Making Sense with Sam Harris - #372 — Life & Work

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

Sam Harris speaks with George Saunders about his creative process. They discuss George’s involvement with Buddhism, the importance of kindness, psychedelics, writing as a practice, the work of Raymond Carver, the problem of social media, our current political moment, the role of fame in American culture, Wendell Berry, fiction as way of exploring good and evil, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, missed opportunities in ordinary life, what it means to be a more loving person, his article “The Incredible Buddha Boy,” the prison of reputation, Tolstoy, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the

podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with George Saunders. George is the author of 12 books, including Lincoln and the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for Best Fiction in English, and was a finalist for the Golden Man Booker, in which one booker winner is selected to represent each decade. His short stories have appeared regularly in The New Yorker since 1992, and his short story collection, The Tenth of December, was a finalist for the National Book Award. George has received

MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, the Penn Malamud Prize for Excellence in the Short Story, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine, and for the last 25 years or so, he has taught in the creative writing program at Syracuse University. As you'll hear today, George and I almost completely ignore his fiction, but we do talk about life and work. We discuss his involvement with Buddhism, the importance of kindness, psychedelics, writing as a practice, his creative process, the work of Raymond Carver, the problem of social media, our current political crisis, the role of Fame in American Culture, Wendell Berry, Fiction

as a Way of Exploring Good and Evil, The Death of Yvonne Ilyich, Missed Opportunities in Ordinary Life, What It Means to Be a More Loving Person, his article titled The Incredible Buddha Boy, The Prison of Reputation, Tolstoy, and other topics. Anyway, it was great to talk to him. I very much enjoyed this. And now I bring you George Saunders. I am here with George Saunders. George, thanks for joining me. Thank you for having me. What a pleasure.

So I have an embarrassing confession to make. I only recently discovered you, and it's embarrassing both with reference to your presence out there in yet started to read your fiction. I have been devouring your nonfiction, and I realize that talking to you about your writing and not focusing on your fiction is somewhat like talking to Julia Child and not talking about cooking. It'll be even easier because I can make any claim I want, you know? Yeah. cooking. It'll be even easier because I can make any claim I want, you know. I can't be as grandiose as I like, and you'll have to just take it. No, but I'm just so happy that you're reading anything, and I appreciate it, and you're not alone in not knowing me. Well, I look forward to reading your short stories for which you are quite famous, and also your novel, Lincoln and the Bardo, for which you won the Man Booker Prize. I don't have to tell you that, but reminding our readers that has occurred.

So you first came across my radar here because, well, I think I noticed the speech you gave at Syracuse that got published as that little book, the commencement speech titled Congratulations, By the Way, which is just this wonderful admonition about and celebration of kindness, which we'll talk about. But then someone on my team noticed that you had blurbed Mingyur Rinpoche's book, and Mingyur is the son of really the greatest meditation teacher I ever studied with, Tukor Ogun Rinpoche. I ever studied with, Tukorogin Rinpoche. And so I wanted to talk to you about your engagement with Buddhism and meditation first as a starting point. I've also read your piece on the incredible Buddha boy that you first published in GQ. So maybe we can start there.

What has been your engagement with Eastern philosophy, meditation, and other esoterica? Sure. Well, I mean, I'll say a good friend of ours who's much more experienced in practice has described me as a fellow traveler. So I'm one of these people who reads a lot of Buddhist stuff and has been involved in meditation, and I kind of fade in and out of the actual practice. So I'm not any kind of, you know, I'm like an anti-authority, really. But basically what happened was years ago, we were in the Episcopal church after our kids were little and we were, you know, kind of been led back to the church by just being parents, you know, and feeling kind of outgunned in the way that sometimes happens. And my wife was involved

in a Christian meditation class and couldn't find a lot of resources. So I found her way to a Buddhist empowerment and came back just like, wow, that was something, you know. And she started meditating, and I just noticed in her, you know, these changes that were so concrete and not huge, but just concrete. And suddenly, you know, we weren't having the kinds of disagreements that we had become habituated to have in a certain way. And it wasn't my doing for sure. It was just something about whatever she was doing there in the morning in the meditation room. So I got intrigued. And this was a long time ago.

