sometimes been referred to as BC before Corona. And here we are mid-sea. And what are your thoughts about how we're handling this as a polity, as a society in terms of through the lens of polarization? Are we all coming together? Are we all coming together? Are we all in this thing together? We are definitely not all coming together.

It's funny, as you were saying that I was thinking about right when this began, I got a text from a friend and it said, so is this the end of polarization? And the book had come out not long ago and the CARES Act had just passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority. And I remember texting back, I don't think so, but asked me again in six weeks. And so now it has been six weeks, eight weeks. And I think I can say pretty confidently it has not been the end of polarization. I just saw a poll today that says 72% of Republicans believe the worst is behind us.

And 74% of Democrats believe the worst is behind us, and 74% of Democrats believe the worst is ahead of us. It is a perfect inversion. And what we're seeing here is that virtually any major crisis is going to get filtered through these mechanisms of who we believe and what our sort of baseline orientation towards the future and towards our leadership is. One of the really striking things if you're just looking at polls in this period is that Joe Biden has had the single steadiest lead on record and put us at the question of the lead or not the lead. It was six points ahead of Trump a year ago. It was six points ahead of Trump right when he was winning the primary

and before coronavirus, and it is six points ahead of Trump right now in the middle of coronavirus. It is the steadiest lead we have ever seen. And the way to think about that, and something I talk about Donald Trump from another perspective in the book, is very little, including world historical world changing events, is powerful enough to shake us out of our baseline orientation of, yeah, my side is doing a good job or no, that side is doing a terrible job. To your mind, is this a really dangerous phenomenon or is it neither here nor there? Oh, it's very dangerous, but often not for the reasons people think. Something I'm trying to make a distinction about in the book is that polarization is not intrinsically good

or bad. It really just means that ideas, arguments, identities, something, affiliations are clustering between two poles. We have had periods in this country that are abhorrent in which politics had a very low level of polarization. And we have had periods in this country, which were fine or great even in which politics has had a low level of polarization, and we have had periods in this country which were fine or great even, in which politics has had a high level polarization. The idea that you have structured your disagreement across your two political parties is very natural and it can coexist with a functional or a dysfunctional political system. The difficulty we tend

to have for a lot of reasons right now in particular, is that our political system is idiosyncratic and that it typically doesn't work among high levels of party polarization. And that's because we have a system in which powers are decentralized across different branches and even inside individual chambers, say like the Senate, you have super majority requirements like the filibuster, you have this very unusual and very powerful committee system. And so you need very high levels of compromise, even consensus to get anything done. What polarization functionally means in a competitive political system, is you can't get that level of compromise or consensus,

except in the most extraordinary of circumstances. And so that means you have a system that begins to trend towards a kind of paralysis, a kind of inaction, an endless amount of fighting, but no capability to resolve those fights. So if I'm here you correctly, it's not necessarily a big deal that there's mutual mistrust given the stakes. It's the real problem is that we don't have a way to work these things out peacefully and that could boil over.

Yeah, I mean, I'll give an example here that I think is helpful in thinking about it. So take the Civil Rights Act. That is one of the single hardest-fought moments in all of American political history. Certainly, one of our most consequential moments is a country. Now, if you think about what the polling during that period would say, it is very clear that people on both sides of that divide thought the other side represented a threat to the country, a threat to its future, a threat to decency and a threat to their way of life.

Right? I mean, white southerners were violent in the streets in defense of segregation and the forces of equality, like what they risked and what they took on to change the country. I mean, remains heroic today. But if you had said, is it the other party dangerous? What wouldn't it made any sense as a question? Because the Civil Rights Act passed with a higher proportion of Republicans voting for in Congress and Democrats, but a Democratic president being the one who pushed and signed

it. So it is not the case that the 20th century are divisions were smaller. It's the case that they didn't split by party or take the Vietnam War. Opposition and support for the Vietnam War were roughly equally distributed by party. So that's just what's very weird about the way things have changed.

I don't think that we have a greater divisions in this country now than we did then. I mean, you had more riots then, more political assassinations then, more political violence then. I mean, you had more riots then, more political assassinations then, more political violence then. I mean, you had more domestic terrorism, think about like the weatherman, etc. What was happening in the country was very fundamental. It was really coming apart. In National Guardsman killing protesters, it can state. It just wasn't split by party. Whereas here, I don't think the as of yet, although we will see

where we go in a couple of years, as of yet, I don't think the, as of yet, although we will see where we go in a couple of years, as of yet, I don't think the divisions are as deep and they're not yet thank God, as violent, but our politics is amplifying them as opposed to calming them. And that's a real difference. So what could be done about this? And what should be done about it? Ooh, I'm not big on solutions. I will say that I have ideas for how to make the American politics work better

in midst polarization, and many of them have to do with small de-democratizing the system. I think that the incentives of democracy itself are good. I think that if the, to win the presidency, you need to win a majority of the vote. Like, that is a good incentive system. There's a reason that most countries that are democracies do that. I feel the same way about the House, I feel the same way about the Senate. So I would like to see voting be easier and I would like to see majorities able to express themselves for voting, such that the will of the majority tends to decide who holds power, not as is currently the case, having the party that did not win majority, controlling most of the government. And then I would like to see majorities able to govern and once they do hold power.

