How to Argue in the Trump Era Without Losing Your Mind

24:15Jessica Tarlov:And a lot of people are very happy to lose those friends. This is usually liberals who feel like Trumpism is a moral stain and that if you don't share the same kind of values with people, why do you really need to be having a conversation, let alone sharing a Thanksgiving table? If you can get past the idea that you should just be nice to people because you're blood related. So I do think that those trend lines are real, but I think that they also do not capture something that is also very real, which is our desire to continue to be in each other's lives. But one of the main reasons that I wrote this book, and it was really two-pronged, but one of them is that I hear from viewers of all political stripes.

25:04Jessica Tarlov:So we have about three and a half to four million viewers on a daily basis. Half are Republicans. So that's MAGA to Romney Republicans. Then 30 percent independents and about 20 percent Democrats. So a real spectrum of people are tuning into the five. And that doesn't even mention the folks that see clips of it that are all over the Internet. But people were reaching out and continue to where they just say, how do you do it? I don't know how you can do this. And these are folks who love Jesse Waters and people who detest Jesse Waters. And the people who want to know how I do it want to also know how they can do it, too.

25:49Jessica Tarlov:And you see this in focus groups a lot as well, that you talk to people, especially I've listened to a lot of them through Sarah Longwell and in other venues. You listen to these swing state voters where their vote actually matters. I don't have that. You know, I vote in New York City. So we're denominations of blue. But there is a lot of sadness in people's stories and in their voices when they're talking about the relationships that they have lost and that the politics matters. But what matters more is finding a way to be able to communicate the politics and keep the relationships. that there has to be a way where we can do that.

26:32Okay, so give us the action plan. How do we do it? Our anti-vax uncle has been invited to Thanksgiving one more time. How are we to do it?

26:43Jessica Tarlov:So some of my answer, I think, will be very hard for people because when you are talking to people whose views are so aggravating and run so counter to how you see the world, But what I argue and I disagree and what I really believe in is starting with listening and understanding when those moments have to happen. And anti-vax is hard because the health thing is bad there. And I made the joke, you know, if you have a newborn baby, that uncle just cannot come to your event and expose the new one to whatever they might be bringing around. But we have really stopped being able to listen to one another.

27:30Jessica Tarlov:And you will find actually when you let people talk, not only do they feel better about the interaction because they were heard and we're all desperate for that, frankly. But a lot of times they will tie themselves in knots. They will proverbially hang themselves as they continue down these roads, especially if you are just carefully interjecting little pieces of your reality and certainly the science. So knowing when to listen and when to talk, I have something in the book that I call the soft start, which if you watch the way that I interact with my colleagues, I use almost all of the time, which is before you get into your point of view, which runs counter to how they're seeing the world, that you find some kind of connective tissue.

28:22Jessica Tarlov:this reminder that we are sharing this space with one another, that they matter to us, that you really want to understand their point of view and how they see the world. So an olive branch of some kind. And also humor helps a lot with that. Being able to make a joke or create a moment of levity before you go in with your proverbial haymaker. I have one of the tips of the book is to think in averages and not in anecdotes. I think back a lot to what Ben Shapiro said when he said the facts don't care about your feelings. And it kind of became the motto for the Trump era and this idea of the hysterical liberal that can't keep it together.

29:05Jessica Tarlov:And having a background in data and research obviously helps me with this. But making sure that I curate the way that I talk about an issue so that the emphasis is on the trend lines more than it is on the personal stories. And that doesn't mean that they don't matter. And I use them regularly. Either something about me, I just had a big back and forth a couple months ago with Jesse, with my colleague about the Save America Act, where I was using the data, but I used my personal story of how hard it was for me to get my real ID. I had to go to the DMV three times to be able to accomplish that, to make the case that you are going to be disenfranchising voters.

29:43Jessica Tarlov:And it's going to be more Republicans than it is Democrats, frankly, when that happens. So those are just some of the techniques that I use in being able to do this. And they work at the table on the five, and they would also work at a family gathering. But it does require, and not in the Michelle Obama, when they go low, we go highway, because that's very Pollyanna. And I don't think that it meets the moment necessarily. But there is a lot lot of generosity and kindness that I think needs to be infused in the way that these conversations take place that will make them much more productive and, frankly, that we'll be able to have them after a several years hiatus if we do it right.

