Making Sense - Sam Harris - #372

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if

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00:00:45.060 Today I'm speaking with George Saunders. George is the author of 12 books, including Lincoln and

00:00:51.560 the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for Best Fiction in English.

00:00:58.340 And was a finalist for the Golden Man Booker, in which one Booker winner is selected to represent

00:01:04.100 each decade. His short stories have appeared regularly in The New Yorker since 1992, and

00:01:10.060 his short story collection, The 10th of December, was a finalist for the National Book Award.

00:01:15.220 George has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, the Penn Malamud Prize for Excellence

00:01:20.600 in the Short Story, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and

00:01:25.100 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world's hundred

00:01:30.000 most influential people by Time Magazine, and for the last 25 years or so, he has taught

00:01:36.100 in the creative writing program at Syracuse University. As you'll hear today, George and

00:01:41.140 I almost completely ignore his fiction, but we do talk about life and work. We discuss his

00:01:47.320 involvement with Buddhism, the importance of kindness, psychedelics, writing as a practice,

00:01:54.480 his creative process, the work of Raymond Carver, the problem of social media, our current political

00:02:00.740 crisis, the role of fame in American culture, Wendell Berry, fiction as a way of exploring good

00:02:07.180 and evil, the death of Ivan Ilyich, missed opportunities in ordinary life, what it means to be a more loving

00:02:13.400 person. His article titled, The Incredible Buddha Boy, The Prison of Reputation, Tolstoy, and other

00:02:21.500 topics. Anyway, it was great to talk to him. I very much enjoyed this. And now I bring you George Saunders.

00:02:34.480 I am here with George Saunders. George, thanks for joining me.

00:02:38.400 Thank you for having me. What a pleasure.

00:02:40.080 So I have an embarrassing confession to make. I only recently discovered you, and it's embarrassing

00:02:47.920 both with reference to your presence out there in the world of writers and also with respect to

00:02:53.820 how much pleasure I'm taking in reading you. It's just, I don't know where my brain has been for the

00:02:58.980 last 20 years, but apparently I missed you. And this embarrassment is compounded by the fact that I

00:03:05.800 have not yet started to read your fiction. I have been devouring your nonfiction. And I realized that

00:03:12.400 talking to you about your writing and not focusing on your fiction is somewhat like talking to Julia

00:03:18.580 Child and not talking about cooking.

00:03:21.060 It'll be even easier because I can make any claim I want, you know?

00:03:24.140 Yeah.

00:03:24.420 I can be as grandiose as I like, and you'll have to just take it. No, but I'm just so happy that you're

00:03:29.820 reading anything and I appreciate it. And you're not alone in not knowing me.

00:03:35.660 Well, I look forward to reading your short stories for which you are quite famous and

00:03:39.800 also your novel, Lincoln and the Bardo, for which you won the Man Booker Prize. I don't have to tell

00:03:47.580 you that, but reminding our readers that has occurred. So you first came across my radar here because,

00:03:54.080 well, I think I noticed the speech you gave at Syracuse that got published as that little book,

00:04:01.200 the commencement speech titled Congratulations, by the Way, which is just this wonderful

00:04:05.780 admonition about and celebration of kindness, which we'll talk about. But then someone on my team

00:04:12.520 noticed that you had blurbed Mingyur Rinpoche's book. And Mingyur is the son of the really the

00:04:19.240 greatest meditation teacher I ever studied with, Tukur Rinpoche. And so I wanted to talk to you

00:04:25.600 about your engagement with Buddhism and meditation first as a starting point. I've also read your

00:04:32.800 piece on the incredible Buddha Boy that you first published in GQ. So maybe we can start there.

00:04:38.720 What has been your engagement with Eastern philosophy, meditation, and other esoterica?

00:04:46.080 Sure. Well, I mean, I'll say a good friend of ours who's much more experienced in practice

00:04:51.340 has described me as a fellow traveler. So I'm one of these people who reads a lot of Buddhist stuff

00:04:56.540 and has been involved in meditation and I kind of fade in and out of the actual practice. So I'm not

00:05:01.700 any kind of, you know, I'm like an anti-authority really. But basically what happened was years ago,

00:05:06.400 we were in the Episcopal Church after our kids were little and we were, you know, kind of been led back

00:05:11.100 to the church by just being parents, you know, and feeling kind of outgunned in the way that

00:05:16.020 sometimes happens. And my wife was involved in a Christian meditation class and couldn't find a lot

00:05:22.140 of resources. So I found her way to a Buddhist empowerment and came back just like, wow, that

00:05:28.180 was something, you know. And she started meditating and I just noticed in her, you know, these changes

00:05:33.380 that were so concrete and not huge, but just concrete. And suddenly, you know, we weren't having

00:05:41.220 the kinds of disagreements that we had become habituated to have in a certain way. And it wasn't

00:05:46.700 my doing for sure. It was just something about whatever she was doing there in the morning in

00:05:50.780 the meditation room. So I got intrigued and this was a long time ago and we've been kind of involved

00:05:56.580 in Tibetan meditation practice since then. There was a time where we were every night, three or four

00:06:02.500 hours a day with a group and now it's less intense. But yeah, it's been, I mean, to me, the greatest

00:06:07.960 thing about it, and this may be, you know, for a dummy like me, this may be the work of a lifetime,

00:06:13.660 but just to go, oh, the mind, you know, you can change it. And if you imagine the best day you ever

00:06:21.300 had when you felt the most loving and empowered and confident, and you compare that to the worst day

00:06:26.160 when you felt terrible and bad and unpowerful, that can be adjusted by things that we do.

