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The Current Transcript for December 26, 2024

Host: Mark Kelley

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

GREG EPSTEIN: It's not just that technology is acting like a religion in our lives. It's that that religion has overtaken all of the world's major religions and has become the dominant force. And this religion really desperately needs a reformation.

MARK KELLEY: Tech is everywhere these days. Possibly there's a phone in front of your face right now. And though how we're using it and how much dominates our conversations, it's taken as a given that it's a vital part of our lives. The Harvard chaplain, Greg Epstein, though, wants us to question how much faith we should place in these innovations. That's coming up in a moment. And then.

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DANIEL LEADER: Not only was it something that I loved, but it was something that, wait a second, I'm making friends. I'm meeting people that are interesting. I'm sharing like a simple joy and a simple excitement.

MK: For the baker, Daniel Leader, bread has always been about more than just something to eat. From early loaves that he actually used as paperweights to discovering the joys of quality flour and helping launch the artisanal baking movement, the real secret has been building community. We'll hear Matt Galloway's conversation with Daniel Leader coming up in 30 minutes. But we begin with our belief in the religion of technology. I'm Mark Kelley, sitting in for Matt Galloway, and this is The Current.

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TECH AGNOSTIC

Guest: Greg Epstein

MK: If you listen to the titans of the tech industry, all the technology they're building is changing the world for the better.

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SAM ALTMAN: I think we are heading into the greatest period of abundance that humanity has ever, ever seen. I think the two main drivers of that are AI and energy.

MARK ZUCKERBERG: Beside that, we're going to live in a world where there are going to be hundreds of millions or billions of different AI agents, eventually probably more AI agents than there are people in the world.

ELON MUSK: The good future of AI is one of immense prosperity, where there is an age of abundance, no shortage of goods and services. Everyone will be able to have anything they want. You know, in my view, that's probably 80% likely. So look on the brighter side.

MK: Well, tech CEOs Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk preach about the promise of technology. The rest of us arguably show our faith in it every day by logging on to social media, by tracking our kids, using an Apple airtag or by using ChatGPT to find us a good recipe. For Greg Epstein, the way we interact with technology is looking more and more like a religious act. He's a humanist chaplain at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his new book, he argues that tech has in fact become the world's most powerful religion, and we should be asking more questions about whether it's worthy of our faith. The book is called Tech Agnostic, and Greg Epstein joins me now from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Greg, good morning.

GREG EPSTEIN: Good morning, Marc. Thank you for having me.

MK: Well, it's great to have you here. You know, let's define our terms. When we talk about religion, I think about this obedience to faith in the hopes for salvation. How do you define what religion is for you?

GREG EPSTEIN: Religion has so many definitions. It's there's no one thing that you can identify as a, you know, religion is this and this only. And, you know, that comes from me studying religion and working in and around it for almost 30 years. But in order to write this book, I also spoke to a wide variety of scholars of religion who talk about how it can be sort of a term of art, but the idea that all of these things that we call religion are alike is a Christian notion. It comes from scholars of Christianity and Christian theologians at the beginning of sort of the modern era who said, you know, we're going to categorize all of these different things that we see around the world according to our terminology, according to our framework for living. You know, and the tech religion can look quite a bit like a Christian conception of religion as well.

MK: So how does it fit? How do you explain that to me, how tech fits into that definition of religion?

GREG EPSTEIN: Well, you know, if you really want to look structurally, some of the things that do really seem to be in common across what we call religious traditions around the world are a sort of narrative story that shapes people's lives and helps them to derive meaning in life, a set of practices and rituals that help connect them to who they think they are, who they're trying to be to their community and then community institutions, even congregations that bind people together and give them a shared sense of meaning. And the funny thing is tech today, Silicon Valley today really has all of those things. That's what I sort of dove into in researching this book for the last six years when I started to realize, oh, you know, I had been organizing a kind of alternative congregation. And I realized that the real alternative congregation was Facebook or social media writ large. When Mark Zuckerberg in 2017 started talking about bringing the world closer together, he rewrote the Facebook mission statement, and it sounded like a congregation leader's manifesto.

MK: You have a great line in the book where you say technology is the water in which we swim, whether or not we notice we are fish. Did you want, by making this, you know, linking this idea of religion and technology, do you want this to be a wake up call to the role it's playing in our lives?

