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Hello and Happy Holidays, beloved micro listeners. We are re-releasing this magnum interview with Ezra Klein as a thank you for listening. Of course, Ezra Klein is the op-ed writer for The New York Times and the host of The Ezra Klein Show. His political analysis keeps me informed and sane, and both Dan and I were absolutely thrilled when he agreed to come on the show. This came out on February 6th, a simpler time. We hope you dig it. Happy Holidays.
Hey Den, 30 year old street dude, Magnum sub, big fan. I am sitting here with not quite my girlfriend, but a woman who I've really fallen for. We've been seeing each other for the past year and everything about this relationship, the sex, the communication, the way we resolve conflicts, it's been the best of my life. It's been incredible. The only issue is that she wants kids and I
No, I don't. I've got to dissect me. We knew this from the start of our relationship. So we're breaking up. We set ourselves a date a while back of when this thing was going to come to an end and that date is approaching less than a month now. Yeah. So I guess my question for you is, how can we enjoy these last few weeks together?
I've had the bow time in life with this woman and I want to continue having good times, but it's really painful knowing that.
We're gonna be exiting each other's lives pretty soon. And then when that day does come, I guess my second question is how can we heal from this? We really want to be friends later on. We're planning on taking some time apart and not talking for a while and then circling back. But if you had any advice on how to best handle the situation, that would be greatly appreciated.
Joining me to help answer this question because why not? Ezra Klein, he is a journalist, a political analyst, a New York Times columnist and host of the Ezra Klein Show podcast. Ezra, thank you so much for demeaning yourself by coming on my show. I am thrilled to be here, demeaned. Yeah, Ezra, this is a sex advice podcast like the Port Authority bus terminal. It's beneath you.
I feel like there's a dynamic here of people getting sex advice from their grandpa or their lame math teacher or something. I appreciate you inviting me on. I don't think this is really what anybody wants to hear from me. But I enjoy talking to you. So I am, I'm glad to be here.
We talked when I was on your show a lot about polyamory and open relationships and right now suddenly having a moment. It's all anybody can talk about besides Israel and Gaza and Ukraine and Russia and the Houthis and the climate and housing and Donald Trump and Nikki Haley and Tim Scott's entirely credible fiance. Polyamory is the only thing anyone is talking about at the moment. You moved to the West Coast for a few years where you encountered polystrate people in their natural habitat, San Francisco.
I'm curious the poly people that you encountered. Were they annoying poly rossellatizers or normy adjacent kind of socially monogamous poly people who took some time for you to realize that you had met some polystrate couples?
Oh, I think it was a much more mixed group than that. It wasn't a lot of proselytizers. I mean, my community in the Bay Area was much more queer. And so when you say, did I meet a bunch of polystrate people that wasn't sort of how my friend group or how the people I knew broke down?
And it's actually been something that's been annoying me a little bit about the New York coverage here. It does have this quality of New York media circles just discovered people are polyamorous in Park Slope like a month ago. And I feel like it's robbed of a lot of the kind of cultural tributaries I understood as being there. Because I grew up in California and I lived in DC for a long time and then came back to the Bay Area for four or five years.
And there it's much more clear that you're dealing with these sort of overlapping circles of, and this is what we talked about when you were on my show, Dan, sort of queer relationship norms that have become more influential and more often adopted by, by straight or straightish couples. I mean, a lot of the non monogamous couples I knew had either both partners or one partner in it was by or had other kinds of explorations that were important for their
happiness to be doing, you have the sort of communes and more hippie and alternative living of the 70s, and then you have the sort of weirdish, actually it's funny for me to describe anybody, and this is weird, but you have the sort of Silicon Valley world, which had adopted parts of it. And so the sort of stereotypical version of it before the stereotype was Park Slope was tech, C-suite people, who, et cetera.
