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The Ezra Klein Show

By Ezra Klein

Produced by Annie Galvin

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

There tend to be two ways one might be familiar with the novelist George Saunders. One is through his amazing short story collections and novels — “Lincoln in the Bardo” is one of my favorite books of all time. The other is through his role as one of America’s leading prophets and proselytizers of kindness, which largely stems from the virality of this beautiful commencement speech he gave some years ago:

Archival clip of George Saunders: What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was right there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded sensibly, reservedly, mildly. Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly?

I’ve talked to Saunders about that speech. He was on the show in 2021 in an episode that many people tell me is their favorite.

Archival clip of Saunders: 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.

I’ve always thought of Saunders in that mode — as the kindness guy. But reading his new novel, “Vigil,” which is about an oil tycoon on his deathbed being visited by angels and people from his past trying to get him to reassess his own life, I began to realize that Saunders is more interested in something else now — not kindness, but the question of judgment. Not just the question of how we treat others, but how we understand our own lives.

In this book, you can feel Saunders searching for bigger, darker game. This is a book about sin and judgment. It’s about free will, and whether or not we have it.

And in it there’s a very fundamental tension between the side of Saunders that does not want to judge — that wants to explain who we are in terms of the conditions we came from, which is a stance of very deep compassion — and the side of him that thinks judgment is necessary, that sin needs to be recognized and that you cannot have truth if you are not willing to open up to ideas of fundamental wrongdoing.

So I wanted to explore some of these questions with Saunders. I wanted to see for him, in this moment, what lies beyond kindness.

Ezra Klein: George Saunders, welcome back to the show.

George Saunders: It’s so nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

There’s a moment in your new book, “Vigil,” where one of the main characters is on his deathbed, and he offers this prayer: “Thank you, Lord, thank you for making me who I was and not some little squirming powerless nincompoop. Thank you for making me unique, one of a kind, incomparable, victorious.”

Tell me about that prayer.

He’s a guy who has been driven by ambition his whole life, and it has served him pretty well. He’s a really powerful oil executive. He had, as I imagined him, some early insecurity instillers. So his whole life he was working against that to try to assert himself and give himself enough power so that he’d never feel that again. And he did it.

I think he’s just turning to God and saying: I’m correct, aren’t I? Like: I did it right? That’s why you gave me all this power?

And he hears God saying: Yes, you did great.

From my perspective, it’s a moment of extreme delusion, where he’s getting exactly the wrong message from the moment he’s in. But from my own experience of being a person, you develop a certain approach to life to keep anxiety at bay, to solidify your view of yourself, to make it easier to get through life.

Then it’s really hard to peel that away. He has an opportunity to maybe have a different perspective on his life — and he just passes.

Do you think there’s a question inside of that?

A question that feels very culturally relevant to me right now — which is whether the greatness that the world rewards, the power that the world offers, is something to be lauded or is something to be feared and ashamed of?

I think it’s something to look askance at. I think everybody, to a greater or lesser extent, is involved in trying to get over in some way, trying to push back on the natural fear that we have of being out of control.

But I think what should be becoming clear to us is that if you say power is everything — that if I get that power, I’m safe — that’s completely B.S. There’s not a world where one person could have so much power as to be above suffering. There just isn’t.

I think our culture is in a particular moment where we have forgotten that for various reasons. So it’s easy politically and maybe personally to think: If I just get enough of this power, then I’m safe.

But that’s clearly delusional.

And: If I just get enough of this validation.

I was thinking about how you have a safer form of social acclaim. You’re a novelist and a writer and very beloved. People quote your work on kindness. You’ve received a lot of social praise.

I have my own version of this. And it can be pretty easy, if you’re having a moment of self-doubt, to fall back on the things the world has told you about yourself. And I wondered when I read this whether any part of you identified with that prayer or the feelings within it.

Oh, 100 percent. When you write a book like this, everybody is you. You both believe in them, and you think they’re full of it.

That’s the whole game of being a novelist. I remember thinking: OK, George, if you were on your deathbed and some evidence was presented that you’d wasted your life, what would your response be?

And, of course, you want to think it would be: Oh, I am corrected. But, in fact, you double down. You say: But I wrote books! So that’s a big, big danger, I think, for anybody — and certainly for me.

The praise comes in, and you accept it very happily, and it inflates you. The blame comes in, and you don’t accept it quite so easily, and you deflect it.

I find it to be the opposite, actually.

[Klein and Saunders laugh.]

Right. That’s right. That’s a good point.

The praise goes off the back like water off a duck, and then you get one mean comment and you’re thinking about it for two weeks.

For sure. And one of the cool things about getting older, actually, is that you realize that everything in the universe is giving you the memo that you’re temporary and that you’re on the way out. Your hairline, your body, the way you feel.

But then in a moment when you get praised, that information contradicts that somehow, and the ego goes: Oh, we are important. We are permanent. I’m still growing in import.

