George Saunders On: Getting Un-Stuck, Calming the Inner Critic, and Building Empathy Without Becoming a Chump

A conversation with celebrated author George Saunders about his new novel, Vigil, and what fiction can teach us about empathy, self-awareness, and mortality. George Saunders is the bestselling, award-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, Tenth of December, and many other books. His new novel, Vigil, tells the story of a woman who died in 1976 and has spent the decades since comforting the dying—until she encounters a former oil executive responsible for early climate change denial. In this conversation, Dan and George talk about: Why George keeps writing about ghosts and the afterlife (hint: it's not just about mortality dread) The lavish empathy at the heart of Vigil—and whether we should extend that empathy even to people doing civilizational damage What George calls "warm metacognition"—the practice of dropping back out of your thought loops to examine what kind of goggles you're wearing How fiction can turn your mind into a "reconsideration machine" (and why that matters in real life) The difference between kindness and niceness George's relationship with death anxiety, which he's had since childhood and which has only intensified with age What George has learned about listening from teaching and hosting his Substack, Story Club Why the older he gets, the more important it is to stretch himself creatively His advice for dealing with stuckness (in writing and in life): curiosity over self-accusation George's new novel Vigil is out January 27th from Random House. Check out his Substack, Story Club https://georgesaunders.substack.com/, where he discusses classic short stories with an incredibly thoughtful community. Related Episodes: George Saunders on "Holy Befuddlement" and How to Be Less of a "Turd" https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/10-happier-with-dan-harris/id1087147821?i=1000582335529 Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:19Dan Harris?

  Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How are we doing today? Today, I'm going to talk to one of the greatest living novelists about how to get out of stuckness and self-criticism, how to be less judgmental of yourself and other people, how to be empathic without being a chump, how empathy, properly understood, actually enhances your edge rather than eroding it, and how thinking and talking about the afterlife can improve your life right now. I always love talking to George Saunders. This is his third tour of duty on this show. Many of you are familiar with George, but real quick, he won the Man Booker Prize for his excellent novel Lincoln in the Bardo, and he's back with a new novel called Vigil,

• 1:03Dan Harris?

  which I have read, and it's excellent. George also teaches creative writing at Syracuse University and hosts Story Club, which is a popular Substack where he analyzes classic short stories. Real quick, before we dive in here, don't forget to check out my new app. It's called 10% with Dan Harris, and you can sign up at danharris.com, the most egotistical web address in the world. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to check out the app before you buy it. Let me just tell you, though, we've got an amazing and growing library of guided meditations from amazing teachers, including people like Joseph Goldstein. We also do weekly live video meditation and Q&A sessions, so you can get your questions

• 1:45Dan Harris?

  answered, and we've set it up so that you can connect with your fellow meditators and create relationships, so you don't feel so alone in this weird thing called meditation. Okay, we'll get started with George Saunders right after this.

• 2:00Speaker 01

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• 3:02Dan Harris?

  George Saunders, welcome back to the show.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  It's so nice to be here, Dan. Thank you for having me.

• 3:06Dan Harris?

  It's a pleasure. Congratulations on your new book. I'm holding it up in my hand. This is the galley copy that you sent me a while ago, Vigil by George Saunders. It's phenomenal. So congratulations and thank you.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  Thank you for reading it and thanks for having me back. I always look forward to being here if you'll have me. So thanks.

• 3:24Dan Harris?

  I've got a list of people who have open invites and you're firmly on that list. So you just hit me up anytime.

• 3:29Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 3:30Dan Harris?

  So let's talk about the book. If you wouldn't mind, without spoilers, would you just describe the basic plot of the book?

• 3:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is always the hard part for me because it always sounds so wacky. But basically, there's a woman who died in 1976 in her early twenties. And since then, she's sort of unable to go on to whatever's next. And she's been kind of roaming the earth and she's decided that her mission is to comfort the dying. So sort of be like a death doula who's already dead, I guess. So she'd been doing this since the seventies. She's done like 343 interventions of this kind. And her whole thing is that she just wants to comfort. So this night, she kind of gets the challenge of her career, I guess. You know, she drops in on this guy and it turns out he's a former oil exec who was very instrumental in that kind of early nineties climate change denial.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  So he's kind of a stubborn old guy and she's put to the task comforting him and hilarity ensues.

• 4:28Dan Harris?

  Actually hilarity does often ensue, which is, which is interesting. So let me start with the obvious question. I'm sure in your press tour for this book, everybody's going to ask you this question, but what is it with you and ghosts and the afterlife and the Bardo or space between, et cetera, et cetera?

• 4:44Speaker 03

  The truth is, what I found about writing is it has to come out of a place of, I don't know if you'd call it joy, but kind of anticipatory frolic, you know, like I can have some fun with this. If you imagine 180 blank pages sitting there like, oh, am I going to fill those up? You can't fill them with duty. You know, you can't fill them with being pedantic. So for me, I'm always kind of just scanning around for something that I think would be fun. And also I know as I'm getting older, I find I want something that's going to be really almost impossible, like something that'll cause me to stretch. So whenever I think of ghosts, somehow that makes me laugh a little bit. I kind of feel interested in it. So there's a sort of a tactical component that if I put ghosts in there, I know I can do it. Now behind that, I think there's kind of a lot of other, maybe more serious things about

• 5:28Speaker 03

  mortality and that kind of thing. But to me, it's kind of like, if I have two people in a cafe talking, I don't really know what to do with that. But if I put a ghost of a former waiter in there, suddenly I'm like, oh, that could be funny. I mean, Flannery O'Connor said this great thing about a writer can choose what he writes, but he can't choose what he makes live. So often when you're a young writer, you decide in capital letters, what you want to write about. And it's usually something about your worldview or a trip you just took or something. Yes, you get more experience, you see that it's actually not your choice. You're just kind of scanning around for something that will light you up. And then you march in that direction and see what happens.

• 6:07Dan Harris?

  Well, you hinted at this, that there's something a little bit more serious underneath. I'm pausing just because there were two things you said that I wanted to follow up on, and I'm having a little argument in my brain about which one I should follow up on. I'm interested in what you said about wanting to push yourself and stretch the older you get. I'm also interested in the fact that the older you get, there's maybe some stuff around mortality that makes you interested in the subject of ghosts and the afterlife. Which one would you prefer to start with?

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Well, I can dispense with the second one a little bit because that mortality dread, I've had that since I was a little kid. I mean, it's getting a little worse now that I'm, you know, in my 300th decade. But I remember as a little kid being in my grandparents' house in Texas, hearing them sleeping in the next room breathing. And they were, you know, ancient, they're probably 48 at that point. But it just seemed like, oh, my God, so life is tied to that breath. If either one of them stops, I don't know how I can deal with it, you know? Even as a little kid, you know, being raised Catholic, it was very much the idea that life was intrinsically a morally urgent thing. Every minute mattered and all that kind of stuff. So that has gotten a little more heightened as I'm getting older, but not much. I think that's always been kind of something that's been on my mind.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  And I know we've talked about here before, just the way that, you know, if you were at a really amazing party with great food and beautiful conversation and having a great time and somebody came up to you and said, uh, you're gonna have to leave, but I can't tell you when. Either you would say it's a lot worse and it's terrifying, or I think you'd want to say this party is even better. And I've got to submerge myself into the pleasures of this and because I don't know when I'm going. That's a pretty urgent feeling.

