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Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode with Nick Offerman. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.
transcript
Hello. I’m Ezra Klein. Welcome to “The Ezra Klein Show.”
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I’m a big Nick Offerman fan in the sense that I’m a big Ron Swanson fan. And if you don’t know who Ron Swanson is, he’s the head of the Pawnee, Ind. Parks and Recreation Department on the show “Parks and Recreation,” which I have watched many times. I have watched it so many times because I am nothing if not a parody of myself, and I enjoy gentle comedies about government bureaucracies.
But Swanson is a fascinating character who turned Offerman into something of a human meme. He’s a libertarian naturalist who’s got this almost camp masculinity, got a big mustache, and he only eats red meat and he lives off the grid and he’s a privacy nut. But he’s also ultimately sweet and vulnerable, and he sees other people really clearly. And people loved that character.
And Offerman, as a human, began to play into it. Famously, he released this long video of himself just drinking whiskey next to a fire. But Offerman also has a woodworking shop. He had that before the show, to be fair. But he really does make furniture there. You can buy it online. And then in “The Good Place,” another show, he appeared in one of the finale episodes as a heavenly woodworker.
It’s really recursive in an interesting way. And there’s always been something fascinating to me about the version of masculinity, a version of throwback masculinity even, that Offerman is playing, inhabiting and then, in some ways, subverting. And then I got this email that Offerman had a new book coming out called “Where the Deer and the Antelope Play.” And in the email, his publicist said the book was partly conceived on a hiking trip with the writer George Saunders — who I just really admire, and he’s been on this show — and the musician Jeff Tweedy, the frontman of Wilco, who I also admire and who has also been on this show. You should look up both of those episodes. They are great.
Anyway, the three of them — Saunders, Tweedy and Offerman — are all close friends who go hiking together, which melted my mind a little bit. And so this book, which partially comes out of their hiking trip, is all about the American outdoors and how it’s interwoven in our history, what we have done to it, the role it does and can play in our lives, how we should think about it, maybe, differently than we currently do.
A lot of the book, to my surprise, is inspired by conversations Offerman has had with a great agrarian philosopher and poet Wendell Berry. I did not see that turn coming here, which is all to say Nick Offerman contains multitudes that I had no idea about. He’s got a wonderful earthy, self-deprecating wisdom, and this conversation was just a lot of fun. As always, my email: ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Nick Offerman, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much for having me.
So what was your relationship with the outdoors like as a child?
It was pretty tempestuous. I grew up in a bit of a cultural vacuum in small-town Illinois, ‘70s and ‘80s. And so we had the three channels of television and top 40 radio, which didn’t leave a lot to draw a young Nick Offerman in. But I did have a bicycle and siblings and cousins and friends and cornfields and the woods and a creek and a tree house and a hammer and some nails. And so you put all those in a toolbox, and I didn’t have very many pairs of jeans that weren’t dirty most of the time.
And did that change as you got older? I mean, at some point, you developed this vibe as the outdoorsman of our generation — which is partially put on, but this is a whole book about the outdoors. It’s a whole book about your relationship with it. So what changed?
Well, it’s poignantly interesting that my family, who are wonderful, gentle, good-hearted people who are farmers, by and large. Even those that aren’t farmers, we all sprung from farm families within, like, an eight-mile radius. And some go on to be schoolteachers or librarians or paramedics, but we all come from this sort of bucolic upbringing. And even so, there’s not an agrarian sensibility. There’s not a particular focus on how are we treating the natural resources, so much as how can we use the seed we’re given by the corporation to create the greatest yield to earn profit for our family.
And when you do that with machinery and out in the elements and so forth, I do think it’s incredibly charismatic, and I find my family really heroic. I always saw my uncles as sort of Han Solo because their Millennium Falcons never were brand new off the showroom floor, but they could always keep them running through the harvest season.
And so growing up, I had this great appreciation for being outside. We also love boats in my family. We love fishing. And it wasn’t until I was a young man that somebody gave me some Wendell Berry stories, and I mean, it was a really specific, almost violent epiphany when I read his stories, and particularly a description of a farmer and his hired hand fixing some fencing. And Wendell describes it as though he’s seen the most magnificent performance of “Swan Lake” or something, where the reverence that he gave to the honest, hard work of humanity with our hands and what we can do with our resources to better our lives for ourselves and our children knocked me on my ass and brought tears to my eyes and said this guy has made kings of me and my family. And that made me just pay attention to the rest of his writing. And that was, whatever, 25 years ago, and I’m just still a student of that, saying, how are we going wrong in our society, and how can we ask the right questions to try and put us back on the right track?
Let’s back up to who is Wendell Berry. Because he’s a really important part of the book, going be a big part of this conversation. Who is he?
He is a writer by way of being a farmer in Henry County, Ky. His brother and his dad were both lawyers. And forgive me, I get this mixed up. One of them was a state representative, as well. But they were these venerable, agricultural, law-minded gentlemen who — his dad created a thing called the Burley Tobacco Program.
There’s a family story about Wendell’s grandfather coming home after taking his tobacco crop to market one year. And he came home, and after paying for the trip and the fees, he ended up breaking even. They made zero dollars and cents for the year’s crop. And so the dad created this Burley Tobacco Program, which was basically a co-op by which all of the farmers were represented in a sort of union fashion so that everybody got a parity price to prevent that from happening, to prevent people from being crushed by the market.
And so Wendell grew up in this family, working on the farm. And his nature took him to study. He was a fellow of the Wallace Stegner program at Stanford. So Wendell thought he was going to be a leading novelist of his day, but it just kept bugging him that he was on the wrong path. And he pretty quickly realized that he and his young wife, Tanya, should move home to the family land in Kentucky, and that’s his subject matter. That’s what he should write about. And he did, and he’s cranked out the most prolific body of work — poetry, fiction and essays — that have just an incredible conscience, a wonderful stewardship sensibility of a small farming operation and how we can sustainably use nature’s resources to maintain the life of a human community.
He sort of became an agrarian rock star in about 1976 with a book of essays called “The Unsettling of America.” And that brought him a lot of attention because it’s a book with so much common sense that people with their heads on straight sat up and said, oh, hey, we should pay attention to what this guy is laying down. And he’s never stopped. He’s still got a new book coming out, hopefully next year, and I’m grateful for it.
You used a wonderful word when you brought him up the first time, that there was a reverence in the way he wrote, just, about — I think it was farmers fixing a fence in that example. And I love Berry’s work. Reverence, I think, is exactly the right word for it, but it’s also a philosophical system. And you mention that, too. I think you said the agrarian sensibility. And he’s often connected to agrarianism, which in your book, you defined and then you say, isn’t that the most boring sentence in the world. But give me your least boring definition of agrarianism.
Well, it’s using the raw ingredients that we find in nature to sustain our human species with a conscience. It’s using nature’s resources equitably, in as fair a way as we can come up with, for all the people and for Mother Nature as well.
And so is that what you’ve learned from him? How do you go from being somebody who likes Wendell Berry’s work to ending up at his dinner table with a mission from him that frames how you end up writing this whole book?
Well, gosh, when I read in Wendell’s stories the way he lionized the commonplace, the nobility of a human work ethic with a conscience, I said, OK, if anything, I was brought up an altar boy in the Catholic Church, and I was always unmoved by the pageantry of the church itself. And among the things I read in Wendell was he doesn’t really care for churches either. He’s extremely spiritual, and he loves to regurgitate lessons from the Bible and Shakespeare, as well, but he doesn’t really like the way people get together because things then go wrong. Once humans start using the beauty and wisdom and truth, somebody says, hey, we might make some money doing this, and then things go south quickly.
But when I read his stuff and it struck me, for me, I said this is the closest to what I’ve understood a gospel to be. And so if I’m going to become a priest in anybody’s teachings, it’s this particular church. And I started writing him letters saying, I’m a storyteller. I’m a performer. I would love to help spread your ideas to as many people as I can. And I don’t know. I guess it affected my decision making. As I have had the success I’ve had in the entertainment industry, it definitely affects the choices I make.
It’s a weird thing to try and evaluate. But I’ve turned down a good number of jobs which would have probably made me more famous and more wealthy, but they didn’t inspire me as evolutionary. I do my best, when I choose things to work on, to have a feeling that they might help us move forward. Or sometimes, it’s just stupidly funny. Like, sometimes, I like to just participate in the delivery of the medicine of laughter.
But when I pick, like, a TV series, that’s a big decision. My thought process is directly fueled, I think, by my years of reading Wendell Berry, where I think, what will this crop do not only in the market, but what will it do in the soil? And what will it do 10 years from now and so forth.
Is there some Wendell Berry in Ron Swanson?
I mean, invariably, there must be because there’s some in me, and there’s plenty of me in Ron. When I was cast as Ron, I had just a passing knowledge of libertarianism. So I did a lot of reading. And Mike Schur, who’s so wonderfully smart and such a gentle teacher as a boss, I dedicated a book to Mike and said, thank you for showing me that we can still be so funny while saying I love you.
And so when Mike and I began creating Ron Swanson, there was a lot of sensibility of sort of the ideal libertarian. And conservatives really want to see through their sort of solipsistic lens that he’s a gun nut. They want to make him a misogynist. They want to make him a harsh conservative in a lot of ways. When, in truth, he’s a real libertarian, which means everybody is great in his book. Your gender, your race, your sexual situation, all of that, in true libertarianism, is fine. Like, that’s your business, and I’m not going to mess with you.
And I think that the common sensibility that Ron brings to everyday problems comes from a sort of agrarian point of view where his system, his sense of economy is much more invested in fishing and hunting and, like, do I have enough land and/or gold to glean the protein my family needs. He may be a little confused when things get more complicated in social dealings. But when it comes to dealing with his ecosystem, I think he’s on the right page.
Yeah, what struck me when you said that meeting and thinking about Wendell Berry changed the course of your work, none of my questions coming into this were, was Wendell Berry responsible for Ron Swanson. But it immediately made me think. I’ve watched “Parks and Rec” more times than I should probably admit on this show, and it always seems to me that Swanson’s libertarianism is played for laughs but his reverence for the natural world isn’t.
The idea that he’s a person who actually finds peace on the weekend in a hut in the woods, that’s just the character. It’s not a joke. And so to the idea of finding roles that root a little bit of Berry into the popular consciousness — I mean, he’s somebody who lives, or at least seems to want to live, orients towards living a little bit more of an agrarian life.
Absolutely. Something that I was very affected by, getting into the world of popular culture, immediately, at the University of Illinois in the theater program, I just was slapped across the face with how far behind all my peers I was culturally. I was a hayseed. I was a slow-talking country kid. And they were all cool as hell. They were all from the suburbs. They had done “Glengarry Glen Ross” by the time they were 18, and I was just hearing of Mamet.
And so it took me some years to begin to understand the simplicity that Wendell Berry and his ilk promote. Just saying walking is better than driving, that sensibility really soaked in where I came to realize that my upbringing and my sense of values actually were profoundly important and that not only were they not to be shunned, they would become the foundation of my life’s work.
And so when you go and have dinner with Berry, he tells you to examine nature not through the lens of John Muir, which is how everybody looks at it, but instead, through the lens of Aldo Leopold. So what does that mean?
