0:06

Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This

0:09

is Sam Harris. Just a

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So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please

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consider becoming one. Today

0:45

I'm speaking with George Saunders. George

0:48

is the author of 12 books, including

0:50

Lincoln and the Bardo, which won

0:52

the 2017 Booker Prize

0:55

for Best Fiction in English, and

0:58

was a finalist for the Golden Man

1:00

Booker, in which one Booker

1:02

winner is selected to represent each decade.

1:05

His short stories have appeared regularly in The New Yorker since

1:08

1992, and his short story

1:10

collection, The Tenth of December, was a finalist

1:13

for the National Book Award. George

1:15

has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships,

1:17

the Penn-Malamud Prize for Excellence in

1:20

the short story, and

1:22

he is a member of the American Academy of Arts

1:24

and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

1:28

In 2013, he was named one of the world's

1:30

100 most influential people by Time magazine,

1:33

and for the last 25 years or

1:35

so, he has taught in the creative

1:37

writing program at Syracuse University. As

1:40

you'll hear today, George and I almost

1:42

completely ignore his fiction, but we

1:44

do talk about life and work. We

1:47

discuss his involvement with Buddhism, the

1:49

importance of kindness, psychedelics,

1:53

writing as a practice, his creative

1:55

process, the work of Raymond Carver,

1:58

the problem of social media. Our

2:00

current political crisis, the role

2:02

of fame in American culture, Wendell

2:04

Berry, fiction as a way of exploring

2:06

good and evil, the death of Yvonne

2:09

Ilyich, missed opportunity as an ordinary

2:11

life, what it means to be a more

2:13

loving person, his article titled The

2:15

Incredible Buddha Boy, The Prison

2:18

of Reputation, Tolstoy,

2:21

and Other Topics. Anyway, it

2:23

was great to talk to him. I very much enjoyed

2:25

this. And now I bring you George

2:28

Saunders. I

2:35

am here with George Saunders. George, thanks for

2:37

joining me. Thank you for having me.

2:39

What a pleasure. So I have

2:41

an embarrassing confession to make. I

2:44

only recently discovered you and

2:46

it's embarrassing both with reference

2:48

to your presence out there

2:50

in the world of writers and also

2:52

with respect to how much pleasure I'm

2:55

taking in reading you. It's just, I don't know

2:57

where my brain has been for the last 20

2:59

years, but apparently I missed

3:01

you. And this embarrassment is compounded by

3:04

the fact that I have not yet

3:07

started to read your fiction. I have been devouring

3:10

your nonfiction. And I

3:12

realized that talking to you about your

3:14

writing and not focusing on your fiction

3:17

is somewhat like talking to Julia Child and

3:19

not talking about cooking. It'll be even easier

3:21

because I can make any claim I want.