But it was clear when you were there that it was these different cultures are all rubbing up against each other literally and figuratively in the in the Bay Area that had created this cross pollination. And then here I think all that's been lost and all of a sudden it has a strange quality of
Wait, why are people in Brooklyn dating each other? Which just robs it, I think, of a little bit of richness and what makes it interesting to me, which is, in fact, the different norms from different places are getting adopted a little bit more. I don't want to call it universally, but are breaking down the expectations for what isn't as normal and what isn't possible in people's lives.
Because of that loss of sort of perspective or any sense of the history of it, of these cultures and cross-pollinizations, you have bad actors on the right who are pointing to this moment, polyamory is having the story in the New Yorker, the New York Times, New York Magazine, even the New York Post, not as evidence that a memoir came out of polyamory and whoever that wrote that memoir had a really good
PR person, but a plot on the part of the left to destroy the nuclear family. When you and your spouse lived in San Francisco, you as a couple new poly people, new people who were practicing polyamory.
Did your nuclear family survive the onslaught or was your nuclear family destroyed by this exposure to other people practicing polyamory, which is what Matt Walsh is arguing is going to happen. I remember when it was gay marriage is going to destroy my nuclear family. So I thought about this actually. And this gets in some shows I want to do in the coming weeks. I think this is exactly backwards.
So there, as you mentioned, what was actually the sort of kernel around which all of these magazine pieces and newspaper stories got built was this memoir, which I have not myself read, but which is from a Brooklyn writer about her open marriage. And the book I'm really interested in right now, which is coming out in a couple weeks, although may have come out by the time this airs, is called Other Significant Others by Rana Cohen.
There's sort of polyamory happening on the edge of it, I would say, but it's about people who put friendship at the center of their lives and much more build these very non-traditional, what I would call families, right? What happens when you treat your best friend like family? What happens when you begin raising a child with people who are not your romantic partners, but just people who love your child and who you're good at co-parenting with?
And to me, polyamory and questions about alternative family structures and questions of putting friendship at the center of your life, and these are all things that have been thought about deeply in queer communities and other alternative communities for a very long time. I think there's a lot of catching up here being done, but it's all dealing with the fact that that nuclear family is already breaking down.
that first nuclear family has not been the norm since the 50s, 60s, 70s. And it was only a norm for a pretty punctuated period of time. So now you have a lot of people who are growing up in single-parent families. You have a lot of families that are blended between divorces. But you also have the loss for many people
the absence of the way human beings traditionally did child raising and community and all that which is extended family. I mean for most of human history you did not have this thing of two parents and one to three kids you definitely didn't have it with two parents,
both have full-time jobs and are somehow trying to raise one to three kids. And it's not working for people to say nothing of them when you only have one parent. And this worry that something is going to break the nuclear family, it's so nuts because a nuclear family has already broken.
It is very, very, very difficult to raise kids with this little support. It is very, very lonely for people when they begin putting everything on their spouse to be their confidant, their social community, their best friend, their second best friend, their sexual partner, their job coach, all of it. And people are away from their families and they're away from extended care networks.
To me, a lot of what is happening in all these conversations and dynamics is like what I think of as this effort to figure out the post-extended family world, which obviously many people still do live near their extended families, but many people don't. They do that we're going to destroy something. People are trying to figure out what to do in the wreckage. It already happened. It feels like we're not answering the question, but I feel like actually we kind of in a sneaky way,
have already begun to answer the caller's question. Before we get really specific about it, I do want to say that the sense of the nuclear family is breaking down, that there's this loss of the traditional ways or traditional for the last 60, 70 years, that nuclear family to parents alone with the mom at home not working.
that going away, and it's already kind of gone away, and there's this sense of loss. Paradoxically, what you describe, like a network of lovers and friends, and this kind of sprawling, nontraditional family, some queer people feel like gay marriage, which privileges the couple that marries, in a sense, threatened what had been a kind of traditional way that gay people structured their family lives.