I was actually thinking about a different moment in your life as I was reading the book, which is about K.J. Boone, an oil company C.E.O. You had worked early in your life as a geophysical prospector.

What is a geophysical prospector?

I was trained at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colo.

We’d go into an area where there might be oil, and then we’d plant a dynamite charge, 10 or 15 feet underground, blow it off, and then with a sophisticated system of sensors, we would record the sound waves as they came back up. Then that could be used to predict the three-dimensional topography underground, which then in turn could be used to locate wells.

How did you get into that?

I trained for it. I was a geophysics major.

I figured. [Laughs.] They don’t just send you out with dynamite and a map.

At that time in the 1980s, that was kind of what they were teaching at the School of Mines in geophysics — highly mathematical and technical.

One of the things that happened that was kind of life informing was: When I was a trainee, I was in a room, and they were having a meeting in the next room with the higher-ups. And it became clear — I could overhear it — that the grid that we were using to submit our drilling recommendations and the grid that the national oil company of Indonesia was using were different.

So we would say: Drill here. And they would take it onto their map and drill in a completely randomized location.

So as the conversation unfolded, everybody was getting awkwardly quiet in there. And then there was a kind of a group agreement that this was unfortunate, but it could be overlooked, and it wouldn’t go any further up the line.

So for 10 years they had been spending millions of dollars on this information and then randomizing it and drilling anyway. And they just decided to keep it quiet.

So it was Kafkaesque.

That does sound very Kafkaesque.

So what was and what is your relationship to oil, to energy, to this fundamental engine of human existence and progress and destruction?

I use it. At that time, it was very simple — it was just an adventure. People weren’t really talking climate change much.

There was some sense, which I saw firsthand, that we were running roughshod over the environment in that area and also over the culture. We were just sort of imperialists, you know?

But mostly, for me, it was just thrilling. We would go into these rainforests where no one had ever set foot, and we’d have the local guys cut a very narrow path, and we’d go in, and there were tigers. For a 22-year-old, it was a thrill.

I used that in the book just to get a way into his mind, like somebody who feels positively about this endeavor. I could see if I had been a little more talented at it, I might have become an executive, and those early feelings of tribal pride would probably have just grown and grown and grown.

So K.J. Boone is an oil company C.E.O. Did you research him? Is he based on anyone for you? How did you put yourself in the mind of a robber baron of sorts?

I researched a bunch for a month. I just read everything I could find, took notes, and then I just put it away.

The purpose of that is not to ever give someone’s biography or to have a real-life basis, but just so that the invention is within the realm of the plausible. For the voice and the attitude — in fiction, I’m always trying to find a corollary to that person in my mind and then trying to build out that corollary.

With him, taking that early oil experience and also superimposing my writing life, the pride I feel in that and the investment I have in that, and then just sort of growing that out line by line.

The game is to make sure that with each one of those you’ve done them the service of really listening and really trying to inhabit the world through their point of view.

What are the years you’re writing this book?

The last three years.

So the last three years, specifically, have been a fight over what we should think about the “great men of history.” And this goes back before the last few years, but the last decade, let’s call it, which is certainly in your head — what should you think about the founding fathers of this country?

What should you think about somebody with the personality of Donald Trump? Clearly a man who has bent the river of history himself. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg.

I was just at the Frick Collection — and, I mean, what a beautiful gallery. Then you read a little bit about Henry Frick. It’s built on some blood, that incredible museum.

So there’s both the critique of the great men of history and then also in the period in which you’re writing, specifically, the backlash to that critique. The backlash to the idea that we have swept away the need for these conquerors, these human beings who are engines of a certain kind of progress.

You may not like what that progress requires, but that is how we have America. That is how we’ll one day go to Mars. That is how we got to the moon. It’s not all nice.

Five years ago, 10 years ago, it felt like the critique was winning. Now it feels like a very joined battle. And I’m curious how all this was sitting in your mind during it.

Watch me evade this question. Because for me, that kind of question puts my head in a spin. Your question is very good, and it is in my heart, but for me, the way to work it out is on the page.

I think a person can access more truth as he seeks greater specificity. The specificity has to be in a locale. So when I think about the great men of history in general, I don’t come up with much that any drunk uncle at a party couldn’t come up with.

But if I locate it in the person of K.J. Boone, then I can kind of work through it.

Well, let’s talk about the way you work it out on the page, because I think we’re not saying something different. I just see you working out what actually feels to me like a very live social argument on the page.

Much of the book is an argument between Boone and his critics in the form of angels and visitations at the time of his death. I want to have you read this section from “Vigil” on Page 18.

[Saunders reads.]

There was a story often told. Perhaps you’ve heard this one. Don’t stop me if you have, though, ha-ha (I dearly love to tell it): Little boy’s grousing: doesn’t like cars. Because of “the pollution.” You know where this one’s going, I bet. The father pulls the car over to the side of the road. “Then I suppose you’ll want to walk.”