3:24

Yeah. I can be as grandiose as I like and

3:26

you'll have to just take it. No,

3:28

but I'm just so happy that you're

3:30

reading anything and I appreciate it and

3:32

you're not alone in not knowing me. I

3:36

look forward to reading your short stories for which

3:38

you are quite famous and also

3:40

your novel, Lincoln and the

3:43

Bardo for which you

3:45

won the Man Booker Prize. I

3:47

don't have to tell you that, but reminding our readers

3:49

that has occurred. So you

3:51

first came across my radar here because,

3:53

well, I think

3:55

I noticed the speech you gave at

3:58

Syracuse that got published as. that

4:00

little book of the commencement speech titled,

4:03

Congratulations, by the way, which is just

4:05

this wonderful admonition about

4:07

and celebration of kindness, which

4:10

we'll talk about. But then someone on my

4:12

team noticed that you had blurbed Mingy

4:14

Rinpoche's book, and

4:17

Mingy is the son of the really

4:19

the greatest teacher, meditation

4:21

teacher I ever studied with Tukurigan Rinpoche. And

4:24

so I wanted to talk to you about

4:26

your engagement with Buddhism

4:28

and meditation first, as

4:31

a starting point. I've also read your piece

4:33

on the incredible Buddha Boy that you first

4:35

published in GQ. So maybe

4:37

we can start there. What has

4:40

been your engagement with Eastern

4:42

philosophy, meditation, and other

4:45

esoterica? Sure. Well,

4:47

I mean, I'll say a good friend of ours who's

4:49

much more experienced in practice has

4:51

described me as a fellow traveler. So

4:53

I'm one of these people who reads a lot

4:55

of Buddhist stuff and has been involved in meditation

4:58

and I kind of fade in and

5:00

out of the actual practice. So I'm not any kind of,

5:03

I'm like an anti authority really. But basically what

5:05

happened was years ago, we were in the Episcopal

5:07

church after our kids were little, and we

5:09

were kind of been led back to

5:11

the church by just being parents and

5:13

feeling kind of outgunned in the way

5:15

that sometimes happens. And my

5:18

wife was involved in a Christian meditation

5:20

class and couldn't find a lot of

5:22

resources. So I found her

5:24

way to a Buddhist empowerment and came

5:26

back just like, wow, that was something,

5:28

you know, and she started

5:30

meditating. And I just noticed in her,

5:32

you know, these changes that were so

5:34

concrete and not huge, but

5:36

just concrete. And suddenly, you know,

5:39

we weren't having

5:41

the kinds of disagreements that we had

5:44

become habituated to have in a certain

5:46

way. And it wasn't my doing for sure. It was just

5:48

something about whatever she was doing there in the

5:50

morning in the meditation room. So I

5:52

got intrigued and this was a long time

5:54

ago, and we've been kind of involved in

5:57

Tibetan meditation practice since

5:59

then. there was a time where we were every

6:01

night, three or four hours a day with a group, and now

6:04

it's less intense. But yeah, it's

6:06

been, I mean, to me, the greatest thing about it, and this

6:09

may be, you know, for a dummy

6:11

like me, this may be the work of a

6:13

lifetime, but just to go, oh, the

6:15

mind, you know, you can change it. And

6:18

if you imagine the best

6:20

day you ever had when you felt the most

6:22

loving and empowered and confident, and you

6:24

compare that to the worst day when you felt

6:27

terrible and bad and unpowerful,

6:30

that can be adjusted by things that we

6:32

do, you know? So now

6:34

I'm kind of like a person who knows

6:36

that if he works out, he can get

6:38

in good shape, which therefore doesn't work out

6:41

much. So, and then of course my writing

6:43

practice is somehow related to meditation in a

6:45

way that's a little complicated, but it's an

6:47

ongoing journey, but I've never found anything that

6:50

was more, I don't know, exciting really,

6:52

than the idea that the mind, you know,

6:54

you mistake yourself for your mind, but your mind

6:57

can be moved around, and

6:59

that's amazing. Yeah,

7:01

that's the point you make in your speech at

7:04

Syracuse where you're emphasizing

7:06

kindness and its importance, the fact that

7:08

there's, we notice this variability

7:10

in our experiences, you know,

7:13

sometimes we're kinder than others, proves

7:15

that this is trainable, this

7:17

can be influenced, right, this is not, the

7:20

mind is malleable, and. Right,

7:22

and I thought for that crowd, you know, it

7:25

was a graduation crowd, and it wasn't even the main event,

7:27

and it was, I knew it was gonna be in this

7:29

sweltering auditorium, so I thought, keep it simple, and

7:32

maybe what I could do as

7:34

a sort of a quasi-academic figure

7:36

is just say in that academic

7:38

setting, you know what, we

7:40

don't, in the West, we

7:42

have historically not talked so much about

7:44

kindness, you know, it's almost

7:46

kind of a sidebar, but in fact, if

7:48

you go to these Eastern traditions, it's the

7:50

whole game, and when I gave that talk,

7:52

and it kind of got some traction, and

7:55

I had further chances to talk about kindness, I realized

7:58

what a gateway signifier that is.