and their relationships, which was these kind of informal networks of lovers and friends, which was great, except, you know, when you showed up at a hospital and the parents that your boyfriend hadn't spoken to for 20 years came rolling in and threw you out.
that, you know, gay people with the absence of marriage didn't have that ability to determine who our own immediate next to kin was and marriage is how you do that. Unless we create some alternate way to do that, marriage has what the AIDS crisis proved to gay people was absolutely necessary and crucial that we secure that right. Other significant others has such a good discussion of this, exactly the dynamics you're talking about and trying to think about exactly as tension that both marriage had
all these legal rights and social recognitions that were, that were and are necessary. And also that it shouldered out, it muscled out, this possibility of seeing more expansive forms of care, also of legal recognition, right? I mean, to me, the most affecting chapter, you sure really have Raina going on the show.
To me, the most affecting chapter was actually about co-parenting and cohabitation, which is the set of things that I personally think about most. One of my deep beliefs about all of this is that if you know polyamorous people, you know that polyamory isn't the answer. If you know monogamous people, you know that monogamy isn't the answer. If you know people parenting in a two-parent family, you know that's not the answer. And a single parent family, you know that's not the answer.
There's no answer here. There's no one thing that is going to work for everybody. People have different needs. They need different amounts of alone time. They need different amounts of support. People have children. Their children are different. Some children are very high needs. We are going to need a lot of answers for...
What is the reality of this, which is a lot of people in a lot of different situations, whether what your income is really shifts what you can do. I mean, a lot of richer families are basically able to purchase the buy we buy, you know, some of the help that you would have once gotten in from an extended family right in terms of nannies and house cleaners and so on.
but most people can't afford a lot of that. The aspects of chosen family, the aspects of fluidity here, that they need to formalize some things but also things that are not highly formalized, that to me is the space that we need to enter into a recognition.
We are, people often talk about these other ways of structuring things as experimental. The thing I always want to say is we are living through the experiment now. This way of raising children, this way of doing family, this way of doing marriage with divorces, but also the amount of weight we put on the partner and marrying for love. This is all an experiment and a bunch of parts of the experiment are not working well and we need to have more experiments, right?
We do not know the answer. There is going to be no one answer, and we're going to need to accept fluidity without becoming so unbelievably afraid of trying to figure things out when the things we're already trying are not working that well. You call it fluidity in what I see, that network of friends and lovers that gave family networks in the absence of the right to marry. Those were really contingencies and workarounds and patches.
It seems to me that what we need are marriage rights, but also bringing those contingencies and work around in patches that wider community to our marriages. And I feel really lucky the way I grew up. I grew up in a tiny apartment building with two apartments. My mom, dad, four kids in one apartment, my grandparents, aunts and uncles.
in the other apartment. I grew up with that kind of network and then raised a kid without that network. And raising a kid, even just one kid without that network was infinitely harder, which brings us to this question.
Let's address the question the caller actually asks, how do I enjoy our last weeks together when the relationship is doomed? Is it possible to them to stick the dismount and be friends? They're both so sad, backing all the way up to the question, Ezra, what's your advice? How do they enjoy this time together? I don't think they should try to enjoy this time together.
Maybe this is not the advice that the caller wants, but I don't think this time is meant to be enjoyable. I think that sitting in the sadness of this time together is actually what it's about. That might be
deep, that might be meaningful. But for a relationship that sounds as loving as this one sounds from the callist question that is dissolving, at least in this format, on the shoals of such a deep difference in the lives they ultimately want to lead, I don't think trying to make the last couple of weeks a party is actually on the
table i think that they're grieving something together whether they can become something else after will see. You know what they could they could become after we've been talking about this now for like fifteen minutes.
not poly, but stay in each other's lives. It's even possible for you to remain lovers. And for this woman that you have this strong connection with, why? Because you can't be the co-parent or the father of her children. Does the relationship that you're in that works on so many levels have to end? You could become, call her the glorified uncle. You could
be still in this intimate relationship with this woman. If you can just together reimagine what a future as a family might look like and who would be involved in the lives of the children that she wants to have with the person to be named later that she might have those children with who may have other partners themselves. It seems to me that like,
The fix here that allows them to have it all have each other, have each other the way they have each other, her to have the kids that she wants, him to not have the kids he doesn't want. I mean, I'm assuming he's not allergic to children. He could be in the same room with children. He could show up at a birthday party for a child that he's not responsible for raising is right there in front of our faces, which is a different kind of sprawling new definition, meaning of what family could possibly be for you, caller and your lover.