30:30So I get how this applies to a family situation, that maybe your crazy uncle is in other ways a kindly person anyway. You're related by blood and anyway, your grandmother cares that he be there and you care about her. So you indulge the crazy uncle and we just try to work around him. But outside the familial context, what are we trying to accomplish? When you point out to Jesse Waters, the Save America Act will disenfranchise people. If you're being candid, you say, that's the point. That's the point. Of course, of course we want to disenfranchise. Now, what I'm worried about is I am living in a mental world where Republicans had their papers more in order than Democrats did.

31:07And that was probably true when George W. Bush and Romney were Republicans. Today, actually, Republicans are messier than Democrats. So the disenfranchisement may backfire. It may not just be minorities. It may be my people too. But when you're dealing with people who are non-relatives, what is the reason we try to preserve the conversation rather than get to what is really being talked about?

31:29Jessica Tarlov:Well, there's an emotional component, which I was trying to get at with, you know, talking about the amount of outreach that I get from people who do want to be having these conversations. You know, people talk a big game about how comfortable they are with their reality. But when you peel back layers, there's oftentimes a lot of hurt feelings and a genuine missing that they feel for these people. The second part of it is that there is an underlying level of persuasion and a different kind of persuasion that can take place. And I make it clear, and I disagree, that I don't see my job as changing minds but opening them.

32:07Jessica Tarlov:And I want to go back to the Save America example, because what happened there in Jesse's reaction was actually a direct extension of being educated about what the bill actually said. It wasn't a, oh, no, we don't want this to happen. We don't want these people to vote. There's so much misinformation and disinformation about what's going on in our politics that you need to have these piercing moments to actually break through it. So the right has branded the Save America Act as a voter ID bill, which is not fair. That is not what this is. It's a bill where you have to show your birth certificate or a passport to be able to vote.

32:52Jessica Tarlov:Now, more Democrats than Republicans have passports. The number of people who have their original birth certificate, very few and far between. But you're looking at, you know, people who have changed their names. You're talking about married women, certainly kids that are away at college and want to be able to vote. They're not traveling with their birth certificates, et cetera. And so pointing out that the right was being actually pretty craven in saying that this was a voter ID bill to make it look like we just want to have a bunch of people who are here illegally vote, which is their favorite fraud claim.

33:28Jessica Tarlov:But instead, recentering it on what documents you have to actually show to do it caused Jesse to question out loud, oh, is that true? And he does this thing where if Dana Perino confirms it, then he believes me. And she confirmed that that was the case. And he said, I don't remember the exact words, but like, oh, that's messed up. When you say, here's this thing you did that looks pretty immoral, and you did it because you thought it would hurt people you didn't like. But it turns out, with better information, you realize it hurts people you do like. And then he said, oh, okay, in that case, I changed my mind.

34:06What has been achieved? What you've done is, yes, he now has better informed prejudices. Oh, I didn't realize that the passport rule was going to hurt my folks. I thought it was going to hurt your folks. But what have you achieved?

34:19Jessica Tarlov:Well, you have told 4 million people what's actually in the Save America Act. So you're having this conversation in an air-conditioned studio in Midtown Manhattan, but it is being projected into households all over the country where a lot of people who are watching think that the Democrats are opposed to a run-of-the-mill voter ID bill, which is not the case. And it makes you seem insane. I'm very much in the business of making liberals seem less insane. And I do this on a wide variety of issues. But if you have a representative of the left that is talking in a way that makes sense to them about everything from the Save America Act to immigration to trans issues, for instance, it is seeping into their minds that you exist.

35:11Jessica Tarlov:That is very important for people to see and for that to register to them, that the caricature of the left that they are being fed is not reality. And I'm sitting right here. Does that mean there aren't some people who you might deem as crazy and I'm in the more center wing of the party anyway, for sure. But you become a regular facet or feature of their life and it has impact. Let me ask you a more pointed question about the purpose of it all. And I'm going to be biased here because I come a little bit from the podcast world now. I do, as I say, I do less television. One of the things that is a real, you see this very much in this medium, that podcasters all the time are, there are many podcasters and many successful podcasters who give large audiences to ideas that shouldn't have large audiences, whether they are just plain crazy, the pyramids were built by aliens, whether they're vicious in one way or another, whether they're anti-Semitic, whether they're conspiratorial.