And we've been kind of involved in Tibetan meditation practice since then. There was a time where we were every night three or four hours a day with a group. And now it's less intense. But yeah, it's been, I mean, to me, the greatest thing about it, and this may be, you know, for a dummy like me, this may be the work of a lifetime. But just to go, oh, the mind, you know, you can change it. And if you imagine the best day you ever had when you felt the most loving and empowered and confident, and you compare that to the worst day when you felt terrible and bad and unpowerful, that can be adjusted by things that we do. So now I'm kind of like a person who knows that if he works out, he can get in good shape, which therefore doesn't work out much. And then,

of course, my writing practice is somehow related to meditation in a way that's a little complicated. But it's an ongoing journey, but I've never found anything that was more, I don't know, exciting really than the idea that the mind, you know, you mistake yourself for your mind, but your mind can be moved around, and that's amazing. Yeah, that's a point you make in your speech at Syracuse where you're emphasizing kindness and its importance. The fact that we notice this variability in our experiences, you know, sometimes we're kinder than others, proves that this is trainable. This can be influenced, right? The mind is malleable. Right. And I thought for that crowd, it was a graduation crowd and it wasn't even the main event. And I knew it was going to be in this sweltering auditorium. So I thought, keep it simple. And maybe what I could do as a sort of a quasi-academic figure is just say in that academic setting, you know what? We don't, in the West, we have historically not talked so much about kindness. It's almost kind of a sidebar. But in fact, if you go to these Eastern traditions, it's the whole game.

And when I gave that talk and it kind of got some traction and I had further chances to talk about kindness, I realized what a gateway signifier that is. You say, try to be kind. Okay. Well, suddenly you're in the realm of what do you mean by kindness? What is that? Is it niceness? Seems like maybe it's more than that. If you're going to try, and it leads to the way in which your projections affect your actions and so on. So it was kind of a simple speech, really, just an admonition to say, look, if you ever were on the receiving end of kindness, you know how powerful it is. I encourage you to spend your life looking into that in a way that I'm doing it kind of a half-assed way. But I encourage them to really do it. Were psychedelics ever part of your path?

For one weekend back in the 80s. Just one? Yeah. And honestly, I went up with some friends up to the Redwoods and we did some acid. And at the time I'm like, oh God, I found my vocation. I'm doing this every day. And then I never did it again. But it was very, I mean, again, in this kind of silly way, I just thought, oh yeah. So it was the first time I'd seen some space between me and the workings of my mind. So there was a moment where I had that classic experience where there's a redwood and I put my hand on it and it was breathing. First I looked at it and it was breathing. And I was still enough in my right mind that I said, well, that's interesting.

Let's see if this hallucination extends to the hand, to your senses. So I put my hand on it and sure enough, it was breathing. So I mean, I came away from it from what I think was actually a pretty mild experience, but just kind of thinking, oh, so this thing on your shoulders there is malleable, you know, and no one could have convinced me that the tree wasn't breathing. So that's interesting. And I, you know, I think in a way I could have gotten the same lesson from a flu, you know, you, you, you have a high fever and you're delirious that that's not you. And suddenly, uh, or, you know, there've been times when I've been sick and just like,

really didn't want to live. I was in so much pain and then suddenly the pain goes away and you're yourself again. So I got a sort of enhanced version of that. But what it did for me was I was kind of a square kid. I didn't drink in college and I was very kind of focused and a little bit Khalil Gibran, Ernest, that kind of person. Khalil Gibran, Ernest, that kind of person. And that experience in the Redwoods kind of just gave me like a tendril, like a path to understanding, in my vernacular, understanding what the 60s were about and what this kind of other strain of American thinking was about. So I was always grateful. And then I had done some research on it before I did it. That's the kind of nerd I was. And one thing that really jumped out at me was that someone who does a lot of acid, the

personality tends to start looking like the personalities of all the other people who've done too much acid. So instead of making you more individual, it makes you less. So that was kind of a cautionary note. So after that first time, I just thought, okay, interesting. Your mind is malleable. You're not your mind. And then I never, never did it again. How does writing mesh with your practice, or in what sense do you view writing as a practice

beyond just the practice required to produce the writing you want to have produced? Well, I think, I mean, I think it was a form of meditation before I knew what that was. So in other words, I have a really busy mind, monkey mind. I just always have very verbally active in my mind. on myself doing was not thinking at all, but just reading the text in a kind of a fairly null-minded state and then waiting for visceral reactions to arise. And it's nothing fancy, it's just cross that word out, you know, or insert this phrase. But I started to be able to feel the difference between a genuine reaction of that type versus a constructed reaction. And the constructed reaction would be, this is a story about patriarchy, therefore, blah, blah, blah. That had never worked for me before. What turned out to work was just this sense of reading the thing, kind of pretending that you haven't read it before. And that's a