I mean, that's dramatic. I mean, you're a professional at this and I'm not at for a reason. I think the question there is, can they do that? Do they want that, right? I mean, if they're listening to Savage Love and also at least one of them sending in the question there, they're probably, he's at least probably familiar with these alternative arrangements. And I assume there's some reason they have not chosen that for themselves. But one of the deep lessons of the kinds of families we're talking about here, the kinds of arrangements we're talking about here,
is there's often more that can be chosen for yourself than you can imagine. One of the really, and I apologize because Rainnigone's book is so on my mind today because I've been preparing for a show on it, but it's very relevant to this. One of the chapters and I found unbelievably affecting is about these guys art and Nick, and they are in, I think, school to be pastors together.
And I believe it is art realizes he is gay and chooses to be celibate within the priesthood, but also believes he's now going to live this life of loneliness. He's going to be alone, right? And he never wanted that. And he wanted this other thing. And Nick and him are best friends are incredibly close.
And they end up basically committing to each other as best friends, and Nick has other relationships with women, but they live together in a functionally, not legally, a domestic partnership, and they share their lives. And Nick also has other dimensions to his life, and so does art, but there is this thing happening at the center of it. And the thing that I found so moving about it was how unimaginable it was to both of them before it happened.
The idea that this, and this is something they actually had to work through, this was just not on the table. It was not an option, and so nobody imagined it could be an option. Then it became one, and that was an act of incredible courage and bravery, I think, as I remember the story on Nick's part initially. Now, after a lot of work, it is working and seems very beautiful. I do think that is one of the possibilities here that
more things are possible under heaven and earth than people realize more things are already happening than people realize. That was one of the big eye-opening things about this to me. You may be right. The fact that something is not done around them may have made them think it cannot be done, but it has been done by other people. The question is whether or not they can be those people.
I want to give a quick shout out or just a quick name check more a memoir of open marriage by Molly Rodden. Winter is the book that we were talking about earlier that kind of kicked off the big poly.
splash in all the media. As you've been so generous through time, can I ask you two quick media questions before we go? Whenever anybody reaches out to me and says, I want to be a journalist, I want to write for a living. How do you create a career as a writer or journalist? I always cite you, or example, really, of how you do that. Because you, before anybody else, created a brand for yourself, before anybody began to label that or talk about that is what writers had to do. But also, you didn't wait for permission to write.
You didn't wait for someone to assign you the beat that you're interested in, you just started doing it. I'm not sure I'd make myself as much of a first in that as you give me, but it is true. I came up in this incredible moment where blogging had emerged and people weren't taking it seriously. I just started when I was not trying to be a journalist.
And it didn't mean i could write without permission and you can always write without permission you can always write and build an audience without permission. I'm very low to give people advice built on my own career now because i feel like the conditions in which that career happened that the strange moment of that air of the internet and that air of blogging and like the big publications in the needed bloggers.
It was so short and what is happening now is so different and things in the media are so tough at this particular instant. But I also think that if you want to be a great writer, the thing that did so much for me was because I was not waiting for permission because I was not
out there waiting for somebody to accept a freelance pitch. I just got reps and I was writing 10 to 15 blog posts a day, some short, but some long for years and years and years. And it's how I got good at this. And I got better in other ways as time went on too. But whatever you're doing, one question is, are you good at it? And whether or not anybody's reading,
your ability to write, to send out a sub-stack to your friends, nobody's stopping you on that. And being good at things is not the only thing that decides whether or not you have a career in them, but it is one of the things. We've all seen bad writers who have careers as writers, and we've all seen good writers who didn't manage to make a career event and couldn't find someone to pay them. But writing now is a little bit like acting has been always, that there's almost this period of time. You almost have to prove that you're willing to do this for free before anyone will pay you to do it.