00:06:32.500 You know, so now I'm kind of like a person who knows that if he works out, he can get in good

00:06:37.140 shape, but therefore it doesn't work out much. So, and then of course my writing practice is

00:06:42.620 somehow related to meditation in a way that's a little complicated, but it's an ongoing journey,

00:06:48.660 but I've never found anything that was more, I don't know, exciting really than the idea that the

00:06:53.740 mind, you know, you mistake yourself for your mind, but your mind can be moved around and that's

00:06:59.260 amazing, you know. Yeah, that's a point you make in your speech at Syracuse that where you're

00:07:06.040 emphasizing kindness and its importance. The fact that there's, we notice this variability

00:07:10.800 in our experiences, you know, sometimes we're kinder than others proves that this is trainable,

00:07:17.120 this is, this can be influenced, right? This is not, the mind is malleable and...

00:07:22.540 Right, and I thought for that crowd, you know, it was a graduation crowd and it wasn't even the

00:07:26.520 main event and it was, I knew it was going to be in this sweltering auditorium, so I thought

00:07:30.120 keep it simple and maybe what I could do as a sort of a quasi-academic figure is just say

00:07:37.120 in that academic setting, you know what, we don't, in the West, we have historically not

00:07:43.600 talked so much about kindness, you know. It's almost kind of a sidebar, but in fact, if you

00:07:48.460 go to these Eastern traditions, it's the whole game. And when I gave that talk and it kind of

00:07:53.680 got some traction and I had further chances to talk about kindness, I realized what a gateway

00:07:58.580 signifier that is. You know, you say, try to be kind. Okay, well, suddenly you're in the realm of

00:08:04.420 what do you mean by kindness? What is that? Is it niceness? Seems like maybe it's more than that.

00:08:09.660 If you're going to try to increase the extent to which you can be kind, how? You know, what are the,

00:08:16.200 in other words, you take a broad signifier like kindness and you start poking at it and it leads

00:08:20.720 to alertness and it leads to mindfulness and it leads to, you know, the extent, the way in which

00:08:24.920 your projections affect your actions and so on. So it was a kind of a simple speech, really just an

00:08:30.080 admonition to say, look, if you ever were on the receiving end of kindness, you know how powerful

00:08:34.940 it is. I encourage you to spend your life looking into that in a way that I'm doing it kind of a

00:08:41.700 half-assed way, but I encourage them to really do it, you know.

00:08:45.260 Were psychedelics ever part of your path?

00:08:47.820 For one weekend back in the 80s.

00:08:51.220 Just one?

00:08:52.480 Yeah, and honestly, I went up with some friends up to the Redwoods and, you know, we did some

00:08:57.660 acid and at the time I'm like, oh God, I found my vocation. I'm doing this every day. And then

00:09:03.180 I never did it again, but it was very, I mean, again, in this kind of silly way, I just thought,

00:09:09.760 oh yeah. So it was the first time I'd seen some space between me and the workings of my mind.

00:09:16.800 And so there was a moment where, you know, I had the classic experience where there's

00:09:20.280 a Redwood and I put my hand on it and it was breathing.

00:09:22.920 Yeah.

00:09:23.740 And first I looked at it and it was breathing and I was still enough in my right mind that

00:09:28.140 I said, well, that's interesting. Let's see if this hallucination extends to the hand,

00:09:33.200 to your senses. So I put my hand on it and sure enough, it was breathing. So, I mean,

00:09:38.140 I came away from it from what I think was actually a pretty mild experience, but just kind of thinking,

00:09:43.380 oh, so this thing on your shoulders there is malleable, you know, and no one could have

00:09:48.820 convinced me that the tree wasn't breathing. So that's interesting. And I, you know, I think in a

00:09:53.440 way I could have gotten the same lesson from a flu. You know, you have a high fever and you're

00:09:57.880 delirious, that that's not you. And suddenly, or, you know, there've been times when I've been

00:10:01.880 sick and just like really didn't want to live. I was in so much pain and then suddenly the pain

00:10:06.780 goes away and you're yourself again. So I got a sort of enhanced version of that. But what it did

00:10:13.340 for me was kind of, I was kind of a square kid. I didn't drink in college and I was very kind of

00:10:18.740 focused and a little bit Khalil Gibran Ernest, you know, that kind of person. And that experience

00:10:25.520 in the Redwoods kind of just gave me like a tendril, like a path to understanding, in my vernacular,

00:10:31.900 understanding what the 60s were about and what this kind of other strain of American thinking

00:10:37.400 was about. So I was always grateful. And then I, you know, I had done some research on it before I

00:10:41.940 did it. That's the kind of nerd I was. And it, one thing that really jumped out at me was that

00:10:46.020 someone who does a lot of acid, the personality tends to start looking like the personalities of

00:10:52.560 all the other people who've done too much acid. So instead of making you more individual, it makes

00:10:57.340 you less. So that was kind of a cautionary note. So after that first time, I just thought, okay,

00:11:01.600 interesting, you know, your mind is malleable. You're not your mind. And then I never, never did

00:11:07.220 it again. How does writing mesh with your practice or in what sense do you view writing as a practice

00:11:14.640 beyond just the practice required to produce the writing you want to have produced?