8:00

You say, try to be kind. Okay, well,

8:03

suddenly you're in the realm of what do you mean by

8:05

kindness? What is that? Is it niceness? Seems

8:08

like maybe it's more than that. If you're going

8:10

to try to increase the extent

8:12

to which you can be kind, how? In

8:14

other words, you take

8:17

a broad signifier like kindness and you start poking

8:19

at it and it leads to alertness

8:21

and it leads to mindfulness and it leads to

8:23

the extent, the way in which your projections

8:25

affect your actions and so on. So it was

8:27

a kind of a simple speech, really just an

8:30

admonition to say, look, if you

8:32

ever were on the receiving end of kindness, you know

8:34

how powerful it is. I encourage

8:36

you to spend your life looking into that

8:38

in a way that I'm doing

8:41

a kind of a half assed way, but I encourage them

8:43

to really do it. Were

8:45

psychedelics ever part of your path?

8:48

For one weekend back in the 80s. Honestly, I

8:54

went up with some friends up to

8:56

the Redwoods and he did some assed

8:58

and at the time I'm like, oh God,

9:00

I found my vocation. I'm doing this every

9:02

day. And then I never did it again.

9:06

But it was very, I mean, again, in

9:08

this kind of silly way, I just thought, oh

9:10

yeah. So it was the first time

9:12

I'd seen some space between me

9:14

and the workings of my mind.

9:17

So there was a moment where I had that

9:19

classic experience where there's a redwood and I put my hand

9:21

on it and it was breathing. First

9:24

I looked at it and was breathing and I

9:26

was still enough in my right mind that I said, well,

9:28

that's interesting. Let's see if this hallucination

9:31

extends to the hand, to

9:33

your senses. So I put my hand on

9:35

it and sure enough it was breathing. So I mean,

9:38

I came away from it from what I

9:40

think was actually a pretty mild experience, but just

9:42

kind of thinking, oh, so this thing

9:44

on your shoulders there is malleable and

9:48

no one could have convinced me that the tree wasn't

9:50

breathing. So that's interesting. And I think

9:52

in a way I could have gotten the same lesson from

9:54

a flu. You have

9:57

a high fever and you're delirious that that's not you

9:59

and suddenly. pretty

30:00

good at imagining that other people are as

30:02

real as I am gets enhanced. So

30:05

I think actually

30:07

we might see in years to come, I think

30:10

people will say that this partisan

30:12

divide that we're involved in has almost everything

30:14

to do with technology. We put on a

30:16

new set of headphones and a new microphone

30:18

and it messed us up and we were

30:20

so inside of it that we

30:23

didn't see the change it was making in our

30:25

patience and our good heart and this and our

30:27

assumption of fellow feeling and so on.