And you're going to do it anyway, which is really what you did. You weren't waiting for permission. You gave yourself permission. That's what I'm always telling folks, like, do like I said, don't wait for permission. Just start writing. And maybe one day you'll make money at it. Maybe not, but you're never going to make money at it if you just don't start doing it. I do think the possibilities emerged again.
To be your own commissioning editor. I think it is harder for me. I'm so pessimistic right now and so frustrated by what I see in the happening to media institutions I love like the LA Times, like Pitchfork, like others. But there is this moment that disappeared for a while because Twitter and Facebook and everything else ate blogging.
which is newsletters have reemerged and you actually can make a bit of money on them. But even if you're not looking to make a bit of money on them, you can do something special with them. Like I'm a huge fan of a newsletter by a music writer in Brooklyn called Dada Strain. And all it is, I pay with delight for this newsletter. This is a guy who knows the music scene in Brooklyn, like backwards and forwards and he writes an essay about it and then he tells you the shows that are coming up that he thinks are good.
And he just knows so much about what he's doing here, that I got two kids. I actually don't end up going very much, even though I like to imagine that it is out there and I could go to it. But he is just out there creating something based on his specific ability to contribute in the world.
And it brings me an incredible value. And so something I've been saying about the media recently is that it feels to me you can survive as being very, very, very big, like the New York Times, and actually very small. I mean, there are more ways to make money as an individual in media, providing a service to people than almost ever. I mean, when I was a blogger, you couldn't monetize the blog. You really had to sell it to another organization. You know, that huge middle, right, where organizations of everything from 40 people to 400 people sit, I'm very worried about that.
newsletters are an incredible way to write by yourself at the temple you want to do and send it to the people you want to get it and build an audience. And if people really like it, you can actually even monetize that audience a bit or even monetize it a lot if things go really well. So yeah, I mean, maybe, weirdly, the ability to do what I did at the beginning has reopened. The ability to do what I did in the middle, I'm more concerned about, but the ability to just build your career
and get your reps in without asking anybody, you can do that again. That to me is the one true bright spot in media right now. All right, I have a question that's kind of about my career. 33 years ago, 44 years ago, when I started writing Savage Love, advice columns were this lowbrow mass market daily kind of genre writing, the back of parade magazine and lenders in the Chicago sometimes. The New York Times, 34 years ago, did not have any advice columns. And now the New York Times has a dozen advice columns.
Social cues, which is perhaps my favorite advice column in the world. The ethicist work friend, how did my lowbrow genre go highbrow? And how come my column isn't in the New York Times? I worry that, well, I can answer the how come your column isn't in the New York Times bit pretty easily. But I do think you had something to do with it. I'd say a couple of things. So one, I think that you built an advice column. I mean, we talked about this. Like to me, you are the preeminent sexual intellectual plus 30 or 40 years. Like you shifted a lot of culture.
And you also brought yours online an interesting way early. And one thing that people began to see online, although I think we always knew advice columns were popular, but you could see how popular they were. And the thing that happened as digital media showed how popular things were is that more bigger publications
felt the need to respond to that. And even internally, when you realized how popular the advice column is, and actually that wasn't that expensive to produce, it was like, well, maybe we should have two. Maybe we should have four. And so there's been media as much more of a competitive market now.
And that means you get more of the things at work and working here is defined as, you know, unfortunately somewhat cost benefit, right? How much does it cost to produce? What does it end up contributing to the bottom line of the publication? And things that don't work, even if they're really valuable or really beautiful or having more trouble or really important. So that's not good necessarily for media as a public institution, but it's good for advice columnists specifically. I've been a subscriber in the New York Times for 40 years. I love daily papers.