00:11:20.540 Well, I think, I mean, I think it was a form of meditation before I knew what that was. So in other

00:11:26.760 words, I have a really busy mind, monkey mind. I just always have very kind of verbally active in

00:11:33.640 my mind, you know? So at one point, it's kind of a long story, but when I finally started writing well,

00:11:39.480 what I found myself doing was not thinking at all, but just reading the text in a kind of a

00:11:46.320 fairly no-minded state and then waiting for visceral reactions to arise. And then it's nothing fancy.

00:11:54.680 It's just cross that word out, you know, or insert this phrase. But I started to be able to feel the

00:12:00.680 difference between a genuine reaction of that type versus a constructed reaction. And the constructed

00:12:06.980 reaction would be, this is a story about patriarchy, therefore blah, blah, blah. That had never worked

00:12:12.500 for me before. What turned out to work was just this sense of reading the thing, kind of pretending

00:12:19.160 that you haven't read it before. And that's, you know, that's a performance that you're doing in a sense.

00:12:24.700 And then you're just being super alert to a certain flavor of reaction that I would characterize as

00:12:30.480 spontaneous. There's just a, oh yeah, of course. And you put that change in. So, and then, you know, sort of

00:12:37.160 to say after all my, you know, longing to be a writer and all my thinking about it and all the instruction

00:12:42.060 I'd gotten to say, yeah, that's it. That right there, what I said is the whole craft manual,

00:12:48.260 really. And, you know, I felt like I'd succeed to the extent that I really could take my own advice

00:12:53.660 and just say, no, it's really, writing is actually mostly a process of reacting to what you've already

00:13:00.420 done. And getting better at filtering out the disingenuous reactions or the overly analytical or

00:13:07.600 intellectual reactions in favor of the ones that are somehow related to what a reader will

00:13:13.520 eventually experience, you know. So, so that in a sense, I mean, now I can say, well, yeah,

00:13:18.100 that's kind of meditation. I mean, you, you sit there and you see what, what it is, you know,

00:13:22.060 see what's happening and you don't discount anything. You don't override anything because

00:13:28.180 it isn't meditation. You know, you, you literally just say what's happening right now. And whether you're

00:13:33.040 sitting on the mat or you're at dinner, you know, you're, you're, the great game would be to say,

00:13:38.040 I'm this kind of cloud and there's things passing through me that I usually ascribe to me. You know,

00:13:45.820 I get angry. That's me. I'm angry. But in fact, it's just, it's all sort of transient.

00:13:52.160 What am I feeling now? Do I have a proper relation to that feeling? Do I, do I, am I a little bit

00:13:57.920 skeptical of it? You know, that kind of thing. But I, I first did that while writing.

00:14:03.080 Hmm. It sounds like you're describing your process of editing even more than the process of,

00:14:09.140 of delivering the first draft. Are you somebody who has essentially a thousand drafts of everything

00:14:16.320 you write? I mean, do you just go over it and over it and over it or, or? Yes. Yeah. Yes. And as I say

00:14:21.900 that, you, you're making me sad because yeah, I'm looking at a big pile over here. I know the feeling.

00:14:25.780 Yeah. Yeah. No, and, and I, of course, and as you know, then what, what the gift that gives you is

00:14:31.060 that you don't have to have a blank page ever. You're just going to, I mean, my feeling is give

00:14:35.500 me, give me the phone book and I can edit it into something that will be eventually interesting to

00:14:40.680 me. So that, that's cool, but it does sometimes, you know, lead to Rubik's cube land where you've got

00:14:46.200 9 million choices and, but, but then again, even that ultimately, you know, it comes down to,

00:14:51.420 well, all right, forget all of that abstraction. Let me read the first line,

00:14:54.720 see what I think and, you know, and go from there. So for me, that, that was, I'm a very

00:14:59.180 anxious person and that when I was in my, you know, late twenties and was really hoping to have

00:15:03.920 a career, I found that the, this approach, it took away so much anxiety, so much of the planning

00:15:09.860 mind and so much of the, you know, what lineage am I in? All those questions kind of boiled down to

00:15:15.900 what do you think of this phrase right here? Which worked for me. And also it worked partly

00:15:21.140 because it took all that anxiety out of it. It was just sort of fun. And, and, and also added to

00:15:25.980 that is this idea of iteration. So you say, well, today I just read this and I marked it up. I put

00:15:31.080 those changes in, I'll read it tomorrow. I'm sure I'll feel differently. That's okay. Do it again,

00:15:37.440 do it again. And eventually, thankfully it, in my practice, it kind of, it does stabilize out

00:15:43.520 after 9 million readings. You start to go, yeah, I'm okay up to page eight, you know? So,

00:15:48.540 do you, do you, you write, you write that way also? Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm rarely a, a first draft

00:15:55.240 is, is good enough guy. I mean, I know, I know a few really fine writers who basically don't or

00:16:01.700 didn't edit. I mean, Christopher Hitchens famously was, was that way. He, the first thing he typed

00:16:07.140 was very close to what he published. And, um, you know, I just find that kind of shocking.