GREG EPSTEIN: Yeah. The idea for me is tech has become so much bigger than just an industry, right? We algorithmically, we still say this phrase the tech industry. But that's a really bizarre thing to say these days because there's not a single industry left in the world, it would seem, that isn't in some meaningful way a tech industry. I mean, I was even talking to one interviewer, and I said, well, maybe, maybe basket weaving hasn't become a tech industry, you know? And she laughed and said, oh no, I know something about basket weaving. It's quite techified these days. And, you know, the point is that if tech as a religion has developed some really strange ideas about AI gods, about what I would call AI heaven, AI hell, chosen-ness and colonialism, which is of course a big part of many of the world's religions as well. And if a strange new traditional religion had come along and developed billions of new followers who were devoting themselves to it, who were worshiping all day, every day and who were being asked to tithe and double tithe, we'd be very critical of such a thing. We would worry, we would wonder and we would question. But I don't think we're questioning this new faith in technology as all things to all people nearly enough.

MK: Why do you feel that we're not questioning it? I mean, religion has a purpose. And so how do you see what the purpose of tech is and why are we failing to grasp that or question that?

GREG EPSTEIN: Yeah. I mean, the thing is that religion has many purposes. People use religion for good and for bad. They use it to inspire themselves and one another. And they also can use it to manipulate, you know, one another.

MK: Right.

GREG EPSTEIN: And the thing about my perspective on all this is I work as a humanist chaplain. I'm non-religious, but I work, I dedicated my life, 20 plus years at Harvard and now at MIT as well, to working in interfaith contexts. I'm not anti-religious and I'm not anti-technology. But, you know, I do think that we have this faith now that technology is the answer to all problems and that it's something that we should be spending every minute of every day of our lives with, it would seem. And, you know, the question to me is who benefits from that? You know, it reminds me of the sort of religion where the leaders ask you to devote yourself to them and to them alone, to their faith and to their faith alone, and they sort of won't let you out of the boundaries of their congregation or their cult even.

MK: Well, we heard some of the tech CEOs in our intro. So how have they become what you call prophets of tech?

GREG EPSTEIN: Yeah. You know, Elon Musk strikes me as the kind of prophet in chief of the new Trump administration. And, you know, I think you played the quote of him saying that we're going to be living in an age of abundance one day.

MK: Yeah.

GREG EPSTEIN: And Elon Musk is already living in an age of abundance. You know, his net worth has risen to heights of up to around 460, $440 billion. He's well on pace to becoming the world's first trillionaire. And so, you know, it's very easy for somebody like Elon Musk to conjure a fantasy of abundance and tell us all that we are going to share in it. Of course, why wouldn't he tell us that? You know, he doesn't want us to think that we all ought to question his wealth. So, you know, Musk and others tell us about a fantasy in which one day down the road, there will be trillions of digital beings uploaded into the cloud. And they say that these digital beings will be just as important, just as worthy as we are. And they go even further than that. They say that because those beings will be just as worthy as we are and it'll be a kind of tech utopia powered by the energy from distant stars, it's a kind of heaven image that they're conjuring, that we have to sacrifice ourselves and our lives and, for example, our climate in order to do everything possible to bring this about. I'll read you a quick quote from Marc Andreessen, the very influential tech multi-billionaire, venture capitalist and investor. He writes in his manifesto, The Techno Optimists Manifesto, which is written in the style of a biblical epistle, and it uses the phrase we believe 133 times. He writes, we believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder, unquote.

MK: Wow. But AI is being positioned as this higher power, this sentient force. Could it be that technology or tech is just playing this role in our lives that’s been left in a vacuum because people are losing faith in religion?

GREG EPSTEIN: I mean, it's fascinating, right? I came to the idea for this book after spending well over a decade trying to help people from this rising generation in the United States and Canada and elsewhere that is one of the least, it's the least religious generation in recorded history, to build a new kind of community, a new kind of congregation, right? I was taught that religion is the most powerful social technology in the world and that that could be a real positive if it was harnessed for people like me, atheists, agnostics, non-religious people. But, you know, I noticed that tech was in fact playing that role in most people's lives. You know, around 2018, when I was invited to be a chaplain at MIT, I realized, oh wow, that, you know, the technology that we're interacting with has taken this role on in the world. And then I started to notice all these other parallels. And what you were just pointing out is absolutely true. There is an extraordinary amount of discourse about God in the AI and tech world. And so AI is actually positioned as a God by a lot of ostensibly serious people, as an actual God that we should be literally worshiping.

MK: Greg, tell me about your own story. You know, religion is built on rituals. How did your own attachment to technology influence how you thought about tech as a form of religion?