It means that. When you think of terms like nature and conservation and activism, when you get into that kind of thought process, that brings to mind Greenpeace and The Sierra Club and tree-hugging and so forth and images of Yosemite and the giant sequoias and the Everglades and the pinnacles of what we’ve come to know as natural beauty in our country.
And then when you bring up Aldo Leopold, originally from Iowa but is known mainly for his work in Wisconsin and, specifically, his understanding that it was wrong of us to completely eradicate the grasslands of the Midwest and replace them with monoculture crops, it’s that idea of wherever you are, looking at what mother nature has created.
And this tips into some of the great stuff I heard in your interview with Richard Powers, where he hit on these themes that I feel like a lot of the themes are similar to what’s in my book, except I was like I feel like I’m composing not quite “Twinkle, Twinkle” but maybe “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” — but here I am listening to Tchaikovsky talk about it. And it’s true. We’re all playing music, but I could absolutely identify the difference in complexity.
That said, that’s the notion. The simplicity that it all drives me towards is being able to recognize, through the lens of Aldo Leopold, that we must be able to look around at whatever piece of land we’re trying to live upon and say, how is our living affecting the health of this natural area, and is it going to be sustainable?
We want our species to survive. That’s hardwired in us. And so part of that must be, what plants are we using? What animals? What minerals, et cetera, are we using? How are we using the water? Is the way we’re using it going to bring more usable water back to us, et cetera. If we can’t wrap our heads around that, we can’t last.
And so instead of looking at nature as some sort of separate, other destination, it’s understanding that you and I are looking at each other on a Zoom thing right now, and we’re part of nature at the moment. This crazy sci-fi conversation is as much a part of nature as a beautiful, giant redwood.
This is something I brought up in the conversation with Powers, but I actually always think that is an important thing to keep in mind. I mean, a redwood is a reorganization of the molecules here into one form driven by life. And this laptop on which I’m looking at a pixelated version of you on Zoom is a reorganization of molecules in the world driven by another form of life. And laptop isn’t alive,
but I always think we’ve gotten into a weird space where we’ve come to think of what we’re doing as not nature. It’s sort of like when we talk about global warming and say, we need to save the world, save the planet. And the planet is going to be here no matter what.
The question is, will we, and will a lot of other a lot of other species we’re driving to extinction?
But we’re part of it. We don’t actually get to hold that separation. There’s no us without it. And in some ways, some of our death drives come at least from some of the natural impulse that we’ve managed to supercharge without any of the things that keep it in harmony.
I couldn’t agree more. And further, the organization of molecules that is you and I in this conversation right now may very well become a redwood.
One can only hope.
Yeah, may we please be so promoted. But both Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold say some beautiful things about this. Leopold comes to understand — there’s a famous story about him where he kills a she-wolf as a young United States Forestry official. And by killing off the apex predators, they allow the deer population, among others, to thrive and over-thrive to the point where they denude the mountain of all of its greenery, and then they starve. There’s too many deer. They eat all the food. They die. And so basically, knocking mother nature’s balance out of whack just by one ingredient, the wolf, kills everything.
And Aldo Leopold talks about how every bit of nature that we can see in, and even those we can’t, they’re all cogs in wheels in this grand mechanism, and only an idiot would throw away the parts. He said the genius tinkerer saves every cog in the wheel because we understand they’re all necessary.
And that’s what I always come back to. That’s why I always open with fallibility and say, let’s just remember, as we get into any conversation, that we’ll never have all the information. And this is part of our ongoing project to understand and respect and treat the knowledge we do have with reverence instead of simply greed and avarice.
I want to be careful as I frame this question because I don’t know John Muir’s writings deeply enough to say every view he held. But at least in the way he’s come to stand in the culture, I think that story you tell about Leopold, which you tell in the book too, strikes me as important. I think Muir has come to stand in for we should conserve and appreciate nature. We should treat nature like it was put here for us, and it would be a waste to get rid of it before everybody’s gotten to see it. And nothing wrong with that. National parks are good. We should do more set-aside land.
But the Leopold idea, at least as you frame it in the book and, I think, the Berry idea, is that there’s a genius to nature that we need to recognize we don’t understand, that it is smarter than we are, that it operates at a time scale we can’t even fathom. And so this isn’t just about preserving it. It’s about recognizing and learning from it, about knowing that we can’t know what we are doing. And as such, we best be careful, be alert, and be open to the idea that the world was doing it better without our massive interventions. Is that how you understand them?
Absolutely. I am very aware of the flaws in myself as a human animal, and so I always approach new experiments and projects with caution. I can just talk about making a new table in my wood shop. If I’m building a new table, I order enough wood knowing that I’m going to screw up the first three things I try. It’s common practice in woodworking. If you’re building a new design, you start with cheap scrap wood, and you make your mistakes on that cheap wood before you start cutting into the good oak.
And in the same way, that’s how I think we should address our relationship in all of our natural transactions, is to say — Rachel Carson touches on it powerfully in “Silent Spring,” where in Northern California, they want to wipe out a certain species of gnat on a lake. And so they come in with a version of DDT to eradicate these gnats when they hatch. And of course, the poison sinks into the water.
The plankton and the microorganisms eat the DDT. Then the fish eat those microorganisms. They die, the fish die. Then the birds that eat the fish, they continue to compound the poison, destroying a bunch of species. And then come the next year, the gnats are back anyway.
And that’s just such a great human lesson of our ability to blindly think we would know better than what mother nature could do or that we could outsmart her in any way.
And so I sort of developed a refrain in the book where we continue to make these mistakes as a society because money. The end result is like, well, sure, we could wait and see how the poison works on the ecosystem, but nobody’s going to make any money off that. We’re trying to get rich here. What’s the matter with you? And I’m trying to add to the chorus of voices saying there are better riches than commerce.
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The first part of the book is a long hike you take with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco and George Saunders, who’s an author. They’ve both been on the show, and I’m a huge fan of both of them. How did you, Jeff Tweedy and George Saunders, who I guess I could see the similarities but are in pretty different fields, how did you all become a trio?
Total serendipity. I was such a massive fan of Jeff and Uncle Tupelo, his first band, and Wilco, his second and lifelong band, since the mid ‘90s. And miraculously, in a later episode of “Parks and Recreation” that I happened to be directing, I was able to cast Jeff as Scott Tanner, this local washed-up rock musician. And so I got to meet my hero by hiring him.
And I was just absolutely terrified to meet him because people who influence you that powerfully, it’s really scary, especially because of the fear that they won’t be as cool as you imagine. And we were shooting at a house in the San Fernando Valley, and Jeff arrived on set and walked down the sidewalk, and we hugged each other. And I immediately knew, oh my god, we’re in love. We will be together forever. And we are. And our wives know about it, and they’re cool. They’re friends. But we did. We literally announced that we were now husbands.
I just can’t say enough about him. I love him so much. He is so talented and funny and a wonderfully humanistic person. He’s openly flawed. He’s very vocal about the troubles he’s had in his life, and the way he turns that back into his work I just really admire.
And then, the same year, I happened to be writing my second book, which is called “Gumption,” and it’s profiles of 21 different heroes, from George Washington to Conan O’Brien across history, just a collection.
The George Washington of our age.
That’s right. Washington and O’Brien, the two greats.
Yes.
But it’s muckrakers across the ages that inspire me, and two of them on the list were Jeff and George. So I sent an email to George through his editor — my editor sent it through his editor — that said, hey, I am a huge fan of your work. I would love to lionize you in this book that’s a sort of humorous look at my heroes. And he agreed to it. Luckily, “Parks and Recreation” has been a powerful calling card. With someone like George, it’s thrilling to hear that he was familiar with “Parks and Rec.” Because if you found out that he never owned a television, like Wendell, for example, you wouldn’t be surprised.
So we met in New York on a cold day of the same year, which I think was 2014. And George walked up, same damn thing, gave me a big hug. And I just said, oh, OK, we’re going to be together forever.
And then that same year, he and Jeff met backstage at the final taping of “The Colbert Report,” Stephen Colbert’s show previous to his current manifestation. And we all reported back to one another. Hey, I met George. Hey, I met Jeff. And since then, we started a three-way text thread. And it was nobody’s idea. We just naturally became a three-way bromance.
And as I say in the book, I’m a little younger than those two, and I really, in every way, feel like I’m the lucky little brother riding in the backseat of their Trans Am, and they’re turning me on to Frank Zappa. There’s something about their work that’s more tangible. You can have a record album. You can have George’s books.
Whereas what they appreciate in me, I would consider more ephemeral. It’s a way that I acted, which I’m down with. I’m happy that I have that ability. But I think just through human, natural self-efficacy, I’m like, yeah, there’s nothing I could do that would ever equal “Lincoln in the Bardo” or “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” but I will keep trying. And thank you to my big brothers for taking me to get ice cream every time.
I think it’s fair to say that there’s nothing any of us are going to do likely to match “Lincoln in the Bardo.” I always wonder about this, but George Saunders, who I’m a huge fan boy of. He’s been on the show. It’s one of my favorite episodes. People should go back and listen to it.
But I’ve listened to probably 10 or 12 interviews with him. I’ve read most of his books. He has a quality of gentle wisdom that is very distinctive, and I always wonder if he’s like that in private, if this is a public guru act and in private he’s just cursing and only wants to watch “Real Housewives of New York.” Is it on all the time?
I mean, no. Naturally, with all three of us, people often ask my wife, Megan Mullally, who played Karen on “Will and Grace,” for those that don’t know, and also Tammy 2 on “Parks and Rec,” we often get asked, are you guys just cracking each other up around the house? And I say, no, we’re not Ron and Karen at home. We make each other laugh quite a bit but just like normal people do.
And George, I would say the same. He’s very funny but in a dorky way, and Jeff, too. All three of us, the content that we’ve put out into the world has been generally edited and refined, and you’re seeing the finest work. We’re sending the cream to be evaluated, but there’s a whole lot of milk that we’re tossing at each other.
That said, our hikes and our conversations in the Glacier National Park trip were full of just dorky conversation and things we like. And George has always been an aspiring musician himself. In fact, when I interviewed him for my book “Gumption,” he eventually mentioned, oh, by the way, I’ve set a Wendell Berry poem to music, which he then let me record for the audiobook of that book. In the credits, there’s this crazy peanut butter in the chocolate of George Saunders setting a Wendell Berry poem to music sung by me.
And so, you know, there is a great humanity to all of us, meaning there’s lots of misses to our hits. But we kind of are always steering our conversations toward that sensibility. And I think that’s why we like to be together, because we catch each other out and say, OK, guys, here’s something that happened to me in traffic today, or here’s something that I’m pissed off about. And I know that we’re trying to find the better side of ourselves, so let’s put this into our three-man workshop.
And so each one of us brings something to the table. And George, specifically, has his Buddhist learnings that are so gorgeous. And Jeff is just a brainiac. I mean, they both have encyclopedic minds that I’ve learned to nod at. And I’m like, oh, you guys talk really great. And listen, I’ll carry these bags so you guys can keep talking.
So what did you take from Glacier National Park?