00:16:13.320 And that's certainly not been my experience of writing, but so when you put your first draft

00:16:18.860 down, do you try to get a full draft of the piece before you start this process of, of

00:16:24.860 endlessly going over it? Or, or do you find yourself doing it in a more piecemeal way just by going

00:16:31.280 over early pages before you get anywhere near the end? I will take it any way I can get it,

00:16:36.620 but usually it's the second thing. Usually it's, you know, I get to a page and if it's rickety,

00:16:40.720 that's a word I think a lot, rickety, it's rickety. Then I'm like, eh, how can I know what

00:16:44.880 happens on page two? And I'm not even sure what happened on page one. So I do a lot. I mean,

00:16:49.100 I think my best stories have been, if you, if you sped them up in time-lapse, you'd see it was a half a

00:16:54.820 page, a quarter page, a page, and then it kind of slowly moves forward, creating pages towards the

00:17:01.160 end. I've had a couple of times where I've sat down and written something from the beginning to the

00:17:04.800 end and edited it for four months. So that, I mean, that's part of, for me, that's part of the

00:17:08.820 struggle too, is in the anxiety of this very subjective practice, everybody wants a method.

00:17:15.680 You know, I really want a method. And I talk about method a lot, but part of the method is to say,

00:17:20.020 there isn't one. And I can say, yes, usually I do it piecemeal, but if tomorrow I don't,

00:17:27.100 I better be smart enough to grab it, you know? So that's been, for me, a really interesting thing

00:17:31.740 to just, as a person, is to say, as much as I crave a security and certainty and method and

00:17:38.860 solidity, that's actually a weaker position than someone who can kind of just walk in and say,

00:17:43.760 okay, whatever it is, I'll work with it. Do you work on several things concurrently,

00:17:48.240 or are you just focused on one thing until you finish it?

00:17:50.860 Usually, I like to work on more than one thing because, and as a story writer, that's usually

00:17:56.400 how it is. And what's nice about that is if something is dead to you at the moment, you can

00:18:00.620 just go, yeah, that thing's not talking to me. And the other one that's screaming, you know,

00:18:05.080 jumping up and down and wearing a clown suit, yeah, yeah, you could be fun today.

00:18:08.260 So for me, I do find that I seem to work best out of a, I wouldn't exactly call it happiness,

00:18:13.740 but it's kind of an overflow, like a positive, I like life feeling, you know, that's ideal.

00:18:19.560 I work worst in a, I'm a writer, for God's sake, why can't I finish this? Oh, you're terrible.

00:18:26.360 So if I have four or five things going on, I can just scan them and go, oh, that looks fun,

00:18:30.400 and then invoke that happier mindset. But again, you know, other times you get into the kind of,

00:18:35.640 with the story especially, you know, the story has, as I do it, it has a lot of weird subconscious

00:18:42.820 stuff going on. So there's a time when it says, you drop everything else, pay attention,

00:18:49.560 to me, even though I'm kind of unpleasant right now, and I will reward you, but you have to stay

00:18:54.740 in me for two or three months or a year, you know. You have to, it's weird, you know, you have to

00:19:01.000 investigate all these cul-de-sacs and these dead ends. And in my case, I have to polish those things

00:19:06.640 to find out if they're not working. And so it's really time intensive, but there is a feeling I

00:19:12.660 recognize where the story is saying, okay, you got me, you know. I give up. I'm going to be

00:19:18.540 beautiful, but in exchange, you got to give me everything for as long as I want it. And then I

00:19:23.800 go, okay, well, that's a pretty good deal, you know. And then it just becomes, you know, almost

00:19:28.600 comically sometimes, you know, regressive, like you'll get up to page 15, it's perfect, and then

00:19:34.020 one day you go, oh God, it actually doesn't, there's a slight logical problem on page 12, and

00:19:38.260 that can go on and on. But once I kind of get this scent, I'm always kind of, in a deep

00:19:43.360 way, kind of happy to be engaged in it. It's like a real, real worthy struggle.

00:19:47.960 And I think I read somewhere that Tobias Wolfe and Raymond Carver were influences.

00:19:53.620 Very much. And Carver, I met a couple of times, but Toby was my teacher at Syracuse, along with

00:19:58.760 Douglas Unger. And yeah, so I think at that time that kind of gestalt was exactly what we're

00:20:04.980 talking about. You know, the story is a mystery that will surrender to you by way of revision,

00:20:10.040 you know. And maybe less of the kind of Hitchens approach, it just came to me and I put it down.