GREG EPSTEIN: You know, maybe I was a canary in the coal mine for some of this tech addiction that I think a lot of us are wondering if we've got now. I was working on my first book, Good Without God: What a Billion Non-religious People do Believe, back in 2008. You know, I was barely 30 and I felt a lot of pressure to write my book well, and, you know, what would my dad, who, you know, had already died many years previous, have thought about it. And I was stressed out. And I'm not a drugs person or an alcohol person per say, but I realized that in order to escape my fear about writing, I was retreating into what I realized was tech addiction, my email, web browsing, you know, looking up the latest article, the newest online story as a way to avoid my problems. And I ended up seeking formal treatment for this. And I went to the meetings and I realized, oh yeah, I'm sitting next to somebody who is an alcoholic on one side, a heroin abuser on the other side, and I'm doing the same thing with my tech. But I realized that I had to go a little bit beyond that, because if tech is an addiction, it's not something that you can go cold turkey from. I mean, it would be laughable for me to suggest to, say, one of my students at a place like a Harvard or an MIT, if they might be struggling with their tech use in similar ways to what I've struggled with, that they should, you know, cast their smartphone into the sea, smash their tablet with a hammer. I mean, what would that get them? It would get them, at this point, isolation from their entire generation. And so what I realized was that this tech should actually be approached more like an eating disorder, because if you have an eating disorder, you can't just stop eating food as a way of treating it. And in fact, you don't even want to have a negative relationship with food, like, okay, I'll eat healthy, but I'll hate myself for it and I'll hate the food. No, you know, eating disorder therapists and experts will help people to develop a whole new healthy relationship with their food, where they address the fears that are coming up when people sort of abuse the food and try to provide them with a better sense of hope and connection through food. And I realized that's exactly what I need and exactly what I think a lot of people need with tech.

MK: But an agnostic is someone by definition who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God. So how does this apply to the path forward in our relationship with tech?

GREG EPSTEIN: So agnosticism is ultimately where I come down as a recommendation, as a message or, you know, maybe a mantra in tech agnostic. For example, Donald Trump was just reelected by the American people as a 34-time and probably counting convicted felon in large part because he comes across as fearless, as incredibly confident in the face of uncertainty. You know, people in America and Canada and elsewhere I think are worried, rightfully so, about a world where climate has made our future incredibly uncertain, where tech has made our future incredibly uncertain. I mean, even if tech promises good things, if we're being told, as we are by a lot of tech leaders, that we're going to be, you know, in ten, 12 years from now, we're going to be uploading ourselves into the cloud, the singularity, as some people call it, will be ending death as we know it, as is, you know, really claimed, that's enormous change. And it's right to be uncertain and even anxious about all of that change. Trump comes along and he's very certain, and that's a problem. So agnosticism is a way of saying we don't need to know every aspect of what is to come. We don't need to know how to, you know, build the perfect society, live the perfect life. What we do need is a sense of confidence in our compassion for one another. We need a sense that we're committed to loving one another, caring for one another, building a better world for all. And that, you know, the idea that we have to have this perfect technological method of doing so and only that can save us, that is faith. And it's a kind of extreme faith that I'm arguing we need to question.

MK: Well, you mentioned, you know, we were talking about Elon Musk, the power of Elon Musk, his role now in the White House. And we look at other tech CEOs. They're owners of media outlets. They control the conversation in a certain way. So how much room is there for us, as, you know, the consumers of tech, to really push back against that power?

GREG EPSTEIN: Yeah. The heartening thing that I found in spending six years researching the different ways in which tech ends up looking like faith is that there are a tremendous number of smart and caring people who are calling for what I would call a reformation, right? Because I don't have a problem with religion per say. It's really important to emphasize I like reformed religions where people, leaders, communities know how to respond honestly to criticism and work to try to do better when they make mistakes. You know, Christians who know how to criticize Christian hegemony, Jews and Israelis that know how to criticize the Israeli occupation and violence, Muslims who know how to criticize, you know, Muslim terrorism and such, right?

MK: So what would a reformed relationship with tech look like?

GREG EPSTEIN: Yeah. So the last third to almost half of Tech Agnostic is about the Reformation. It's about what I would call the positive alternative to tech worship. And so there are people who essentially are tech heretics, apostates, you know, people who are willing to take on these incredibly powerful multibillion, multitrillion dollar companies and industries and say, you know, no, you don't get to disrupt entire communities of people just because it will drive more profits to your shareholders. I tell the story of a woman, for example, named Veena Dubal, a professor at the University of California who was an expert in the taxi industry in the San Francisco area just before Uber and Lyft came along. And so she was in really good position to document how much harm Uber and Lyft and companies like them were doing to the people, the humans who serve us in our communities by driving cars. And she fought back so hard against those companies. Dubal is extremely brave. She and many others are making an important impact. They're causing a lot of tech companies to have to take steps back and recognize their overreach. But there's much more work to be done.