Gosh. The great thing was, and I think it’s what Wendell was trying to do when he sort of gave me the challenge that’s within the book, going there and seeing one of the rock star parks that John Muir turned Teddy Roosevelt on to the idea of preserving these public lands because of the grandeur of their beauty, seeing that in person and experiencing it and saying, OK, I get it. You’re right. But let’s just take a step back. It’s like eating the most incredible meal of veal when veal used to be produced in a very brutal way. It’s saying, OK, this is incredibly delicious. You made it — what now? You did what to the calves?
And seeing Glacier Park and having a well-read guide with us who knew a lot about the history of the land and saying basically, the simple transaction of look at this pristine wilderness untouched by human hands. Oh wait, there were humans here? Oh. That’s how we got them out? Oh shit.
And so basically, stepping back and doing that math of, what is this piece of nature that we have sort of falsely set up, as Teddy Roosevelt called them, as our crown jewels? We’ve sort of taken this acreage and put it on a shelf and said, this is for us. This is our fancy hat. You can see it on parade, but don’t ask us about the millinery. Don’t ask us about the haberdashery because there’s a lot of blood involved.
So I mean, that was a great foundation through which to talk to George and Jeff about us people, how we treat each other and how that is inextricably linked to how — as you said, the way we treat each other. If I mistreat you, I very well could be mistreating a future redwood and so forth and so on. So that’s what I came out of Glacier with was the beginnings, the sort of springboard of this book. And in the way that John Wayne is what I used to think of the type of manhood to which to aspire and then growing up and learning about misogyny and empathy and racism and homophobia and everything else and saying, oh, OK, that’s not the type of manhood to which to aspire.
And the national parks, I think, initially are the John Wayne of, perhaps, conservation lands and saying, oh, no, no, no. There’s so much more nuance to the conversation. So let’s start there and see what we can improve upon.
I want to hold on the word manhood for a second here because it always seems to me that your great topic is manhood, that you have a somewhat camp masculinity that you play in public, the long video sipping whiskey by the fire. And obviously, a lot of it’s real. You really do have a woodworking shop. But how would you describe your relationship to the thing of manhood or masculinity?
It’s a great question because I never set out — I always said, don’t ask the clown behind the makeup why the children are crying. I knew I loved my mustache because my Uncle Don and Uncle Dan had mustaches when I was a kid, and I wanted to grow up and be like the Han Solos in my family. But I wasn’t aware that I would be considered particularly manly by popular culture.
And so it wasn’t my idea, I guess, is where I would start. It’s something that I feel was hung upon me. And I said, OK, I guess I see where that’s coming from, and I’ll try to do my best to use that accusation of manliness to maybe try and bend the conversation and say, OK, yeah, I do these things that are traditionally considered manly. But I also think it’s OK to kiss whoever you want to or any other number of sort of open-minded notions that aren’t associated with manhood.
I developed the slogan, “Hug before punch.” I don’t promote the idea of violence. I promote the idea of common sense and talking to one another and listening. And the idea of men aren’t supposed to cry, well, of course we’re supposed to cry, all of those things.
In fact, at my wood shop, I got into the habit of not hiring men because that’s one of the places where, almost immediately, people in conversations would say, oh, that’s for guys or you really appeal to the male audience, they would say to me. And I would say, I think that’s the John Wayne thinking because there are as many women that are amazing woodworkers as men. And so I love trying to take the gender out of things as best I can. And I’ve been given the opportunity by being accused of being manly.
One of the things that often seems to me you’re doing is cleaving the aesthetics of being manly from maybe some of the more traditionally not great content. So I’m talking to you now. You’re in a plaid flannel shirt. You’ve got your wood shop. You are releasing a new Lagavulin, which is an awesome thing to get to do.
And in the book, too, I mean, there’s a lot of moving firewood around and rebuilding a farm, and it’s all there. But then the things you are saying and thinking at the center of that are more subversive. You’re going through Glacier National Park and reflecting on the destruction of the Indigenous cultures there. You are on the farm and thinking about what it means to eat meat the way a lot of people do, where it’s factory farmed and grows up in these terrible conditions.
There’s a lot in your book and a lot, frankly, in your acting about empathy and being able to listen at the end of the day. And I think that’s part of the project that I’m curious about, the maintenance of the symbols and even finding value in some of these older symbolic things, working with your hands, et cetera, but the recognition that you could still attach that to maybe new content.
Gosh. I knew that you were going to blow me away with your thoughtful questioning. You’ve done it. I’m so grateful for this. Because this is something I’ve never thought about, but now you’re making me think about it. And I think my instincts have basically taken the gifts I was given, the visibility that “Parks and Recreation” brought me with the conception that I’m somehow the trope of American manhood in any way, taking that and saying, OK, guys, that’s cool. I can split firewood. Check this out. But also, let’s think about how we’re using our natural resources while I’m a lumberjack.
And I know you’re very vocal and fascinated with veganism and with our food culture in general. And things like that, often, people will approach me after a show and say, I’m so excited to meet you. My wife really wanted to come meet you, but she’s a vegetarian and she was scared to meet you, as though I was going to punch her or something.
And I always say, no, no, it’s totally part of the comedy. Ron Swanson also hated Canada and Europe, and that’s all for a laugh. Of course, Canada and Europe and vegetarians and vegans, they all are as great as anything else, and all of those require nuance.
And so I narrated a documentary called “Sacred Cow” about the problems with, particularly, the beef industry. And one of the things it dives into is how vegetarianism or veganism, none of these food systems are achievable without killing animal life. In the case of a plant-based diet, it gets down into the soil or the insects or the snails. But we have not achieved a way of creating food without killing some kind of animal somewhere.
And so it’s a conversation that all I’m saying is so far, I seem to still love eating a steak or a cheeseburger. But I’ve become incredibly staunch about saying there’s an incredibly right way to create and provide this beef and then there’s 99.9 percent of the rest of the beef we’re creating. So I’m kind of on the side, I think, of the sensitivity of a vegan lifestyle that has the welfare of animals in mind, even though, in my case, they’re being raised to be consumed.
Wendell Berry has something nice to say about it where he’s like, I want these animals to live a happy life. And that, to me, is part of the message where I could say, look, everyone, I am a red-meat-eating American. But what we’ve been sold as being OK as to how this food is provided is so not OK. So let’s dig deeper into that.
Yeah, there is no way to eat or live in this world without violence. You’re crushing the field mice to make corn. There’s not an option here that does not include violence. It’s funny because I read the discussion of meat eating in the book, and I really liked it. Something I always tried to tell people on this is for the most part, vegetarians, vegans and people who believe animals should be raised to have good lives and only killed and eaten then — which you have a beautiful quote from Wendell Berry to that effect — are much closer in the food system they’re imagining then anyone OK with the food system that we have now.
The truth is, if that was the food system we have, I am not sure in any way that I’d be vegan. I loved meat. I still miss meat. I still think it’s delicious. At this point, it’s been a long time since I ate it, so it just feels a little weird to me to eat. But one of the reasons, when I was making this transition to the way I eat now, that I did it is that it was so hard to truly know what you were being served.
You actually have a quick discussion in the book of the little labels that get put on eggs and how many of them are just straight bullshit, how many of them are just something there to make the consumer feel better. And then there would be, occasionally, these scandals that will come out where the fancy markets were selling commodity beef under the wrapping of being pasture raised. And in a world where there was the ethic of care, you wouldn’t have to worry about this. It’s a world where the ethic of care is operating on the margin that it becomes very hard to know what’s actually in front of you and in certain ways, if you don’t want to participate in it, safer to abstain altogether.
It’s absolutely true. The eggs are a great example. It’s legal in our food system. Among the myriad of things you can put on your egg labels, it includes the options of organic or 100 percent organic. Which if you go to the Rebanks family farm in England, they just call them eggs. They raise their own eggs, but their neighbors also get their eggs from each other, and many people in town get their eggs.
So we’ve globalized our food system so profoundly that, through Michael Pollan’s research, we’ve learned that someone with as great of a superficial reputation as Whole Foods is flying in your blueberries. The carbon footprint wasn’t taken into consideration when they created their business model. And so reining in our food system from the global back to the extremely local is one of the most important things we can do for national security.
I mean, when it comes down to it, like when the pandemic hit, there was such a run on so many grocery items because we live in fear because we don’t know where these things come from. If you know who’s providing even just your eggs and dairy and meat and produce, that just creates such a more profound sense of security and health for you and your family.
Are you a local eater?
As much as I can. I live in Los Angeles, which is not near much good agriculture, so to speak. But we have great farmer’s markets that we utilize. And one thing that’s similar with me and Ron is a great love of eggs, and so I’m always fascinated to find out where my eggs come from and how they’re raised. But it’s an ongoing thing. Farmers come and go from the farmer’s market. During the pandemic, it got really strange with markets being on and off. So it’s a constant thing, and it always will be.
That’s something I just always try to remember. My sensei, which is a whole other story from book one, who taught me Kabuki theater and Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, this Zen master, told me, always maintain the attitude of a student. He told me that when I was 19. And I was a college student, and I was like, OK, that doesn’t seem that wise. But pretty quickly, it sank in where part of what it means is our lives are a subject of study that should never be considered finished because the circumstances will always be evolving. Just like a relationship, you have to maintain it and be vigilant for changes and health and supply of resources and so forth.
Let me turn this question around because one way of hearing this conversation is Nick Offerman, rich, famous actor, and Ezra Klein, rich, famous journalist, are sitting around talking about how everybody should eat expensive food. And there is something to that. If you never want to get your blueberries flown in, the farmer’s market can be pretty expensive. The good meat, it is pricey.
It is pricey to have meat done through regenerative agriculture. It just is. It breaks my heart a little bit, but it is. And I always think the hardest part of this whole conversation is recognizing that part of the pressure here is people are strapped, and they want to spend less on their food, and they also want the full range of choices. And so you end up in a system that optimizes for the lowest possible price at the grocery store, even if there are incredible costs that are imposed elsewhere. And so how do you think about that? Because you spent a lot of time on this farm — it’s a working farm — with people who are doing the daily work. We talked a bit about scale as being the difficulty in our food system. But a lot of that is in order to feed a lot of people, at least what looks like cheaply. And there can be a sense of this whole conversation being a luxury good for people who can afford the goods it is serving up.
Two things come to mind. One is I just try to continue to engender the conversation by pointing people to things like the Wendell Berry Farming Program, and they have a beef program called Our Home Place Meat. There are operations that I admire that are making a living at sustainably farming with rotational grazing, doing it right. So there’s that idea. Just encouraging people to go to the farmer’s market, just saying to them, do you know who’s making your food and what is in it for the health of you and your kids, et cetera. So that’s the sort of local point of view.
It’s also incredibly satisfying, if you’re not growing any food, start with a basil plant on a windowsill. Start with some herbs. Grow some tomatoes. It’ll blow your mind. It feels like a superpower if you aren’t into it. Once you make a meal where you’re like, know where this garlic came from? And if the answer is you grew it, that garlic is the most delicious thing you’ll ever eat. The macro sensibility gets into politics, and I have a hard time wrapping my head around it, which is why I’m glad to be a foot soldier in this conversation.