• 7:47Dan Harris?

  I'm just thinking, like, would the party be better or worse for me if somebody said that to me?

• 7:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:53Dan Harris?

  And then how do I feel about my actual life in light of that?

• 7:57Speaker 03

  Certainly, all the spiritual practices that we do, I feel like you were trying to move ourselves into the category that would find it a better party. But I don't think that's true of me just yet. That would just make me clinch up, you know? And start eating a bunch of treats and snacks, drinking more, dancing more wildly, you know?

• 8:16Dan Harris?

  Wasn't there some Catholic saint who said, Lord, make me chase just not yet?

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. I've had a couple of outbursts of that kind of feeling of like, okay, this is better because it's limited. But that's a fairly transient feeling, I think.

• 8:34Dan Harris?

  Is there some sort of cosmology that you actually have a suspicion about that's reflected in the two novels that deal with what happens after we die?

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think there's a kind of a big and a little. The big one is I suspect that there's an experience after death, or that when someone dies and is lying there, they're still experiencing some stuff. I don't know exactly when that occurs or how, but I think that makes sense to me. Even if you just want to say it's the brain flickering out or something still to the person experiencing it, it would be, it could be in the way that dreams are, it could be quite vivid and real, and it also could be unlimited in time. I have a suspicion that experience wouldn't be entirely untethered from either the way you lived your life, or maybe terrifyingly, the state of your mind at the moment of the exit. That's

• 9:28Speaker 03

  a little more horrific to me. So I think those things are reflected in the books a little bit. The idea that you could look at this whole book as being something that's happening in a kind of a quasi-dream state that these dead people are trapped in because of their, the moment of their passing or something like that. On the other level, I think these books kind of enact psychodramas. In other words, in Lincoln, all those people were stuck, in Lincoln and Nevada, they were stuck there because of some delusional mental habit that they had that resulted in an unfulfilled desire, for example. So you could see that as a kind of a cosmological thing, but it's also every one of us in every minute, really. I mean,

• 10:11Speaker 03

  we've got some delusion going on that keeps us separate from actual reality. We're suffering for it. We're often stuck in some kind of denial. So I kind of see it both ways. And the cosmology of the books isn't really consistent. In other words, if you really were having, if Jill in this book, for example, was having that experience at the moment of her death, it would be kind of weird that she would, well, maybe it wouldn't. I don't know. I have to think about that one. It might actually be totally consistent.

• 10:42Dan Harris?

  I don't think anybody is grading you for consistency.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  I hope not.

• 10:49Dan Harris?

  No, it's...

• 10:50Speaker 03

  But what do you think about, as of right now, what do you think happens if one of us drops at this moment, from the dropped person's perspective?

• 11:00Dan Harris?

  To state the obvious, just to get it out there, I don't know. I do find, as you said, I find it horrifying that...

• 11:09Dan Harris?

  The proximate cause of your fate after death would be not the quality of your ethical conduct in your arc of your life, but instead the quality of your mind at the moment of expiration, because the latter is really, in many ways, out of your control. What will my, the quality of my mind be if I'm being murdered?

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Right.

• 11:34Dan Harris?

  Or if I'm in incredible pain and terrified, or in incredible pain and drugged? And I fully plan to be drugged if I'm in incredible pain at the end?

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Even start a little early, you know?

• 11:47Dan Harris?

  I've tried that.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  Just in case. No. But I mean, there's an interesting kind of third option, which is that you're, might have something to do with certain habits you cultivated of, I suppose, of spiritual, spiritual discipline or aspiration, so that even in that moment, you would have a habit of some kind of thought that might, I don't know. I like that Woody Allen thing, I'm not, I'm not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens.

• 12:13Dan Harris?

  I feel so guilty quoting Woody Allen, and yet.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:20Dan Harris?

  Dude has a lot of good lines.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:22Dan Harris?

  But I think what you're saying is, this is not an area of Buddhist cosmology, or I don't know what the right word is, philosophy that I understand well, but to the extent that I understand any of it, I do think the Buddhists would hold that your, what's happening in your mind at the moment of death really is important in terms of what happens next. But given how complex the mind is, how, I think the Buddha said there are a thousand or a billion mind moments every second, that a lifetime of, hopefully, like 80, 20 ethical conduct and a decent amount of mental training, you know, strengthening the wholesome factors of the mind, will be in there even if you're in a state of horror, or anger, or pain, or

• 13:06Dan Harris?

  delusion, and so you've got a fighting chance of a next act that's pleasant.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. And this is something in, that's present in the books, is that if you, at that moment, if you have some kind of ability to step out and look at it and recognize that whatever is happening to you, it's your mind, you know, your mind is generating that phenomenon. But again, I know that that's something that takes years and years of. But like in Lincoln and the Barto, those ghosts had to kind of have the self-possession to recognize that they were dead. That was kind of their, their way of getting out. So I don't know. But yeah, it interested me because whatever we sort of speculate about the afterlife, it always feels like there's a mirror and whatever you say about that is true right this minute as well.

• 13:49Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  You know, so salvation in this moment, what does that look like? Hell in this moment, what does that look like?

• 13:55Dan Harris?

  How does that observation you just made, does it play out in your life in any consistent way?

• 14:02Speaker 03

  For me, the thing is, if you, you know, these are all things I know intellectually, and I'm, I'm not very good at moving the knowledge from my head into my actual heart or life. But the idea that if you exist in a delusional relation to reality, then there's ongoing suffering every minute. So for example, if you're somebody who only talks and never listens, that kind of person, I mean, you may never get called on it in this life. People might tolerate or they, you know, but somewhere in the actual quality of every moment is being affected by that mind state that's causing you to only talk and not listen. So I would say in a certain, maybe kind of sophisticated way, that's actually heaven or hell, you know? If you go through your whole life, not listening to other people,

• 14:44Speaker 03

  say, or you know, being aggressive with them or overriding them or whatever it is, there's some kind of negativity that accrues. For me, the mind blowing thing is you might never become aware of it. You just missed out. I think in our Western traditions, we always want there to be a big hammer that comes out at the end and says, boom, go directly to hell, you're a bad listener. But it could also be the punishment and reward is being collected in every instant, whether or not you ever learn about it. To me, that rings true in a certain way. And it rings true if you see someone else doing it. If someone else is making an error, you can see, oh, that poor guy, you know? But then you turn on yourself and it might not be so easy to discern what your delusion you're catering to in every instant.

• 15:26Dan Harris?