MK: You say in the book you have long been known as an irrepressible, optimistic optimist. So how has writing this book affected that?

GREG EPSTEIN: I'm worried, of course, about how much power Silicon Valley, what we call big tech, is amassing, and, you know, the extent to which, you know, these companies are dominating our sense of who we are. But I am optimistic about the power of agnosticism essentially, about the idea that if we can affirm human caring and human compassion and, you know, human worth simply because we are all human, not because we have to accomplish the greatest thing, be the most exceptional person, win the economy, win the, you know, every single battle for tech supremacy, but if we can just focus on not knowing what we don't know about our tech future, but knowing what we know about how important it is to be compassionate and caring for one another, you know, I think we can successfully push back against the worst excesses of tech. I do feel confident in that.

MK: You're shouting from a rooftop. Let's find out now who's listening. Greg, it's a fascinating conversation. Thank you.

GREG EPSTEIN: Thank you so much, Mark. It's great to talk to you.

MK: Greg Epstein is a humanist chaplain at both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His new book is called Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation. Coming up after your regional update.

SOUNDCLIP

DANIEL LEADER: Each of us in our own little world could experience this connection and the satisfaction and the sharing, you know, from nothing. Flour and water.

MK: It really is magic that just by combining flour, water and a bit of yeast, we can create one of the most delicious foods in the world. Daniel Leader helped launch the artisanal bread movement decades ago around this simple act, and he's built a community worldwide. Our conversation with Daniel Leader coming up in 90 seconds. I'm Mark Kelley, sitting in for Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

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DANIEL LEADER

MK: I'm Mark Kelley, sitting in for Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current. Let's travel back to a time not so long ago when we were faced with an unprecedented challenge, one that left us isolated and in search of a distraction.

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FIRST SPEAKER: Like so many self-isolating people, I have taken to making my own bread. This, my friends, is a yeast leaven, fresh from the oven, full of love, comfort inducing, carb loaded COVID coping mechanism.

SECOND SPEAKER: I was obsessed with baking sour dough bread, and if anyone wanted some sourdough starter, I would be happy to give them some.

THIRD SPEAKER: We've really been missing community during social distancing. Making bread for others has kind of become our little way of loving them from afar. We can't come see you, but hey, here, have some bread.

MK: Bread, bread, bread. The pandemic helped drive home that idea that a shared loaf of bread provides a lot more than just sustenance. Daniel Leader has known this for decades. He's the founder of the Bread Alone Bakery in upstate New York and a pioneer of what we now call the artisanal bread movement. 40 years ago, when he was selling bread out of the back of the family's station wagon, organic flour wasn’t yet a thing. Many people hadn't even heard of sour dough, let alone tasted it. Now, thousands, if not millions of loaves later, Daniel Leader is sharing what he's learned about his craft and our relationship with bread. His new book is called A Slow Rise: Favorite Recipes from Four Decades of Baking with Heart. Daniel Leader spoke with Matt Galloway earlier this month, and this is their conversation.

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MATT GALLOWAY: Are you a toast person for breakfast? Do you bake bread and then throw it in the toaster, or perhaps not, every day?

DANIEL LEADER: 100 per cent toast person. And actually, I make my toast in a very special way. I have an AGA cooker, and I have this like, it's a little bit of like a rat cage. And I put the bread there and I put it directly on the burner. So I get like nice caramelized edges when I'm making my toast.

MG: I can smell your kitchen already. Oh my goodness. This is such an interesting book because, as I said, it's filled with recipes, but it's also the story in some ways of how you ended up doing your life's work. And this starts for you with a book. Tell me about the book that opened your eyes to bread making.

DANIEL LEADER: Well, I was in college, and I was working as a breakfast cook. And I lived on a street called Mifflin Street in Madison, Wisconsin, and there was one of the first US food co-ops was there. And there next to a bean of whole wheat flour was Edward Espe Brown's book, the Tassajara Bread Book. And there was something about this paperback book with a simple loaf of bread and jam on the cover that spoke to me. And I took it home, and I read it out on the porch, and I just started baking this simple 100% whole wheat bread. And people would say, oh, your house smells so good. And then a neighbour would tell another neighbour. And then some neighbours told the college professors. And within just a couple of months, I was starting to be called the bread guy in Madison, Wisconsin, and people would invite me over to their dinner parties or whatever just to share this simple loaf of whole wheat bread. And it just, not only was it something that I loved, it was something that I was learning to love, but it was something that, wait a second, I'm making friends. I'm meeting people that are interesting. I'm sharing like a simple joy and a simple excitement. And it captivated me then and it still captivates me today.