But what I focus on is how early on in our government we were admonished by people like Theodore Roosevelt, who said, you know, if you ever let the corporate money into politics, we’re screwed. Well, cut to our lifetimes and our parents’ lifetimes where by now, our government seems to be largely shaped and steered by corporate interests.
And I use as my example the sensibilities of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who, among other things, are very vocal about saying all of these politicians, Republican and Democrat and in between, are all taking corporate money. If those two politicians, Elizabeth and Bernie, are anomalous and being vocal about that subject, that’s terrifying. If they’re the only ones standing up and saying, we’re never going to get anywhere as long as the government is scratching the backs of the corporate interests that are paying the government to scratch the backs of the corporate interests.
And so with regard to this conversation, it’s the food corporations who are being serviced. It’s the people not doing the right thing, food wise, that are receiving government subsidies. And so by continuing to shine a light on this conversation, the only answer I can wrap my head around is bringing our voting power to reflect upon medium and small-sized farming.
Because I think it’s also very deeply a cultural challenge. And this is one of the reasons I’m interested in your kind of public aesthetic of reverent masculinity, maybe we’ll call it, which is, look, corporations are responsible for all kinds of ills in our life — and goods, too — but they are not the only reason people want things to be cheap at the grocery store. And one of the hardest conversations to have, I think, is the conversation — I see this in politics — where you say, there are certain things in life that should be more expensive than they are because how cheap they are right now is an illusion. Fossil fuels are like that, but so is meat. Meat should be more expensive. Through most of our history as a species, it costs a lot to get an animal. It cost a lot of calories for a long time. But then later, it cost a lot in terms of how long it took you to raise the animal. And so there was a reverence that came in through that. It was expensive, and so you treated it as expensive. You treated it with respect.
This is, I think, a theme of some of your book. You have a very lovely chapter, or section, on work and how the work that goes into something is often the point and becoming detached from that, becoming detached from that linkage can undermine what the thing is in your relationship. You give this with a story from your wood shop where your business agent comes and says, can we just pick one thing you make and put it into mass production and put it in “SkyMall“? And you say, no, that the labor involved in the crafting of a table or chair or canoe was the whole point. So can you tell me a bit about that and the relationship between the labor that goes into an object and its value?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think a lot of the answer to where we, as a species, have gotten off on the wrong fork lies in that. The consumerist powers that be have learned that they can sell us human nature. And again, this initially comes from a couple of different pieces of Wendell Berry writing, that we’ve been sold a bill of goods that work is dirty or beneath us and that if we can, the good life, or making it big or when our ship comes in, then we’ll no longer have to work, that that’s something to aspire to.
And I had a seminal moment early on in my relationship with Megan. When she was on Will and Grace, we lived in a beautiful little house in the Hills with a little swimming pool. And one day, I think I was about 30, 31, and I thought, oh, I’ve made it. I’m now living the life of Riley. I’m going to smoke a joint, put on some Neil Young on my outdoor speakers because I’ve made it, and I’m going to float in the pool.
And I did that for about a song and a half, and then I thought, well, what are you going to do, just lay here all day? And I was like, oh, yeah, how is this good? I’m not going to get anything done. That sounds like a recipe for depression and addiction, whereas if I take the tools I’ve been given and apply them —
so that’s when it really hit home for me that it’s another version of it’s the journey, not the destination. By making things at my wood shop or by writing a book or by writing funny songs and touring the country and singing them to audiences, those are all ways in which I’m not drinking too much beer or powering a massive yacht to the Virgin Islands or so forth and so on. Jeff Tweedy has always said, he just tries to live in a way where he creates more things than he destroys.
And it’s that sensibility in the same way the simple act of walking is such a profound practice, profound discipline that A, it foments so much creativity in me and so many of the people I admire, writers and creative heads. They go for a walk. That’s how George thinks about the bananas, exquisite ideas that he comes up with. Jeff goes for a walk. Wendell Berry goes for a walk. And he says this great thing about the pace and setting limits for yourself. Once we got to vehicles, we no longer see the countryside around us.
And if my book is about paying attention to the nature precisely where we exist, like the actual watershed that we are taking part in, the faster your car goes, the less you see of it. And he says, back when you had to walk or at least go at the pace of a horse, not only then did you notice the leaves on the trees, the health of the stream, the health of your neighbor’s house — oh, that needs a paint job. Oh, they’ve done a nice job. Oh, look, they’ve built a milk house. They’re doing well, et cetera.
That sensibility at my wood shop, I don’t know, it just really hit home where, first, I became a woodworker by myself because I was obsessed with it, and then it became a little business and I hired employees. And I said, you know, we’re not here to make as much money as we can. We might as well go work at a factory or pour concrete, neither of which are super fun. I want you guys to have a good life. I want your input in what we make and how we make it so that we make enough money to stay out of the red but also have a happy life together.
And so that’s my third book, which is my woodworking book, but it also is full of recipes for our cookouts. And I had everybody in the shop write a chapter of the book because it’s about how a community of inputs creates a much better recompense in life, whether it’s a family or a theater company or a wood shop. I had a line that I love that was like, eight people with one beer each is so much better than one guy with eight beers.
And so it’s all about that. I had the gift of growing up with the eight people with one beer and understanding that if we could all work together to make something, it’s that together and the work that is even more important than the pay you receive at the end of it. And if you turn that into a lifetime, I think cumulatively, we end up with a much better grasp on a lot of these problems of scale that we’re talking about.
And I’m so grateful, as the person that I grew up as, that somehow my parents and my family and community gave me the tools to have the ears and eyes to cotton to what people like Wendell and Richard Powers and George and Jeff and James Rebanks and so forth are laying down. Because I’m 51. I’m going to I’m going to go to work and try to make a living and keep those around me happy and behave like a human being. And I’m so grateful that I’ve been shown by the wisdom of calmer heads than mine that one can do that while trying to say I love you.
I’m not 100 percent sure if this is a related or unrelated thought, but something I was thinking about while you said that was as I’ve got in a little older, one of the unexpected ambitions of my life has been to become a great appreciator. Now you have —I was a good consumer when I was young. I wanted stuff. And to some degree, I got some of it, and I collected certain things. But it was about the acquisition, and then you’d be onto the next.
And something I’ve come to respect more in other people when I see it now and try to cultivate more in myself is it really is the case, you can listen to any music, functionally, in the world now. You can read every book, to a first approximation, published in the last couple hundred years. And cultivating in yourself an ability to actually go out there and appreciate, including things that are not naturally the things you already know, the people who can do that, who have the ears to do that, the attention to do that are the ones who seem to me to end up becoming wise and fulfilled. And the people who can’t have a lot more trouble walking that path.
Yeah, I mean, I hope to be on that path myself. And I think that you hit an important point, which is given the incredible amount of content available, basically all content, it’s fallen to us now to become curators of our life experience. Limits are no longer placed on us by locality or corporate broadcast abilities. We can now generally consume any content whenever we want. And so the curation of that has made it all, to me, profoundly more important.
I feel like 20, 30 years ago, I may have just ended up being a pretty happy guy with a furniture shop. But because I somehow, so far, have been able to successfully navigate listening to these founts of empathy and of conscience, it allows me to then recognize the chasms in my own abilities as a human being and say, OK, great. If I can keep my head on my shoulders, if I can continue to find my ass with both hands, then I might end up making more than I destroy as well, just like the people I aspire to.
But maybe there’s a place where you are just a happy guy with a furniture shop. And I bring that up to ask what is literally my favorite question to ask anybody. But because you did the show “Devs,” I can practically ask it of you, which is do you believe in the many universes interpretation of quantum mechanics? Do you believe we’re all constantly splitting off into parallel worlds?
Well, I love science fiction, and I love fiction. And I love that notion. I love all those things. I love the human imagination and that someone like Alex Garland can successfully explain that to me and I can grasp it. I love all of that, and I relish thinking about it.
I was asked questions like this a lot when we were promoting that show, and I can’t begin to really grasp it. Because if we are in a simulation right now, which if you talk to these quantum physicists, they can pretty quickly convince you that it’s disprovable if we are or not. If this is just reality or if we’re simulation number 1,000,027, there’s no discernible way for us to ever know. And I was like, OK, you got me.
So I mean, I’m open to the possibility of things that I can’t prove. That makes a lot more sense to me than man-made religious texts that involve any sort of magic realism where I’m like, yeah, I get that your heart’s in the right place and I understand the values in your allegory, but this was written by some dudes. That is the difference between the many worlds theories where I’m like, OK, there’s no way we can prove that this is or isn’t the case. So great, I’ll happily accept the idea that there are an infinite number of mes and yous and outcomes.
I think that is a good place to come to a close here. So always our final question, what are three books you would recommend in this universe or any other?
Well, I’m always amazed when I say to people, do you know Wendell Berry, and they say no. And I’m like, son of a bitch.
All right, so I’ve already mentioned “The Unsettling of America.” And I think a great place to hook people is how I was hooked, which is through his prolific body of fiction.
And so the book the book I started with is called “Fidelity.” It’s a collection of short stories. And I’m telling you, it’s a farmer’s common sense. The women and men, his fictional community, have taught me so much about love and forgiveness and values. So that’s a great deal of what fuels my writing and thinking.
My second book would be “Wanderlust” by Rebecca Solnit because it’s a book that’s on point. It’s all about walking. It’s how walking is so intrinsic to the good work of human beings in so many ways, in particular, maintaining an awareness of what’s going on with nature, the absolute delight that one can experience just by being in weather.
I have never seen a movie in a theater — and I love to see movies in theaters — that remotely approaches the feel of being out in a storm with the proper gear. That feels like an incredible human triumph. But beyond that, it’s the history of walking. It’s all of the great thinkers and the effect of walking upon them. She’s a wonderful brain that I greatly admire.
And then finally, I’m going to take a hard left to Peggy Orenstein. And it’s a two-for-one because it’s a book called Girls and Sex, but there’s a twin called Boys and Sex. And they’re just these unvarnished looks at our young people and the sort of calcified cultural ruts concerning our sexual behavior toward one another that I wish I had been handed as a manual to puberty.
And I recommend it to everyone I know with or without kids. Like, if you would like to get kissed, you should read these books. And if you would like to equitably and favorably kiss people, you should read these books. They’re so wonderful. They would have saved me a great deal of clumsy fumbling. So please, give that opportunity to your young people.
Nick Offerman, thank you very much.
Thank you so much, Ezra.
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“The Ezra Klein Show” is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Roge Karma and Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.
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EZRA KLEIN: Hello. I’m Ezra Klein. Welcome to “The Ezra Klein Show.”
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I’m a big Nick Offerman fan in the sense that I’m a big Ron Swanson fan. And if you don’t know who Ron Swanson is, he’s the head of the Pawnee, Ind. Parks and Recreation Department on the show “Parks and Recreation,” which I have watched many times. I have watched it so many times because I am nothing if not a parody of myself, and I enjoy gentle comedies about government bureaucracies.
But Swanson is a fascinating character who turned Offerman into something of a human meme. He’s a libertarian naturalist who’s got this almost camp masculinity, got a big mustache, and he only eats red meat and he lives off the grid and he’s a privacy nut. But he’s also ultimately sweet and vulnerable, and he sees other people really clearly. And people loved that character.