  I was thinking about this very thing the other day when I was talking to somebody, and I can't even remember, who, about a third person who we both felt was, you know, capable of a level of self-deception and delusion that was unusual, and that bad things ensued for that person and anybody in that person's orbit. And then I made the move of wondering, well, what's that thing about me? And it's really hard to know.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a blind spot. That was something in this book that I think I'm talking about because I found it in the book. This main guy is not a good person. But one of the technical challenges of the book was that, once it got set up, I didn't have a authorial way to fully tell you how bad he was, because a lot of the book is in his mind. So he's got all kinds of defenses and practiced denial moves built up. And the other characters are kind of, they're from other times, this 1970s and the 1880s is the two other main characters. So they don't really understand the nature of what he's done. So it was kind of an interesting inadvertent technical challenge to say, okay, how do I, if all I can do is represent this guy's

• 16:42Speaker 03

  life from inside his head, how do I signal over his head to you, the reader, that he's a pretty not great person? So that's fun. That's the fun of it, really. You're writing a book and you think it's going to be easy and perfect. And then in the middle of it, you go, oh, I made myself a little bit of a problem here.

• 16:58Dan Harris?

  I'm just so interested, and now we're bouncing around a bit because I do want to come back to self deception. But when you say that that authorial challenge was fun, as a kind of JV writer myself, I don't find authorial challenges fun. I howl at the moon when I'm in the middle of them. So are you being fully honest that you find it fun? Or do you have moments of frustration?

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:25Dan Harris?

  And tearing your hair out?

• 17:27Speaker 03

  I'm defining the word fun as kind of widely. For me, what the fun is howling at the moon and going, oh, look at that. I'm howling at the moon. That's happened before. It'll be okay. Or howling at the moon is part of the process, that kind of thing.

• 17:42Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  With this book, there's a lot of stuckness, actually, in the middle of it. And part of me was despairing about that because you think, oh, I can't do it. I picked the wrong book. But I think at this stage, I have those feelings. And I have a second level of feelings of like, yeah, that's okay. You've been here before. And also a new or a dawning understanding that the harder it is in the middle, the greater the problem the book is trying to solve. You know, it's almost like Houdini. Like if Houdini said, I'm gonna now escape from this windbreaker, you'd be like, okay, well, you know, you can escape from a windbreaker. But if he's got, you know, if he's got a straitjacket and some chains and he dropped them in the Hudson, then you're like, okay. So there's a feeling of like, the subconscious is very trickster,

• 18:23Speaker 03

  you know, and it'll give you some really, really difficult obstruction. And for me, it's just grind. You just come back day in day and hit your head against the obstruction and then eventually it gives. So to me, that's fun in a way, you know, if you have that sort of slight understanding that this is the process, then it can be fun. And I guess in the same way that if you're doing something really difficult and strenuous physically, like climbing Everest, is that fun? It maybe depends, I guess, if you've done before, you understand the stages and that kind of thing.

• 18:53Dan Harris?

  I'm interested in what you said about getting yourself out of stuckness because whether, and now I'm speaking to the listener, whether you're a writer or not, we all have massive challenges in our lives. If I'm hearing you correctly, and now I think some of what I'm about to say will include some projection or guesswork on my part, but it sounds to me, George, like you have a way of talking to yourself in those really difficult moments that allows you to kind of work through this stuckness over time.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do a lot of talking to myself. My thing in writing is I'm mostly trying to avoid anxiety. I didn't get a book out till I was 38, partly because I was so anxious about which book it would be. You know, I wanted to make sure I'm in the right lineage, have the right voice. So at some point, I just thought, you know, let's develop a, an approach to the writing life that minimizes anxiety and therefore increases freshness and productivity and so on. So one of the things I'll try to say to myself, and it sounds a little bit corny, but I'll just say like, if there's a problem in the book, I kind of almost turn to the book and say, okay, what's happening here? Not you, son of a bitch, you're ruining my career, but what is going on with us, you know? And the book, you know, actually kind of answers like, well, you know, this section in here is just dull, or whatever it

• 20:08Speaker 03

  wants to say, it can say it. So for me, a lot of the approach to stuckness is first of all to say, oh, I'm stuck. Not, "Oh, damn it, I'm stuck, I'm worthless," but, "Oh, okay, I'm stuck." And then, kind of, I think for me personally, when I am proceeding negatively in a place of stuckness, it's because I'm overthinking it. My brain is going crazy, there's self-accusation, there's all kinds of peripheral worries and stuff like that. Whereas, in a more positive mode, the mind is fairly quiet and it's fairly curious about the state of the stuckness. Like, "Okay, so what's actually happening here?" There's one mode where you don't want to hear any answers,

• 20:50Speaker 03

  and you're defensive, and there's another mode where you're really open to hearing the answer, whether it's from a person, or in this case, from the book. That second mode is one I try to nurture in my revising, just to sort of go, "Okay, accept any answer, even accept a fatal answer. If the answer is, "This book is doomed, you've got to throw it away." Okay. Often, the book doesn't have that answer, it just has a much smaller, simpler one. So, for me, a lot of it is just trying to cultivate that mind. You know, to say, "Well, I thought this part was good yesterday, it's reading badly today." "Huh, okay." So, there's all kinds of weird little mental moves, one of which is, for example, when I start reading something to revise it, part of my mind breaks out and looks at the way I'm reading that day.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  And it says, "How are you as a reader?" And if I say, "I'm in a terrible mood and I am going to cut the shit out of this thing," I go, "Okay, you can do that." Or if I say, "Oh, I love everything about this document, even the mistakes, I love them," you know? "Okay, remember that." So, that kind of colors how seriously you take that day's edits. But it also does a kind of a magic trick of saying, "I'm going to allow all the writers that you are to weigh in on this, even the irrational ones, even the ones that are wrong, that are too generous or too stringent. You guys are all welcome to come in. If you make a mistake, don't worry, we'll straighten it out tomorrow." It's kind of something that I discovered in writing, and it's interesting for me now to try to think, is there a real-world

• 22:17Speaker 03

  version of this, you know, where you have that kind of attitude? Yeah.

• 22:23Dan Harris?

  A real world version, meaning outside of writing?

• 22:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, to me, the answer is it it sounds a lot like what I've come to understand about Dharma practice, but it's just kind of like when you enter a situation in the world, can you have that same attitude of saying, okay, first of all, my mind is over determining things, projecting, as you said, my mind is telling me with more certainty what's happening than it should be, because that's what the mind does. Okay, so can I quiet that down a little bit? If data comes at me from the world, what's my relation to that? Am I defensive or am I accepting it? What would I have to do with my mind and my eyes and my breath, you know, to get to a place where I was getting all the data that a moment offered,

• 23:09Speaker 03

  that kind of thing? And then maybe also kind of that acceptance of this moment might be a complete disaster. I might be in a terrible situation. Or for me, the hardest thing is if I make a mistake, my mind flares up in all kinds of neurotic things. So in that moment to say, okay, you made a mistake, your mind is flaring up, that's not good for you. That's all kind of modeled in miniature in a writing moment for me.

• 23:34Dan Harris?

  Yeah, of course. To me, it seems eminently scalable. What I hear in what you're saying is just a habit of warm metacognition, where you're just constantly dropping back out of whatever discursive thought loop you're in, you're dropping back and you're dropping back again to see like, what kind of goggles am I wearing as I look at my writing and at my thinking, you're in a kind of a grandfatherly way, you're adding in levels of warm remove over and over. Is that a decent description?