I grew up reading them. I used to read the bridge column in the New York Times and think, who is this for? A paper was so big and sprawling then, the old broadsheet New York Times, that they had the space to have a column and a columnist who wrote for probably 100 people in New York City about bridge.
And, you know, a long-come thing, internet, tightening budgets, classified ads go away, papers shrink, and, you know, you get online and you see how many readers the bridge column has, and it goes. And income's an advice column that holds more eyeballs. But even I, the fan of the genre of the advice columns, I missed the bridge column if only because of what it meant to see the bridge column in the New York Times.
what it meant about this desire on the part of a big paper like that to serve readers who were a very tiny
marginalized subculture, if I can use that kind of expression in reference to people who play bridge. But the delight of that, the only thing I will say that is good here, I mean, there are things I'm worried we're losing, specifically local news. But, you know, if you, it was just really hard to get any information about bridge back then. And now I don't know much about bridge subculture. That's one of the ones I do not visit myself. But my sense is probably the information available to you now as a bridge fanatic, just completely swamps.
What has been available to you as a bridge fanatic at any other time in human history. It's like, it's so weird to me. The niche is so well served. The mass is so well served and the middle is so poorly served. And like that to me is modern media, right? I was saying, you know, I subscribe to this weird. I subscribe to a lot of weird music, sub, sub stacks and newsletters.
Philip Sherborn's great reviews of different electronic and ambient albums. The information I can get on that now, it's like nothing has ever been available in human history before. But if I want to read profiles of musicians, the kinds of things that Rolling Stone and actually a lot of papers used to do really well, there are very few places, right? And Pitchfork just got folded into GQ and gutted. And so this is a weird way in which the ability to get really deep on something really specific is better than it's ever been.
The ability to get great international or Washington news better than it's ever been. The ability to just read a magazine that's good is worse than it's been, certainly when I've been alive. And that does make me despair about it.
I want to say as with bridge so too with butt plugs. And that's why you're not in the New York Times. Exactly. There's like so much information you can get instantly online about bridge. I used to have to explain what a butt plug was every once in a while and savage love on the regular. Now it has a wiki page. You don't need me to explain to you. Not you Ezra. You the reader who didn't know what that was because they overheard someone use that expression like, what's that? Ask Dan. Now people just Google it and there's that information.
Now, chat GPT will tell you about any sexual paraphernalia you might want to know about. It was created AI and it has a purpose. All right. Ezra Klein is a journalist, a political analyst, a New York Times columnist and a New York Times best-selling author. He hosts the Ezra Klein show podcast, his last book, Why We're Polarized. We'll help you understand this political moment that we are
living in. And I got to say, the series of interviews Ezra has done on his own podcast since October 7th are really required listening for anyone out there who sincerely wants to understand from all angles the Israel Gaza war. Ezra, thank you so much for coming on the Savage Love Cast. I can't tell you how much it meant to me. Thank you, Dan. It's always great to talk to you.
That's it. Thanks again to Ezra Klein. If you liked this, there's more where this came from. The magnum version of the love cast is twice as long as the micro with more calls, more guests, and no ads. Imagine that. You can listen to every episode of the Savage Love cast we've ever made, starting in 2006. When George W. Bush was president and we thought we had it bad then, you can also read Savage Love the column and struggle session, where Dan gets into scraps with you.
and you'll get invited to Savage Love Live, so zoom hang out with Dan. Early bird tickets to hump, and probably more, I can't think of everything there's so much. And you'll support the show, and that's not nothing. Get your Magnum subscription or give it as a gift over at savage.love. We appreciate you, no matter how you're listening. Happy holidays, be safe, be well. Oh, we're gonna dish out another bit of extra bonus content next week too, so okay. That's it, goodbye.