And Offerman, as a human, began to play into it. Famously, he released this long video of himself just drinking whiskey next to a fire. But Offerman also has a woodworking shop. He had that before the show, to be fair. But he really does make furniture there. You can buy it online. And then in “The Good Place,” another show, he appeared in one of the finale episodes as a heavenly woodworker.
It’s really recursive in an interesting way. And there’s always been something fascinating to me about the version of masculinity, a version of throwback masculinity even, that Offerman is playing, inhabiting and then, in some ways, subverting. And then I got this email that Offerman had a new book coming out called “Where the Deer and the Antelope Play.” And in the email, his publicist said the book was partly conceived on a hiking trip with the writer George Saunders — who I just really admire, and he’s been on this show — and the musician Jeff Tweedy, the frontman of Wilco, who I also admire and who has also been on this show. You should look up both of those episodes. They are great.
Anyway, the three of them — Saunders, Tweedy and Offerman — are all close friends who go hiking together, which melted my mind a little bit. And so this book, which partially comes out of their hiking trip, is all about the American outdoors and how it’s interwoven in our history, what we have done to it, the role it does and can play in our lives, how we should think about it, maybe, differently than we currently do.
A lot of the book, to my surprise, is inspired by conversations Offerman has had with a great agrarian philosopher and poet Wendell Berry. I did not see that turn coming here, which is all to say Nick Offerman contains multitudes that I had no idea about. He’s got a wonderful earthy, self-deprecating wisdom, and this conversation was just a lot of fun. As always, my email: ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
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Nick Offerman, welcome to the show.
NICK OFFERMAN: Thank you very much for having me.
EZRA KLEIN: So what was your relationship with the outdoors like as a child?
NICK OFFERMAN: It was pretty tempestuous. I grew up in a bit of a cultural vacuum in small-town Illinois, ’70s and ’80s. And so we had the three channels of television and top 40 radio, which didn’t leave a lot to draw a young Nick Offerman in. But I did have a bicycle and siblings and cousins and friends and cornfields and the woods and a creek and a tree house and a hammer and some nails. And so you put all those in a toolbox, and I didn’t have very many pairs of jeans that weren’t dirty most of the time.
EZRA KLEIN: And did that change as you got older? I mean, at some point, you developed this vibe as the outdoorsman of our generation — which is partially put on, but this is a whole book about the outdoors. It’s a whole book about your relationship with it. So what changed?
NICK OFFERMAN: Well, it’s poignantly interesting that my family, who are wonderful, gentle, good-hearted people who are farmers, by and large. Even those that aren’t farmers, we all sprung from farm families within, like, an eight-mile radius. And some go on to be schoolteachers or librarians or paramedics, but we all come from this sort of bucolic upbringing. And even so, there’s not an agrarian sensibility. There’s not a particular focus on how are we treating the natural resources, so much as how can we use the seed we’re given by the corporation to create the greatest yield to earn profit for our family.
And when you do that with machinery and out in the elements and so forth, I do think it’s incredibly charismatic, and I find my family really heroic. I always saw my uncles as sort of Han Solo because their Millennium Falcons never were brand new off the showroom floor, but they could always keep them running through the harvest season.
And so growing up, I had this great appreciation for being outside. We also love boats in my family. We love fishing. And it wasn’t until I was a young man that somebody gave me some Wendell Berry stories, and I mean, it was a really specific, almost violent epiphany when I read his stories, and particularly a description of a farmer and his hired hand fixing some fencing. And Wendell describes it as though he’s seen the most magnificent performance of “Swan Lake” or something, where the reverence that he gave to the honest, hard work of humanity with our hands and what we can do with our resources to better our lives for ourselves and our children knocked me on my ass and brought tears to my eyes and said this guy has made kings of me and my family. And that made me just pay attention to the rest of his writing. And that was, whatever, 25 years ago, and I’m just still a student of that, saying, how are we going wrong in our society, and how can we ask the right questions to try and put us back on the right track?
EZRA KLEIN: Let’s back up to who is Wendell Berry. Because he’s a really important part of the book, going be a big part of this conversation. Who is he?
NICK OFFERMAN: He is a writer by way of being a farmer in Henry County, Ky. His brother and his dad were both lawyers. And forgive me, I get this mixed up. One of them was a state representative, as well. But they were these venerable, agricultural, law-minded gentlemen who — his dad created a thing called the Burley Tobacco Program.
There’s a family story about Wendell’s grandfather coming home after taking his tobacco crop to market one year. And he came home, and after paying for the trip and the fees, he ended up breaking even. They made zero dollars and cents for the year’s crop. And so the dad created this Burley Tobacco Program, which was basically a co-op by which all of the farmers were represented in a sort of union fashion so that everybody got a parity price to prevent that from happening, to prevent people from being crushed by the market.
And so Wendell grew up in this family, working on the farm. And his nature took him to study. He was a fellow of the Wallace Stegner program at Stanford. So Wendell thought he was going to be a leading novelist of his day, but it just kept bugging him that he was on the wrong path. And he pretty quickly realized that he and his young wife, Tanya, should move home to the family land in Kentucky, and that’s his subject matter. That’s what he should write about. And he did, and he’s cranked out the most prolific body of work — poetry, fiction and essays — that have just an incredible conscience, a wonderful stewardship sensibility of a small farming operation and how we can sustainably use nature’s resources to maintain the life of a human community.
He sort of became an agrarian rock star in about 1976 with a book of essays called “The Unsettling of America.” And that brought him a lot of attention because it’s a book with so much common sense that people with their heads on straight sat up and said, oh, hey, we should pay attention to what this guy is laying down. And he’s never stopped. He’s still got a new book coming out, hopefully next year, and I’m grateful for it.
EZRA KLEIN: You used a wonderful word when you brought him up the first time, that there was a reverence in the way he wrote, just, about — I think it was farmers fixing a fence in that example. And I love Berry’s work. Reverence, I think, is exactly the right word for it, but it’s also a philosophical system. And you mention that, too. I think you said the agrarian sensibility. And he’s often connected to agrarianism, which in your book, you defined and then you say, isn’t that the most boring sentence in the world. But give me your least boring definition of agrarianism.
NICK OFFERMAN: Well, it’s using the raw ingredients that we find in nature to sustain our human species with a conscience. It’s using nature’s resources equitably, in as fair a way as we can come up with, for all the people and for Mother Nature as well.
EZRA KLEIN: And so is that what you’ve learned from him? How do you go from being somebody who likes Wendell Berry’s work to ending up at his dinner table with a mission from him that frames how you end up writing this whole book?
NICK OFFERMAN: Well, gosh, when I read in Wendell’s stories the way he lionized the commonplace, the nobility of a human work ethic with a conscience, I said, OK, if anything, I was brought up an altar boy in the Catholic Church, and I was always unmoved by the pageantry of the church itself. And among the things I read in Wendell was he doesn’t really care for churches either. He’s extremely spiritual, and he loves to regurgitate lessons from the Bible and Shakespeare, as well, but he doesn’t really like the way people get together because things then go wrong. Once humans start using the beauty and wisdom and truth, somebody says, hey, we might make some money doing this, and then things go south quickly.
But when I read his stuff and it struck me, for me, I said this is the closest to what I’ve understood a gospel to be. And so if I’m going to become a priest in anybody’s teachings, it’s this particular church. And I started writing him letters saying, I’m a storyteller. I’m a performer. I would love to help spread your ideas to as many people as I can. And I don’t know. I guess it affected my decision making. As I have had the success I’ve had in the entertainment industry, it definitely affects the choices I make.
It’s a weird thing to try and evaluate. But I’ve turned down a good number of jobs which would have probably made me more famous and more wealthy, but they didn’t inspire me as evolutionary. I do my best, when I choose things to work on, to have a feeling that they might help us move forward. Or sometimes, it’s just stupidly funny. Like, sometimes, I like to just participate in the delivery of the medicine of laughter.
But when I pick, like, a TV series, that’s a big decision. My thought process is directly fueled, I think, by my years of reading Wendell Berry, where I think, what will this crop do not only in the market, but what will it do in the soil? And what will it do 10 years from now and so forth.
EZRA KLEIN: Is there some Wendell Berry in Ron Swanson?
NICK OFFERMAN: I mean, invariably, there must be because there’s some in me, and there’s plenty of me in Ron. When I was cast as Ron, I had just a passing knowledge of libertarianism. So I did a lot of reading. And Mike Schur, who’s so wonderfully smart and such a gentle teacher as a boss, I dedicated a book to Mike and said, thank you for showing me that we can still be so funny while saying I love you.
And so when Mike and I began creating Ron Swanson, there was a lot of sensibility of sort of the ideal libertarian. And conservatives really want to see through their sort of solipsistic lens that he’s a gun nut. They want to make him a misogynist. They want to make him a harsh conservative in a lot of ways. When, in truth, he’s a real libertarian, which means everybody is great in his book. Your gender, your race, your sexual situation, all of that, in true libertarianism, is fine. Like, that’s your business, and I’m not going to mess with you.
And I think that the common sensibility that Ron brings to everyday problems comes from a sort of agrarian point of view where his system, his sense of economy is much more invested in fishing and hunting and, like, do I have enough land and/or gold to glean the protein my family needs. He may be a little confused when things get more complicated in social dealings. But when it comes to dealing with his ecosystem, I think he’s on the right page.
EZRA KLEIN: Yeah, what struck me when you said that meeting and thinking about Wendell Berry changed the course of your work, none of my questions coming into this were, was Wendell Berry responsible for Ron Swanson. But it immediately made me think. I’ve watched “Parks and Rec” more times than I should probably admit on this show, and it always seems to me that Swanson’s libertarianism is played for laughs but his reverence for the natural world isn’t.
The idea that he’s a person who actually finds peace on the weekend in a hut in the woods, that’s just the character. It’s not a joke. And so to the idea of finding roles that root a little bit of Berry into the popular consciousness — I mean, he’s somebody who lives, or at least seems to want to live, orients towards living a little bit more of an agrarian life.
NICK OFFERMAN: Absolutely. Something that I was very affected by, getting into the world of popular culture, immediately, at the University of Illinois in the theater program, I just was slapped across the face with how far behind all my peers I was culturally. I was a hayseed. I was a slow-talking country kid. And they were all cool as hell. They were all from the suburbs. They had done “Glengarry Glen Ross” by the time they were 18, and I was just hearing of Mamet.
And so it took me some years to begin to understand the simplicity that Wendell Berry and his ilk promote. Just saying walking is better than driving, that sensibility really soaked in where I came to realize that my upbringing and my sense of values actually were profoundly important and that not only were they not to be shunned, they would become the foundation of my life’s work.
EZRA KLEIN: And so when you go and have dinner with Berry, he tells you to examine nature not through the lens of John Muir, which is how everybody looks at it, but instead, through the lens of Aldo Leopold. So what does that mean?
NICK OFFERMAN: It means that. When you think of terms like nature and conservation and activism, when you get into that kind of thought process, that brings to mind Greenpeace and The Sierra Club and tree-hugging and so forth and images of Yosemite and the giant sequoias and the Everglades and the pinnacles of what we’ve come to know as natural beauty in our country.