• 24:14Speaker 03

  It's a perfect, a warm metacognition. I'll remember that. That's exactly it. It's sort of a put on in a sense. I mean, I feel that way kind of, but it also, I think, comes out of the love that I have for the form. You know, like, I've wanted to be a writer since I was pretty young, and I have a lot of reverence for it. So that makes that warm metacognition more possible, because I so much want a story of mine to be good and to speak to people and to, yeah, all those things, that I have that extra level of pragmatism. You know, like, okay, how can I get this to work? Warm metacognition is one way. And so it's easy to apply that in something that matters very much to you.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  I guess if you were a doctor and you're a person on the table that you really wanted to save, you would be very energetic in investigating which mental states might make you most efficient, say. So I have a love for that form that I think it also makes me really willing to be patient and to do many, many, many rewrites because somehow for me, the idea of putting out something that isn't my best or doesn't show good intention, that really would kill me. I think it is a useful way to use one's OCD, you know, just.

• 25:34Dan Harris?

  Just a little something you said in the last 25 seconds of your last answer, that doesn't show good intention. What do you mean by that?

• 25:45Speaker 03

  Well, I guess what I mean really is that I would not like it if somebody read a book of mine and felt that it was phoned in, in any level. So, I mean, good intention. Yeah, I think I probably mean more good intention for a result. I want you to say, well, this book didn't speak to me, but he clearly is sincere in it. He's investigating something interesting to him. Therefore, I still like him. You know, that kind of thing. As opposed to, God, this guy checked out. You know, he's checked out and he just sent me, he wrote this book that doesn't have any. I mean, in one another sense, there's the other kind of good intention, which, you know, I hope this book will move somebody and help somebody. And that part of it, which is very Buddhist, but I think that comes from the work.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  If I'm in here every day, doing my best to make the book sing, that has good intention written all over it. And good intentions will be communicated by the work. And also because, and I think we've talked about this before, the way I imagine this process is that when I'm writing, I'm kind of imagining you or other readers on the other end. Well, a lot of the revision process has to do with what's your imaginary projection of your reader look like? If it's some schmuck who's gonna give me $20 that I can easily fool, that's gonna come across in the editing. Whereas if it's just my beloved friend, who's smarter than me, who's been around the world, who I'm not going to compel if I just

• 27:11Speaker 03

  don't do my best. In other words, a kind of intimate, positive, relational kind of thing, that comes through in the edits as well. And then I think good intentions comes through that way. I mean, I'm making it sound very dreamy. It's also, of course, very ambition driven. I wanna be good at something. But all this stuff kind of comes in one package, I think, you know? For me, it's really comes down to revision. That's kind of the holy grail is to come to something fresh again and again. All this stuff will happen in that process.

• 27:43Dan Harris?

  Coming up, George Saunders on the role of empathy as a writer, and how understanding even the sorrows of your enemy, as George puts it, can be instructive.

• 28:01Speaker 04

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• 29:01Dan Harris?

  I'm going to attempt a segue here. We'll see how I do. To me, it seems like a straight line. You and I have just been talking about your attitude toward your own mind in moments of stuckness, or to use your term, self accusation in writing. And I think, and in my experience, how we are with ourselves is often how we are with the world. And empathy toward others is a massive theme in your work writ large, and yet again, a massive theme in this book, at least as I read it. And so I want to set up one moment from the book and actually read it back to you and then get you to talk about it on the other side.

• 29:45Dan Harris?

  Are you cool with that?

• 29:47Speaker 03

  A good segue. Yeah, I love it.

• 29:48Dan Harris?

  Okay, okay. So at one point, there's the main character who we keep talking about, Jill. And then her nickname is Doll. Jill Doll Blaine. Blaine is her last name. So she is, as we've discussed, you don't ever use the term angel or ghost, but she's somebody who has passed away in the 70s and has either decided on her own or accepted the assignment of comforting people in their moment of death. And in one moment, she is actually inhabiting the mind of the man who was responsible for her death. The guy's name is Bowman. I don't think this is spoiling anything to say that, well, can I say a little bit about how she died? Would that spoil anything?

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think you can say that.

• 30:31Dan Harris?

  Okay, I don't think it spoils anything, but I wanted to check with you. Anyway, Bowman had been trying to hurt her husband Lloyd, but ended up hurting her. And she takes this moment to inhabit the mind of Bowman, who's still alive. And in so doing, he no longer seemed strange. He seemed, and now I'm quoting the character. He seemed inevitable. And because he is inevitable, it would be ludicrous to pass judgment on him. So I'm just going to read a little bit of a quote from that part of the book. He had left his mother's womb with a particular predisposed mind and started living. And immediately that predisposed mind had run up against various events.

• 31:15Dan Harris?

  And been altered in exactly the way such a mind buffeted by those exact events would be altered. And all the while, he Bowman trapped inside Bowman had believed he was making choices. But what looked to him like choices had been so severely delimited in advance by the mind, body and disposition thrust upon him that the whole game amounted to a sort of lavish jailing. His feelings of rage, of shame, of being worthless, of needing to lash out preemptively at even the slightest threat were all real and he must suffer them every day. And why? Because he had been born him. But he had not chosen to be born him. That had just happened to him. And then life had happened to that him exerting upon it certain deleterious effects,

• 32:00Dan Harris?

  including but not limited to the desire to blow up Lloyd, again Lloyd, her husband, whom he perceived correctly, by the way, in the relative sense, to be his enemy. Anyway, I could go on. This is just speaking to, I'll use a word that you use, a lavish sense of empathy, of a deep understanding of other people's whys and wherefores. Before I ask further questions about it, let me just get you to comment on the foregoing and then I'll ask some more questions.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  I didn't realize this as I was writing her, but she's a first person omniscient narrator. So she's always talking to us, but she has this ability to inhabit other minds. It started with this incident that you're talking about, that you read from. When I was a little kid, I remember this one incident where I was in Catholic school and I was a real kind of goody two shoes. I was a good reader. I was very well behaved. And one of the nuns was praising me. And of course, I was lapping up. I loved it. Meanwhile, there's a kid that I'd known, you know, for a while, and he's over here, and he's not a good reader. And she's kind of giving him a little grief about it, you know, why don't you get up to speed? And he's, at the end of the day, I saw him, he's crying. So I thought, well, that's weird, because I didn't, like, in the womb, I didn't check the box that said, good reader.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  I just was a good reader, and I didn't check the box obedient kiss up. I just, you know, I just was that. In the same way that he didn't, in the womb, decided that he would be a poor reader. That struck me, because I certainly enjoyed the praise, as I still enjoy any praise. But I was looking a little scarce at it, like, well, you're praising me for something that I, you know, whatever that is, didn't choose. There's a second element that people often talk about, like, well, but you worked hard at whatever the thing is. You improved. You got to be a better reader. You spent a lot of time reading. But even that, I think, wasn't on the checklist, or was on the checklist, and I had no ability to check it. So there was an item called, will be a hard worker. I don't remember checking that box.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  It kind of makes an elaborate case for predestination in a certain way. And in a softer level, it says, maybe we should judge a little less harshly, and praise with a little more reserve, because none of us designed ourselves. And even our ability to change ourselves, I would say, is sort of a predestined quality. So that's Jill's point of view. In a philosophical sense, we're talking about, that's an absolute view.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  But then she also has a relative view, which is she's her. And she likes what she likes. She likes to be praised, and she likes to be not blamed. That section where she died, and that you just read, it just could have appeared to me, and sort of blocked the path of the book in a certain way. And I kept taking it out and putting it back in, and taking it out and putting it back in. And in the end, it sort of became, I think, what the book is about a little bit. You know, do we have, on the one hand, a bear chasing prey is totally natural, and you can't blame the bear for it. But if you're the one he's chasing, suddenly you want a gun. So.