36:11And if and when pressed, why did you do this? Why did you have this, you know, Jew, should we kill them all debate on your show? What we need to air view is the discussion is good. We need to have civil conversations. I said, you know, the things that make civil conversations is not just the behavior of the civil conversants, but the boundaries. You have civil conversations within certain limits and they vary from society to society and time to time. And the tendency of sort of the most modern forms of media, and here cable TV is a little old fashioned, is to open the doors to all kinds of things that I wonder whether we should be opening the door to and whether the ideal of civil conversation becomes a kind of rationalization for simply letting the crazy win.

36:56Jessica Tarlov:I agree with you in theory. And I don't want to have those conversations myself. Like, I don't want to talk to a Nick Fuentes or a Candace Owens. I'm not interested, Tucker Carlson, etc. And likewise, there are some people on the far left who I'm not dying to sit down with. Otherwise, I would invite them on, raging moderates. But your question and the way that you are seeing the world, I think, is based on an outdated view of, quote unquote, legitimacy in media and this idea that there are true gatekeepers anymore. So there are vaunted institutions, right, that still matter. New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker.

37:45Jessica Tarlov:I had this conversation with David Remnick, too. But the rest of the world is moving on while a lot of us are sitting around saying, I don't want to dignify that kind of view with a conversation. And again, I don't want to do that. I'm going to interrupt there. It's precisely because I don't believe there are gatekeepers anymore, that each of our individual decisions becomes more important. so in 1972 if the local AM radio station invited on a Holocaust denier or an anti-vaxxer or a neo-Nazi that would be upsetting to people who listen to that local radio station but that would never happen on a nightly news program that would never happen on a local news program so it wasn't really such a big deal it would never happen in the local newspaper today all those institutions are gone and so everything is the equivalent of the old AM radio station and so every person is called upon, is constantly making these moral choices about what to do and what not to do.

38:46Every person with media, which is everybody who's got a social media account on any platform, we're all in it and we all have to make these choices. And we all have this ideal civil conversation as an excuse available when we're really doing something that we, not the gay people, we should not do.

39:03Jessica Tarlov:But, and sorry if I'm not getting it perfectly, but I mean, I think that we're both in agreement that you don't want to have a conversation. You're not going to be inviting Nick Fuentes on the David Frum podcast. Correct? Yeah. Yeah. But, but that's, that's too easy a call. If for example, there's someone who says the election of 2020 was rigged for Biden, I'm happy to talk about that subject. Yeah. That's an important subject. And obviously the president of the United States believes it. And just - 60 % of Republicans do. 60 % of Republicans. But I'm not going to talk with them. I'm going to talk about them.

39:39Because I think they're wrong.

39:39Jessica Tarlov:With them sitting there though? Or just their existence? I'm going to talk about them. I'm going to talk - I'm going to bring on people who - The way - When I'm booking my program, the way I would do it for this little piece of real estate, I will have people on who understand the phenomenon, can discuss what the people who say this thing say it. But I'm not going to help them because the problem is that since there are no gatekeepers and since we all have little patches of grass, we all are minding our own gate. And then we have a question to decide about how am I going to mind my gate to my little piece of grass?

40:17Jessica Tarlov:So I – okay, so I did understand it probably that maybe just the way that I said it wasn't because of how you actually see the gatekeepers issue too. But my point stands that the election denier that you're not bringing on, and I don't want to talk to them either. I'd rather talk to Mark Elias about all of the cases that he won in court and how he's continuing to protect and safeguard democracy. My point is that that election denier who you're not having on is going to go and build an audience 10 times the size of yours. And that's what I meant by this idea of legitimizing or platforming, I think is quite outdated in the way that media works today.

41:03But what then happens is that election denier then goes on, builds a podcast 10 times the size of mine. And then it becomes tempting to say, well, why didn't I piggyback on him in a way, and I will justify what I'm doing. And you see this a lot with a lot of quite big shows. This is how Hassan Piker entered the mainstream where he now is, is a lot of people said, I will invoke the excuse of, well, we're debating it to conceal my true motive. And so I think we all have to think about, I mean, this is a question that I don't get invitations to go on Fox anymore. And every once in a while, I do. And I always respond by saying, sure.

41:47But just tell your executive producer you booked me and see what happens. And then the call will come in 15 minutes later. We're taking the show in a different direction. So I don't go on Fox anymore. But if I were invited, I would think very hard about doing it. And there are things I do. Yeah, I think very hard about doing it.