End of objections from el kiddo.

Your choice, Jacques.

Dying in the back of a horse cart stuck in the mud? Or zinging toward help, air con blasting?

Anyone with a lick of sense would choose the latter.

We had.

The world had.

That was what was so damn stupid about it. People forgot the empty larder. Forgot drought, forgot famine. Forgot what it was like to be at the mercy of the world.

“Forgot what it was like to be at the mercy of the world.” This is part of his self-conception. He is one of those people who have removed, to some degree, humanity from the mercy of the world.

Tell me about the feelings, the argument, the life experience you’re channeling there.

There was a time when I was in my 20s, that my dad had a restaurant, and it burned down. So things were rough. We were living in Texas, and I just got that first sense that in our country, if things got tough below a certain level, nobody was coming except your friends and family.

That landed on me. At that time, I was an upbeat, optimistic, Ayn Rand kind of guy. But still, it landed.

And then many years later, when we had our family, we didn’t have any money saved. We were just going paycheck to paycheck. That feeling came back almost like a flashback, like: Oh, God. For all of the surface glitter of the culture, if you drop below a certain level, you’re an embarrassment. The cavalry isn’t coming.

I’ll add a third thing. When I first got out of college, I went to visit a friend of mine from high school. He was living in his mom’s basement. He had a good job. He was a very attractive, intelligent guy.

The question hovered: Why are you still at your mom’s?

And he said that he had certain experiences when he was young and they were very poor that were quite humiliating for him. He had internalized them, and he said: I’m not moving out of this basement until I’m a millionaire.

It really struck me because he was not somebody who was at all off-center or deficient in any way. He was a high-achieving guy. But that early pain had stung him.

I think that’s what this guy is tapping into. Maybe in a more general sense, I think that’s what capitalism is about, really. It’s beautiful if you’re above the line. And if you’re below the line — what’s that line from Terry Eagleton? “Capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body.”

So I thought: Well, if I want to have a motivation for him that isn’t easily dismissed, that’s a pretty good one. And I could just really feel it.

Let me actually try to argue that even more strongly than you did.

I agree that capitalism can plunder the sensuality of the body. If you’re working in lithium mining in unsafe conditions to feed the world’s desire for various electronics, the sensuality of your body is being pretty plundered.

On the other hand, you know what plunders the sensuality of the body? For most of human history, half of all human beings died before they were 15 years old and a quarter of them before they were 1 year old.

It was interesting to me that in that answer, you went toward the question of money and the social safety net. I even understood in the way you wrote this that you’re talking about something much more fundamental, which is: To what degree do we live insulated from nature by technology versus to what degree are we at the mercy of nature?

To what degree do we control the world — which is what we’re always trying to do as human beings, for better and for worse — versus to what degree does the world control us?

The lines are: “Dying in the back of a horse cart stuck in the mud? Or zinging toward help, air con blasting?”

Your book talks a lot about the deaths from natural disasters that are worsened by climate change, but I think the numbers are something like we have one-fifth as many deaths from natural disasters as we did in 1960. That’s partially because we are so much better at building and getting emergency response to places and telling people where to go.

So there’s this really deep Janus-faced nature to this modernity we’ve built, and yet I think we also look around at it and think something has gone terribly wrong.

Yes. In the local sense, I think about when our kids were little and I was working. It was a great job — tech writer. And this is maybe a factor of contemporary life, but for 10 hours a day, I was doing something that had no relation to anything that I cared about — except providing for.

So within that work space, I would do whatever — I was photocopying, I was mopping up spills, writing technical reports.

So when I think about that plundering of the body, I think of that. Now, again, it’s part of this huge system that you’re alluding to. But I think for the individual, the journey through capitalism — especially in my lifetime — has become one of increasingly handing over everything to sustenance.

As corporations become so powerful, the feeling that one should naturally give up more of one’s private space, more of one’s peace of mind, in order to live within the system — I feel that’s something that has really happened in my lifetime.

I want to have you read one more part — actually, from that same page — that I think also gets at an interesting way in which you make this argument through his voice.

[Saunders reads.]

Whereas nowadays folks padded past climate-controlled cases of out-of-season vegetables and fish from faraway seas and meat from animals who fed in meadows under mountain ranges whose names a person could hardly pronounce, thinking: Yap, yap, yap, big deal, pork from Denmark, salmon from the Bering Strait, loaves of woven bread from Ferrara, all of this is my right.

When what it was, was a goddamn miracle.

How had that bounty made its way here?

Did it walk?

Just magically appear?

Go waltz on someone else’s feet, Henri.

I was so struck by that phrase, “All of this is my right.”

I feel like the thing you do really effectively when you’re inhabiting Boone’s voice is get at the idea: It’s not a right, it’s not a miracle. We want it to be a........

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