• 35:10Dan Harris?

  Right, so it does raise a bunch of practical questions like, how far do you take empathy in the face of a bear chasing you, or Trump in the White House? We'll get to that in a second, but let me just ask more broadly, is it your view that we should all endeavor to attempt, when appropriate and safe, Jill's ultimate worldview? And if so, how?

• 35:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a little complicated here. She doesn't really do what she says. She's got good ideas, and I think if, as I was writing the book, it became clear that she's not exactly on target in the way that she handles the situation at hand. But that said, I think the answer is yes. And I think we agree on that. I don't see any limitation to empathy. Because if you think of empathy as an elaborate thought experiment, where you attempt to understand the sorrows of your enemy, you can do that for a long time and you can still act. I would argue that it makes you a more effective actor. If you have a political opponent, the more time you can spend trying to understand them from the inside, the more effectively you can push back. I don't think there's any limitation.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  We sometimes make the mistake, though, I think, and I certainly do this, of getting empathetic and getting kind of warm and rosy, and therefore not really calling people to task if they need to be called a task. And I think in the spiritual traditions, like in Dharma, there's a very honorable tradition of like the wrathful teacher. And the idea is if you could stop someone from a bad behavior, it doesn't really matter how you do it. If you have to be angry, be angry. If you have to be funny, be funny. If you have to, whatever you have to do to alter the behavior would ultimately be compassionate, you know? So, yeah, I don't see any limitation in empathy, as long as you don't do like idiot compassion and start just thinking, I know how you're feeling, you know?

• 37:07Speaker 03

  Go ahead and hit me with that stick, fine, you know? Or that kind of idea where somebody drives a spike through your head and you're like, oh, thank you for the coat rack, you know? I don't think that's a reasonable kind of empathy. But in writing, that's kind of the main thing, is how do you? And I remember as a kid, hearing the stories about Jesus and like the woman at the well and all, and it seemed to me that's what he was doing, is through some kind of power, maybe just of alertness, he was able to meet a person.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  Get inside their consciousness and know just how to inflect them in a positive way, which seemed to me as a kid like a great, great superpower.

• 37:45Dan Harris?

  You mentioned Jesus. I mean, he really has the ultimate worldview of, you know, I'm not, I'm not a scholar of the Bible, but I believe one of the last things he says before he dies and then comes back is forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I think if you had an experience like Jill has, in other words, if you could for five seconds truly occupy the mind of another person and then come back out, I think that would be just life-changing. What you'd see kind of automatically is what yourself is, what Dan is. For five seconds, you weren't Dan, you were me. Then you go zing and back into your own head. And suddenly the juxtaposition of those two things tells you so much about consciousness and about that jail that we're in all the time. I'm in the George Dale since 1958. So I think in fiction, you're kind of trying to do that imaginatively, but it's interesting because I don't think to spend these years thinking

• 38:43Speaker 03

  about this kind of rotten guy, this KJ Boone, who's in the, who's dying in the bed was interesting because I'm not sure, I mean, I know for a fact, you can't actually do that. I can't actually imagine myself in someone else's head. So what's actually happening is you're trying to do that, but the other person is colored with your phenomenon in a certain way. So that's part of the challenge too. But yeah, I think even, you know, in times like these that are so difficult, I still contend that we, we can be fierce opponents of negative movements, but that empathy is a really powerful tool in that pursuit even. It's kind of like if you, you know, if you said, I'm going to fix that car. Well, you

• 39:25Speaker 03

  might want to spend some time figuring out what car it is. How does it work? You could still have the fierce desire to fix the car, but then you'd have some tools.

• 39:34Dan Harris?

  And as you said, it does not preclude taking stern action. There's that story I love from the great meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg about her early days in India when she's listening to all these Dharma teachers talk about. The importance of compassion. And she says, well, what if somebody tries to mug me out in the street and the teacher said, well, you should take your umbrella and very compassionately smack them.

• 39:55Speaker 03

  Right, right. They're prevented from doing the bad thing they were gonna do. It's a funny thing, the confusion I think we have with kindness and niceness. That's

• 40:04Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  An interesting, yeah.

• 40:06Dan Harris?

  Yes. In the book, there's this state that Jill goes into repeatedly, elevation. Can you describe what that is?

• 40:13Speaker 03

  Well, I think it's whatever happened to her in that passage you just read, where she inhabits the person who is responsible for her death, intuits that what herself actually is, and then is free of it a little bit. I think it's something like enlightenment, but she didn't know that word. And also, I'm not sure that it's actual enlightenment. But anyways, it's sort of like she had a great experience of being free of herself and intuitively knows that that's where she needs to be headed. One of the things about the book is that her diction changes. Her real life diction is sort of lower and regular. And then when she's in this elevation state, she's got access to a higher range of language. And she likes that. And I think she likes the

• 40:55Speaker 03

  fact that she's not stuck in a body until she decides that she does. She kind of does like being stuck in a body. So that was one of the tensions of the book is I make this state called elevation, which I think, at least in my early work on the book, I thought, that's what I want to, I want to be elevated like she is. She's compassionate. She's full of love. She's got omniscience. She's got this vast view of things. But then, in the book, she keeps getting drawn back to her physical self. And she makes a pretty good list of the things that she enjoyed in that realm. And I thought, oh, yeah, that's how I feel too. I want to be free of myself. And I also want to be me.

• 41:33Dan Harris?

  Yes, again, Lord, make me chase just not yet. Or, you know, give me moments of chastity, but also carnality.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. There's this idea, and I stumbled upon when I was writing a book about the Russian literature. Chekhov said, you know, a work of art doesn't have to solve a problem. It just has to formulate it correctly. So in this one, a lot of the things we're talking about, there's a division of opinion. The book has two minds on a certain issue. And about halfway through, I thought, oh, yeah, that's good, actually. I don't have to decide. I just have to sort of improve the presentation of both views, so that they're having the best possible argument. And then hopefully that involves you as a reader. And if you look to me and say, George, is it A or B? I'm like, yeah. In my model of fiction, what that does is it makes you go, oh, I often decide too early.

• 42:24Speaker 03

  I often identify a binary and then I throw down on one side or the other before I actually need to, you know, and when I read Chekhov often the experience is I'm having my proclivity for facile judgment shown to me. And I go, oh, I can actually wait. I can wait. I can wait. I can get more information, more information. And often in the Chekhov story, you get so much information that your whole desire to judge dissipates. And you get this feeling like, ah, that's how it is. Yeah.

• 42:52Dan Harris?

  Didn't you describe Chekhov's stories as a brief reconsideration machines?