42:03Jessica Tarlov:because you were given the opportunity if brett bear wanted to have you on to talk about right as i said i i think about it and the reason i think about it is i would say all i control is me and it isn't i'm not thinking about platform just saying in my one and only rapidly shrinking dwindling life where do i want to be what conversation do i want to have and what am i and whatever little matchstick of credibility that i've got what am i doing with it i would think about that. And so I might go on a Brett Baer show, but there are many shows that I say, not going to do this because I think I'm using them, but they're really using me.

42:41I would worry about that.

42:43Jessica Tarlov:I understand that as a set of considerations, and I could tick through a, you know, a number of hosts at Fox that I think would be worth your time to go on with this mentality that you go on with Martha McCallum or Shannon Breham on Fox News Sunday, or, you know, Dana, who you would have known from Bush years. But I think that we are very much in a moment of media for the sake of mutual benefit. And you look at the interview that Abdul El-Sayed did with Jesse Waters a couple of weeks ago. So 25 minutes of airtime with millions of people watching and then probably tens of millions of impressions that happened by extension of it, where Abdul got to say the things that he wanted to, you know, some of them joking, like about circumcision, for instance, but then others very serious about the issues that matter to voters and talking about the toll that this war is having on Americans, you know, what he's hearing from everyday voters.

43:47Jessica Tarlov:And Jesse got to talk about the things that are of value to him. And maybe I've just been doing it a very long time And so I don't see it necessarily in that kind of tradeoff. But I have certainly seen the implications in the plus column of showing up and tussling with people who think differently than you about important ideas. And winning elections is very important to me. And I don't work for the Democratic Party, but everyone knows I'm a partisan. And I think we have better outcomes across the board in issue areas and the economy, health care, et cetera, when Democrats are in office. And I know where the eyeballs are.

44:33Jessica Tarlov:I know where the pressure points are that I can emphasize or push on to make sure that I am putting together a cogent argument that might live somewhere, even in the recesses of someone's mind who votes differently than me. And I also know that in modeling a kind of back and forth, I don't want to just call it, you know, civic discourse or civil discourse, because sometimes it's not particularly civil, right? Sometimes you can be yelling at one another, which is a part of real life too. But that I would rather be doing this than sitting around talking to people who largely agree with me and see the world the same way.

45:16Jessica Tarlov:That is not interesting to me. It feels kind of dull on a comparative basis. And I also just don't think it's the frontier where elections are fought and won anymore. So how would you guide someone who's thinking about this? Someone who had a public profile and they're thinking, I've got the invitation from Tucker Carlson. I've got the invitation from Mehdi Hassan. I have an opportunity to bring Hassan Piker on my air. I've got the opportunity to bring an election denier and anti-vaxxer on the air. And let's put aside public officials, because once the anti-vaxx crackpot is Secretary of Health and Human Services, then, yeah, then you have to die.

45:51He's got power. Once the election denier is President of the United States, he's like, but how would you think? What are our limits? When does one say yes? When does one say no? How does one think about this question? So I don't have ready answers, so I'm looking for yours.

46:06Jessica Tarlov:I don't about all of it. You know about every single option that you threw out there. I'm not going to go sit in Tucker's cabin in Maine for three hours. And likewise, he doesn't want to have me come do that. I would rather talk about Hassan Piker and his impact on the party than go on his Twitch stream and talk to him directly about these things. though I was on a panel with him, which a lot of people attended and in clip world continues to live on. So, you know, I think that there are personal calls to make about how you what not just how you want to spend your time, but what you think you'll be able to get out of it and what some of the pitfalls of it will be, because a lot of these people who have views that you or I might not agree with are also very, very good debaters, right, and are good at controlling the conversation and pushing in whatever direction they might want to go in.

47:06Jessica Tarlov:And so I don't have a perfect answer to that. I do have one when it comes to certainly the kind of engagement that I do with people who are, you know, far less offensive or, you know, peddling in some of these conspiracies that, you know, offend both of us. But even when those do come up, you know, like a little flirtation with, oh, well, there was some fraud, for instance, even though the cases have not found that to be the case, that I am there with a well-thought-out answer to that reality so that the 60 percent of Republicans who aren't completely sure about what happened in 2020 can see that a reasonable person is pushing back against it.