00:20:17.540 There was a real understanding that it was hard work and that revision, you know, we were,

00:20:23.040 this was in the 80s at Syracuse, and you heard a lot about, of course, Carver, but also about

00:20:27.340 the Russian Isaac Babel, who was famously fastidious in editing and would, the story was

00:20:34.480 that his friends who were unpublished would give him their stories and he would take the story in

00:20:39.180 another room and 10 minutes later come out with a series of cuts. And then the person would then

00:20:43.920 publish the story. So we were kind of in, you know, in the thrall of that kind of an idea of

00:20:48.500 writing this, you know, craft and hard work and residing in the phrase and the sentence level

00:20:53.240 choices. So I still, I still kind of feel that way. Yeah. Well, famously in Carver's case or

00:20:58.960 infamously, it was so laborious that I believe Gordon Lish was still taking credit for a lot of

00:21:08.020 his work, right? I mean, like in terms of the final edit that gave us the Carver we thought we knew and

00:21:13.460 loved. I don't know if you have any insight into that or if you knew Lish or... I didn't know either

00:21:18.660 one of them very well. I did teach, the New Yorker had an incredible thing up and it may still be up

00:21:23.880 there, but it was, I think it was what we talk about when we talk about love in the original

00:21:28.160 version that Carver had and then the version that Lish edited it down to. And it was kind of

00:21:32.940 mind-blowing because as you say, the Carver that we think of is not so present in the early draft.

00:21:40.760 And in the later one, it's Carver, you know? So, but then in a reversal of that, there was a story

00:21:45.940 called A Small Good Thing, which is a masterpiece that I think Carver then took back and it had

00:21:53.580 been published in a much pared down version and he rewrote it and it's gorgeous. So, you know,

00:21:58.500 I think, I mean, I don't know when I, I don't know how you feel, but when I work with editors,

00:22:02.760 I feel like first I want to do as much as I can. I want it to be in my mind perfect. Then when I hand

00:22:08.960 it over, I am so happy for anything that will make it better. And, you know, there's that intimate

00:22:13.920 relationship where if, if the editor does something radical and extreme and it makes the story better,

00:22:19.920 we both go, oh yeah, that's, that's right. You know? So in a way, you know, I'm the author,

00:22:25.540 but there's another author, which is this super author that, that I don't have direct contact with,

00:22:31.740 but that's the person you want writing your story. And sometimes you need help and I'm totally

00:22:36.100 down with that. Yeah. I feel the same way. I've become over the years, far less precious and

00:22:43.660 defensive with respect to how I engage in editor. I mean, I guess one reason is I married my main

00:22:50.080 editor. So, so I took all this in-house and so I can only be so defensive there and maintain a happy

00:22:56.960 marriage. Well, and the thing is, you know, if you get, if you get it right once and you, and you know,

00:23:01.100 you, you realize that you, I mean, you feel like you, you're writing to last beyond your life,

00:23:08.160 which means you're writing to hit some high water mark that will speak to some future human

00:23:12.880 being. So that's such a beautiful aspiration that I think if someone said, well, here, here's a line,

00:23:18.380 add this line. And you're like, I can't, that would be me taking your line. But the universe said,

00:23:23.440 that's a much more beautiful story with a line in it. You'd have to be nuts because, you know,

00:23:27.180 because by the time, you know, a hundred years go by, nobody cares if you wrote it around. So

00:23:30.900 in a certain way, all of this method that we're talking about for me is a way of,

00:23:35.720 you know, leaving me, George behind, because I'm sick of him. You know, I know his limitations,

00:23:41.680 but in this mode of, I call it like the subconscious, I don't know if that's the right

00:23:45.560 term, but engaging with this sort of hidden wisdom by way of revising, you, you know, I actually

00:23:52.760 see on the page evidence of more wisdom than I have in everyday life, you know, more wit, more

00:23:58.960 brevity, more humor, all that stuff. So that, that, you know, at this late stage, that's the

00:24:03.680 addictive thing to me is to say, after 65 years of being me, I'm kind of over it, you know, a little

00:24:09.540 bit. I mean, still an egomaniac, but, but I, I'm familiar with my pattern on the, in writing, I

00:24:15.340 sometimes will go, Oh my God, I didn't, I didn't know I had that in me, you know, or I didn't know

00:24:19.820 I believed that, or I didn't know I, so that's, that's incredible, you know, the, to step outside

00:24:24.180 of the habituated self by a practice is, you know, that's, that's good. Yeah. Yeah. I, I just started

00:24:31.140 writing again regularly for that reason. I mean, I, I really, I came into everything I have done

00:24:36.520 professionally, you know, as a writer, I even on some basic level went into neuroscience simply to

00:24:43.260 have something to write about. I mean, I was never planning to work in a lab or teach at a

00:24:47.740 university, but in the last 10 years I've spent more or less all my time talking and there's been,

00:24:54.080 been some writing involved to do that, but the practice had really atrophied for me. And it was

00:24:59.860 just 10 days ago or so I joined Substack just as a way of plugging into a machine that would force me

00:25:07.000 to write regularly. So I noticed you're over there. I don't know what, what are you doing on

00:25:12.160 Substack given the fact that you seem to regularly publish in the New Yorker? And I don't know if

00:25:17.360 you're still writing for GQ and, and elsewhere, what, what, what's Substack doing for you?

00:25:22.140 Well, I wrote a book a few years ago called A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. And it's a book

00:25:26.520 where I took seven or eight Russian short stories that I taught for 20 years. And then I just taught

00:25:31.740 them through the essay form. So the, the stories are in the book and with, along with my commentary.