• 42:59Speaker 03

  Yes, I did. I hope I did. But yeah, no, that's exactly the idea I'm talking about. And maybe it's especially relevant now and so much of our, we're expected to have opinions on so many things so quickly, things that actually don't have much to do with our day to day lives. We have to opine, opine, opine. In a Chekhov story, or maybe any good story, you're made aware of your desire to judge and decide by the tension you feel as you read the story. There's a great Tolstoy story called Master and Man, and there's a real stinker, a real greedy guy who insists on going out on a business deal on a holiday evening. He takes this peasant along with him. Your mind is just really arrayed against this guy. And it's kind of

• 43:42Speaker 03

  fun, like, oh, God, I hope he catches it. He's such a jerk. If I had him here, I'd give him a piece of my mind. And then the story unfolds and you're kind of really enjoying that energy, that kind of vengeance energy. And then a really bad thing happens to him. And it's almost like your mind goes, oh, I didn't, I didn't mean it. Except you go, well, I did mean it. So in that moment, you're aware of how much ill you were wishing on this guy. Then it happens and suddenly you're rooting for him to be saved. So all of that is a way of sort of subtly, lovingly outing the mind for its usual habits, which in the fictive world, which slows things down and exaggerates them. Suddenly you can see what your mind does all the time in every waking moment.

• 44:23Dan Harris?

  I have been deeply influenced by that line. I haven't even read Chekhov, honestly, I'm embarrassed to admit, but your line about Chekhov of reconsideration machines, it comes into my mind a lot because my goal is to turn my mind into a reconsideration machine.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah. So I think fiction kind of is a, you know, lightweight training in that very practice. It's hard to do it when the world is rushing by and, you know, you're inside your mind and your body and it's got all of its imperatives, but in that moment where you're just reading and somebody has gone ahead on the path, Chekhov in this case, and prepared it, cultivated it in a highly exaggerated way so that you, following in his footsteps, will have these experiences we're talking about. That's the skill. And he had a great heart, I think, and I don't know, I think he had a sense of innate fairness. So when he was writing a story, and Tolstoy too, they were writing a story and they were feeling a certain way about a character that maybe wasn't entirely fair, they noticed.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  And then the story would take that into account. So in a certain way, writing a story is a really high, very slow, slowed down, high alertness practice. Because you're reading your own text and you're going, okay, how do I feel? How would a reader feel? And often there are things that happen there. You didn't put them there. You didn't plan it at all. I mean, this book, Vigil, is a big example of that. I didn't know planning. But the task is, in rereading, are you on high alert to what, it's weird, but what an imaginary person, your reader, might feel? So it's like a dream moment in life, almost like the Matrix. Everything slows down. And you can become aware of your writerly feelings. You can

• 46:06Speaker 03

  become somewhat aware of what a reader might be feeling. You can become aware of the micro movements of the character's mind. Very, very satisfying. Then I step away from the writer's desk, back into the world, and I start fucking things up immediately. It's all going too fast. Slow down. Let me rewrite you.

• 46:27Dan Harris?

  Coming up, more from George Saunders on empathy for his characters, plus his thoughts about salvation, absolution, and karma.

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• 47:42Dan Harris?

  You mentioned KJ Boone, the guy who's dying in the story, who's a climate denier and oil executive, who I think a lot of readers would think has it all coming. But I'm curious, do you have a view on the subject of absolution and whether it can apply last minute to somebody who's done civilizational damage?

• 48:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was interesting because I didn't realize this until late. I think he only speaks once in the book. And at this point, there's no way he's fixing anything. He's got both feet in the grave. So then the question became, is there anything at that point one can do? I think if KJ Boone 10 years ago decided to fix things, and you know, he could have. But at this point, there's nothing except internally. And so I think what I felt about him was that, or kind of what the reader is waiting for and what Jill's waiting for, or somebody's waiting for, is for him to say, "Yikes, I was entirely in the wrong. I misspent my life. Every minute of my life was in service of this bad goal." If a person could do that, I think it is a kind of a salvation because they're not trapped in that denial mindset anymore.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  They're face to face with the truth. It doesn't undo anything that they did. And I think all of us have the feeling when we look at these, anyone we consider a bad actor, we kind of want them to get... Nailed and for them to know about it. This is one of the things about Hitler killing himself in the bunker, like, okay, I think he saw that he was doomed, but did he see he was wrong? And, you know, do we get to administer the punishment? We didn't. So it's an interesting idea. For me, I came to kind of, it's weird how it happens. Politically, I can't stand a guy like this. And I think you should be in jail, probably, you know? But as a writer, you know, you spend all these hours inside of his head. And basically what you're saying to him is, oh, you tell me. Tell me your side.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  I'm right here and I want to hear your best version. How did you get here? What's happening to you? Doing that, I start to feel a kind of a warmth for him in spite of his sins. And that's a really weird place to be and it's hard to stay there. And then in the end, I think Jill has that same kind of thing. She's also been in his head with me or vice versa. And so there's a really complicated moment at the end. I won't spoil, but it's kind of like very localized empathy. Where I think she has an overall really negative view of him. But in that exact moment, she opts to give him some comfort.

• 50:07Speaker 03

  As opposed to letting him continue to suffer. So that's a moment I'm still thinking about. But anyway, to be with him for that long was interesting. And as I said, the book made me a kind of a trap. Because there's no place for my cliche borderline progressive views to come in and save the day. I made a point of view structure that makes it impossible for me to come in and say, dear reader, here are his sins. I actually had, I had a scene, because I wanted so badly to communicate to the reader that I understood the, how bad he was, you know? In spite of my empathizing with him. And so I had one scene where this activist, there's a wedding going on next door. And there was a scene where the activist wanders over and looks at the house and basically just reads the laundry list of all this guy's sins.

• 50:51Speaker 03

  And it dropped the bottom right out of the book. It didn't work. So I just have to trust that the reader will, hearing the story through Boone's point of view, will be able to reconstruct an accurate picture of what this guy actually did in the world, which is pretty awful.

• 51:06Dan Harris?

  This reader did, and I think more importantly, I picked up that the point was not to argue that what this guy did was bad as the moral of the story. But instead, the moral of the story is the elevation is the empathy.

• 51:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:23Speaker 03

  But then, you know, it's funny, as I was finishing the book in the last like six or eight months, I started to look a little askance at Jill too, because she, I think her idea is solid. I believe it. But it's funny, she's not the most effective teacher, actually, for him. I think. The book's done, and now I'm kind of reading it as a reader. But I mean, she's there all night, and she, she doesn't really find a way to get through to him. I'm interested in that, too. And in the end, you know, she doubles down on her view. I had a lot of sort of multiplicity in this book. Like, I like her, I love her, I think she's great, I think she's screwing up. I think KJ Boone is a criminal, and I kind of love him. Yeah. So, so that was nice. That was a nice experience to have that, you know. Don't know how you feel about the people in your own book.

• 52:07Dan Harris?