And then when you bring up Aldo Leopold, originally from Iowa but is known mainly for his work in Wisconsin and, specifically, his understanding that it was wrong of us to completely eradicate the grasslands of the Midwest and replace them with monoculture crops, it’s that idea of wherever you are, looking at what mother nature has created.
And this tips into some of the great stuff I heard in your interview with Richard Powers, where he hit on these themes that I feel like a lot of the themes are similar to what’s in my book, except I was like I feel like I’m composing not quite “Twinkle, Twinkle” but maybe “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” — but here I am listening to Tchaikovsky talk about it. And it’s true. We’re all playing music, but I could absolutely identify the difference in complexity.
That said, that’s the notion. The simplicity that it all drives me towards is being able to recognize, through the lens of Aldo Leopold, that we must be able to look around at whatever piece of land we’re trying to live upon and say, how is our living affecting the health of this natural area, and is it going to be sustainable?
We want our species to survive. That’s hardwired in us. And so part of that must be, what plants are we using? What animals? What minerals, et cetera, are we using? How are we using the water? Is the way we’re using it going to bring more usable water back to us, et cetera. If we can’t wrap our heads around that, we can’t last.
And so instead of looking at nature as some sort of separate, other destination, it’s understanding that you and I are looking at each other on a Zoom thing right now, and we’re part of nature at the moment. This crazy sci-fi conversation is as much a part of nature as a beautiful, giant redwood.
EZRA KLEIN: This is something I brought up in the conversation with Powers, but I actually always think that is an important thing to keep in mind. I mean, a redwood is a reorganization of the molecules here into one form driven by life. And this laptop on which I’m looking at a pixelated version of you on Zoom is a reorganization of molecules in the world driven by another form of life. And laptop isn’t alive,
but I always think we’ve gotten into a weird space where we’ve come to think of what we’re doing as not nature. It’s sort of like when we talk about global warming and say, we need to save the world, save the planet. And the planet is going to be here no matter what.
The question is, will we, and will a lot of other a lot of other species we’re driving to extinction?
But we’re part of it. We don’t actually get to hold that separation. There’s no us without it. And in some ways, some of our death drives come at least from some of the natural impulse that we’ve managed to supercharge without any of the things that keep it in harmony.
NICK OFFERMAN: I couldn’t agree more. And further, the organization of molecules that is you and I in this conversation right now may very well become a redwood.
EZRA KLEIN: One can only hope.
NICK OFFERMAN: Yeah, may we please be so promoted. But both Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold say some beautiful things about this. Leopold comes to understand — there’s a famous story about him where he kills a she-wolf as a young United States Forestry official. And by killing off the apex predators, they allow the deer population, among others, to thrive and over-thrive to the point where they denude the mountain of all of its greenery, and then they starve. There’s too many deer. They eat all the food. They die. And so basically, knocking mother nature’s balance out of whack just by one ingredient, the wolf, kills everything.
And Aldo Leopold talks about how every bit of nature that we can see in, and even those we can’t, they’re all cogs in wheels in this grand mechanism, and only an idiot would throw away the parts. He said the genius tinkerer saves every cog in the wheel because we understand they’re all necessary.
And that’s what I always come back to. That’s why I always open with fallibility and say, let’s just remember, as we get into any conversation, that we’ll never have all the information. And this is part of our ongoing project to understand and respect and treat the knowledge we do have with reverence instead of simply greed and avarice.
EZRA KLEIN: I want to be careful as I frame this question because I don’t know John Muir’s writings deeply enough to say every view he held. But at least in the way he’s come to stand in the culture, I think that story you tell about Leopold, which you tell in the book too, strikes me as important. I think Muir has come to stand in for we should conserve and appreciate nature. We should treat nature like it was put here for us, and it would be a waste to get rid of it before everybody’s gotten to see it. And nothing wrong with that. National parks are good. We should do more set-aside land.
But the Leopold idea, at least as you frame it in the book and, I think, the Berry idea, is that there’s a genius to nature that we need to recognize we don’t understand, that it is smarter than we are, that it operates at a time scale we can’t even fathom. And so this isn’t just about preserving it. It’s about recognizing and learning from it, about knowing that we can’t know what we are doing. And as such, we best be careful, be alert, and be open to the idea that the world was doing it better without our massive interventions. Is that how you understand them?
NICK OFFERMAN: Absolutely. I am very aware of the flaws in myself as a human animal, and so I always approach new experiments and projects with caution. I can just talk about making a new table in my wood shop. If I’m building a new table, I order enough wood knowing that I’m going to screw up the first three things I try. It’s common practice in woodworking. If you’re building a new design, you start with cheap scrap wood, and you make your mistakes on that cheap wood before you start cutting into the good oak.
And in the same way, that’s how I think we should address our relationship in all of our natural transactions, is to say — Rachel Carson touches on it powerfully in “Silent Spring,” where in Northern California, they want to wipe out a certain species of gnat on a lake. And so they come in with a version of DDT to eradicate these gnats when they hatch. And of course, the poison sinks into the water.
The plankton and the microorganisms eat the DDT. Then the fish eat those microorganisms. They die, the fish die. Then the birds that eat the fish, they continue to compound the poison, destroying a bunch of species. And then come the next year, the gnats are back anyway.
And that’s just such a great human lesson of our ability to blindly think we would know better than what mother nature could do or that we could outsmart her in any way.
And so I sort of developed a refrain in the book where we continue to make these mistakes as a society because money. The end result is like, well, sure, we could wait and see how the poison works on the ecosystem, but nobody’s going to make any money off that. We’re trying to get rich here. What’s the matter with you? And I’m trying to add to the chorus of voices saying there are better riches than commerce.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
EZRA KLEIN: The first part of the book is a long hike you take with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco and George Saunders, who’s an author. They’ve both been on the show, and I’m a huge fan of both of them. How did you, Jeff Tweedy and George Saunders, who I guess I could see the similarities but are in pretty different fields, how did you all become a trio?
NICK OFFERMAN: Total serendipity. I was such a massive fan of Jeff and Uncle Tupelo, his first band, and Wilco, his second and lifelong band, since the mid ’90s. And miraculously, in a later episode of “Parks and Recreation” that I happened to be directing, I was able to cast Jeff as Scott Tanner, this local washed-up rock musician. And so I got to meet my hero by hiring him.
And I was just absolutely terrified to meet him because people who influence you that powerfully, it’s really scary, especially because of the fear that they won’t be as cool as you imagine. And we were shooting at a house in the San Fernando Valley, and Jeff arrived on set and walked down the sidewalk, and we hugged each other. And I immediately knew, oh my god, we’re in love. We will be together forever. And we are. And our wives know about it, and they’re cool. They’re friends. But we did. We literally announced that we were now husbands.
I just can’t say enough about him. I love him so much. He is so talented and funny and a wonderfully humanistic person. He’s openly flawed. He’s very vocal about the troubles he’s had in his life, and the way he turns that back into his work I just really admire.
And then, the same year, I happened to be writing my second book, which is called “Gumption,” and it’s profiles of 21 different heroes, from George Washington to Conan O’Brien across history, just a collection.
EZRA KLEIN: The George Washington of our age.
NICK OFFERMAN: That’s right. Washington and O’Brien, the two greats.
EZRA KLEIN: Yes.
NICK OFFERMAN: But it’s muckrakers across the ages that inspire me, and two of them on the list were Jeff and George. So I sent an email to George through his editor — my editor sent it through his editor — that said, hey, I am a huge fan of your work. I would love to lionize you in this book that’s a sort of humorous look at my heroes. And he agreed to it. Luckily, “Parks and Recreation” has been a powerful calling card. With someone like George, it’s thrilling to hear that he was familiar with “Parks and Rec.” Because if you found out that he never owned a television, like Wendell, for example, you wouldn’t be surprised.
So we met in New York on a cold day of the same year, which I think was 2014. And George walked up, same damn thing, gave me a big hug. And I just said, oh, OK, we’re going to be together forever.
And then that same year, he and Jeff met backstage at the final taping of “The Colbert Report,” Stephen Colbert’s show previous to his current manifestation. And we all reported back to one another. Hey, I met George. Hey, I met Jeff. And since then, we started a three-way text thread. And it was nobody’s idea. We just naturally became a three-way bromance.
And as I say in the book, I’m a little younger than those two, and I really, in every way, feel like I’m the lucky little brother riding in the backseat of their Trans Am, and they’re turning me on to Frank Zappa. There’s something about their work that’s more tangible. You can have a record album. You can have George’s books.
Whereas what they appreciate in me, I would consider more ephemeral. It’s a way that I acted, which I’m down with. I’m happy that I have that ability. But I think just through human, natural self-efficacy, I’m like, yeah, there’s nothing I could do that would ever equal “Lincoln in the Bardo” or “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” but I will keep trying. And thank you to my big brothers for taking me to get ice cream every time.
EZRA KLEIN: I think it’s fair to say that there’s nothing any of us are going to do likely to match “Lincoln in the Bardo.” I always wonder about this, but George Saunders, who I’m a huge fan boy of. He’s been on the show. It’s one of my favorite episodes. People should go back and listen to it.
But I’ve listened to probably 10 or 12 interviews with him. I’ve read most of his books. He has a quality of gentle wisdom that is very distinctive, and I always wonder if he’s like that in private, if this is a public guru act and in private he’s just cursing and only wants to watch “Real Housewives of New York.” Is it on all the time?
NICK OFFERMAN: I mean, no. Naturally, with all three of us, people often ask my wife, Megan Mullally, who played Karen on “Will and Grace,” for those that don’t know, and also Tammy 2 on “Parks and Rec,” we often get asked, are you guys just cracking each other up around the house? And I say, no, we’re not Ron and Karen at home. We make each other laugh quite a bit but just like normal people do.
And George, I would say the same. He’s very funny but in a dorky way, and Jeff, too. All three of us, the content that we’ve put out into the world has been generally edited and refined, and you’re seeing the finest work. We’re sending the cream to be evaluated, but there’s a whole lot of milk that we’re tossing at each other.
That said, our hikes and our conversations in the Glacier National Park trip were full of just dorky conversation and things we like. And George has always been an aspiring musician himself. In fact, when I interviewed him for my book “Gumption,” he eventually mentioned, oh, by the way, I’ve set a Wendell Berry poem to music, which he then let me record for the audiobook of that book. In the credits, there’s this crazy peanut butter in the chocolate of George Saunders setting a Wendell Berry poem to music sung by me.
And so, you know, there is a great humanity to all of us, meaning there’s lots of misses to our hits. But we kind of are always steering our conversations toward that sensibility. And I think that’s why we like to be together, because we catch each other out and say, OK, guys, here’s something that happened to me in traffic today, or here’s something that I’m pissed off about. And I know that we’re trying to find the better side of ourselves, so let’s put this into our three-man workshop.
And so each one of us brings something to the table. And George, specifically, has his Buddhist learnings that are so gorgeous. And Jeff is just a brainiac. I mean, they both have encyclopedic minds that I’ve learned to nod at. And I’m like, oh, you guys talk really great. And listen, I’ll carry these bags so you guys can keep talking.