30:30

Yeah, I feel

30:33

that if it's not the whole story, it's

30:36

most of the story of what

30:38

ails us at this moment. I

30:40

mean, it's interesting because you in

30:43

your title essay in the book,

30:45

The Brain Dead Megaphone, you diagnose

30:47

a similar problem that really is

30:49

just pre the rise of social

30:51

media. I don't know

30:54

when you published the original essay probably around 2006 or

30:56

so. Yes, it's quite

30:58

old. Yeah. But I mean, so social media

31:00

had not yet become what it was going

31:02

to become. And yet the, I mean, perhaps

31:04

you can describe what you meant

31:06

by the Brain Dead Megaphone because it was

31:09

a great analogy in terms of how

31:11

you describe it co-opting

31:13

everyone's attention and thinking

31:16

and behavior ultimately. But

31:18

I think social media has just compounded the

31:20

problem you described there. Yeah. I mean, the

31:23

essay starts with this little thought experiment

31:25

that says if you imagine yourself in

31:27

1480 or something and you're a peasant

31:29

farmer somewhere, you know 12 people and

31:33

they all know you and they

31:36

give you their opinion and you talk back

31:38

and maybe at some point, you know, as

31:40

time goes on, there might be a newspaper

31:42

in town, but the brain was doing

31:44

a very different kind of work then. Fast

31:46

forward to today or to 2006. There's

31:49

so many voices that we that are sort

31:51

of disconnected from us that

31:54

are weighing in for our attention and a

31:56

great many of those have agendas hidden or

31:58

overt. So we're... we're in

32:00

constant conversation with strangers who may or

32:02

may not mean us well, that's

32:05

a different function. In the

32:07

same way that we're eating, we weren't really

32:10

maybe meant to eat big slabs of beef

32:12

with mayonnaise on them because the stomach didn't

32:14

evolve for that. I think the brain didn't

32:16

evolve for as much,

32:19

I guess you'd say, impersonal communication

32:21

from far away, especially agenda-laced. So

32:24

that essay started to say, these

32:26

powerful forces from beyond are

32:29

dominating our minds. It's very

32:31

hard for us to actually communicate with them or to

32:33

deter them. And they're also

32:36

maybe most fatally determining what

32:39

it is we deem important. So

32:42

these days I was thinking, if you imagine a

32:45

baseball stadium, or you get a card and

32:47

it says, please come to this

32:49

baseball stadium, wear red if you're

32:51

a Republican, wear blue if you're a Democrat, fun

32:53

time will be had. We show up at the

32:55

baseball stadium in our red and our blue, there's

32:57

already a little tension in the air, there's

33:00

a podium on the pitcher's mound, and

33:02

the guy says, I'm gonna talk about immigration.

33:05

Already, you're in an incredibly charged, over-determined

33:07

environment. Okay, now turn it back and

33:09

say, you get a card that says,

33:12

come to the baseball stadium, wear

33:14

whatever the hell you want. People show up,

33:18

there's no politics in the air, some

33:20

baseball players run on the field. It's

33:23

the same people in the stadium,

33:25

in a completely different environment.

33:29

That I think is the essence of what

33:31

we're in right now. We're being told so

33:34

often that our political identities are what matter,

33:37

and we bring that forward, and we're

33:39

also being told what constitutes politics. Even

33:42

though I would argue that there's kind of

33:44

a short list of things that has not

33:47

that much relevance for a lot of us. If

33:49

you tick through the five or six things that

33:51

are political, I would be

33:53

willing to bet that most people don't actually, that's

33:56

not actually what politics looks like day to day. It's not

33:58

what their interaction with government. looks

34:00

like. So this is, I think, sort

34:02

of the next step of that magnet

34:04

megafone idea, which is that absent personal

34:07

contact and absent the

34:09

incredible power of one-on-one

34:12

exchange, we get

34:14

into pretty funny areas where we're worried

34:16

about things that aren't happening yet. We're

34:19

making projections about people that probably

34:21

actually aren't realistic, especially given the

34:23

non-solidity of the self.

34:26

So I think it's actually a

34:29

vast psychological or projective malaise

34:31

that we're in. And

34:33

as you say, it's not 100% everything, but I think

34:35

it's sort of dominant. Yeah,

34:38

I actually went back and

34:40

read your coverage of

34:42

Trump rallies that you wrote for The

34:44

New Yorker in 2016. And

34:48

it was interesting to hear the snippets

34:51

of the exchanges you had with

34:53

Trump supporters and people who were

34:55

protesting Trump supporters. I guess

34:57

my first question is about the present. Are you doing that

34:59

kind of coverage or reporting this

35:01

time around, or have you done your

35:04

stint at the

35:06

edge of the apocalypse? No, I think I've done it.

35:09

That was such a hard piece for me, because I'm

35:11

really kind of a wimp. I don't really like to

35:13

judge people or write harshly about them.

35:15

I still write fiction, because in fiction, you can make somebody

35:17

up and they can be as rotten as you like. So

35:20

that piece, I went to

35:22

a bunch of rallies and talked to people, and

35:25

they're nice people. And I

35:27

was just, I don't know, I was tiptoeing around the

35:29

whole thing. And David Remnick at The

35:31

New Yorker sent me this great note, and he said something

35:34

like, while I admire your attempt at fairness,

35:37

it seems like you're avoiding the hard work of

35:39

analysis. And that was really true. So

35:42

I don't think I'll be doing that again,

35:44

partly because of the things we've been

35:47

talking about. If I go into the field and have

35:49

to write an essay like that, I

35:52

feel like I'm leaving part of myself behind. And it's

35:55

a part I really like. And it's the part that

35:57

really, the time to make it happen. make

36:00

up your mind about a person who's never. I

36:02

really love that. And in fiction, I can do that.