  Let me go back to something you said at the beginning that I said I was gonna follow up on but didn't, about the notion of stretching. I'm just gonna read something you wrote on your Substack, which is called Story Club, that everybody should go check out. One of the things we've talked about here at Story Club is the way in which we have to try not to be too sure about what we're doing, not resting on our laurels, or knowing too well what our approach is, or what we're best at. Rather, we try to let the work tell us, teach us even, what it wants us to do. In the process, the work might show us some new things about ourselves and our talent. It can serve as a self-expansion device. The obstructions and challenges we run into as we're writing, the doubts, the frustrations, are what it feels like to be stretched. So you said early on that as you've gotten

• 52:51Dan Harris?

  older, you feel it's even more important to stretch yourself. Why?

• 52:56Speaker 03

  Well, one reason is, I got, started getting published late, and found out that I did actually have a talent, but it was very slender. I'm not somebody who's particularly well-read or naturally articulate. And so, a lot of my books come out of a doubling down on my limitations, if I could put it that way. At 67, you find that you've, you know, you had a little, little wedge of cake of talent, and you've eaten most of it. And so, the only way you're gonna get a couple more books out of it, in a sense, is to go to the places that you think you probably can't do. Or, we start out by saying, I wanna have fun when I write, I wanna have a certain joyfulness, that's how I know what to write. But with this book, there was a sense of, well, yes, that's in place.

• 53:41Speaker 03

  But also that's going to be really hard. I don't quite know how one does that. Or it could be really corny if I do it this way. So that kind of feeling I really welcome because it means you're going to have to use modes of your ability that have been a little lazy or have been neglected. In this book, there was a lot, you know, the, all the places where I'm in his head. That's kind of old fashioned modernism, which I gave up a long time ago because I couldn't do it. So if I'm going to represent this guy, I kind of have to be sort of a Virginia Woolf light. I have to kind of go back to that. At this age, I think a person on one level knows himself way too well. I actually look at myself and go, are you saying that again? Are you making that same joke? Are you having that same mindstream thought?

• 54:26Speaker 03

  So anything that can pop you out of that is so welcome. And revision is something that does that for sure. Again, if you pick a book that you think you can't write, that's a good way to kind of, I think there's an accretion that happens with age. Maybe it's actually in the brain. You become very familiar to yourself and you start, you know, you use the same tricks and the same moves. It's almost like a cycle. The more you do that, the more you do that. So for me, writing a book that is hard for me is a way of reminding myself that actually consciousness is unlimited. But we sort of pen it in with habit, I think. The rigor of art is one way to kind of kick down that wall for a couple of hours a day, maybe.

• 55:08Dan Harris?

  I love everything you just said. My projection onto the statement that I didn't know you were going to make, which is that the older I get, the more stretching seems important to me. My projection from my POV was I know this is how I think of it as as I'm getting older, I need to prove to myself that I'm not dying yet. So I need to take on more audacious projects as a result.

• 55:32Speaker 03

  Yes, I think that's exactly right. I remember that like the first kind of breakthrough I had in writing, you know, what a joy that was, you know, to feel. And again, I mean, partly it was just ambition, but was also. Oh, there's parts of me I didn't know existed that I can get to by this route. That was really wonderful, you know, to kind of walk around with a secret knowledge that you just nailed three really good paragraphs that the world will someday see. You also want to recreate that, which is harder and harder as you work longer in the field, I suppose, you know, that so just that craving for freshness. And then too, you know, again, just the idea that you think you know yourself, but that art says, no, you don't. He says, dude, you, you know, you only know a fraction of yourself, but your habits keep you there.

• 56:14Speaker 03

  But now let's see if we can find some unexplored quadrants of yourself before it's too late.

• 56:20Dan Harris?

  You said earlier that this is going way back in this conversation, but you said that you've been worrying about death since you were a kid at your grandparents' house, listening to the tenuousness of their breath. Has the fear of death not accelerated at all as we flip into each new calendar year for you?

• 56:39Speaker 03

  Oh, no, it has for sure. What I feel more is a certainty that it will happen that I didn't feel 10 years ago. That I still thought there was going to be some special arrangement or something. But and also I think it's weird. I can start to see not how it will happen.

• 56:57Speaker 03

  Okay, for example, when I was younger, I thought what happened was you got to be 106 and you were weakened and then you died. But at this age, a lot of people I know and love have gone on and that's not how it happened for them. They were perfectly fine and then suddenly they weren't. There's something going on and they that makes me feel strange, you know, just that it could, it will, it will drop on you, on us unexpectedly, like a thief in the night. And then you'll still be you, you'll still be vital, probably to some extent. You still have a lot of ambitions and it'll come, you know? So I think maybe in a way I believe that it will come for me a little more than I used to. Yeah, that, which I guess is appropriate at 67.

• 57:43Dan Harris?

  So not so much fear as consciousness, alertness, awareness, awakeness to the reality.

• 57:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think I can also feel my mind going, "Yeah, but not really." It's not, I mean, it's gonna happen to you, but not really, or not soon, I guess that's the other thing. But then, you know, again, I mean, I think in that, in that spirit of, I can't remember how you put it, but the inner warmth, then I can kind of say, "Okay, yes, that's true. It's also true that you don't really understand it. So what do you think you could do, George, to, one, make yourself believe it a little more fully, and two, not be so scared of it? And three, make the best use of your time?" The weird thing is, I know the answer to those questions. And I'm a bit of a procrastinator somehow, that's the mystery.

• 58:32Speaker 03

  But for me, like, the meditation practice that we've done has been so beautiful, because I can remember, I'm not doing much these days, but I can remember when I was, and all of these, this whole equation gets altered, doesn't it? You know, like, suddenly you're, the clinging to yourself gets a little bit, gets 6% lessened, or whatever, or 10%. And suddenly then, "Okay, yeah, I'm still afraid of death, but kind of less." This book was a real obsession of mine, and now I'm kind of trying to figure out a way to just slightly reorient my life, so I'm paying more attention to those kind of things.

• 59:03Dan Harris?

  Meaning doing more meditation?

• 59:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:05Dan Harris?

  Let me, in closing here, read you another quote from you and let you weigh in on it. This is not from the book, this is from an interview you gave. I think it was a, I think you were typing back and forth with your interviewer for this, but maybe this came out of you verbally, I don't know.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  If it's articulate, it didn't.

• 59:27Dan Harris?

  I doubt that. Here it is. "I find Buddhism inspiring in that it says, 'Everything matters, suffering is real, death is imminent. Pay attention to everything as if this was your last moment on earth.' And then I see writing as part of an ongoing attempt to really viscerally believe that everything matters, suffering is real and death is imminent. Check off said that art prepares us for tenderness, and I think that this is also what spiritual practice can do."

• 59:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'd agree with that. With maybe, no, maybe with the addition that, you know, art slows things down, as we talked about earlier. So it gives you sort of an increased chance to notice those things. And yeah, I think that's true. I, you know, it's funny though, lately I've been wondering, well, there's writing and there's talking about writing. And I, in the mode of writing, lots of amazing things happen that we've been discussing. And then, of course, when you go to talk about it, it's just in approximation. And I find myself, well, I go in waves. I teach at Syracuse, so sometimes I'm talking about writing a lot. And with Story Club, I'm talking about writing a lot. And it's always kind of a relief to not be talking about it and just be doing the thing. Because I think when you talk about it, you always fuck it up. You know, you, you kind of reduce it.