00:25:36.940 And that was really a fun kind of writing because it was not performative. It was kind of me

00:25:41.960 teaching, you know, which I've done since 96 or something. So it was, it was cool to,

00:25:47.000 in the same spirit, you know, to go, Oh, this voice of this book is different from anything

00:25:50.860 I've ever written before. It's pretty confident and it's kind of kind hearted, you know? And,

00:25:56.180 and so I just kind of wanted to keep doing that book. And, um, so I started this thing called

00:26:01.640 Story Club. So what we do is we, we do, we do a lot of, some talk about craft and then we'll,

00:26:07.860 I'll put a, a story up like this week, we have a Chekhov story up on Sunday. We'll have,

00:26:13.240 we'll read it for a week. And then the following Sunday, I'll weigh in with some opening thoughts.

00:26:17.180 And then we have this incredible comment section, which are just three or 400 comments and the

00:26:22.420 positivity there. And the kind of rigor is unbelievable. So for me, it's become kind of

00:26:28.280 an adjunct thing of teaching and also just to keep me reading new work. And, you know, and as you're

00:26:33.600 saying, if you, if you, I used to, you know, I'd read a Chekhov story and go in and talk about it

00:26:37.520 in class. Well, when I wrote that book, I'm like, Oh my God, there's a lot more to this than I was

00:26:43.060 able to find just talking off the top of my head, of course. So it's, it's a way of forcing myself

00:26:48.560 to write about Chekhov or Tolstoy or whoever on a pretty regular basis, which is, so it's been,

00:26:53.900 it's been a lot of fun. And, you know, just, I mean, honestly, these days to see how positive and

00:26:58.500 encouraging people are with one another to have an online space. It isn't snarky. You know, there's

00:27:03.540 no, yeah, it's, it's kind of, I mean, it's weird, but it actually has been really good for my mental

00:27:08.260 health, you know, just to say, look, another week, 200 comments and everyone's nice. You know,

00:27:13.640 we're human beings, they're still capable of that, you know?

00:27:16.420 Yeah. That's why I got off of social media. It became such a digital sewer that I realized it was,

00:27:24.060 as much as I was trying to kind of manually correct for it, and I was, it still was gradually

00:27:31.540 making me more of a misanthrope. I mean, it was just making me just more negative in some kind of

00:27:38.700 global sense with respect to my view of humanity. And I knew, I mean, consciously, I would certainly

00:27:44.840 have told you every step along the way that this was not an accurate reading on who people are. I mean,

00:27:53.240 I just know that I'm seeing the worst of people. It's a kind of funhouse mirror in which I'm just

00:27:57.800 looking at an increasingly grotesque distortion of, you know, a bunch of strangers, and in some

00:28:04.060 cases, not even strangers, people who I know to be better people than they, in real life, than they

00:28:08.300 were showing up as online. But it still was working its magic on me, and I just decided I needed to

00:28:14.300 pull the plug because it was just bad for my, my mind, ultimately.

00:28:17.640 Yeah, yeah. You know, it's interesting to be a fiction writer. Like, in my stories,

00:28:22.020 there's a lot of internal monologue. So, a person's walking along the street, and he's having his,

00:28:26.380 his thoughts. And one thing that really has kind of made me aware of is that, you know,

00:28:32.140 we have this idea of, of a, a person being sort of a solid, consistent entity. And now in,

00:28:38.940 like in Dharma, we know that's not true. Fiction, writing fiction is a good way, and reading it is a

00:28:43.980 good way of reminding ourselves that it's literally not true. Even from moment to moment, you know,

00:28:47.960 someone can have, and in my stories, they often do, have a thought in favor of thing A, and then

00:28:53.360 two paragraphs later, they're against it. That's really true. And I think when you think about,

00:28:58.820 you know, social media, a person steps up to a computer, has an anonymous, you know, somewhat

00:29:05.380 anonymous name, there's a snarky comment in front of them, and immediately, they pop off about it.

00:29:12.860 That's one manifestation of that person. But if that person now gets away from the computer,

00:29:18.440 steps outside, and sees an old person fall on the street, that's another manifestation. So,

00:29:24.140 I think in some ways these days, our assumption of solid self is messing us up even in that realm,

00:29:28.880 because we're spending a lot of time, as you say, in a realm where our worst self is encouraged to

00:29:34.840 come forward, which also happens to be the one that doesn't think before it speaks, and doesn't,

00:29:39.480 certainly doesn't rewrite before it speaks. We're spending, I'd say, a much higher percentage

00:29:45.060 of our day in that guy, you know? So, it changes the communication dynamic. It also changes the

00:29:52.440 person, I think, you know? So, I've never really been on social media, and I noticed that when I'm

00:29:57.640 writing fiction, the part of me that's pretty good at imagining that other people are as real as I am

00:30:03.560 gets enhanced, you know? So, I think actually we might see, you know, in years to come, I think

00:30:09.520 people will say that this partisan divide that we're involved in has almost everything to do

00:30:15.160 with technology. We put on a new set of headphones and a new microphone, and it messed us up. And we

00:30:20.360 were so inside of it that we didn't see the change it was making in our patience and our good

00:30:26.460 hardiness and our assumption of fellow feeling and so on. Yeah, I feel that if it's not the whole

00:30:34.800 story, it's most of the story of what ails us at this moment. I mean, it's interesting because you,

00:30:41.000 in your title essay in the book, The Brain Dead Megaphone, you diagnosed a similar problem that

00:30:49.240 really is just pre the rise of social media. I think, you know, I don't know when you published

00:30:54.780 the original essay probably around 2006 or so. Yeah, it's quite old, yeah. Yeah, but I mean,

00:30:59.440 so social media had not yet become what it was going to become, and yet the, I mean, perhaps you

00:31:05.220 can describe what you meant by the brain dead megaphone because it was, it's a great analogy

00:31:10.160 in terms of how it, how you describe it co-opting everyone's attention and thinking and behavior

00:31:16.800 ultimately. But I think social media has just compounded the problem you described there.