MG: Let me ask you about the Tassajara Bread Book. I mean, this is it's interesting for a number of reasons, one of which is that it was written by a Zen monk. I mean, Tassajara is a Zen retreat. People might know it for the place that it holds within Zen mythology, if I can put it that way, in California. What was it about the book and about his approach, which is rooted in Zen philosophy, that was really interesting to you?

DANIEL LEADER: I mean, you know, I didn't know about, anything about Zen philosophy at the time. I was just, I was just looking at a bread book that appealed to me. But within those pages, he would talk about being connected to the process, you know, holding the flower in your hand, smelling each step along the way, you know, really immersing yourself in the process. And now we talk about mindfulness and being in the moment, but he didn't use those words. He talked about the emotional connection to making bread and really, really touching the dough and feeling it as if it's life itself. And that really spoke to me. I mean, I was 18 and trying to find my way in life, and it just spoke to an emotional quality that is very much alive to this day for me.

MG: He also talked about how, and these are, I mean, you write about this in the book, working to Bake bread can renew our spirit. With this work, we renew the world, our friends, our neighbours. I mean, that can sound, and you're just talking about bread, but at the same time, it’s what you said right at the very beginning, that you become the bread guy, that something is created when you are baking your own loaf of bread that people want to be part of.

DANIEL LEADER: I mean, I'm still fascinated by what happened during the pandemic, because of all of the foods, of all of the things that people could have kind of attached themselves to for comfort, it was bread. I mean, it was such a phenomenon. And, you know, the social media posts were extraordinary. And people, I know some bread bakers who were quite skilled at social media. They have a million or two million followers, and they are reaching out to the world in their commitment to making good bread at home. It's quite fascinating.

MG: What did you make of that? I want to come back to you in a moment, but you just raised this. What did you make of the fact that of all the things that people turned to, it was bread baking during that really isolating time?

DANIEL LEADER: To me, I always think of bread baking like farming, like music. You know, you walk in a room and there's beautiful music, you feel different. You pull a carrot from a garden, you feel different. But bread baking has that, I don't know, it's so primal. It's so real. There's nothing that you can't understand. You have some water. You have some flour. And then when the mythology went away about sour dough, wait a second, sour dough is just flour and water that you feed a few times over a few days, and all of a sudden, it's this bubbly mass and that is going to make your bread. And the byproduct is this wonderful flavor of, you know, you know, technically, we're creating lactic in acetic acid. I mean, there's a lot of science to it, but there's a lot of mythology and there's a lot of just practicality. I mean, when I first learned to bake in France in the early 80s, the bakers who taught me, they couldn't tell you about the type of lactobacilli or the exact qualities of the flour. They, you know, they smelled the sour dough. They felt the dough in their hands. They touched the flour. And it was that experience that they refined over time that turned them into good bakers. And I think that during the pandemic, each of us in our own little worlds could experience this, you know, this connection and the satisfaction and the sharing from, you know, from nothing. Flour and water.

MG: Were you a natural at this? What were the early loaves that you baked like when they came out of the oven?

DANIEL LEADER: Oh no, they were paper weights. I remember, you know, back when I was in college, we actually had, you know, typewriters and we would have our term papers piled up. I can remember putting a loaf of bread on one of my term papers so it wouldn't blow away.

MG: How did you learn? I mean, you talked about going to Europe. What was it that you learned when you were traveling through Europe?

DANIEL LEADER: You know, I consider myself a master of going to the back door of a bakery and knocking on the door. And in the early days, I spoke just enough French to kind of talk my way into a bakery. But I was very lucky that, you know, at this time, you know, sour dough, even in France back then, was just beginning to come alive again. I mean, there were maybe a half a dozen bakeries in Paris. But I would simply talk my way into the bakery and then I would ask them, could I stay a shift? And then they turned into three nights. And back then, before there was a lot of modern and retarding proofing equipment, you know, we'd start working at midnight and work until eight in the morning. So, you know, we would have time to talk and we would have time to like, you know, really look at the oven and look at the dough. I mean, it was really, I'm actually quite happy that the Internet was not around when I was learning bread baking because I got to experience it, you know, firsthand, like from real artisans, from real craftsmen and women. And it was a, you know, a wonderful part of my life.