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  You sound more confident than you actually are. And in a game that really is all about showing up to the thing you're working on and being willing to accept any answer, as we talked about earlier, the more method you have, the more you set yourself up for a kind of a temporary blindness. In other words, if I go to a story and I have, oh, no, I know what my method is, I have a Substack, then that mindset might preclude certain solutions, or it might preclude certain long periods of confusion and stuckness that could be very fruitful. So I have to really watch at this stage of life to not be too sure of method. Even as I'm pontificating about it, I have to go, yeah, that's kind of bullshit.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  You know, when you actually go to do it, that's not what you're doing. It's kind of a double awareness of that.

• 1:01:28Dan Harris?

  Before I let you go, let me ask you two questions that I always ask. The first is, is there something you were hoping we would get to that we didn't?

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  Well, I actually, you know, I'm interested in your life. In particular, I listen to you and I'm just amazed by the people you find and what you bring out of them. So I would like to hear, over the course of you doing this kind of work, what has happened to you? From the exposure to all of these different, very wise people.

• 1:01:57Dan Harris?

  One thing that comes to mind just specifically from hosting the show for now, we're a couple of months away from our 10th anniversary.

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  Oh, happy anniversary.

• 1:02:06Dan Harris?

  Thank you. One of the things you can hear, if you go back and listen to the earlier episodes, is a kind of impetuosity, impatience, that is still there in my mindstream. But hosting the show has taught me, you mentioned this earlier, it's taught me to be a better listener. And you talked about how there might be eternal damnation for those who are bad listeners. And much of my life, I was that. I was good at one-to-many communication as a network news anchor, not very good at really listening and listening in a way that then leads to the next question and that instead of just ticking off the next question on my list. So I would say that's a big benefit. I still screw this up all the time. I heard the CEO

• 1:02:50Dan Harris?

  of my company say to somebody recently, and I can't remember what the number she used was, I think it was either 60 or 70, but she said, yeah, Dan practices what he preaches about 70% of the time, or maybe 60% of the time, which either one I'll take.

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  Well, that's pretty good.

• 1:03:05Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:05Speaker 03

  That's pretty good. Yeah, yeah. No, no, I think that's a superpower you have of listening and having a conversation that actually is responsive. And I recognize that from teaching too, because when I was a younger teacher, it was all about me making sure that they knew what I knew, and that's how I thought I was going to help them. And then now, I still talk too much in class, but I get in good roles where, you know, it's not, isn't it funny, it's just a slight adjustment of the mind, like a mental leaning back. And if I do that, the student will talk, talk, talk, and then lead right to the perfect place for me to make my very light, judo-like suggestion. And then they'll hear it. Whereas in the old days, I'd be anticipating that, I'd flood them with the

• 1:03:49Speaker 03

  comment, which they wouldn't hear, and then we'd miss that moment. So, yeah.

• 1:03:54Dan Harris?

  You use the word flood and I mention these guys all the time on the show. But I, for eight years now, I've been working with, and I think this, my introduction to the two people I'm about to name is what changed my hosting style and my interpersonal style. I met through Joseph Goldstein, who you're familiar with, he's a great meditation teacher. I met these two, I didn't even know there was such a thing as a communication coach, but my friends Dan Klerman and Mudit Nisker, they teach people how to talk and listen. I still work with them and almost everybody in my close, close orbit also works with them now. And one of their terms is flooding. That's a bad thing. You should never flood people with information because they just can't hear it.

• 1:04:35Dan Harris?

  You should instead come up with little judo-like chunks of information that you can judiciously slide across the table toward them. And I think about, this is not the way they describe their work, but I think about it as we are in this constant exchange with other people of, we're hurling words across this like unfathomable chasm, right? Of my inner world through yours, like comes out of my face, whole just leaps across this unbelievable gulf into their ears and their mind, gets cut with their childhood and their biases and whatever happened to them that morning and the state of their bowels and all of that. And we hope that they understand it. And so we're dealing with this very flawed system.

• 1:05:19Dan Harris?

  And the thing is, what you, what you want are some skills that give you the best opportunity to keep people in their prefrontal cortex instead of their amygdala.

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:05:28Dan Harris?

  And to keep yourself in your prefrontal cortex instead of the amygdala. And that is the best chance in this really fraught endeavor of achieving some success.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  And the prefrontal is, is it awareness versus monkey mind? Is that kind of the?

• 1:05:43Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:05:44Dan Harris?

  Rationality versus fear.

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  I had a really good writing teacher who talked about dialogue that way. And he said, a quality of bad dialogue is that the two people are really listening to each other, you know? And they respond directly. But a good dialogue is you're answering out of your thought stream.

• 1:06:01Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  And I'm answering your distorted response out of my thought stream and we go zing past each other, you know?

• 1:06:07Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 1:06:07Speaker 03

  No, I love that.

• 1:06:08Dan Harris?

  Yeah. So life, therefore, what you want, I think a life well-lived is to make it as. Dissimilar from good fiction as possible because you you want boring dialogue.

• 1:06:21Speaker 03

  Boring heartfelt communication. That's gonna be the name of my next book, Boring Heartfelt Efficient Communication, a novel.

• 1:06:31Dan Harris?

  Final question for you is if you don't mind, just reminding everybody of the name of your new novel and maybe talk a little bit about Story Club.

• 1:06:38Speaker 03

  Sure. So the new novel is called Vigil. It's out in January 27th with Random House. I also host the Substack called Story Club that came out of a book I wrote called The Swimming Upon in the Rain, which was kind of a close, loving, I hope, dissection of some Russian short stories. And that was so much fun and got such nice feedback that I started this Substack. Kind of every week I introduce a classic short story and we talk about it. The kind of wonderful thing about Story Club is that for some reason, the community is just super positive. People are so smart and so well-read and well-lived. There's a kind of unbelievable level of courtesy that is there. I was gonna just do it for a year,

• 1:07:20Speaker 03

  and I got so addicted to that community, to learning from them, and also really just observing the kindness and the engagement. So I'll often have the experience of, you know, being in the world of the news and kind of feeling despairing about human communication and then drop in there and you've got like 200 or 300 people talking about a Tolstoy story with a great deal of interest in each other, you know. So I've really loved that.

• 1:07:45Dan Harris?

  I know why the community is great over on Story Club. Because, and this is gonna sound negative, but the fish rots from the head. So in this case, the fish isn't, the head of the fish is not rotten, and therefore, the body of the fish is thriving.

• 1:08:01Speaker 03

  That's my blurb from you. He's not exactly a fish rotting from the head down.

• 1:08:08Dan Harris?

  You got it. Take it. Run with it. Thank you for your time. Thanks for writing this beautiful book. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.

• 1:08:15Speaker 03

  Well, and thank you for all you do. You're a big fixture around our house and you're always, always helping us. We appreciate it.

• 1:08:25Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to George. Always love talking to that dude. Don't forget to check out my app, 10% with Dan Harris. You can sign up at danharris.com. We've got lots of guided meditations and we do weekly live meditation and Q and A sessions. Join the party. Finally, thank you very much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

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