EZRA KLEIN: So what did you take from Glacier National Park?
NICK OFFERMAN: Gosh. The great thing was, and I think it’s what Wendell was trying to do when he sort of gave me the challenge that’s within the book, going there and seeing one of the rock star parks that John Muir turned Teddy Roosevelt on to the idea of preserving these public lands because of the grandeur of their beauty, seeing that in person and experiencing it and saying, OK, I get it. You’re right. But let’s just take a step back. It’s like eating the most incredible meal of veal when veal used to be produced in a very brutal way. It’s saying, OK, this is incredibly delicious. You made it — what now? You did what to the calves?
And seeing Glacier Park and having a well-read guide with us who knew a lot about the history of the land and saying basically, the simple transaction of look at this pristine wilderness untouched by human hands. Oh wait, there were humans here? Oh. That’s how we got them out? Oh shit.
And so basically, stepping back and doing that math of, what is this piece of nature that we have sort of falsely set up, as Teddy Roosevelt called them, as our crown jewels? We’ve sort of taken this acreage and put it on a shelf and said, this is for us. This is our fancy hat. You can see it on parade, but don’t ask us about the millinery. Don’t ask us about the haberdashery because there’s a lot of blood involved.
So I mean, that was a great foundation through which to talk to George and Jeff about us people, how we treat each other and how that is inextricably linked to how — as you said, the way we treat each other. If I mistreat you, I very well could be mistreating a future redwood and so forth and so on. So that’s what I came out of Glacier with was the beginnings, the sort of springboard of this book. And in the way that John Wayne is what I used to think of the type of manhood to which to aspire and then growing up and learning about misogyny and empathy and racism and homophobia and everything else and saying, oh, OK, that’s not the type of manhood to which to aspire.
And the national parks, I think, initially are the John Wayne of, perhaps, conservation lands and saying, oh, no, no, no. There’s so much more nuance to the conversation. So let’s start there and see what we can improve upon.
EZRA KLEIN: I want to hold on the word manhood for a second here because it always seems to me that your great topic is manhood, that you have a somewhat camp masculinity that you play in public, the long video sipping whiskey by the fire. And obviously, a lot of it’s real. You really do have a woodworking shop. But how would you describe your relationship to the thing of manhood or masculinity?
NICK OFFERMAN: It’s a great question because I never set out — I always said, don’t ask the clown behind the makeup why the children are crying. I knew I loved my mustache because my Uncle Don and Uncle Dan had mustaches when I was a kid, and I wanted to grow up and be like the Han Solos in my family. But I wasn’t aware that I would be considered particularly manly by popular culture.
And so it wasn’t my idea, I guess, is where I would start. It’s something that I feel was hung upon me. And I said, OK, I guess I see where that’s coming from, and I’ll try to do my best to use that accusation of manliness to maybe try and bend the conversation and say, OK, yeah, I do these things that are traditionally considered manly. But I also think it’s OK to kiss whoever you want to or any other number of sort of open-minded notions that aren’t associated with manhood.
I developed the slogan, “Hug before punch.” I don’t promote the idea of violence. I promote the idea of common sense and talking to one another and listening. And the idea of men aren’t supposed to cry, well, of course we’re supposed to cry, all of those things.
In fact, at my wood shop, I got into the habit of not hiring men because that’s one of the places where, almost immediately, people in conversations would say, oh, that’s for guys or you really appeal to the male audience, they would say to me. And I would say, I think that’s the John Wayne thinking because there are as many women that are amazing woodworkers as men. And so I love trying to take the gender out of things as best I can. And I’ve been given the opportunity by being accused of being manly.
EZRA KLEIN: One of the things that often seems to me you’re doing is cleaving the aesthetics of being manly from maybe some of the more traditionally not great content. So I’m talking to you now. You’re in a plaid flannel shirt. You’ve got your wood shop. You are releasing a new Lagavulin, which is an awesome thing to get to do.
And in the book, too, I mean, there’s a lot of moving firewood around and rebuilding a farm, and it’s all there. But then the things you are saying and thinking at the center of that are more subversive. You’re going through Glacier National Park and reflecting on the destruction of the Indigenous cultures there. You are on the farm and thinking about what it means to eat meat the way a lot of people do, where it’s factory farmed and grows up in these terrible conditions.
There’s a lot in your book and a lot, frankly, in your acting about empathy and being able to listen at the end of the day. And I think that’s part of the project that I’m curious about, the maintenance of the symbols and even finding value in some of these older symbolic things, working with your hands, et cetera, but the recognition that you could still attach that to maybe new content.
NICK OFFERMAN: Gosh. I knew that you were going to blow me away with your thoughtful questioning. You’ve done it. I’m so grateful for this. Because this is something I’ve never thought about, but now you’re making me think about it. And I think my instincts have basically taken the gifts I was given, the visibility that “Parks and Recreation” brought me with the conception that I’m somehow the trope of American manhood in any way, taking that and saying, OK, guys, that’s cool. I can split firewood. Check this out. But also, let’s think about how we’re using our natural resources while I’m a lumberjack.
And I know you’re very vocal and fascinated with veganism and with our food culture in general. And things like that, often, people will approach me after a show and say, I’m so excited to meet you. My wife really wanted to come meet you, but she’s a vegetarian and she was scared to meet you, as though I was going to punch her or something.
And I always say, no, no, it’s totally part of the comedy. Ron Swanson also hated Canada and Europe, and that’s all for a laugh. Of course, Canada and Europe and vegetarians and vegans, they all are as great as anything else, and all of those require nuance.
And so I narrated a documentary called “Sacred Cow” about the problems with, particularly, the beef industry. And one of the things it dives into is how vegetarianism or veganism, none of these food systems are achievable without killing animal life. In the case of a plant-based diet, it gets down into the soil or the insects or the snails. But we have not achieved a way of creating food without killing some kind of animal somewhere.
And so it’s a conversation that all I’m saying is so far, I seem to still love eating a steak or a cheeseburger. But I’ve become incredibly staunch about saying there’s an incredibly right way to create and provide this beef and then there’s 99.9 percent of the rest of the beef we’re creating. So I’m kind of on the side, I think, of the sensitivity of a vegan lifestyle that has the welfare of animals in mind, even though, in my case, they’re being raised to be consumed.
Wendell Berry has something nice to say about it where he’s like, I want these animals to live a happy life. And that, to me, is part of the message where I could say, look, everyone, I am a red-meat-eating American. But what we’ve been sold as being OK as to how this food is provided is so not OK. So let’s dig deeper into that.
EZRA KLEIN: Yeah, there is no way to eat or live in this world without violence. You’re crushing the field mice to make corn. There’s not an option here that does not include violence. It’s funny because I read the discussion of meat eating in the book, and I really liked it. Something I always tried to tell people on this is for the most part, vegetarians, vegans and people who believe animals should be raised to have good lives and only killed and eaten then — which you have a beautiful quote from Wendell Berry to that effect — are much closer in the food system they’re imagining then anyone OK with the food system that we have now.
The truth is, if that was the food system we have, I am not sure in any way that I’d be vegan. I loved meat. I still miss meat. I still think it’s delicious. At this point, it’s been a long time since I ate it, so it just feels a little weird to me to eat. But one of the reasons, when I was making this transition to the way I eat now, that I did it is that it was so hard to truly know what you were being served.
You actually have a quick discussion in the book of the little labels that get put on eggs and how many of them are just straight bullshit, how many of them are just something there to make the consumer feel better. And then there would be, occasionally, these scandals that will come out where the fancy markets were selling commodity beef under the wrapping of being pasture raised. And in a world where there was the ethic of care, you wouldn’t have to worry about this. It’s a world where the ethic of care is operating on the margin that it becomes very hard to know what’s actually in front of you and in certain ways, if you don’t want to participate in it, safer to abstain altogether.
NICK OFFERMAN: It’s absolutely true. The eggs are a great example. It’s legal in our food system. Among the myriad of things you can put on your egg labels, it includes the options of organic or 100 percent organic. Which if you go to the Rebanks family farm in England, they just call them eggs. They raise their own eggs, but their neighbors also get their eggs from each other, and many people in town get their eggs.
So we’ve globalized our food system so profoundly that, through Michael Pollan’s research, we’ve learned that someone with as great of a superficial reputation as Whole Foods is flying in your blueberries. The carbon footprint wasn’t taken into consideration when they created their business model. And so reining in our food system from the global back to the extremely local is one of the most important things we can do for national security.
I mean, when it comes down to it, like when the pandemic hit, there was such a run on so many grocery items because we live in fear because we don’t know where these things come from. If you know who’s providing even just your eggs and dairy and meat and produce, that just creates such a more profound sense of security and health for you and your family.
EZRA KLEIN: Are you a local eater?
NICK OFFERMAN: As much as I can. I live in Los Angeles, which is not near much good agriculture, so to speak. But we have great farmer’s markets that we utilize. And one thing that’s similar with me and Ron is a great love of eggs, and so I’m always fascinated to find out where my eggs come from and how they’re raised. But it’s an ongoing thing. Farmers come and go from the farmer’s market. During the pandemic, it got really strange with markets being on and off. So it’s a constant thing, and it always will be.
That’s something I just always try to remember. My sensei, which is a whole other story from book one, who taught me Kabuki theater and Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, this Zen master, told me, always maintain the attitude of a student. He told me that when I was 19. And I was a college student, and I was like, OK, that doesn’t seem that wise. But pretty quickly, it sank in where part of what it means is our lives are a subject of study that should never be considered finished because the circumstances will always be evolving. Just like a relationship, you have to maintain it and be vigilant for changes and health and supply of resources and so forth.
EZRA KLEIN: Let me turn this question around because one way of hearing this conversation is Nick Offerman, rich, famous actor, and Ezra Klein, rich, famous journalist, are sitting around talking about how everybody should eat expensive food. And there is something to that. If you never want to get your blueberries flown in, the farmer’s market can be pretty expensive. The good meat, it is pricey.
It is pricey to have meat done through regenerative agriculture. It just is. It breaks my heart a little bit, but it is. And I always think the hardest part of this whole conversation is recognizing that part of the pressure here is people are strapped, and they want to spend less on their food, and they also want the full range of choices. And so you end up in a system that optimizes for the lowest possible price at the grocery store, even if there are incredible costs that are imposed elsewhere.
And so how do you think about that? Because you spent a lot of time on this farm — it’s a working farm — with people who are doing the daily work. We talked a bit about scale as being the difficulty in our food system. But a lot of that is in order to feed a lot of people, at least what looks like cheaply. And there can be a sense of this whole conversation being a luxury good for people who can afford the goods it is serving up.
NICK OFFERMAN: Two things come to mind. One is I just try to continue to engender the conversation by pointing people to things like the Wendell Berry Farming Program, and they have a beef program called Our Home Place Meat. There are operations that I admire that are making a living at sustainably farming with rotational grazing, doing it right. So there’s that idea. Just encouraging people to go to the farmer’s market, just saying to them, do you know who’s making your food and what is in it for the health of you and your kids, et cetera. So that’s the sort of local point of view.