performance that you're doing in a sense. And then you're just being super alert to a certain flavor of reaction that I would characterize as spontaneous. There's just a, oh yeah, of course. And you put that change in. And then sort of to say after all my longing to be a writer and all my thinking about it and all the instruction I'd gotten to say, yeah, that's it. and all my thinking about it and all the instruction I'd gotten to say, yeah, that's it. That right there, what I said is the whole craft manual, really. And I felt like I'd succeed to the extent that I really could take my own advice and just say, no, it's really, writing is actually mostly a process of reacting to what you've already done and getting better at filtering out the disingenuous reactions

or the overly analytical or intellectual reactions in favor of the ones that are somehow related to what a reader will eventually experience. So that in a sense, I mean now I can say, well yeah, that's kind of meditation. I mean you sit there and you see what it is, you know, see what's happening, and you don't discount anything. You don't discount anything. You don't override anything because it isn't meditation. You literally just say, what's happening right now? And whether you're sitting on the mat or you're at dinner, you know, the great game would be to say, I'm this kind of cloud and there's things passing through me that I usually ascribe to me. I get angry, that's me,

I'm angry. But in fact, it's all sort of transient. What am I feeling now? Do I have a proper relation to that feeling? Am I a little bit skeptical of it? That kind of thing. But I first did that while writing. It sounds like you're describing your process of editing even more than the process of delivering the first draft. Are you somebody who has essentially a thousand drafts of everything you write? I mean, do you just go over it and over it and over it? Yes. Yes. And as I say that, you're making me sad because yeah, I'm looking at a big pile over here. I know the feeling. Yeah. Yeah. No. And I, of course, and as you know, then what the gift that gives you is that you don't have to have a blank page over here. You're just going to,

I mean, my feeling is give me the phone book and I can edit it into something that will be eventually interesting to me. So that's cool, but it does sometimes lead to Rubik's Cube land where you've got 9 million choices. But then again, even that ultimately, it comes down to, well, all right, forget all of that abstraction. Let me read the first line, see what I think and go from there. So for me, I'm a very anxious person. And that, when I was in my late 20s and was really hoping to have a career, I found that this approach took away so much anxiety, so much of the planning mind and so much of the what lineage am I in?

All those questions kind of boiled down to what do you think of this phrase right here, which worked for me. And also, it worked partly because it took all that anxiety out of it. It was just sort of fun. And also added to that is this idea of iteration. So you say, well, today I just read this and I marked it up. I put those changes in. I'll read it tomorrow.

I'm sure I'll feel differently. That's okay. Do it again. Do it again. And eventually, thankfully, in my practice, it does stabilize out. After nine million readings. You start to go, yeah, I'm okay up to page 8. You write that way also, Sam?

Yeah. I mean, I'm rarely a first draft is good enough guy. I know a few really fine writers who basically don't or didn't edit. I mean, Christopher Hitchens famously was that way. The first thing he typed was very close to what he published. And I just find that kind of shocking. That's certainly not been my experience of writing. But so when you put your first draft down, do you try to get a full draft of the piece before you start this process of endlessly going over it? Or do you find yourself doing it in a more piecemeal way just by going over early pages before you get anywhere near the end? I will take it any way I can get it,

but usually it's the second thing. Usually I get to a page and if it's rickety, that's a word I think a lot, rickety, it's rickety, then I'm like, how can I know what happens on page two when I'm not even sure what happened on page one? So I do a lot. I mean, I think my best stories have been, if you sped them up in time lapse, you'd see it was a half a page, a quarter page, a page. And then it kind of slowly moves forward, creating pages towards the end. I've had a couple of times where I've sat down and written something from the beginning

to the end and edited it for four months. So, I mean, that's part of, for me, that's part of the struggle too, is in the anxiety of this very subjective practice, everybody wants a method. You know, I really want a method. And I talk about method a lot, but part of the method is to say, there isn't one. And I can say, yes, usually I do it piecemeal, There isn't one. And I can say, yes, usually I do it piecemeal, but if tomorrow I don't, I better be smart enough to grab it. So that's been for me a really interesting thing too, just as a person is to say, as much as I crave a security and certainty and method and solidity, that's actually a weaker position than someone who can kind of just walk in and say,