And I want to be very clear here, what I'm offering is not a pathway for kind of big D democratic dominance. Republicans are very, very competitive when they have to win a majority of the vote. Just look at the states, look at Republican governors in blue states like Maryland and Massachusetts. I mean, you can have a very majoritarian Republican party. It's just because they don't have to do it that way that right now there's been a victory within that coalition for a path that has been minoritarian, but nevertheless is able to hold power. So I have that set of ideas, but the problem with them to just be very honest with you

and with the audience here is that for the same reasons that polarization keeps all kinds of things from getting done, it keeps big structural systemic reforms from happening. So like, if I was able to give you a plausible way that my solution set would pass, the problem I'm trying to address wouldn't be there in the first place, right? It would already have been fixed. We wouldn't be, if we could do what I'm talking about, like, well, then it'd be ridiculous to say we're paralyzed in the first place. And we'll see, I mean, coronavirus could upend the political system, given what's happening to the economy, search dramatically that maybe all bets are off in a year or two. But I think sometimes it is

worth simply as a writer and as a reporter and a journalist Describing how a system works or doesn't work even if you can't pretend to know how to fix it Hopefully what I'm offering in the book will to people of all political persuasions and thankfully It's largely been how people reacted to it be seen as an accurate description of what is happening in the system and why people's incentives Look the way they do how to change it is gonna be hard and I suspect we're not gonna solve it in the sense and why people's incentives look the way they do. How to change it is going to be hard. And I suspect we're not going to solve it in the sense of passing a package of bills or they're going to make it all go away. We're just going to change as a country either because our demographics change or something happens to us, you know, or we end up in a war or like the underlying structure 30 or

40 years from now is going to be different than it will be today. But I can't confidently tell you how. You do have some prescriptions, though, when it comes to how we can handle polarization as an individual. I want to get to those in a second, but before I do that, let me just go back to coronavirus. We talked at the beginning of this, how about how coronavirus definitely did not end polarization, what are the consequences of us being polarized as we navigate this pandemic in your mind? I don't know yet to be honest with you. I have rarely had as much trouble imagining the country three months or six months or one year into the future as I do now. Like even what the range of probabilities are just seems completely opaque to me.

I think it is possible that we are about to enter into a culture war over coronavirus that you're going to have the kind of blue coalition beyond the side of lockdown and the red coalition beyond the side of opening up. And that in particular, one of the things that has happened that I track in the book over the past 50, 80 years is we have polarized very dramatically by the density of places that we live. And so if you look into the early 20th century, how dense your community is, it does not predict which party you vote for. But if you look now, it's an incredibly powerful predictor of which party you vote for. But if you look now, it's an incredibly powerful predictor of which part of you vote for. There is not a single dense place in this country defining density

here as 900 people per square mile that votes for public. And so something that is true is that while coronavirus is very much a threat and a real issue in rural communities, it for the obvious logic of disease contagion is more dangerous in urban areas. And so layered on top of this sort of increasing red blue divide over what to do and what the incentives are, what you have then is like it's catalyzing this already quite dangerous urban world divide in our country. It has a lot of resentment built into it and a lot of like unusual power differentials because rural areas have disproportionate political power and

urban areas have disproportionate economic and cultural power. And so that both here and historically and other countries is a very dangerous dividing line to exacerbate. But on top of all that, one thing that like if you could stand outside the problem, I think we would see a little bit better, is polarization and bad governance is letting us polarize around a choice that should never even be the choice for making it all. We can't have a debate as we often have on Twitter right now, and I see it all the time,

and I see it from people I agree with, where it's like people who are functionally arguing for a lockdown with no end in sight against people functionally arguing for a lockdown with no end in sight against people functionally arguing for a reckless reopening. Both of those are untenable positions. You need to do the governance work to build a third option. In my view, and if you just look at where this is working in other countries, you need to build the testing, tracing, and quarantining capacity so that you can be in safely reopening as quickly as possible.

And it's in the absence of positive, some political leadership that is doing the work to build that third path that middle way that we end up polarizing around two ideas that neither of them are sustainable, neither of them are safe, and neither of them will work. And so having an incredibly polarized debate over two ideas that shouldn't even be the choice we're facing, like that is a deep and consequential failure loop for a country to be in. So now let's get to your argument about how we can depolarize ourselves. And as you write quite hilariously in your book,

you say, yeah, I know, of course, the politics book by the liberal Californian vegan ends with a call to mindfulness. So with that disclaimer out of the way, how can mindfulness help here? So there's a couple of things, right? I try to preempt a little bit of the mockery here in the book, but I don't even mean mindfulness in the sense that a lot of people mean it as meditation. I try to preempt a little bit of the mockery here in the book. But I don't even mean mindfulness in the sense that a lot of people mean it as meditation. I use some words from Robert Wright, who I know you've spoken to before, to talk about it more directly as just the capacity of being aware of what's going on in your own mind. Much of the book is about the way in which politics and political media and political figures manipulate our identities and how once our identities

Which we can talk about in define are activated that really changes our cognition It changes how we treat each other it changes our experience of the world and Like so many things that happen in our own minds the process of identity activation and then the process of Distortion through that activation It is very easy to be caught up in it and never realize it is happening and so something the process of identity activation and then the process of distortion through that activation, it is very easy to be caught up in it and never realize it is happening. And so something I'm trying to get people to do there

is to be a little bit more attentive to what is happening inside them and in the workings of their own minds when they are in political discussion, reading or consuming political media and otherwise having or being exposed to political triggers. Look, I am not a meditator in the way that many people you have on the show are, but I've been here before and I do try to have a real practice. And I think about it. And for me,

the great insight and meditation and mindfulness is that I often have no clue what is happening, not just in my own mind, but in my own body. The experience of just stopping and saying, oh, I'm not in a bad mood, I'm actually nauseous, or I'm not stressed, I'm actually tired, or I can't take 10 breaths in a row and not find myself looping over this thing that I can't seem to stop thinking about.