MG: What did you learn about flour and about the importance of what we put into the dough?

DANIEL LEADER: Well, you know, there's kind of like two worlds in milling. You've got, you know, commercial milling and what I'm calling the non commodity milling. And non commodity milling would be a small flour mill, often stone ground, that has direct relationships with the farmers who are supplying this mill. And this flour is often less, most often, it's less refined. In France, they have a type of flour called type 85 where they just sift off a little bit of the bran just to make it a little bit lighter.

MG: Just explain what that means for people who don't know when you say it’s less refined.

DANIEL LEADER: So if you take a wheat berry and you crush it in a stone, okay, 100% of that flour would be whole wheat flour. But whole wheat flour tends to be a little heavy, so what they do is they just have some sifters, and they'll just maybe sift off, let's say, five or 10% of the bran just to make the flour a little bit lighter. But it's not white flour. It's kind of like a sandy color with flecks of bran in it, a very, very different quality than commercially ground white flour that we'll see in a supermarket. But luckily, you know, certainly in the States, and I know this is true in Canada as well, there's a lot of small mills popping up. In fact, one of my favourite mills in France just opened a mill near Quebec. And so they're milling this French style flour in Montreal in Quebec now.

MG: And you notice that in the taste of the bread.

DANIEL LEADER: Oh, totally. Oh, I can tell instantly in the taste. I can tell in the color. I can tell in the way the loaf rises. I can tell in the caramelization of the loaf because you haven't sifted out a lot of the germ which has got the fatty part of the wheat kernel in it. It's got more of the bran. You develop different flavour profiles with this more wholegrain flour.

MG: How does it taste differently? I mean, describe what that taste would be, the difference.

DANIEL LEADER: I would say that there's an earthy, especially when you're making sour dough bread, there's an earthy quality, but it's pungent at the same time, but not overpowering. It's this very, it's like it's a strong and soft smell at the same time. But it develops a really, I like to make sour dough breads that are not too acid. And so it's got this sweet and sour quality at the same time.

MG: People think of baking as being a science in many ways. I mean, you use a scale because it's more precise than measuring things out by hand, for example. But in the book, you talk about the soft skills of baking. That might sound like a contradiction to some people. Can you explain that?

DANIEL LEADER: Well, you know, I know bakers who are by the books only. And it's sometimes, like they're so worried about the skill that they lose their contact with the process. And I like to have a balance between the two. Like last night, I was actually making some bread because I knew we’re doing the show today. And, you know, the moment you put the water and flour together, there's a process called autolyze where before you add your sour dough, you just hydrate the flour and you let it sit for an hour. And I was, you know, I had a friend over and I would say, these are the qualities we look at. And we picked the dough up and we saw how the dough draped over my fingers. We saw how it stretched in my hand. We smelled it. Okay. Now, I had scaled the flour. I had scaled the water. I was being very careful about the process, but I was equally in touch with how it felt in my hand because no two batches of flour are exactly the same. So I might say, Well, wait a second, this feels firmer than last time. Well, you know, I'm skilled enough. And most people, you can just say, oh, it feels a little tight. I'm going to add a little bit more water to the dough. Now, if you're only going by the book, you're not going to even ask that question. You know, you're going to say, well, I did it the right way. Where I'm always encouraging bakers to feel, to smell, to hold the dough in your hand, to not rush the process, and more importantly, enjoy the process. Be in touch with it so that you feel it as you're going each step of the way.

MG: I mean, that literally speaks to what you're doing. You have your hands in the dough, and yet because of maybe the times we live in or what have you, we are trying to rush through things. But you're telling people while your hands are there, actually, I mean, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier with the Tassajara book, be in the moment while you're baking that bread.

DANIEL LEADER: Right. And also, you know, maybe today's bread is going to be better than yesterday's. Maybe it's going to be worse. But enjoy the process. And like when… wait a second, this bread is different than the last time. Why? What did I do differently? Oh, I let the sour dough go two hours longer. Oh, it was a little bit warmer. Oh, yesterday, I left it in the cooler for 24 hours, and today I only did 18. You know, like you can kind of go through the process and kind of like review it in a way that's like each bake is a learning skill.

MG: That’s why you say that each loaf doesn't need to be a 10 out of 10, that seven or eight out of 10 is fine.