47:56Jessica Tarlov:And I'm sure that's not a good enough answer for you because you maybe want to hear, yeah, I'm down to sit down with all of these people. And that isn't how I feel about it. I think there is a mental health toll on people that matters, which is why the book also isn't about forcing you to talk to people who you absolutely hate or feel like you can get nowhere with them. But to consider that life is long and it is complicated and that you can prepare better for those moments when you do sit down than maybe you thought in the first place. Yeah. I wrestle with these things. No, me too. It's a part of my own disappointment because I think that, you know, some of the branding around what I do, not self-branding, but what other people think, is that I'm just someone that wants to do these debates all the time.

48:53Jessica Tarlov:And I'm desperate to go on a show like Surrounded, you know, where it's like one person versus 20 people who think something different. And I'm not. I enjoy the dynamic of the table at the five and the relationships and the rapport that I have with these colleagues and the way that I'm able to talk about these issues in a long-term sense. And I think that that's a much more realistic way to be having these conversations with people who are ideologically different than to sit down for a one-off couple-hour conversation with someone who has a lot of views that you might find really repellent. One of the themes I hear in your answer is you have this powerful and admirable trust in the reach of reason.

49:40If you can seem reasonable, if you can use reason, you can make an influence. I often find myself as I get older wondering how much human beings are reasonable creatures and whether reason is what moves them. And a story here, when you talk about being with 20 to 1, I was in a situation a long time ago at the beginning of the Iraq War. I'd gone to London to watch the debate in the House of Commons about whether Britain should enter the Iraq War. And there was a big march, and I wanted to watch the march. So I changed out of my House of Parliament clothes into ordinary street clothes and just counted on being obscure enough that I could join the march.

50:20And I was in Trafalgar Square. but somebody recognized me from one of the TV shows I did. And I'm quite large and quite hostile crowd gathered around me. It was quite aggressive. It was getting, it was getting a little, a little testy. And so I, after a few minutes of sort of people yelling at me and me yelling back, and I said, it became clear they were not going to let me escape so easily that there might actually be, you know, a little punch thrown. So I stood on the lip of the fountain in Trafalgar Square and said to the group of people. There are now probably about 40 of them. I'll tell you what, I will stand here for exactly 20 minutes or whatever the figure was, 30, 20, 30, and answer whatever questions you have about President Bush and what I know about Prime Minister Blair, and then I'm going to leave.

51:04And I did it. And as I spoke to them, they did become calmer. And when the time came, they did part and let me go without any altercation. And at the time, I thought what I'd done was I had shown the power of reason. But in retrospect, I look back and just say, you know, what I'd done was I sort of escalated the confrontation, said, you know, you're going to, if you want to turn mob violence on me, you're obviously going to win. But I'm going to give an account of myself. And just somehow there was a kind of sub-rational communication that meant that we could talk for 20 or 30 minutes or whatever it was.

51:37And then they parted and let me go, which they were not going to do if I hadn't engaged with them in the first place. And I think about that story. And what did I learn about my fellow human creatures there and the power of reason or the non-power of reason.

51:50Jessica Tarlov:That's a great story also. And I'm not sure that I would have thought to do that. So good quick thinking at that moment because I know how tense it was. But I think that that story is about what we were talking about earlier on in this conversation, not necessarily, you know, reason or not reason or the ability to tap into someone's rationality, but this universal desire to communicate and to be heard and recognized as having a set of beliefs or a perspective worth your time. And that's what you told them. You said what you think and what you believe right now matters. And it matters to me. And I, yes, you gave an allotment of time and said, it doesn't matter to me for more than 30 minutes.

52:46Jessica Tarlov:But 30 minutes when you don't really know what's about to happen does feel like a good, you know, chunk of change there. So that's what I heard in that story. But you recognized their humanity and the universal desire that we all have to be taken seriously and as rational actors, right, with a point of view worth tangoing with. And that is very much what I'm talking about in I Disagree, and that a lot of relationships can be resuscitated or built from focusing on exactly what you did, which is you've got something to get off your chest. Likewise, I've got something to get off my chest. Let's find a way to do this.

53:37Let me ask you one last question with something you said a minute ago. You talked about how many of the people with crazy views are very good debaters. And that's clearly true. And in fact, one of the reasons I have paused with the whole concept of quote unquote debate is I guarantee that if any normal person debates an anti-vaxxer, the normal person will lose. And the reason that the normal person will lose is because if you're a normal person, you have a beautiful new baby, you go to the doctor and say, what shot should I give the baby? The doctor says you should have this scheduled shots and you do it.