36:05

I can just come back to a story again and

36:07

again, and I can have a more generous approach. Somehow

36:10

when I'm doing faster writing or

36:12

more political writing, I just feel like

36:15

the essential thing that kind of got me to the party

36:17

in the first place gets a little bit left behind. So,

36:20

and you know, I'm kind of now getting to the point

36:22

in my life where I'm like, well, if I don't weigh

36:24

in, it's not the end of the world. When

36:27

you're in your 30s or 40s and you're first starting

36:29

to get some success, you think everyone's waiting to hear

36:31

my view. And now you're

36:33

like, no, actually, no one's waiting to hear your view.

36:36

And if you rush it, you're gonna say something stupid

36:38

or hurtful. So I'm a little more

36:40

content these days to just write fiction and kind

36:43

of hang back. And, you know, cause

36:45

it's, you know, you do kind of realize

36:47

it takes a long time to write fiction. And I

36:50

want to make sure that I do everything in that realm

36:52

that I can. But, you know,

36:54

I say that and who knows that, you know, I'm

36:57

pretty revved up about the selection. But,

36:59

you know, it's kind of like, I can do something

37:01

in that mode and I can just feel that it has

37:03

less power than a short story would. So

37:06

to linger on the political

37:08

moment, how do you explain

37:12

where we are now? And I

37:14

guess if we could jump

37:16

forward 10 years and let's assume we

37:19

didn't go over the brink into

37:21

something truly dystopian, but let's

37:23

say we get back to

37:26

something that resembles political

37:28

normal, whatever that was.

37:31

When you look back on this period,

37:34

how would you explain it? How

37:37

did we get here? Well, I think to

37:39

me, it's a two-part thing. One

37:41

that we've talked about a bit is just the idea of

37:44

the social media immersion that we've

37:46

all gradually sunk into. You

37:48

know, if you imagine you had a family that had

37:51

some issues and then

37:53

you put everybody on speed, you

37:55

know, and gave them a device that

37:57

distorted what they said and heard. So

38:00

your device would only hear the negative things that someone

38:02

was saying about you. And then

38:04

go to a family party and watch how

38:06

quickly that gets ugly. So

38:09

I think we're in some version of

38:11

that. And this is not to say that social

38:13

media doesn't have incredibly powerful positive things.

38:15

It certainly does. But I think this

38:17

is the sort of force multiplier

38:20

is the way in which we're communicating with

38:22

one another. And with the hidden

38:24

algorithmic nonsense that's being done

38:27

to us, which then influences

38:30

what we hear and say, that's a big part of

38:32

it. Then I think the other part of it is something

38:35

more real world, which is

38:37

that the money has gone up. If

38:40

we imagine ourselves as a United States as a country that

38:42

lives on the side of a mountain and

38:44

money is oxygen, all the oxygen has drifted

38:47

up to the top. So

38:49

everybody on the hillside and in the valley is in

38:51

a kind of anaerobic condition and

38:54

it makes you feel panicked and

38:56

you feel correctly that somehow things

38:58

aren't fair. So this

39:00

I think is, it's not just the, I

39:02

mean, there was a time where that was

39:04

the story to explain the MAGA movement. I

39:06

think that's not correct actually because lots of

39:08

rich people in that movement. I think this

39:10

explains the general agitation that everybody left,

39:13

right, center is feeling. And I

39:15

can see it, you know, I grew up in Chicago and I

39:17

had a lot of relatives in Amarillo, Texas. And I

39:19

can just see that the world that I grew

39:22

up in in the sixties, seventies is

39:24

just different on the most basic level. Can

39:27

a young person like my dad did at 21, 22 buy

39:29

a house? Hmm,

39:32

you know, are there a lot of jobs

39:34

out there where you can show up for 40

39:36

hours a week and have all your needs met

39:38

and your dignity preserved? Hmm. So

39:40

I think Bernie Sanders is on the right track

39:42

about a lot of this stuff. And the idea

39:45

that we have had a slow drift into, a

39:47

drift away from what I would

39:50

consider kind of the American dream, which is let me

39:52

go to work 40 hours a week. And in exchange,

39:54

you give me a life full of dignity. I

39:56

think we're not there anymore. So I think if you

39:58

take those two things together,