DANIEL LEADER: Yeah, absolutely. I no longer try to make perfect loaves. I try to have the process be from the beginning to the end, an experience. And if the bread is a 10, I'm happy. If the bread is an eight, I'm happy. Of course, you know, if I really mess something up, that's a little disappointing. But that doesn't happen too much these days.

MG: It’s hard in the Instagram era because everybody wants to take a picture of their bread when it's perfect and post it.

DANIEL LEADER: Yeah, I'm guilty of that too.

MG: Good to know. One of the other things that you talk about, and people who bake know this, is that when you bring it out, when you bring the loaf out of the oven, you need to stop and you have to listen. What are you listening for?

DANIEL LEADER: Well, when the bread is cooling, you get this kind of crackling. And especially if you bake the bread a little bit dark, not too dark, but you get some real caramelization, you get this fissure from the loaf cooling. And if you listen to that, I remember the very first time this happened to me, I was at a bakery in Paris, and the bakers said, listen to me. Listen to the music of the bread. And he puts the baguette next to my ear and he's smiling from ear to ear like because I had never done that before. And he was so excited that I was experiencing that process for the very first time.

MG: That's crackling away as it cools down.

DANIEL LEADER: Exactly. Exactly.

MG: Do you name your sour dough starter? I ask because people, this is what you saw during the pandemic as well. People become very attached to their sour dough starter. Sometimes they name them for reasons that are too long. Mine's called Carmine. But do you feel attached to sour dough starter?

DANIEL LEADER: Oh, totally. And what's interesting is we just got back to Maine, where I live now, and we were gone for about three and a half weeks. And so, you know, I come home and I check my sour dough right away. And I literally only keep it like, maybe like 40 grams in the refrigerator and I check it. And so it's been three weeks. And then I fed it yesterday morning getting ready to mix the dough last night and, you know, like and it just comes alive so quickly. That in itself is like this magical process. Like people say, well, can I kill my sour dough? Well, I mean, I think it's possible maybe if you neglect it for three or four months. But I've had sour doughs for two months sitting in the fridge and, you know, you feed it again and off it goes.

MG: But it is a thing, right? People do become attached to the starter.

DANIEL LEADER: Oh yeah. Well, I'm definitely attached to it. I'm very, very careful. Like if we have a lot of guests or in the summer, if a family comes in, they're in the refrigerator moving things around and I open the fridge and my sour dough is not in its normal place, I'm like, oh my God, you know, did someone take it? Did they throw it away? Like it's a moment of panic because I am attached to my 50 grams of sour dough I keep in my fridge.

MG: So we were talking earlier. You said you're fine sometimes with the eight out of 10 loaf.

DANIEL LEADER: Yeah.

MG: You also, after you retired, had a chance to live through this dream that you'd had. And it's not, you're not looking for an eight out of 10 or nine out of 10. You're looking for 10 out of 10 in competing in Le Grand Prix de la Baguette. What is that?

DANIEL LEADER: Well, in Paris, every year since 1993, they have this competition, and every bakery in Paris is entitled to bring two baguettes. And you have to get there between 10 and 11 a.m. You bring two baguettes, and they weigh them. They check the length, and then they lay all these baguettes out on a table. The table must be 40 fit long. And so you have this sea of baguettes and it's something that I had always been fascinated about. And so I called a friend of mine who has a bakery in Paris, and I said, well, why don't we, why don't we enter? And what do you think if I bake the bread? And he checked the rules and it's only the bakery that can enter. They don't ask who baked the bread. So I, along with his baker, we bake these two baguettes, and they were exactly the right weight and exactly the right length. And we took the baguettes there, and it's like this magical moment where you've got bakers showing up on bicycles and bakers showing up on motorcycles and cars and, you know, bakers of every size and shape and age showing up, and they drop the two baguette off and then they all, it was a very nice day. It was in May. And all of the bakers are like lined up along the sand, breaking baguettes and talking and waiting for the judges to decide.

MG: It sounds very French and very, very much like Paris.

DANIEL LEADER: Oh my God, it was so much fun. And, you know, they have three teams of judges, and they each start out with like 40, 40 baguettes and they bring it down to 20 and they bring it down to 10. And then each table picks one, and then the judges at the end all pick one winner, and that winner gets to deliver bread every day to the Élysée Palace in Paris for a year. And they win, I think, €500. But it's not so much about who wins in my mind. It's about the joy of all these bakers coming together. And it was really, it was really one of the most wonderful moments of my life being part of that competition.

MG: How did it go for you in terms of the competition?

