Podcast Summary

Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show
Episode: Best Of: Zadie Smith on Populists, Frauds and Flip Phones
Date: December 12, 2025
Host: Ezra Klein
Guest: Zadie Smith

Episode Overview

Ezra Klein revisits a favorite wide-ranging conversation with novelist and essayist Zadie Smith, delving into her novel "The Fraud" as a lens for examining contemporary populism, the complexities of identity, the inadequacy of logic alone in political life, the effects of digital technology on selfhood, and the particular challenges of aging and loneliness. Drawing from British history, Smith’s personal experience of class mobility, and the realities of online life, they interrogate whether modern forces are fostering or flattening our inner and societal complexity.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Political Pressures and the Amorphous Self

Timestamps: 00:53–07:20

• Amorphous vs. Solid Selves:
  Smith reflects on how political events (Brexit, Trump 2016) demand people suppress personal ambiguity and crystallize into fixed roles—protesters, defenders, activists.
• Quote (Zadie Smith, 04:49):
  “For me, it’s a tension in my thought... if I had to, I would call myself a radical humanist, a socialist, but also an existentialist... The existentialist part means, I guess, that I think people are thrown into life, that I don’t believe in people having essences.”
• On Doubt and Certainty (Ezra Klein, 06:32):
  “There are times when both internally and externally, people view [internal conflict] as a kind of decadence.”
• Smith's Role as a Writer:
  She feels her role is to remind readers of personal wholeness, "to deal with people in their privacy as well as their public selves."

2. The Tichborne Trial & Populism

Timestamps: 07:20–13:34

• Historical Case as Parable:
  Smith’s 19th-century novel is inspired by the Tichborne trial, where a working-class butcher claimed to be an aristocrat—paralleling populist movements that galvanize mass support despite factual fraudulence.
• Connection to O.J. Trial:
  Smith compares it to O.J. Simpson: “a larger truth was told around a lie”; the courts, institutionally racist, were put on trial by proxy.
• Motivations for Belief:
  The downtrodden supported Tichborne not for logic, but emotion—the courts were seen as inherently unjust to people like them.

3. Intelligence, Blind Spots, and Class

Timestamps: 13:34–15:12

• Dual Characters:
  Comparing Sarah Ainsworth (working class, emotional intelligence) and Eliza Touchet (elite, intellectual), Smith notes multiple “ways to be intelligent”—street smarts, emotional acuity, practical knowledge.
• Quote (Zadie Smith, 13:34):
  “What we define as intelligence, we define it so partially. There are many, many contexts... I can go into and be a true fool, truly lost. And that’s important to know.”

4. Emotion vs. Logic in Politics

Timestamps: 15:12–20:00

• Logic, Pathos, and Ethics:
  Smith seeks to balance emotion, logic, and ethics in life and writing, echoing Aristotle's framework.
• The Error of Dismissing Emotion:
  Both agree that the “facts don’t care about your feelings” view is reductive.
  Smith:
  “The facts don’t care about my feelings is a truly fascistic sentence... We are creatures of feeling, in part. To deny that is to deny a part of the kind of animal we are.” (18:05)

5. The Wave and Retreat of “Wokeness”

Timestamps: 21:15–27:57

• Change on Campus:
  Smith observes discourse about “wokeness” is more pronounced in media than in her classrooms; she avoids binary “culture war” frames—“I don’t take the bait... it’s a circle jerk.”
• Hierarchical Reversal (Smith, 24:51):
  “People who thoughtlessly considered themselves at the center of history culture would be made to look at the world another way. That first hierarchical reversal is a revolution in thought, and it’s incredible.”
• Identity and the Universal (27:03):
  Smith:
  “Everybody had an identity apart from white people. They had no identity. They were the universal. So part of that turn is everybody saying, why don’t you try having an identity for once? See how you like it. And the answer was, nobody liked it.”

6. The Containment of Identity

Timestamps: 27:57–33:56

• Multiplicity vs. Containment:
  Politics and language force a narrowing—both Klein and Smith mourn the violence done when many identities are made singular for political purposes.
• Containment (Smith, 33:07):
  “When I think of my identity, I think of myself as a black British woman... as a writer, a mother... many things. Those things are all me.”
  She strives in writing to “defend that fundamental sense... that we are, in the end, this person.”

7. The Limits and Costs of the “Linguistic Turn”

Timestamps: 33:56–35:59

• Fighting for Language:
  Smith attributes a turn to linguistic activism to young people lacking material outlets for change—“they fought in the only place they knew where to fight, which was language.”
  But solely focusing on language is “wildly inefficient... nothing compared to decent wages, decent housing, health care…”

8. Language, Identity, and Pain

Timestamps: 35:59–39:13

• Strictures of Language:
  Klein reflects on how standard labels (e.g., “Jewish,” “Zionism”) can contain and flatten lived complexity, a pain Smith shares:
  “At a certain point you get tired of being presented with this new idea of yourself, you know?”
• Self-Concept vs. Others’ Perceptions:
  Smith underscores the deep difficulty of reconciling your internal story with how you are seen, especially at the scale of collective identity.

9. Digital Technology and Selfhood

Timestamps: 39:13–46:46

• On Social Media:
  Smith argues smartphones and platforms are “behavior modification systems” that structure both content and form of thought, making argument and attention shallow and binary.
  “Modification is my bread and butter... But the question becomes, who do you want to be modified by and to what degree? When I look at the people who have designed these things... this machinery is not worthy of them.” (39:13)
• The Totality of Capture (Smith, 43:16):
  “All mediums in the past have had partial capture. What blows my mind and what I think is the paradigm shift is this is total.”
• Living Without a Smartphone (Smith, 45:00):
  She tried one for three months, found the potential for addiction and exposure to others’ opinions (“crumbling half assed life presented as a TV show”) unbearable, and prefers rare travel snafus to “having my very consciousness colonized.”

10. The Curation of Relationships and the Value of Depth

Timestamps: 53:05–55:49

• Social Breadth vs. Depth:
  The wish to know “everyone” fades, replaced by treasuring a handful of deep bonds.
  Smith:
  “If you truly loved and were truly loved by two people in your lifetime, you had every right to think yourself a Midas.” (53:05)

11. Aging, Loneliness, and Gender

Timestamps: 57:14–66:16

• Aging as a Steeplechase (Read by Smith, 58:18):
  A passage tracking a woman’s sense of loneliness through the “stages” of aging—loss of beauty, menopause, invisibility.
• On Isolation:
  Smith: “I think there is a deep isolation in people... There will be moments when you will feel this isolation. I think it’s existential.” (59:23)
• Gender Differences:
  Aging is “monumentally” different for men and women, especially in relation to physical expectations, social connections, and cultural narratives of beauty.
• The Value of Privacy:
  Smith notes the importance of private bonds (her marriage), which provide freedom from performance and allow one to just “be”—suggesting that true freedom may lie in privacy as much as in self-expression.

12. Generational Dynamics and Exclusion

Timestamps: 66:16–73:59

• Difficulty of Really Knowing Others:
  Despite a novelist’s skill for observation, Smith emphasizes the challenge and importance of genuine listening—“being able to sit in front of another human being and just listening... that is so hard.”
• Aging and Social Invisibility:
  Smith’s prose (read aloud) captures the “almost dizzying feeling of exclusion” in old age, compounded by losing roles or “decorativeness”—and notes the futility of generational warfare (e.g., “OK, boomer”), since all young people are fated to become old.
• On Generational Vanity:
  Smith quips that every generation believes they’ve “solved it,” only for the next to cringe at their predecessors’ self-certainty and tastes.

13. Book Recommendations

Timestamp: 74:03

1. The Director by Daniel Kehlmann:
   A novel about a filmmaker’s complicity with Nazi Germany, paralleling the moral complexity of "The Fraud."
2. The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz:
   A nuanced biography of Fanon, rescuing him from caricature and digging into his influence and contradictions.
3. The Diaries of Virginia Woolf (5 Vols):
   Smith extols their joy, brilliance, and candid humanity—her “Twitter” substitute, time spent soaking in Woolf’s mind.

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “The facts don’t care about my feelings is a truly fascistic sentence... We are creatures of feeling, in part. To deny that is to deny a part of the kind of animal we are.” — Zadie Smith (18:05)
• “If you truly loved and were truly loved by two people in your lifetime, you had every right to think yourself a Midas.” — Zadie Smith, from "The Fraud" (53:05)
• “A private person, a person who is a mystery to the world and, what’s more important, to herself.” — Zadie Smith, on the kind of web she wants (49:20)
• “It’s a behavior modification system. It’s meant to do that. It’s really well designed. People aren’t terrible. The system is terrible.” — Zadie Smith (48:46)
• “Being poor is stressful, expensive, tiring, mentally exhausting. It’s a denuding of yourself... The primary concern.” — Zadie Smith (29:19)
• “Old, young is crazy... You are literally fighting the person you’re about to become.” — Zadie Smith (70:17)
• “You may not be to my taste, fair play. But as I heard Elizabeth Strout say somewhere, every person is a world.” — Zadie Smith (53:42)

Conclusion

This sweeping episode explores what it means to maintain an interior life amid political, social, and technological forces pushing us into simplicity and performance. Zadie Smith’s wit and wisdom on class, identity, technology, aging, and art offer listeners a nuanced framework for holding onto both complexity and compassion in an era of binary debates and mass mediation.