00:31:21.760 Yeah, I mean, the essay starts with this little thought experiment that says, if you imagine

00:31:26.660 yourself in, you know, 1480 or something, and you're a peasant farmer somewhere, you know 12

00:31:31.880 people, and they all know you, and they give you their opinion, and you talk back, and maybe at some

00:31:39.600 point, you know, as time goes on, there might be a newspaper in town. But the brain was doing a very

00:31:44.880 different kind of work then. Fast forward to today or to 2006, there's so many voices that we, that are

00:31:51.740 sort of disconnected from us that are weighing in for our attention, and a great many of those have

00:31:56.960 agendas hidden or overt. So we're in constant conversation with strangers who may or may not

00:32:03.440 mean us well. That's a different function, you know, in the same way that we're eating, you know,

00:32:09.000 we weren't really maybe meant to eat big slabs of beef with mayonnaise on them, because the stomach

00:32:14.840 didn't evolve for that. I think the brain didn't evolve for as much, I guess you'd say, impersonal

00:32:20.560 communication from far away, especially agenda-laced. So that essay started to say,

00:32:26.340 these powerful forces from beyond are dominating our minds. It's very hard for us to actually

00:32:32.500 communicate with them or to deter them. And they're also maybe most fatally determining

00:32:37.940 what it is we deem important, you know. So these days, I was thinking, you know, like if you imagine

00:32:44.200 a baseball stadium, or you get a card and it says, please come to this baseball stadium.

00:32:50.780 Wear red if you're a Republican. Wear blue if you're a Democrat. Fun time will be had.

00:32:55.500 We show up at the baseball stadium in our red and our blue. There's already a little tension in the

00:32:59.460 air. There's a podium on the pitcher's mound. And the guy says, I'm going to talk about immigration.

00:33:05.460 Already, you know, you're in an incredibly charged, over-determined environment. Okay,

00:33:10.880 now turn it back and say, you get a card that says, come to the baseball stadium. Wear whatever

00:33:14.780 the hell you want. People show up. You can't, there's no politics in the air. Some baseball players

00:33:21.040 run on the field. It's the same people in the stadium and a completely different environment.

00:33:29.460 That, I think, is the essence of what we're in right now. We're being told so often that

00:33:33.860 our political identities are what matter. And we bring that forward. And we're also being told

00:33:39.460 what constitutes politics. Even though I would argue that there's kind of a short list of things

00:33:45.100 that has not that much relevance for a lot of us, you know. If you tick through the five or six

00:33:50.640 things that are political, you know, I would be willing to bet that most people don't actually,

00:33:55.280 that's not actually what politics looks like day-to-day. It's not what their interaction

00:33:59.400 with government looks like. So this is, I think, sort of the next step of that branded megaphone

00:34:04.120 idea, which is that absent personal contact and absent the incredible power of one-on-one

00:34:12.060 exchange, we get into pretty funny areas where we're worried about things that aren't happening

00:34:18.120 yet. We're making projections about people that probably actually aren't realistic, especially

00:34:22.940 given the non-solidity of the, you know, the self. So I think, I think it's actually a vast

00:34:29.440 psychological or projective malaise that we're in. And as you say, it's not 100% everything,

00:34:35.440 but I think it's, I think it's sort of dominant.

00:34:38.720 Yeah, I actually went back and read your coverage of Trump rallies that you wrote for The New Yorker

00:34:44.820 in 2016. And it was interesting to hear your, the snippets of the exchanges you had with Trump

00:34:53.340 supporters and people who were protesting Trump supporters. I guess my first question is about

00:34:58.560 the present. Are you doing that kind of coverage or reporting this time around? Or have you done

00:35:03.600 your, your stint at, uh, at the edge of the apocalypse?

00:35:07.400 No, I think, I think I've done it. That was such a hard piece for me because I'm, I'm really kind

00:35:11.680 of a wimp and I don't really like to judge people or, you know, or write harshly about them. I still

00:35:16.060 write fiction because in fiction you can make somebody up and they can be as rotten as you

00:35:19.300 like, you know?

00:35:20.220 Right.

00:35:20.540 So that piece was, I went to the, a bunch of rallies and talked to people and they're nice people,

00:35:25.900 you know, and, and I was just, I don't know, I was tiptoeing around the whole thing. And

00:35:30.200 David Remnick at The New Yorker sent me this great note and he said, I, something like,

00:35:34.280 you know, while I admire your attempt at fairness, uh, it seemed like you're avoiding the hard

00:35:38.620 work of analysis. And that was really true. I was just, you know, so, so I, I don't think

00:35:43.340 I'll be doing that again, partly because of the, the things we've been talking about. If I

00:35:47.680 go into the field and have to write an essay like that, I don't, I feel like I'm leaving part of

00:35:53.340 myself behind. Uh, and it's a part I really like, and it's the part that really, you know,

00:35:58.680 that, that thing, uh, the time to make up your mind about a person is never, I really love that.