54:07And you don't ask too many questions. Why? Because you're not a nut. But the nut goes and spends two hours researching vaccines on the internet, which is not enough time to understand anything in a way that a serious scientist gives his life or her life to understand it. But the nut gives 10, 20, 30 hours and a nut. But certainly enough to overwhelm the normal person. When you step onto an airplane, how does the jet work? You don't know. I mean, vaguely, maybe you remember something from a book you read once or Popular Mechanics, but you don't really know. Someone who believes that jet engines don't fly would overwhelm you in argument, only they do fly.

54:44And then the project of debating the jet engines don't work, vaccines aren't real, becomes kind of a doomed undertaking because the crank knows not enough, but knows more than you.

54:55Jessica Tarlov:Yes. And feels more passionately about it or that you have to defend it at that level. I find that parsing the crazy helps a lot. And I write about this in the book, the importance in engaging as much as you can. And again, this is my job, this isn't purely for fun. So obviously that's a factor in this and I want that out there. But spending the time to understand what is going on within the anti-vax movement, or I think more generally or more appropriately, we need to spend time understanding the Maha movement, which this is a dangerous facet of. But I happen to have friends who are very smart and rational people who were very interested and had been talking about a lot of the things that RFK Jr.

55:51Jessica Tarlov:was discussing vis-a-vis the dyes in our food and, you know, what this was doing to kids. And I'm not a good enough mom that I have stopped all macaroni and cheese intake. But those aren't a bunch of crazy people. Those are people who are doing the vaccine schedule, you know, absolutely everything the doctor tells you to do, but are also saying like the impact of big food or whatever we're supposed to call it is completely damaging to all of us and especially our kid. They're concerned about microplastics, all of this. And this is how you have these strange bedfellows, politically speaking. And so I do think tussling with that is worthwhile because at least you can call the balls and strikes within it.

56:35Jessica Tarlov:Like, I went through the big, beautiful bill to see where the good points were because Lisa Murkowski, for instance, is someone who I think is a rational actor. I think that she is a moral good person. You know, you can't say you're one of six that voted to convict Trump after the January 6th insurrection and have spoken out against a lot of the enormous overreaches of this government and Donald Trump personally. And she found a way to yes. So what is in this bill that is at least decent? And so I guess that would be my response about someone who is an anti-vaxxer, you know, to talk to parents who do exist that think that the schedule has gotten too full and that we have it's too close together.

57:24Jessica Tarlov:It's too much for little kids. I mean, I go to a very liberal pediatrician, downtown Manhattan, and they talk to us about the vaccine schedule and whether we wanted to go at the recommended one or these were the shots where the option was to split it up. Like, do you want to do this and then come back a week later? Sometimes that's all people want to hear. And it gets lumped into this anti-vax sentiment and it's questions around what a baby can take at that moment. Now, of course, there's the bullshit components of it about, you know, that we're just adding vaccines willy nilly and we objectively don't need these things.

58:04Jessica Tarlov:And we know that is not true. But engaging with their arguments and spending time with it outside of the bounds of debating with them live, but for your own personal education, I think is very valuable. Well, let me add one more anecdote that sort of would be my counter to engaging with a vaccine schedule. This is probably before you became very politically aware, but 1992, this is before 9-11, the election of Bill Clinton and H.W. Bush running for re-election and Ross Perot. There were a series of town hall debates, a series of debates, and the last was a town hall, moderated by Carol Simpson of ABC.

58:44And people stood up and asked questions of the three candidates. And this is the political story I think about maybe more than any other. So one of the people who stood up to ask the question was an older woman who was obviously very nervous about being on TV, the one and only time in her life in front of tens of millions of Americans. And she asked, I would like to ask each of the candidates how you personally have been affected by the deficit. President George H.W. Bush unfortunately has to go first, and he tries to explain interest rates, and it doesn't work. And then Ross Perot goes second, and he says something characteristically insane.

59:16and then it's Bill Clinton's turn. And he moves that giant body of his as close to the woman as the setup will allow. And he answers, I will answer your question. But before I do, let me ask you a question. How have you personally been affected by the deficit? And as she spoke, it became clear that either because she was nervous and got confused or maybe she'd never known the difference in the first place, she didn't mean the deficit. She meant the recession that was also happening at the same time. She'd mixed them up. She wasn't speaking her native language of human beings. She was speaking political speak or economic speak.