And realizing actually how little control I have over that, that for me, over a course of years has been a tremendously cognitively humbling process. And it's something that I think we need to expand to thinking about politics too, the sophistication with which we are manipulated in politics far exceeds the sophistication with which we understand our own cognitive and emotional reactions to political stimuli and just beginning to get some traction on that not even equalizing But just beginning to see that it is an issue is I think an important first step Even if the only thing is a first step towards is us individually having a better, healthier relationship with politics. I don't think this, and I'm very clear about this in the book, I don't think this is a systemic solution for our problems. I think it is a healthy thing to do

as individuals, and that is not worthless. Definitely not. So yes, I think that's worth saying. You're not saying meditation is going to solve all of our political dysfunction. What you are saying is that an individual who's living in this political environment can have a stator healthier relationship to her or his surroundings or their surroundings by employing and deploying mindfulness. Yeah, I think that's right.

And I use the example bit of Twitter here. And this is something I think about a lot because a lot of political communication now happens on Twitter, a lot of very important communication between politicians, between journalists. It's not real life as people say, but it is not meaningless in the way that many wish to think. And it is worth being there and just trying to take

a second or two after to ask, if you have somebody who spends time there, well, how do I feel right now? What is happening in me? What is different in me since opening that up than before? You know, this is true. Also for cable news, it's true for all kinds of different things. And there are things we cannot change about politics.

And there's all kinds of things we cannot change about our own lives. But something that we do have a little bit more control over than I think we give ourselves credit for is the informational ecosystems we inhabit and the kinds of identities that we reinforce through constant activation. And that's, by the way, a very important part of the book. We all have many identities, many identities. Some of them are political, some of them are not. I talk about myself as sort of a Californian, a father, a dog owner, a vegan, a Jew, a liberal, like a Mac user, you know, I have all kinds of things that are weak, that are strong, things that are values that people hold can become identities curious as an identity for me in a way that, you know, some other kind of values are not. And so the identities that get consistently threatened

or activated in some way are the ones that become very strong at us. We have a lot of psychological literature showing this. And so building an informational ecosystem for yourself, such that some such that you are trying to activate most often, the ones you want to be strongest. Like that is something that is more in our power than we realize, which is not to say it isn't a struggle, but I will tell you for sure that if you leave the entirety of that project to other people, it is not going to go the way you hope. So, I have this memory and we can go back to the check the tape and maybe my memory is

wrong, but I have this memory of the last time you were on the show, which was before you had written the book. I was, I think, extolling the virtues of a varied media diet. And I have this memory that you said, actually, there's some evidence that that doesn't actually work to depolarize yourself. Did I remember that incorrectly? No, that's correct. I talk about that evidence in the book. And so it is 100% not my view that the way you're going to get to a better version of yourself is that if you're a liberal listening to this say, you should start

firing up bright-part news three times a day. Not only does that not work, it does the opposite. I talk about, for instance, an experiment in the book. This is to my knowledge, the single largest experiment of its kind, done on social media, where researchers at Duke University, they paid, we've those 1200 people in the ultimate version of the study. They paid them to let the researchers restructure their Twitter feeds, such as if you were a Democrat, you began seeing Republican voices that their researchers had chosen for you and vice versa if you were Republican.

their research was chosen for you and vice versa if you were a Republican. And what happens at the end of the study is that the people who are exposed to this like now diversity of voices in their Twitter feed, the Republicans become more conservative and the Democrats, the effect is small, so it's not clear that it was significant, but if it had any directionality at all, they become more liberal. So it's really not my view at all that what you should do is just like try to expose yourself to quote unquote the other side, it's very important that you're exposing yourself.

Either the things that are strengthening some other dimension of you, so I talk a lot in the book about strengthening state and local identities. One of my really big pieces of advice from people is to actually make sure you are reading a local news source every day.

But then another version is you can try to find people who do not feel like they're on the other side and you who you share enough with that you can like listen to them. So there's a really big difference between people who are writing persuasively for an audience that doesn't agree with them and people who are writing persuasively for an audience that does agree with them. I use the example of don't read Breitbart, if you're on the left, at least if you wanna kind of pursue this project

of personal depolarization, but somebody who you might wanna read is like Ross Douthet at the New York Times. Just gonna say that name. Who is somebody who is very, very self-consciously trying to talk to a liberal audience even though he is a conservative. And he writes in a way where he's trying to like

get himself in your circle so then you can hear him. It's a very particular kind of work. So you have to be very thoughtful about how you do this. It isn't simply the easy version of the echo chamber, right? Like if you like watching Sean Hannity, like switch over to MSNBC too, like that doesn't appear to do much for people. You actually have to be pursuing this in a more intentional way than that. With a more, I think, sophisticated or maybe on this podcast, I guess where you'd use a skillful understanding of how your psychology works. You know, let me just tell you a little bit of how I do it. And I may be a special case just because I'm a journalist, but I feel like the firing up bright part thing is a bit