00:36:03.440 And in fiction, I can do that. I can just come back to a story again and again, and I can

00:36:07.600 have a more generous approach. Somehow when I'm doing faster writing or, or more political writing,

00:36:13.660 I just feel like the, the essential thing that kind of got me to the party in the first place

00:36:18.400 gets a little bit left behind. Uh, so, and you know, I, I'm kind of now getting to the point in

00:36:23.100 my life where I'm like, well, if I don't weigh in, it's not the end of the world. You know, when you're

00:36:27.860 in your thirties or forties and you're first starting to get some success, you think everyone's

00:36:31.280 waiting to hear my view, you know? And now you're like, no, actually no one's waiting to hear your

00:36:35.500 view. And if you rush it, you're going to say something stupid or hurtful. So I'm a little

00:36:40.020 more content these days to just write fiction and, um, kind of hang back and, you know, cause it's,

00:36:45.600 uh, you know, you do kind of realize it takes a long time to write fiction and I want to make sure

00:36:51.380 that I do everything in that realm that I, that I can, but you know, I say that and who knows that,

00:36:56.060 you know, I, I'm pretty revved up about this election. So, but you know, it's kind of like,

00:36:59.900 I can say I can do something in that mode and I can just feel that it has less power than

00:37:04.060 a short story would. So to linger on the, um, the political moment, how do you explain where we are

00:37:13.180 now? I mean, I guess if we could, you know, jump forward 10 years and let's assume we didn't go over

00:37:20.120 the brink into something truly dystopian, but we, we, we, let's say we get back to something that

00:37:26.900 resembles political normal, whatever that was. When you look back on this period, how would you

00:37:35.420 explain it? How did we get here? Well, I think to me, it's a two, it's a two part thing. One that

00:37:41.840 we've talked about a bit is just the idea of the social media immersion that we've all gradually sunk

00:37:47.920 into. You know, if you imagine you had a family that had some issues and then you put everybody

00:37:53.960 on speed, you know, and, and gave them a device that distorted what they said and heard. So your

00:38:00.440 device would only hear the negative things that someone was saying about you, you know, and then

00:38:04.400 go to a family party and watch how quickly that gets ugly, you know? So I think we're in some,

00:38:10.540 some version of that. And this is not to say that social media doesn't have incredibly powerful,

00:38:14.640 positive things. It certainly does. But I think this is the, this sort of force multiplier is the

00:38:21.100 way in which we're communicating with one another and with the hidden algorithmic nonsense that's

00:38:26.740 being done to us, which then influences what we hear and say. That's a big part of it. Then I think

00:38:33.180 the other part of it is something more real world, which is that the money has gone up. You know,

00:38:39.880 if we imagine ourselves, the United States is a country that lives on the side of a mountain,

00:38:43.680 you know, and money is oxygen, all the oxygen has drifted up to the top. So everybody on the

00:38:50.140 hillside and in the valley is in a kind of anaerobic condition and it makes you feel panicked and you

00:38:56.120 feel correctly that somehow things aren't fair. So this I think is, it's not just the, I mean,

00:39:02.980 there was a time where that was the story to explain the MAGA movement. I think that's not correct

00:39:06.880 actually, because lots of rich people in that movement. I think this explains the general agitation

00:39:11.620 that everybody left, right, center is feeling. And I can see it. You know, I grew up in Chicago

00:39:16.840 and I had a lot of relatives in Amarillo, Texas, and I can just see that the world that I grew up

00:39:21.840 in in the 60s and 70s is just different on the most basic level. Can a young person like my dad did at

00:39:29.040 21, 22, buy a house? Hmm. You know, are there a lot of jobs out there where you can show up for 40

00:39:35.380 hours a week and have all your needs met and your dignity preserved? Hmm. So I think Bernie Sanders

00:39:41.800 is on the right track about a lot of this stuff. And the idea that we have had a slow drift into,

00:39:47.560 a drift away from what I would consider kind of the American dream, which is let me go to work 40

00:39:52.760 hours a week. And in exchange, you give me a life full of dignity. I think we're not there anymore.

00:39:57.540 So I think if you take those two things together, that explains a lot of what we're experiencing.

00:40:03.780 But again, you know, who knows? I mean, the world is vast and my mind is small.

00:40:09.620 How do you think about celebrity and our relationship to fame? I mean, I guess you,

00:40:15.260 you know, there's two aspects to that question. One would just be, you know, what's your experience

00:40:20.920 of it and how do you relate to it? But then I guess it ties directly into what we've been talking

00:40:26.640 about here. Cause I see some significant role for what our culture does with fame. It's at least

00:40:35.580 one explanatory variable of the Trump phenomenon specifically. Yeah. Well, I mean, for a writer,

00:40:42.580 it's, it's kind of a non, I mean, David Foster Wallace said one time, the most famous writer in

00:40:47.020 the world is about as famous as a local TV weatherman, you know? So, so I think, but,

00:40:51.540 but I mean, you know, you know, that there are those moments where you feel like...

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - June 24, 2024

#372 — Life & Work

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