It’s also incredibly satisfying, if you’re not growing any food, start with a basil plant on a windowsill. Start with some herbs. Grow some tomatoes. It’ll blow your mind. It feels like a superpower if you aren’t into it. Once you make a meal where you’re like, know where this garlic came from? And if the answer is you grew it, that garlic is the most delicious thing you’ll ever eat. The macro sensibility gets into politics, and I have a hard time wrapping my head around it, which is why I’m glad to be a foot soldier in this conversation.
But what I focus on is how early on in our government we were admonished by people like Theodore Roosevelt, who said, you know, if you ever let the corporate money into politics, we’re screwed. Well, cut to our lifetimes and our parents’ lifetimes where by now, our government seems to be largely shaped and steered by corporate interests.
And I use as my example the sensibilities of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who, among other things, are very vocal about saying all of these politicians, Republican and Democrat and in between, are all taking corporate money. If those two politicians, Elizabeth and Bernie, are anomalous and being vocal about that subject, that’s terrifying. If they’re the only ones standing up and saying, we’re never going to get anywhere as long as the government is scratching the backs of the corporate interests that are paying the government to scratch the backs of the corporate interests.
And so with regard to this conversation, it’s the food corporations who are being serviced. It’s the people not doing the right thing, food wise, that are receiving government subsidies. And so by continuing to shine a light on this conversation, the only answer I can wrap my head around is bringing our voting power to reflect upon medium and small-sized farming.
EZRA KLEIN: Because I think it’s also very deeply a cultural challenge. And this is one of the reasons I’m interested in your kind of public aesthetic of reverent masculinity, maybe we’ll call it, which is, look, corporations are responsible for all kinds of ills in our life — and goods, too — but they are not the only reason people want things to be cheap at the grocery store. And one of the hardest conversations to have, I think, is the conversation — I see this in politics — where you say, there are certain things in life that should be more expensive than they are because how cheap they are right now is an illusion. Fossil fuels are like that, but so is meat.
Meat should be more expensive. Through most of our history as a species, it costs a lot to get an animal. It cost a lot of calories for a long time. But then later, it cost a lot in terms of how long it took you to raise the animal. And so there was a reverence that came in through that. It was expensive, and so you treated it as expensive. You treated it with respect.
This is, I think, a theme of some of your book. You have a very lovely chapter, or section, on work and how the work that goes into something is often the point and becoming detached from that, becoming detached from that linkage can undermine what the thing is in your relationship. You give this with a story from your wood shop where your business agent comes and says, can we just pick one thing you make and put it into mass production and put it in “SkyMall”? And you say, no, that the labor involved in the crafting of a table or chair or canoe was the whole point. So can you tell me a bit about that and the relationship between the labor that goes into an object and its value?
NICK OFFERMAN: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think a lot of the answer to where we, as a species, have gotten off on the wrong fork lies in that. The consumerist powers that be have learned that they can sell us human nature. And again, this initially comes from a couple of different pieces of Wendell Berry writing, that we’ve been sold a bill of goods that work is dirty or beneath us and that if we can, the good life, or making it big or when our ship comes in, then we’ll no longer have to work, that that’s something to aspire to.
And I had a seminal moment early on in my relationship with Megan. When she was on Will and Grace, we lived in a beautiful little house in the Hills with a little swimming pool. And one day, I think I was about 30, 31, and I thought, oh, I’ve made it. I’m now living the life of Riley. I’m going to smoke a joint, put on some Neil Young on my outdoor speakers because I’ve made it, and I’m going to float in the pool.
And I did that for about a song and a half, and then I thought, well, what are you going to do, just lay here all day? And I was like, oh, yeah, how is this good? I’m not going to get anything done. That sounds like a recipe for depression and addiction, whereas if I take the tools I’ve been given and apply them —
so that’s when it really hit home for me that it’s another version of it’s the journey, not the destination. By making things at my wood shop or by writing a book or by writing funny songs and touring the country and singing them to audiences, those are all ways in which I’m not drinking too much beer or powering a massive yacht to the Virgin Islands or so forth and so on. Jeff Tweedy has always said, he just tries to live in a way where he creates more things than he destroys.
And it’s that sensibility in the same way the simple act of walking is such a profound practice, profound discipline that A, it foments so much creativity in me and so many of the people I admire, writers and creative heads. They go for a walk. That’s how George thinks about the bananas, exquisite ideas that he comes up with. Jeff goes for a walk. Wendell Berry goes for a walk. And he says this great thing about the pace and setting limits for yourself. Once we got to vehicles, we no longer see the countryside around us.
And if my book is about paying attention to the nature precisely where we exist, like the actual watershed that we are taking part in, the faster your car goes, the less you see of it. And he says, back when you had to walk or at least go at the pace of a horse, not only then did you notice the leaves on the trees, the health of the stream, the health of your neighbor’s house — oh, that needs a paint job. Oh, they’ve done a nice job. Oh, look, they’ve built a milk house. They’re doing well, et cetera.
That sensibility at my wood shop, I don’t know, it just really hit home where, first, I became a woodworker by myself because I was obsessed with it, and then it became a little business and I hired employees. And I said, you know, we’re not here to make as much money as we can. We might as well go work at a factory or pour concrete, neither of which are super fun. I want you guys to have a good life. I want your input in what we make and how we make it so that we make enough money to stay out of the red but also have a happy life together.
And so that’s my third book, which is my woodworking book, but it also is full of recipes for our cookouts. And I had everybody in the shop write a chapter of the book because it’s about how a community of inputs creates a much better recompense in life, whether it’s a family or a theater company or a wood shop. I had a line that I love that was like, eight people with one beer each is so much better than one guy with eight beers.
And so it’s all about that. I had the gift of growing up with the eight people with one beer and understanding that if we could all work together to make something, it’s that together and the work that is even more important than the pay you receive at the end of it. And if you turn that into a lifetime, I think cumulatively, we end up with a much better grasp on a lot of these problems of scale that we’re talking about.
And I’m so grateful, as the person that I grew up as, that somehow my parents and my family and community gave me the tools to have the ears and eyes to cotton to what people like Wendell and Richard Powers and George and Jeff and James Rebanks and so forth are laying down. Because I’m 51. I’m going to I’m going to go to work and try to make a living and keep those around me happy and behave like a human being. And I’m so grateful that I’ve been shown by the wisdom of calmer heads than mine that one can do that while trying to say I love you.
EZRA KLEIN: I’m not 100 percent sure if this is a related or unrelated thought, but something I was thinking about while you said that was as I’ve got in a little older, one of the unexpected ambitions of my life has been to become a great appreciator. Now you have —I was a good consumer when I was young. I wanted stuff. And to some degree, I got some of it, and I collected certain things. But it was about the acquisition, and then you’d be onto the next.
And something I’ve come to respect more in other people when I see it now and try to cultivate more in myself is it really is the case, you can listen to any music, functionally, in the world now. You can read every book, to a first approximation, published in the last couple hundred years. And cultivating in yourself an ability to actually go out there and appreciate, including things that are not naturally the things you already know, the people who can do that, who have the ears to do that, the attention to do that are the ones who seem to me to end up becoming wise and fulfilled. And the people who can’t have a lot more trouble walking that path.
NICK OFFERMAN: Yeah, I mean, I hope to be on that path myself. And I think that you hit an important point, which is given the incredible amount of content available, basically all content, it’s fallen to us now to become curators of our life experience. Limits are no longer placed on us by locality or corporate broadcast abilities. We can now generally consume any content whenever we want. And so the curation of that has made it all, to me, profoundly more important.
I feel like 20, 30 years ago, I may have just ended up being a pretty happy guy with a furniture shop. But because I somehow, so far, have been able to successfully navigate listening to these founts of empathy and of conscience, it allows me to then recognize the chasms in my own abilities as a human being and say, OK, great. If I can keep my head on my shoulders, if I can continue to find my ass with both hands, then I might end up making more than I destroy as well, just like the people I aspire to.
EZRA KLEIN: But maybe there’s a place where you are just a happy guy with a furniture shop. And I bring that up to ask what is literally my favorite question to ask anybody. But because you did the show “Devs,” I can practically ask it of you, which is do you believe in the many universes interpretation of quantum mechanics? Do you believe we’re all constantly splitting off into parallel worlds?
NICK OFFERMAN: Well, I love science fiction, and I love fiction. And I love that notion. I love all those things. I love the human imagination and that someone like Alex Garland can successfully explain that to me and I can grasp it. I love all of that, and I relish thinking about it.
I was asked questions like this a lot when we were promoting that show, and I can’t begin to really grasp it. Because if we are in a simulation right now, which if you talk to these quantum physicists, they can pretty quickly convince you that it’s disprovable if we are or not. If this is just reality or if we’re simulation number 1,000,027, there’s no discernible way for us to ever know. And I was like, OK, you got me.
So I mean, I’m open to the possibility of things that I can’t prove. That makes a lot more sense to me than man-made religious texts that involve any sort of magic realism where I’m like, yeah, I get that your heart’s in the right place and I understand the values in your allegory, but this was written by some dudes. That is the difference between the many worlds theories where I’m like, OK, there’s no way we can prove that this is or isn’t the case. So great, I’ll happily accept the idea that there are an infinite number of mes and yous and outcomes.
EZRA KLEIN: I think that is a good place to come to a close here. So always our final question, what are three books you would recommend in this universe or any other?
NICK OFFERMAN: Well, I’m always amazed when I say to people, do you know Wendell Berry, and they say no. And I’m like, son of a bitch. All right, so I’ve already mentioned “The Unsettling of America.” And I think a great place to hook people is how I was hooked, which is through his prolific body of fiction.
And so the book the book I started with is called “Fidelity.” It’s a collection of short stories. And I’m telling you, it’s a farmer’s common sense. The women and men, his fictional community, have taught me so much about love and forgiveness and values. So that’s a great deal of what fuels my writing and thinking.
My second book would be “Wanderlust” by Rebecca Solnit because it’s a book that’s on point. It’s all about walking. It’s how walking is so intrinsic to the good work of human beings in so many ways, in particular, maintaining an awareness of what’s going on with nature, the absolute delight that one can experience just by being in weather.
I have never seen a movie in a theater — and I love to see movies in theaters — that remotely approaches the feel of being out in a storm with the proper gear. That feels like an incredible human triumph. But beyond that, it’s the history of walking. It’s all of the great thinkers and the effect of walking upon them. She’s a wonderful brain that I greatly admire.
And then finally, I’m going to take a hard left to Peggy Orenstein. And it’s a two-for-one because it’s a book called Girls and Sex, but there’s a twin called Boys and Sex. And they’re just these unvarnished looks at our young people and the sort of calcified cultural ruts concerning our sexual behavior toward one another that I wish I had been handed as a manual to puberty.
And I recommend it to everyone I know with or without kids. Like, if you would like to get kissed, you should read these books. And if you would like to equitably and favorably kiss people, you should read these books. They’re so wonderful. They would have saved me a great deal of clumsy fumbling. So please, give that opportunity to your young people.
EZRA KLEIN: Nick Offerman, thank you very much.
NICK OFFERMAN: Thank you so much, Ezra.
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EZRA KLEIN: “The Ezra Klein Show” is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Roge Karma and Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.
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