of a red herring in a sense. I wouldn't recommend that either, but I do, for example, I try to be small-sea Catholic in my podcast listening and in my digital paragrenations around like what I'm reading online. And so, for example, on podcasts, I listen to you. I listen to The Weeds, which is also on the Vox Media Network. I listen to Morning Joe. I listen to The Pod I listen to the weeds, which is also on the Vox Media Network. I listen to Morning Joe, I listen to the PodSaves, America guys, and then I also listen

to the commentary podcast. They've gone to daily, actually, during the coronavirus. I listen to Ben Shapiro, who's daily, occasionally I listen to the Federalists, and then I work at ABC News, so I'm getting some pretty straight down the middle news as a huge part of my diet. It's very interesting to be mindful as I'm consuming all of this content because it's

possible that Joe Scarborough can say something that I find, you know, totally triggering in the same thing with Ben Shapiro, and I can watch how this is playing out. I can watch how my... So interesting to see how my ancient and perhaps irrational desire to see people vanquished can come up and how delightful I find it when somebody agrees with me. And I find that that makes me,

and maybe this is just me imagining it, but I feel like that makes me a better citizen and a better journalist. What do you think of the foregoing? So I have a couple thoughts there. One is that I will say also for me that that I think in many ways my healthiest political identity is out of journalists. It is an identity that for me front loads curiosity, at front loads, and need to understand.

I don't get to just write people off. I have to figure out where they're coming from. The question is not simply for me, are people right, but do they represent something happening in our politics? And to what you were just saying, I actually think that podcasts are a really good place to do that. So I was talking a couple of minutes ago about the ways in which different mediums make us feel and how people act in different mediums. The absolute worst place to do this is Twitter, because people are a very one dimensional,

unnuanced speaking to their own crowd version of themselves on Twitter. Some of the people you just mentioned, if you follow their Twitter accounts and you listen to their podcast, you get very different versions of them. One reason I'm a pretty low volume Twitter these days is because I do not feel I can be there. And the more I am there, the further I stray from the values I want to embody in my own work. So it isn't to say I'm not there at all. I promote a lot of

ox stuff on Twitter, right? Like I promote my stuff and occasionally send off some tweets. But the better I am at Twitter, in many ways, the worse I am in terms of what I want to be versus podcasting, it has the nature of being in conversation with people. It brings forward a social dynamic where people are looking for oftentimes some of conciliation. Most people do not like the feeling of conflict in like a real and direct way. And so you'll often actually have the experience of I try on my podcast to make sure I'm bringing on people who disagree with me.

And I will have people who have spent a long time disagreeing in very sharp terms with me. And they'll get on my podcast and I'll be like, all right, hit me with it. Like let's do the thing. And I will not get them to, they won't say it, right? Because like the feeling of being there in a room with someone or there in conversation with someone, it is so different.

Now you wanna be a little careful with that because you can be, you wanna make sure that you are seeing both sides of these things is true. It is not the case as some people like to pretend that the version of ourselves we are when we are trying to be reasonable, trying to win someone over is necessarily our true self. A lot of people, including reporters like me, have been fooled by politicians or others who are trying to be reasonable in one venue.

And then when it comes down to the vote, they do something that is not what they told you they were going to do or not what they were framing themselves is going to do. I remember, for instance, something like this with Evan By was a Democratic senator from Indiana. And I remember talking to him when he was leaving the Senate and he gave us stirring op-ed and then interview with me about how the Senate had become a broken institution and he was going to go be a university president or teacher work for philanthropy just do something where he could actually help people. And like I covered all that and then he went and signed up I think it was with a private equity firm and you know just like kind of went

into buck raking. And you know so you got to be careful because people don't always present breaking. And, you know, so you got to be careful because people don't always present. There are mediums that will pull out a kind of showy part of someone that, you know, you have to actually track if you're getting the true version of them or track that's going to hold to their incentives down the road. But I think podcasting is a place where people try to be heard and can be halting more human versions of themselves in a way that writing forces a sharpness and a declarativeness from a versions of themselves in a way that writing forces a sharpness and a declarativeness from a lot of people, and then particularly social media

has a kind of conflict and contempt oriented discourse that makes it very hard to see yourself and somebody who doesn't already agree with you or you don't already agree with. Yeah, I agree with that. So podcasts win in this project over social media for sure. And speaking of podcasts, another one that I would recommend is co-hosted

by the aforementioned Russ Douthat. It's called the Argument It's a New York Times podcast, and he is on there with, is it Michelle? Missile Goldberg and David Lee and Hart. Yes, it's an excellent podcast, and you really get to hear people who have different views of the world interact, and sorry, this is me looking for affirmation here.

But on behalf of the audience, you do think that one could have a varied podcast diet that could help in this project of depolarizing oneself. That would be different than, as you said, firing up right bark three times a day or letting somebody reprogram your Twitter feed. I do, but I really want to emphasize that I think that people hear this and the place they naturally go, which is sort of where you've gone here, is to this idea of depolarizing yourself. In the sense of, I'm on the left, I should be more open to the right.