59:51And once Bill Clinton understood the real question, well, he hit it out of the park. And then I'm the governor of a small state. If people lose their jobs, I probably know them or know their families. Bingo. And that was the moment that came to be known as the I feel your pain moment, although Bill Clinton never literally said that. And one of the things I learned from that is you have to hear the question behind the question. So when I hear a mother of a precious newborn talking about the vaccine schedule, I mean, you can engage with that and say, look, this is crazy. This idea that the vaccines are too close together.

1:00:19No reputable scientist would give that even two minutes of attention. So if I engage with you on that, I'm actually not only not helping the discussion, I'm not helping you because I'm not talking about what you really care about, which is you've brought this beautiful creature into an uncertain world and you're full of fears. And your fears have latched onto something they shouldn't latch onto, which is the vaccine schedule, where you just do what the pediatrician says and not ask questions. But you have these other fears and they are deeper and maybe we can address them. But understanding that you may not yourself understand why you are saying the things you say.

1:00:52And if I answer the things you say, I'm not serving either myself or you.

1:00:56Jessica Tarlov:So I think there is a way to do both. I totally agree with you about the underlying issue, which is that you're afraid because you have this incredible precious cargo now. and the idea that they're going to get pricked. But I think that you can do both things to say, I can sense that you're afraid and that you don't want your little baby boy or your little baby girl to be in any pain. But I do think that it is incumbent upon us to talk to people about what they think and where they are getting that information and then to find a way to say, but the science says without seeming like a total jerk and that we're not particularly good at that.

1:01:45Jessica Tarlov:You know, this is what has happened to a large degree in the debate about climate change. For instance, you notice how even people like Bill Gates, who were out front in terms of talking about the deleterious impacts of climate change and rising sea levels and temperatures and all of it, has even backtracked somewhat on, you know, what he said was going to happen. And obviously there was tons of hyperbole around it from electeds and even people in the scientific community. All of that wears on people. And I don't think that it is worthwhile. It's one thing to be dismissive of having a conversation with the King Vax crank.

1:02:25Jessica Tarlov:So like RFK Jr., pre-HHS secretary. So, you know, before he was somehow responsible for all of us, which is a travesty. But the person who is following along or who has this different kind of source material than you, I don't think it should be beneath us to engage in that. Because again, if you take them seriously and you show them and their views some level of respect, it makes room for them to hear a counter opinion. And I'm not saying, again, that you're going to necessarily change their mind, but you might open it up to the idea that perhaps more research should be done. And that's how you get these moments, right?

1:03:09Jessica Tarlov:All of these people who say like, oh, my God, and then I realized X, Y, or Z thing wasn't reality or he wasn't really on my side. So all of these Trump voters right now that are having regrets about it. And if you don't make a gentler space for that to happen, that's where you really lose people. and then they have no interest in even talking to you, let alone listening to a program that we might host. Jessica, you are so good at what you do. So thank you for joining me today on The David Frum Show. I'm so grateful to you. Oh, it was fabulous. Thank you for having me. Bye-bye.

1:03:49Jessica Tarlov:Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile with your summer price forecast. Now, unfortunately, we're seeing rising costs across the country with possibility that big wireless hates you 100%. Now over here at Mint Mobile, we're seeing sunny skies and dropping prices. Every plan to just$15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12 month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. Thanks so much to Jessica Tarlov for joining me today on the David Fromm Show.

1:04:25As I mentioned at the top of the show, my book this week is a novel, Yesteryear, by Carol Claire Burke. I sometimes think if I ever had to teach writing, and I hope I never will, but if I ever had to, I would want to assign my students novels that were almost good. How much, after all, are any of us going to learn from reading Ulysses or Remembrance of Things Past? Those are works of unique genius, and we're not going to ever manage to achieve anything like that. But we can write better books. And the way to write better books is by looking at books that are pretty good, but not quite there and trying to figure out what went wrong.

1:05:03Yesteryear is a novel that has been a big commercial success. Much praise. It's in book clubs. It's been profiled on television. And indeed, it is very clever and engaging. I enjoyed reading it. It is the story of an online influencer who leads the life of a trad wife and is very commercially successful, sells products, has millions of followers on Instagram, who is by some trick of, I won't go too much into the trick because this is the hinge on which the novel turns, but is catapulted back into the past and finds herself on a farm that looks very like her own farm with a family that looks very like her own family only in the year 1855, where the trad and traditional becomes a little more sinister.

