SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Like a lot of people, David Litt fell into a funk - let's call it a depression; he certainly does - during the pandemic. But the former speechwriter for President Obama and bestselling author who describes himself as a Frisbee-playing, farm-to-table eating and - his words - NPR-listening image of a liberal did not soothe himself by baking bread or spinning pottery. He learned how to surf, tutored by his brother-in-law, Matt Kappler, a tattooed electrician who doesn't believe in vaccinations and is a superfan of Joe Rogan. David Litt's new memoir, "It's Only Drowning: A True Story Of Learning To Surf And The Pursuit For Common Ground." He joins us in our studios. Thanks for hanging ten with us today. Does anyone still say that?
DAVID LITT: They do on longboards, so yes.
SIMON: Oh, OK, good.
LITT: Yeah. No, this is - I've become the kind of surfer who's nitpicky about surf speak, so this is going to be really fun.
SIMON: Oh.
LITT: (Laughter).
SIMON: All right.
LITT: Yeah.
SIMON: I'll try and drop it. Why did you learn surfing?
LITT: During the pandemic, my wife would regularly see me scrolling through the news and worrying. And she would say, you know, you really need to pick up a hobby. And I would explain, I already have a hobby, and my hobby is scrolling through the news and worrying. And eventually, I came around to her view, and the hobby I tried was surfing, in part, because of my brother-in-law, my wife's younger brother Matt. And the two of us are different in literally every way. I mean, he owns two motorcycles. I own two computer monitors for work. He once threw out his back training to become an ultimate fighter, and I once threw out my back lifting a bag of cat litter.
SIMON: Ha.
LITT: (Laughter) So we're not very similar people, to put it mildly. But during the pandemic, he seemed to thrive at a time when I was wilting. And most of what he does in life, I could never imagine myself doing. I was not about to buy a motorcycle. I was not about to cover myself in tattoos. We've known each other for about seven seconds, and you can already tell that's not my kind of person. That's not who I am. And yet, he's a hardcore surfer, and that was the one thing I think in the back recesses of my mind, I could imagine doing that he did. And I thought, for the first time since I've known him, I guess he must know some kind of secret. I don't want to be Matt, but I think I want to be a tiny bit more like him in some respect. And surfing, looking back on it, I think was the way in.
SIMON: Let me ask you about the surfing part. It involves a lot of flopping around, right?
LITT: It does when I do it.
SIMON: (Laughter).
LITT: What I learned the hard way was that the best time to surf - learn to surf is around age 7. And 15 is old, and 20 is geriatric. And I started at 35. And so I learned very quickly this was the most physically demanding thing I've ever done, because there are muscles that are used by surfers and essentially nobody else. And so that was an eye-opening experience, just to try to paddle a surfboard. And then on top of that, dealing with the fear that comes from being a tiny animal on a very small plank in a very large ocean, as an adult, that's a challenge.
SIMON: Did you and Matt, your brother-in-law, talk about your differences much?
LITT: At first, we didn't. At first, I would say the opposite - anything but our differences. But something pretty remarkable happened, which is during the time that I write about in the book, and then even since then, just this time that we've spent together created this foundation where now, if something's going on in the news, I'm often curious about what he thinks, not 'cause I think I'm going to agree with him or vice versa, but because he's a friend. And so we can talk about these things that before we just couldn't talk about.
SIMON: I mean, you didn't just surf together. You indicated you would go on surfing trips.
LITT: We did, which scared me - both the surfing part but also the time spent together part.
SIMON: Yeah.
LITT: You know, when I first met Matt, which was in 2012, I didn't - it wasn't that we clashed, but I knew right away that we had nothing in common. And to suddenly say, OK, we're going to spend a week in Santa Cruz, California, or we're going to hang out together and share a hotel room at an artificial wave pool in Waco, Texas - spending that kind of time, you know, I thought that this would mostly be a journey about what happened in the water. And that's certainly there, and it's in the book. But then at the same time, so much of it was, you know, just driving from place to place or going to the grocery store to stock up before a big day of surfing.
SIMON: Look, I have to ask - pointed review of your book in the Washington Examiner by Mark Judge, who finds your view of Matt, your brother-in-law, patronizing and liberal elitist because you don't seem to hold out the possibility that he might be right about anything. I wonder how you think about that.
LITT: You know, I respectfully disagree with that. All memoirs, to me, are about change. And this is where I think he had a point. I think, at the beginning of the book and the beginning of this journey, I would have told you that I didn't have anything to learn from someone like Matt. And actually, this is a book about how much I learned from him. And I think he learned from me, too. But I think we learned from each other precisely because we are so different. And there are a number of ways where I can point to that. But one of the biggest ones is, I handle fear much better because of what I would have told you three years ago was Matt's recklessness.
You know, Matt is a good - very good surfer. He's not the best surfer in the world. The thing I have seen him do that no other surfer I've ever seen in the water can do is claw himself onto a wave. So a big wave is coming, and he just gives it everything he's got and throws himself over the lip. And watching him do that for the first time, I thought, OK, I want to be more like Matt. And I think that is part of what got him through the pandemic. And I think it's also, I hope, part of what I learned.
So I guess what I would say is I suspect that the reviewer you mentioned may not agree on my character now, but we might be in a surprising agreement about my character when I started the book. And I'm not just proud to have changed. I think life is so much more fun in this new iteration of myself. And in a big way, that's what this book is all about.
SIMON: You don't talk about common ground so much as neutral ground.
LITT: I started off thinking that this would be about finding common ground in the sense that we would realize we're not so different, right? We actually have tons in common. And, if anything, it was the opposite, where Matt and I have spent three years together, surfing and also just hanging out. And what we have learned is, yeah, we have absolutely nothing in common. And yet those differences don't matter nearly as much as we thought. And the neutral ground, which, to me, is a space that isn't coded liberal or conservative - it's not about the things that divide us. For us, it was surfing, but I think anyone listening has their own version of that.
SIMON: I got to tell you, I hear from a few people who say they listen to both NPR and Joe Rogan.
LITT: That does not surprise me. I mean, I'm, to some extent, one of them these days. I'm not - I wouldn't describe myself as a huge fan of Rogan. But I would say, listen to him talk about someone who you already like and more or less agree with, and you will find that episode really fascinating. And I will now highly recommend the Joe Rogan episode with Kelly Slater, who's a legendary surfer. And at the end of that interview, I didn't just feel like I knew more about Kelly Slater. I feel like I knew Kelly Slater. And I can see why he's so popular with his listeners, many of whom, as you point out, are also potentially listening right now or to NPR in general.
SIMON: Very next-to-last sentence of the book, you mentioned that Matt didn't want to see an early copy. Has he now?
LITT: So he did. He originally didn't want to see an early copy. Later on, he said, well, actually, maybe I would like to see one. And so he's an electrician. He was doing a job in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where we live. So I drove over, parked behind his truck, you know, walked into this empty house with an early copy of the book. And I was so nervous. I mean, you know...
SIMON: Yeah.
LITT: ...Reviews are scary, but this was the scariest review I knew I was going to get. And the first sentence of the book is, Matthew Kappler is my brother-in-law, and we're very different, and one of the biggest differences between us is that if I lived like him, I would die. And I saw him read that, and he just started to laugh. And I said, OK, this - we're going to be OK.
SIMON: David Litt's new book, "It's Only Drowning." Thanks so much for being with us.
LITT: Thank you for having me.
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