I'm on the right, I should be more open to the left. And I think that is a cramped, in many ways, a cramped way to think about the choices here. Number one, for a lot of the reasons I was talking about earlier with polarization, actually being a real thing, the truth of the matter is that the choice, one thing you can very easily do in this, and I do it, but I have a reason I do it for myself, is I am often trying to create an argument that doesn't quite exist, for instance. I mean, if you are reading Rost out that to understand the right, you do not understand anything about Donald Trump. Ross Douthit is no closer to Donald Trump really than I am. So one, by nature of looking for voices that you respect, you are very likely to distort the

actual political structure you're dealing with. So it's a good intellectual project because like you should, you know, like I have a little Tyler Cowan is a libertarian leaning economist who I really like and admire and I can spin up a little Tyler Cowan on my shoulder for that critique, but like nobody in politics thinks like Tyler. So one, you gotta be careful about what you're actually doing, but two, I think it is important. One of the things that seems true to me then that we are too left or too right is that we are too national, that we are too, that we are actually just being pulled in this way I try to describe in the book towards one singular division of politics. And what I think would be the healthiest thing for our politics, Rick Brodley, is actually, I mean, you can try moving people from the left to the right or making them more open-minded, but because politics has a way of collapsing down to a binary yes-no,

but because politics has a way of collapsing down to a binary yes, no, that doesn't actually do you that much good given that it will not be as multi-dimensional, say your podcast listening, what can be really important is creating new dimensions actually for polarization. So for instance, I mean, this is why I think it's a really important thing to track that our politics has become so incredibly nationalized, something I talk a lot about in the book, and I think this is a really important part of it, is we were built, our entire structure is built to represent place very heavily, but over the past 30 or 40 or 50 years,

place has really receded as an important dimension of our politics. If you look at how members of the House voter, members of the Senate vote, it has very little to do on the big ticket items with where with where they're from and almost everything to do with much party they represent. And like one way I always tell people to think about this is the Affordable Care Act was a straightforward subsidy from the insured to the uninsured and from richer states to

poorer states, or at least from states with lower uninsured populations to states with higher ones. So if you look from that perspective, what you should see is politicians representing high and insured constituencies voting for it and those representing low and insurance constituencies voting against it, but you don't. You just see Republicans voting against it and Democrats voting for it,

no matter what they represent. So I really pushed people to the idea that you actually wanna be developing cross cutting identities, not just trying to change this left-right identity structure. And that means, again, regional is very important there. I think, like, listening to things like this show, I think there is a spiritual dimension on politics that can be very powerful if it is practiced in a consistent and rigorous way, not just as a secondary identity, but something that actually gives you an anchoring

from political wins. So it isn't just about left right. Like, I would really urge people to try to break a little bit out of that space because in many ways, the problem with politics from a polarization perspective is that if we're going to collapse down to simply left right in a system that works way ours does, then everything is going to be zero sum. Am I wrong to think that in some ways you're harkening back to your exhortation issued earlier to maybe anchor your identity in the place where you live, not just are you on

the left or the right when it comes to the national political scene? Yeah, or at least that's one. I mean, I really do urge people in the book and look recognizing I'm a national political journalist and do not always practice what I preach here, but anchor more in areas that they are. People are very caught up in national politics when they often can't have that much effect on it. They routinely do not even know who their state representative is, even though that person probably meet them for coffee.

Just trying to have an effect in the place you live can be very powerful, can be very healing, it can be very important, like in a literal, consequential sense. And over time, those things can work together in useful ways. If we had a politics built more in place, I think we'd have a better politics. But you don't even have to just anchor, right?

Like a simple way of putting this is if 90% of your political news consumption is national, what if that were just 70%. It doesn't have to go all the way over to the other side. I'm not saying abandoned national politics. I'm just saying that for most of us, we could stand to move a little bit in the direction. For me, I live in California. I make sure that I check the LA times every day.

I do it through. I like the LA times app, so people should download that if they are interested. But the LA times does the best job of covering California. And like, that's really important to me, even though my job is I cover things nationally. So I'm very involved nationally. I try to make sure I have a special attention

to what's going on in the area around me. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ More 10% happier after this. More 10% happier after this. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brownleur,

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I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. So you said before if I heard you correctly that the project here isn't depolarizing ourselves, so if that's not what the project is, what is the project? So for me first, yes, the project is not depolarization. For me first and foremost, the project is understanding how the system we are in actually works and how it works upon us. And it is really, again, it is extraordinarily important to my political views that I am not here to tell you being polarized given the choices we are faced with is the wrong attitude.

I would like American politics, given that I think polarization is somewhat natural and somewhat inevitable. I would like American politics to be functional and governable within the context of polarization. Now, other people could read the book and read the analysis and have a totally different idea of solutions, including that depolarization is the only thing that matters. But my view of this is that we simply do not know. And I cannot stress this enough because I really have looked. I might feel differently here if there was any intervention we knew of that could work at scale to depolarize. If I could find in my research anything like that, I can tell you lots of things that work at very small scales.

If there's this whole thing about intergroup contact hypotheses in the way kind of setting up particular structures in which people from different groups work together and in service of a common project and so on. And there are groups like better angels that do that work. But in terms of like what is happening at the national level at scale, we're not going to depolarize. We're going to move a little bit back and forward. And then at some point something big is going to happen that is going to change the game

entirely. And who again, I guess it's possible coronavirus will be that thing, depending on what happens over the next year or two. But I think that we have to accept polarization as a dynamic we are living with for now and try to understand how to adapt to it. In very much the same way that, for instance, with climate change, which I wish we did not have climate change, I want to do everything we can to stop it, but also I want like we need to accept that the climate is changing around us and we are going to have to figure out how to make our societies work in that context, at least you know up to a certain level of warming. So part of what I'm trying

to do is establish this as a force and reality in our lives such that it is more than simply something we lament and have ineffectual conversations about how to turn back. So there's something that we can bring into our analysis of how things work and use to see the world a little bit more clearly. Sorry, to be clear, Mayan, I wasn't asking about when I said the project being depolarization, I wasn't asking in a macro sense. I met more for us as individuals who want to be as happy and sane as we can be given the political atmosphere in which we exist. I think about how we can have a better, how we can be better citizens and how we can,

so there are two things that I'm interested in here. One is how can we be better citizens given the atmosphere in which we're existing and then how can we be happier? Healthiers, humans in the same atmosphere. I do not think that the answer is to give up your principles, but I do think there is value in having understanding empathy and compassion vis-a-vis those with whom you disagree because as you reference this group better angels, a group I have a lot of respect for, they're not doing

this work at scale per se, but they are doing pretty interesting work on a micro level bringing reds and blues together and facilitating conversations where they try to get to what they call accurate disagreement. And that strikes me as a really interesting I've been to these encounter sessions and you can see that it just feels good it It's not that they're trying to convert the other side. They're just trying to actually understand them. Yeah, I don't disagree with any of that. I've been on the Better Angels podcast. I'm very much in touch with those folks. And as I said, I tend to be a fan of trying to work on

both your temperament and engagement with politics, such that it doesn't fall prey to some of this, but to try to like hold your views in a space of honesty and rigor, which of course everybody does, right? It's like easy enough to talk about that. But that's why I try to be careful on this. I mean, and it's again why in the book, what I call for in that section is not exactly depolarization, but in this case, it was identity mindfulness. But actually mindfulness is a very good way of thinking about it. What I am urging people to do is to make sure that you are acting in politics with intentionality and that you are noticing, again, here speaking individually, what politics is doing to you, how you are being manipulated by it. And so to some degree,

if you're somebody who you look at the current situation and you feel that the right answer is just a very polarized answer and you want to act that way in relationship to it? I'm not against that. I think that is a totally reasonable viewpoint, actually. And I also think the other viewpoint is reasonable. And, you know, I blather on about politics professionally so people can certainly see where I fall on this day-to-day and frankly, it changes day-to-day. But I think mindfulness is actually a good place to start here, rather than

being attached to which outcome you're going to get to. That's why I'm a little cautious when you say depolarization because I find sometimes people mistake the path there for the destination. Yes, so I completely understand that. When I say depolarization again, I do not mean, I think there's a vast difference between seeing things from an alternate point of view and dropping your values or abandoning your values. Let me add one thing in here, though, that is something I am thinking a lot about and struggling with a lot, and I feel like this is a rare space where I can talk about it, which is something that I talk about a lot in the book

and think about a lot in politics is the ways in which the system has become zero sum. Again, here's separate from like the polarizing nature of disagreements. I describe it length and it is true that the way we've set up our system, it is irrational for the minority party to work with the majority party in most cases

and so they don't And so nothing gets done. And people, what they want to do typically in politics is win is beat the other side. And again, I describe and have a lot of studies showing the ways in which policy, which is positive, some collapses down to identity competition. And I'm using identity in a very broad way here, not in the way identity politics is often used, which is kind of zero sum. Group power competition is zero sum because you're fighting over status. Something that I have been struggling with in myself is this idea that, like, how would you think

about more ideas of nodulism in your politics? We are built on so many metaphors and ideas and approaches that both explicitly and implicitly tell you to imagine winning as actually beating the other side. A victory for someone is a loss for someone else. But something that I have seen many, many times in politics is that when you are doing what emotionally ends up feeling like winning, you are often actually losing. And when you are winning, what you are doing is often very emotionally difficult. And to be more vivid on this, to pass legislation often means compromising on so many things and giving up so much and including so many voices and stakeholders, to the people who passed it, it doesn't end up feeling like a win at all.

Like take the Affordable Care Act, which was a very painful process for many of the people who passed it, it doesn't end up feeling like a win at all. Like take the Affordable Care Act, which was a very painful process for many of the people who were pushing it from the very beginning. They lost many fights along the way to at least somewhat winning a war, which ended up helping pens and millions of people get health insurance for whatever its flaws. So that was a process in which they won a genuinely historic substantive victory, but it was grueling. Meanwhile, I see constantly this sort of the noble loser kind of thing happening where people love, they love winning a fight that actually turns people against them, say on Twitter or in an election, or they prefer to lose

in a way that keeps them pure. And I think we need to find better ways to tell stories, to do reporting, to just think about the people, about how to have a politics where you recognize that you don't win by beating people, you win by bringing them into your circle with you, you win by expanding your coalition, you win by entering into a relationship that over time allows you to be heard by somebody who wouldn't otherwise listen to you. They just give a very quick story here. Something I think a lot about, which is on my podcast probably about a year ago, is the Swim and Leia Garcis, who is the head of Mercy for Animals. And Leia is a long time animal, rights activist, and she is somebody who looks around and

sees an injustice happening in the world around us at a scale so large as to be mind-melting. And what she focused on particularly is the way we treat and torture and kill chickens. And she realized what she was doing wasn't working. And so what she began doing over the past couple of years as in her organization behind her is beginning to build coalitions with chicken farmers, the people who are actually carrying out the slaughter that she has devoted her life to stopping, and trying to find common cause with them on their working conditions and on the way they're being treated, such that together they could take some of the steps towards treating both

the human beings and the animals better, even if the ultimate worlds they both want are really different. And that's a really difficult kind of political practice that is doing a lot of good in the world. And that I think we don't honor or see or teach that well. Like we, you know, that is not what happens at the end of the show, you know, or the end of the story. But to me, like, that's a very non-dualistic way of doing this, like, recognizing somebody who, in some ways, seems the most like your enemy is a person you actually need to build the bridge with in order to get something

done, not because you guys are going to end up agreeing, but because politics is often this not just art of compromise, but art of acceptance of a pluralistic space in which we're all going to have to give a little bit to get a little. And something that worries me is that I just think we're becoming much more zero sum. I think you have very polarized opinions, but still that kind of approach to politics. You can have very middle-to-road opinions, but have a very, very zero sum approach to politics. And I don't know.

I would, you're hearing me rambling a bit because I think this stuff is hard, but I think it's important to start trying to call out this kind of political practice as something that is maybe pretty important here. So, how do you think that would look in an individual life for people here listening who are just regular people who happen to live in America at a time of polarization, of increased polarization? How would we operationalize this non-dual vision that you're starting to articulate here?

Well, so in a big way, I don't know, because I'm starting to play with it and think about it. But in a small way, I think maybe there is something more clear here, which is to say that the people who do this are trying to get something done. It is easier to make politics a polarizing war of group identity when it is most abstract. When you are sitting somewhere and thinking about the overall national or even international picture and it doesn't really moment to moment affect you that much. So you're not actually like trying to do anything but like you're trying to beat the other side

because you correctly fear or hate them or incorrectly fear or hate them, whatever it might be. One reason I push people to getting engaged locally, and one reason I use a lay-eggarsus example where she is a very, very specific goal, which is fewer chickens living lives of torture and slaughter, is that because the goals become so clear, it becomes much easier to see that you need to build these coalitions and create these compromises and create a form of politics that is about making progress,

not feeling self-righteous. And so making sure that your politics is actually dedicated and oriented towards getting something tangible done in the world around you, which is much easier to do locally than nationally. I think is probably a first step. There's a political scientist named Tom Hirsch, who makes a distinction between what he calls

political hobbyism, which is following and being engaged in politics as a hobby, like the way you might be engaged in sports, and actually doing the work of politics, which he sees as trying to win people over and actually get power. So there are different ways of cutting this conceptually. Nanduolas may be something in my head, but not even, but still not the clearest one. But I think that making sure you're trying to actually get something done and that you're anchored to that, you're anchored to actually helping, not just winning, is probably the base upon which to build that kind of approach.

That sounds reasonable to me. It does. I don't know if I can help you develop the idea any further, but the notion that what you just said about stepping out of the abstract, national, hobbyist-based approach to politics and into these sort of very hands-in-the-dirt, practical, local working with people with whom you may not share the same worldview toward a common goal of helping other people. That seems like a very practical, doable way to be part of the solution rather than the problem.

I mean, I certainly hope so and it is at the, achievable. And if you do it at worst, you do try to help people locally. So, you know, look, at the same time, people have to and should be engaged in national politics somewhere or another. So I think it's simply about making sure you have a good breakdown between the two. But the more your politics can be about making progress,

the more it is going to naturally fall into a positive someplace. And the more your politics actually relies on who wins something that only one side can win like an election, the more it will naturally be in a zero someplace. And there's just sort of no real way to get around that. My goal, as I have said in this discussion was, you know, aside from just bringing you on and getting to hear you talk, which is always great, was to give people some practical sense of how to, in the midst of these weird and unpleasant

times in which we're living to be better citizens, but also to have a better relationship, a sane or healthier relationship to the political scene. Have I given you a chance to fully give your thoughts about that in this interview or are there things that I've missed? No, I think I've talked plenty. I'll say, and I'll say it as a question to you, because I'm sure people be interested in the tuning in over you. I struggle with the question of how to talk even just about things like mindfulness and

meditation amidst crisis, because I don't want to tell people You know, there's like that old line that it is not a sign of health to become a custom to a sick society and Obviously, I want good things to come out of this, but I wonder how you think about the Relationship because it's something I struggle with between trying to engage in practices that help you accept what is going on versus listening to maybe a proper sense of rage and frustration and anxiety it provokes because those can be activating emotions that help people recognize it's something has to change not just that we should learn to have a better relationship with something that should never have happened in the first place.

Yeah, I think it's a bit of a false binary because I think acceptance and a meditative contemplative sense is not at all resignation or passivity. It's accepting what is the truth right now, being mindful and curious about it? So like you're seeing something playing out on TV, like the horror in America's nursing homes and you're feeling the anger, the sadness, the many other emotions that may come up. You can in that moment calmly with some curiosity investigate the feelings that you're feeling how they're showing up in your body, the kinds of thoughts they're provoking and metabolize the emotions that will allow you to then take the action that

you want to take that is most likely to be effective from a place of some increased calm rather than reflexive rage. And so I am really, I'm not a proponent of bland, blind acceptance, but rather a mindful, calm, compassionate engagement. Does that make sense? Yeah, it very much does. I mean, you know, I don't know if this is a review. It's something that right now I really struggle with.