DANIEL LEADER: We don't know because only one person wins.

MG: They don’t tell you anything else other than that one person wins.

DANIEL LEADER: Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe there's a runner up, but we got to… because they knew I was writing about it for the book, they let me stand in the room when the judges were going through the competition. And so after about an hour and a half in the room, it was so intoxicating, the smell, that I went away for a minute.

MG: Do you worry, and I ask you this because you're involved in this wheat improvement centre, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre in Mexico.

DANIEL LEADER: Yeah.

MG: Do you worry about the impact of a changing climate on what is essential to your life's work, which is, is the wheat that leads to the flour, which leads to the bread?

DANIEL LEADER: Yeah. I mean, it's a big issue. Last year in France, the harvest was very high quality but half the quantity. The centre in Mexico is doing all of this amazing research, trying to create crossbreeding varieties of wheat. There's a photo in the book where they’re trying to have the foliage and the wheat, have the leaves be bigger, which keeps the soil cooler, and also varieties of wheat that have a root structure that goes deeper so that they need less water. So there's tremendous research going on there and at other centres really trying to look at what can we do to combat climate change. Just for example, here in Maine, most of the farmers that are growing wheat are now planting spring wheat rather than winter wheat just because…

MG: There’s not much of a winter anymore.

DANIEL LEADER: Yeah, it is scary, but it's also hopeful that you have this amazing scientific community across the world working to address this problem.

MG: And an audience that is there. I mean, there's a whole fight against ultra processed food, but also this real movement of people to try to figure out how to slow their lives down, whether it's changing your technology or what have you. It feels, and it's beyond the pandemic, that the people want to eat real food and people want to figure out, I get that it takes more time than just pulling a loaf of bread off the store shelf, but they want to figure out how to create some of that food as well.

DANIEL LEADER: Yeah. And I mean, there's a real movement. I've seen this in Canada where you've got people's, I wouldn't call them homesteading, but I would say there are people starting family farms again looking for niche products that they can grow or process on the farm. There's this micro bakery movement where people are starting, you know, micro bakeries in their garages and doing subscription services. So all, all of the bread is sold before they even bake it. But, you know, it's interesting to me, you can look in people making spirits and people doing all types of foods at home, craft cheeses. I mean, it's a scary time, but it's also an exciting time for Kraft Foods.

MG: And so for people who would be freaked out by that, I mean, there's a part in the book where it's, you know, reasons to try sour dough. And the point is making sour dough is easier than you think. What would you say to somebody who's like, I don't have the time for this. I don't have the skill for this. I'm going to make the, what do you say, the paperweight that I'm going to put on my term papers rather than something that people would want to eat? What would you say to them?

DANIEL LEADER: Well, the first thing I would say is that the whole world was making sour dough bread up until about 1900. So modern yeast raised bread is relatively new. So if people did that from the beginning of time through, you know, the turn of the century, it can't be that hard. I mean, before people had had machines and, you know, all types of gadgets to help us, you know, people were making sour dough bread forever. So that's the first thing. It's not hard. It's a basic skill. The second thing, it's a lot more weight than work, okay? You could say, oh, my sour dough bread took 36 hours from start to finish, you know? Well, how much time did you actually spend working? If you feed your sour dough before you go to work in the morning and in the afternoon, you need your dough a little bit and you shape it before you go to bed, and the next morning you get up, it's sitting in your refrigerator, and the next morning before you go to work, you pop it in the oven for 45 minutes, maybe you've done 25 minutes of actual work. It's 24 hours of time and 24 minutes of work. And so, you know, when you take the complications out of it, it's not complicated. It's a simple process. It's something anyone can do. You know, there's this, people are almost intimidated by yeast and sour dough. If you could just take that out of your mind. It's an easy process. People have done this since the beginning of time. I can do it too.

MG: And it's kind of like a magic act. Flour, water and salt.

DANIEL LEADER: Exactly. Exactly.

MG: It's a real pleasure to talk to you. The book, as it should, made me hungry and made me want to get my hands back into the bowl and mix up a loaf of bread. Daniel, thank you very much.

DANIEL LEADER: It is my pleasure. Thank you for this.

MK: Daniel Leader's new book is called A Slow Rise: Favorite Recipes from Four Decades of Baking with Heart. He spoke with Matt Galloway earlier this month. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Susan Ormiston will be joining you in the host seat at The Current tomorrow. I'm Mark Kelley. Thanks for listening to The Current. Get your dukes up and have a great Boxing Day.

Thursday, December 26, 2024 Episode Transcript

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