okay, whatever it is, I'll work with it. Do you work on several things concurrently or are you just focused on one thing until you finish it? Usually, I like to work on more than one thing because, and as a story writer, that's usually how it is. And what's nice about that is if something is dead to you at the moment, you can just go, yeah, that thing's not talking to me. And the other one that's screaming, jumping up and down and wearing a clown suit, yeah, yeah, you could be fun today. So for me, I do find that I seem to work best out of a, I wouldn't exactly call it happiness, but it's kind of an overflow, like a positive, I like life feeling. That's ideal. I work worst in a, I'm a writer for God's sake, why can't I finish this? Oh, you're terrible. So if I have four or five things going on, I can just scan them and go, oh, that looks

fun, and then invoke that happier mindset. But again, other times you get into the kind of, with the story especially, the story, as I do it, it has a lot of weird subconscious stuff going on. So there's a time when it says, you drop everything else, pay attention to me, even though I'm kind of unpleasant right now, and I will reward you. But you have to stay in me for two or three months or a year. It's weird. You have to investigate all these cul-de-sacs and these dead ends. And in my case, I have to polish those things to find out if they're not working.

And so it's really time intensive. But there is a feeling I recognize where the story is saying, okay, you got me. I give up. I'm going to be beautiful. But in exchange, you got to give me everything for as long as I want it. And then I go, okay, well, that's a pretty good deal. And then it just becomes almost comically sometimes regressive. Like you'll get up to page 15, it's perfect.

And then one day you go, oh, God, it actually doesn't. There's a slight logical problem on page 12. And that can go on and on. But once I kind of get the scent, I'm always kind of in a deep way kind of happy to be engaged in it. It's like a real worthy struggle. And I think I read somewhere that Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver were influences. Very much. Raymond Carver, I met a couple of times, but Toby was my teacher at Syracuse along with Douglas Unger. And yeah, so I think at that time that kind of Gestalt was exactly what we're talking about.

The story is a mystery that will surrender to you by way of revision. Maybe less of the kind of Hitchens approach. It just came to me and I put it down. There was a real understanding that it was hard work and that revision... This was in the 80s at Syracuse, and you heard a lot about, of course, Carver, but also about the Russian Isaac Babel, who was famously fastidious in editing. The story was that his friends who were unpublished would give him their stories, and he would take the story in another room and 10 minutes later come out with a series of cuts, and then the person

would then publish the story. So we were kind of in the thrall of that kind of an idea of writing this craft and hard work and residing in the phrase and the sentence level choices. So I still kind of feel that way. Yeah. Well, famously in Carver's case, or infamously, it was so laborious that I believe Gordon Lisch was still taking credit for a lot of his work, right? I mean, like in terms of the final edit that what we talk about when we talk about love in the original version that Carver had and then the version that Lish edited it down to. And it was kind of mind-blowing because, as you say, the Carver that we think of is not so present in the early draft. And in the later one, it it's carver you know so uh but then in a reversal that there was a story

called a small good thing which is a masterpiece that i think carver then re-took back and it had been published in a much pared down version and he rewrote it and it's gorgeous so it you know i i think i mean i don't know when i i don't know how you feel but when i work with editors 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 it over, I am so happy for anything that will make it better. And there's that intimate relationship where if the editor does something radical and extreme and it makes the story better, we both go, oh yeah, that's right. So in a way, I'm the author, but there's another author, which is this super author that I don't have direct contact with, but that's the person you want writing your story.

And sometimes you need help, and I'm totally down with that. Yeah, I feel the same way. I've become over the years far less precious and defensive with respect to how I engage an editor. I guess one reason is I married my main editor. So I took all this in-house, and so I can only be so defensive there and maintain a happy marriage. Well, and the thing is, if you get it right once and you realize that you, I mean, you feel like you're writing to last beyond your life, which means you're writing to hit some high water mark that will speak to some future human being.

So that's such a beautiful aspiration that I think if someone said, well, here's a line, add this line. And you're like, I can't. That would be me taking your line. But the universe said, that's a much more beautiful story with a line in it. You'd have to be nuts because by the time, you know, 100 years go by, nobody cares if you wrote it down. So in a certain way, all of this method that we're talking about for me is a way of, you know, leaving me, George, behind because I'm sick of him. You know, I know his limitations, but in this mode of, I call it like the subconscious, I don't know

if that's the right term, but engaging with this sort of hidden wisdom by way of revising, I actually see on the page evidence of more wisdom than I have in everyday life. More wit, more brevity, more humor, all that stuff. So at this late stage, that's the addictive thing to me is to say, after 65 years of being me, I'm kind of over it a little bit. I mean, still an egomaniac, but I'm familiar with my pattern. In writing, I sometimes will go, oh my God, I didn't know I had that in me, or I didn't know I believed that, or I didn't know I... So that's incredible, you know, to step outside of the habituated self by a practice is, you know, that's good. Yeah, yeah. I just started writing again regularly for that reason. I mean, I really, I came into everything I have done professionally,

you know, as a writer. I even, on some basic level, went into neuroscience simply to have something to write about. I mean, I was never planning to work in a lab or teach at a university. But in the last 10 years, I've spent more or less all my time talking, and there's been some writing involved to do that. But the practice had really atrophied for me. And it was just 10 days ago or so, I joined Substack just as a way of plugging into a machine that would force me to write regularly. So I noticed you're over there. I don't know, what are you doing on Substack given the fact that you seem to regularly publish in The New Yorker and I don't know if you're still writing for GQ and elsewhere. What's Substack doing for you?

Well, I wrote a book a few years ago called A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. And it's a book where I took seven or eight Russian short stories that I taught for 20 years. And then I just taught them through the essay form. So the stories are in the book along with my commentary. And that was really a fun kind of writing because it was not performative. It was kind of me teaching, which I've done since 96 or something. So it was cool in the same spirit to go, oh, this voice of this book is different from anything I've ever written

before. It's pretty confident and it's kind of kindhearted. So I just kind of wanted to keep doing that book. And so I started this thing called Story Club. So what we do is we do a lot of, some talk about craft, and then I'll put a story up. Like this week, we have a Chekhov story up on Sunday. We'll read it for a week, and then the following Sunday, I'll weigh in with some opening thoughts. And then we have this incredible comment section, which are just 300 or 400 comments, and the positivity there and the kind of rigor is unbelievable. So for me, it's become kind of an adjunct thing to teaching and also just to keep me reading new work.

And as you're saying, I used to read a Chekhov story and go in and talk about it in class. Well, when I wrote that book, I'm like, oh, my God, there's a lot more to this than I was able to find just talking off the top of my head, of course. So it's a way of forcing myself to write about Chekhov or Tolstoy or whoever on a pretty regular basis, which is, so it's been a lot of fun. And just, I mean, honestly, these days to see how positive and encouraging people are with one another, to have an online

space that isn't snarky, there's no, it's kind of, I mean, it's weird, but it actually has been really good for my mental health, you know, just to say, look, another week, 200 comments and everyone's nice. You know, we're human beings, they're still capable of that, you know? Yeah, that's why I got off of social media. It became such a digital sewer that I realized it was,

as much as I was trying to manually correct for it, and I was, it still was gradually making me more of a misanthrope. I mean, it was just making me just more negative in some kind of global sense with respect to my view of humanity. And I knew, I mean, consciously, I would certainly have told you every step along the way that this was not an accurate reading on who people are. I mean, I just know that I'm seeing the worst of people. It's the kind of funhouse mirror in which I'm just looking at an increasingly grotesque distortion of a bunch of strangers, and in some cases, not even strangers, people who I know to

be better people in real life than they were showing up as online. But it still was working its magic on me, and I just decided I needed to pull the plug because it was just bad for my mind, ultimately. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's interesting to be a fiction writer. In my stories, there's a lot of internal monologue. So a person's walking along the street and he's having his thoughts. And one thing that really has kind of made me aware of is that we have this idea of a person being sort of a solid, consistent entity. And now, like in Dharma, we know that's not true. Writing fiction is a good way, and reading it is a good way of reminding ourselves that it's literally not true. Even from moment to moment, someone can have, and in my stories they often do, have a thought in favor of thing A, and then two paragraphs later they're

against it. That's really true. And I think when you think about social media, a person steps up to a computer, has an anonymous, somewhat anonymous name, there's a snarky comment in front of them, and immediately they pop off about it. That's one manifestation of that person. But if that person now gets away from the computer, steps outside and sees an old person fall on the street, that's another manifestation. So I think in some ways these days, our assumption of solid self is messing us up even in that realm because we're spending a lot of time, as you say,

in a realm where our worst self is encouraged to come forward, which also happens to be the one that doesn't think before it speaks and certainly doesn't rewrite before it speaks we're spending i'd say a much higher percentage of our day in that guy you know yeah so it it changes the the communication dynamic it also changes the person i think you know so i i've never really been on social media and i noticed that when i'm writing fiction the part of me that's pretty good at imagining that other people are as real as i am gets enhanced you know and enhanced. So I think actually we might see in years to come, I think people will say that this partisan divide that we're involved in has almost everything to do with technology. We put on a new set of headphones

and a new microphone and it messed us up. And we were so inside of it that we didn't see the change it was making in our patience and our good heartedness and our assumption of fellow feeling and so on. because you, in your title essay in the book, The Brain Dead Megaphone, you diagnose a similar problem that really is just pre the rise of social media. I don't know when you published the original essay, probably around 2006 or so. Yeah, it's quite old, yeah. Yeah. But I mean, so social media had not yet become what it was going to become. And yet the, I mean, perhaps you can describe what you meant by the brain dead megaphone, because it was, it's a great analogy in terms of how it, how you describe it, co-opting everyone's attention and thinking and behavior

ultimately. But I think social media has just compounded the problem you described there. Yeah. I mean, the essay starts with this little thought experiment that says, if you imagine yourself in 1480 or something, and you're a peasant farmer somewhere, you know 12 people, and they all know you, and they give you their opinion, and you talk back. And maybe at some point, as time goes on, there might be a newspaper in town. But the brain was doing a very different kind of work then. Fast forward to today or to 2006, there's so many voices that are sort of disconnected from us that are weighing in for our attention. And a great many of those have agendas, hidden or overt.

So we're in constant conversation with strangers who may or may not mean us well. That's a different function. In the same way that we're eating, we weren't really maybe meant to eat big slabs of beef with mayonnaise on them because the stomach didn't evolve for that. I think the brain didn't evolve for as much, I guess you'd say, impersonal communication from far away, especially agenda-laced. So that essay started to say, these powerful forces from beyond are dominating our minds. It's very hard for us to actually communicate with them or to deter them. And they're also maybe most fatally determining what it is we deem important. So these days I was thinking, if you imagine a baseball stadium, or you get a card and it says, please come to this baseball stadium, wear red if you're a Republican, wear blue if

you're a Democrat, a fun time will be had. We show up at the baseball stadium in our red and our blue, there's already a little tension in the air, there's a podium on the pitcher's mound, and the guy says, I'm going to talk about immigration. Already, you're in an incredibly charged, overdetermined environment. Okay, now turn it back and say you get a card that says, come to the baseball stadium, wear whatever the hell you want. People show up. There's no politics in the air.

Some baseball players run on the field. It's the same people in the stadium and a completely different environment. That, I think, is the essence of what we're in right now. We're being told so often that our political identities are what matter, and we bring that forward. And we're also being told what constitutes politics, even though I would argue that there's kind of a short list of things that has not that much relevance for a lot of us. If you tick through the five or six things that are political, I would be willing to bet that most people don't actually, that's not actually what

politics looks like day to day. It's not what their interaction with government looks like. So this is, I think, sort of the next step of that brain-dead megaphone idea, looks like. So this is, I think, sort of the next step of that brain-head megaphone idea, which is that absent personal contact and absent the incredible power of one-on-one exchange, we get into pretty funny areas where we're worried about things that aren't happening yet. We're making projections about people that probably actually aren't realistic, especially given the non-solidity of the self. So I think it's actually a vast psychological or projective malaise that we're in. And as you say, it's not 100% everything, but I think it's sort of dominant. Yeah, I actually went back and read your coverage of Trump rallies that you wrote for The New Yorker in 2016.

And it was interesting to hear the snippets of the exchanges you had with Trump supporters and people who were protesting Trump supporters. I guess my first question is about the present. Are you doing that kind of coverage or reporting this time around? Or have you done your stint at the edge of the apocalypse? No, I think I've done it. That was such a hard piece for me because I'm really kind of a wimp. I don't really like to judge people or write harshly about them. I still write fiction because in fiction, you can make somebody up and they can be as rotten as you like. So that piece, I went to a bunch of rallies and talked to people and they're nice people, you know, and I was just, I don't know, I was tiptoeing around the whole thing.

And David Remnick at New Yorker sent me this great note. And he said, I, something like, you know, while I admire your attempt at fairness, it seems like you're avoiding the hard work of analysis. And that was really true. I was just, you know, so, so I, I don't think I'll be doing that again, partly because of the, the things we've been talking about. If I go into the field and have to write an essay like that, I don't, I feel like I'm leaving part of myself behind. And it's a part I really like. And it's the part that really, you know, that thing, the time to make up your mind about a person is never. I really love that. And in fiction, I can do that. I can just come back to a story again and again, and I can have a more generous approach. Somehow

when I'm doing faster writing or more political writing, I just feel like the essential thing that kind of got me to the party in the first place gets a little bit left behind. And I'm kind of now getting to the point in 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 in your thirties or forties and you're first starting to get some success, you think everyone's waiting to hear my view, you know, and now you're like, no, actually no one's waiting to hear your view. And if you rush it, you're going to say something stupid or hurtful. So I'm a little more content these days to just write fiction and, um, kind of hang back

and, you know, cause it's, uh, you know, you do kind of realize it takes a long to just write fiction and kind of hang back. Because you do kind of realize it takes a long time to write fiction. And I want to make sure that I do everything in that realm that I can. But I say that, and who knows? I'm pretty revved up about this election. But it's kind of like I can do something in that mode, and I can just feel that it has less power than a short story would. To linger on the political moment, how do you explain where we are now? I mean, I guess if we could jump forward 10 years and let's assume we didn't go over the brink into something truly dystopian, over the brink into something truly dystopian. But let's say we get back to something that resembles political normal, whatever that was. When you look back on this period, how would you explain it? How did we get here?

Well, I think to me, it's a two-part thing. One that we've talked about a bit is just the idea of the social media immersion that we've all about a bit is just the idea of the social media immersion that we've all gradually sunk into you know if you imagine you had a family that had some issues and then you put everybody on speed you know and and gave them a device that distorted what they said and heard so your device would only hear the negative things that someone was saying about you you know and then go to a family party and watch how quickly that gets ugly, you know? So I think we're in some version of that. And this is not to say that social media doesn't have incredibly powerful, positive things.

It certainly does. But I think this is the sort of force multiplier is the way in which we're communicating with one another and with the hidden algorithmic nonsense that's being done to us, which then influences what we hear and say. That's a big part of it. Then I think the other part of it is something more real world, which is that the money has gone up. If we imagine ourselves, the United States is a country that lives on the side of a mountain, you know, and money is oxygen. All the oxygen has drifted up to the top. So everybody on the hillside and in the valley is in a kind of anaerobic condition.

And it makes you feel panicked. And you feel correctly that somehow things aren't fair. So this, I think, is, it's not just the, I mean, there was a time where that was the story to explain the MAGA movement. I think that's not correct, actually, because lots of rich people in that movement. I think this explains the general agitation that everybody, left, right, center, is feeling. And I can see it, you know, I grew up in Chicago and I had a lot of relatives in Amarillo, Texas, and I can just see that the world that I grew up in in the 60s and 70s is just different on the most basic level. Can a young person like my dad did at 21, 22 buy a house? Are there a lot of jobs out there where

you can show up for 40 hours a week and have all your needs met and your dignity preserved? So I think Bernie Sanders is on the right track about a lot of this stuff. And the idea that we have had a slow drift into a drift away from what I would consider kind of the American dream, which is let me go to work 40 hours a week. And in exchange, you give me a life full of dignity. I think we're not there anymore. So I think if you take those two things together, that explains a lot of what we're experiencing. But again, who knows? I mean, the world is vast and my mind is small. How do you think about celebrity and our relationship to fame? I mean, I guess there's two aspects to that question. One would just be, what's your experience of it and how do you relate to it? But then I guess it ties directly into what we've been talking about here. Because I see some significant role for what our culture does with fame.

It's at least one explanatory variable of the Trump phenomenon specifically. Well, I mean, for a writer, it's kind of a non... I mean, David Foster Wallace said one time, the most famous writer in the world is about as famous as a local TV weatherman. You know, so I think...

But I mean, you know, there are those moments where you feel like... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do,

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