Not that I would have the capacity to have acceptance, even if I wanted it, but I have found it harder to have a good practice right now than at any other time. And I don't know, it's funny. It's, you would think there's this way in which it forces you to just be in one place and sit and like experiences, but the desire to not feel it has been very powerful for me. I've been very much struggling with my practice here in a way that I, not that I haven't been trying to keep it up because I have been, but, um, but yeah, there is something about wanting to flee from this moment and knowing

that we might be in it for a long time, which is really, really increased the tendency I sometimes have to want to run from an unpleasant emotion. Oh, I mean, I really hear that and I appreciate you saying it. And just so I'm clear because I want to respond to it, but I want to respond accurately, you're not saying you're finding yourself not doing whatever your daily, a lot of, or daily-ish, a lot of meditation is, but that on the cushion you're finding

that it's choppier, is that what you're saying? Yeah, it's not just choppier. What is even the right way to put it? That the work that is going in to just making it through the time on the cushion, like there is so much internal struggle in that that sometimes what I've loved the most about it, like that feeling of like clarity and like you're seeing something, you know, maybe every once in a while, I'm like that so much of that is gone.. I have an internal drive towards distraction right now.

This desire to not feel this way that makes the work of trying to let myself sit with the things that are actually happening and just experience them much harder. No matter what the way of doing it is, that's true for my time on the cushion. It's true also just like for my space as a human being. I was talking to somebody and she made the point that like I've started drinking a lot more coffee during this period and she made the point like, well, how does your body feel? And it was like, this is my therapist. And she's like, and I was like, oh, my body feels tired. And my mind is going crazy. And trying to like sit in between those things has been very disorienting.

Okay. I have a bunch of responses with the caveat that I am not a trained meditation teacher. So this is a little bit like getting your gallbladder removed by somebody who slept at a holiday in last night. But first of all, I would give yourself a break. That's my number one message to you is give yourself a break. That's my number one message to you, is give yourself a break. We are living through times that suck. And I think perfectionism is going to be super unhelpful

right now. This urge toward doing things the way with the quality that we were doing it before the pandemic. I just think that's too big an ask. And the fact that you're you may be forming or exacerbating some habits that you had BC before corona, but are they getting worse now? You know, the coffee drinking, the urge toward distraction may be a Twitter or or TV or whatever it is, whatever your vice,

not that either of those things is truly a vice, but if you misuse them, they can be. I think that's all just gonna happen. And you wanna do your best to be mindful of it, but like not tell yourself some story, but being a failure if it's happening at an increased level because we're all gonna find coping mechanisms for just a terrible moment in human history.

In terms of the meditation practice itself, the one thing you said that really struck me was the clarity that you like. It might be helpful to notice that that's a form of desire. You are wanting more clarity and wanting is one of the most noxious things you can bring to the meditative party. And there is going in with expectations about what's going to happen in a sit is truly going to trip you up. And in fact, it's meditation, it's so useful to be reminded of the fact that meditation isn't about feeling any certain way, it's about feeling whatever you're feeling clearly. So that the feelings and many of our feelings these days are difficult, don't yank you around as much.

So I just said a bunch of words. Did any of that make sense to you? No, that very much does make sense to me. I mean, I think it is, I will just say for me, it is a constant lesson of these practices that I often do go in wanting something. I started meditating because I wanted to feel less anxious. And instead, what it did for years

was kind of show me how I was actually feeling. And that forced me to make changes that would help me ultimately, you know, feel a little bit more at home in my own skin. And I take the point you're making there too, that certainly for me, I definitely struggle with remembering that it's just about seeing what is there. And yeah, like sometimes what is there is not what you wish was there because things are not what you wish they were. But that space between your driven sometimes to meditate by a wanting of something,

and the wanting is in some ways the enemy of the meditation is, that's an interesting tension to hold. But just know what I'm hearing from you is good practice. The wanting is totally natural. You don't deserve a smack on the snout for that. That's just human. Why we need teachers in our lives, or good friends who also meditated, is just to be reminded of very basic things that we often forget. That's the function of having fellow meditators in your life, or meditation teachers in your life, is to just be reminded of things because we all fall into these traps of wanting. I go into, over and over, I learn about the the disutility of desire in my own meditation practice. And that's the point. And what I heard from you

about how you're encountering and not liking these things that are coming up in your meditation practice, well, that to me sounds like you're doing it right. Because if, if you're not more anxious right now, you are not paying attention because we're in a pandemic and it sucks. But if you stick with it and try to maybe notice the desire of arising and let it go a little bit and it relaxes into all of these uncomfortable emotions you're feeling just to the best of your ability with the promise of meditation.

And I feel pretty confident about this promise is that you'll be able to coexist with these difficult emotions more skillfully than you would by either trying to feed them, fight them or paper over them through Twitter benches or too much coffee. Yeah, well, I did want to come into this and be told by you I was doing it right, so I feel like I really, really got my goal achieved here today. It's so fun to talk to you. Congratulations on the book and I really appreciate you making this much time for the podcast. So so thank you.

No, it's always a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Big thanks to Ezra before we go and remind you that discount we're running right now 40% off a subscription to 10% happier Just go to the link in the show notes and as always if you're somebody who works in healthcare or education or in the grocery stores or food delivery the app is free just go to 10% dot com slash care I want to thank the team who work so hard on the show all week long, every week. Samuel Johns, running point, our producer, our sound designers, our Matt Boynton, and Agna Sheshik of Ultraviolet Audio, Maria Wartel, is our production coordinator.

We get a ton of incredibly important input and guidance from our colleagues at 10% Ben Rubin, Jen Poient, Liz Levin, and Nate Toby. Also big thank you to our ABC comrades Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohan. We'll see you on Wednesday for Rochy Jones' Halifax. That was a great conversation. Excited to bring that to you. We'll see you soon. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.

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