1:05:49I think a lot of people have this fantasy about what it would be like to go back into the past, but they never think what would it be like to not have dentistry, to not have antibiotics, to not know why chickens and cows get sick. And of course, to be completely isolated in the country without roads, without cars, without any access to the outside world. So that's a very ingenious gimmick. And it's won the novel a lot of attention. And apparently the novel has been optioned for the movies, and I'm sure it will make a fine movie. And as a novel, it's entertaining, amusing, interesting, provocative, but it's not quite a good piece of writing.

1:06:28And it's worth, I think, some time to think about why not? Why does it just fail? And what is the consequence of that just failure? To my mind, the difference between good and almost good is we can enjoy an almost good novel in the here and now. We can enjoy its cleverness. We can enjoy its satire. We can enjoy its reflections on contemporary society. And then it will be forgotten. And 10 years from now, 15, no one will return to it. Books that are good are famously described as news that stays news. Yesteryear won't stay news. And here's why. The first problem and the least of the problems is the way the book is written.

1:07:07Yesteryear is constructed as a first person narrative. The central character is also the person who tells the story. So anytime the writer wants to write, the writer has to remember that she's writing in the voice of her principal character. Well, Carol Klernberg loves to write. There's writing all over this book. And what she especially loves are similes and metaphors. Again and again, a thing is compared to another thing. At one point, the sound of a camera clicking is compared to the closing of a prison gate. A depressed woman who is slumping a little in her chair as compared to shriveled fruit.

1:07:40A gloomy face as compared to a lunar eclipse. People left behind in a room after a more powerful person has exited the room are compared to fallen puppets. And so it goes. I mean, there's one of those on every page. Obviously, the writer enjoys them and admires them and thinks they're very clever. And some are okay, some are less good. But the question she doesn't stop to ask is, would her narrator in fact talk like that? And talk like that all the time. So in order to advance her own idea of writing, she is losing her connection to her character. The second and more important strike to the book is a lack of object permanence.

1:08:15Why do things happen? People have different relationships to each other on one page of the book than they have later, as the author's satirical purposes require and her polemical purposes require. The author has very strong points of view. So every once in a while, she needs to slap somebody she doesn't like. And then things happen that are in no way indicated or built up to by any previous buildup or any previous characterization. Finally, there is a kind of lack of sympathy through the book. Now, there's nothing wrong with having an unsympathetic principal character. Thackeray did it in Vanity Fair.

1:08:48But Becky Sharp, although she's not a very likable or admirable character, she's a fascinating character. She's someone we inhabit from within. And she's not a completely horrible in every way character. her. She has certain excellences and attributes. And so do the people around her. We feel sympathy for her victims because many of them are nicer people than she is. If you hate everybody and make everybody the butt of your humor and your satire and your polemical points, then we end up living as if we were this unlikable narrator. One of the questions that fans who praise the book will say is you have to understand, you have to enter into the spirit of the book.

1:09:32And the spirit of the book is the main character is nasty. So everybody in the book is nasty. And that's the author's art. But you're left wondering after a while, maybe it's not just the characters who are nasty, principle or secondary. Maybe the author's kind of nasty. I'm not sure I'm enjoying, I mean, she's clever and she's got funny things to say. I'm not sure I'm enjoying spending time with her and not just with her character. But the book is famous. I'm sure you'll have a chance to read it for yourself. See if you agree or disagree with me. That's it for this week's edition of The David Fromm Show.

1:10:05Thanks so much for watching or listening. As always, the best way to support the work of this program is by subscribing to The Atlantic. That way you get my work and all of my colleagues. I hope you will consider sharing and promoting the program on whatever social media platform you use. See you next week here on The David Fromm Show. Bye-bye.

1:10:46This episode of The David Fromm Show was produced by Nathaniel Fromm and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme is by Andrew Edwards. Claudine Abad is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Baldez is our managing editor.

1:11:06Jessica Tarlov:Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile with your summer price forecast. Now, unfortunately, we're seeing rising costs across the country with possibility that big wireless hates you 100%. Now, over here at Mint Mobile, we're seeing sunny skies and dropping prices. every plan to just$15 a month. Give it a try at midmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months, $90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms.