This Question Can Change Your Life

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

News, Government, Society & Culture

4.3 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 2 January 2026

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I like to start the year with a few episodes on things I’m personally working on. Not resolutions, exactly. More like intentions. Or, even better, practices. One of those practices, strange as it sounds, is repeatedly asking the question: “What is this?” It’s a question I got from a book of the same name, by Stephen and Martine Batchelor. In that book, they are describing an approach to Buddhist meditation built on the cultivation of doubt and wonder. You can see that as a spiritual practice, but it’s also an intellectual and ethical one. It is, for me, a practice that has a lot of bearing on politics and journalism. Stephen Batchelor’s latest book, “Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times,” explores those dimensions of doubt more fully. And so I wanted to have him on the show to discuss the virtues of both certainty and uncertainty, the difficulty of living both ethically and openly. You can see this as a conversation about our inner lives or our outer lives, but of course they are one. And Batchelor, as you’ll hear, is just lovely to listen to. Mentioned: Buddha, Socrates, and Us by Stephen Batchelor What Is This? by Martine Batchelor and Stephen Batchelor Ethics of Care by Carol Gilligan Book Recommendations: Children of a Modest Star by Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman Work Like a Monk by Shoukei Matsumoto The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The So I was like at the beginning of the year to do a couple of episodes that are around things that I am working on in my own life.
0:36.2	Resolutions episodes, you might say. And something I've been working on in my own life. Resolutions, episodes, you might say.
0:38.3	And something I've been working on over these past months, years, is being able to sit with doubt.
0:47.3	Not just doubt, being able to sit in the wonder of uncertainty.
0:51.6	Because the first person we believe our own easiest marks
0:56.5	are ourselves, the stories we tell,
0:59.0	the things we think we already know.
1:01.6	So maintaining an openness, a curiosity,
1:05.2	I think it's important politically,
1:06.2	I think it's very important in my work as a podcast host,
1:08.4	but it is, as much as it is anything, a spiritual
1:11.5	practice, a practice of remaining present in the fundamental unknowability of this life
1:19.3	and this earth. And my guest today has helped me with those practices and in ways that maybe
1:25.9	he would not have known. Stephen Batchelor is the author
1:29.0	of many books on Buddhism and Meditation, including this book he wrote with his wife
1:34.9	Martine Bachelor called What Is This? Which is from a meditation retreat, a Saan meditation retreat,
1:43.9	that they held some time ago.
1:46.2	And saan meditation works around the question of what is this, just asking it again and again,
1:52.6	and allowing it to arise in you, this feeling of doubt, and then to sit with that,
1:56.4	and to see what that might reveal.
1:59.0	Batchez's latest book is Buddha, Socrates, and Us, ethical
	...

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