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

Summary

Podcast Summary:

10% Happier with Dan Harris
Episode: George Saunders On: Getting Un-Stuck, Calming the Inner Critic, and Building Empathy Without Becoming a Chump
Date: January 30, 2026
Host: Dan Harris
Guest: George Saunders — Novelist, Booker Prize winner, creative writing professor (Syracuse), and author of Vigil

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Episode Overview

Dan Harris sits down with celebrated novelist George Saunders to explore practical and philosophical strategies for getting "unstuck" in life and creativity, handling self-criticism, and building a resilient sense of empathy—without falling into naivete. They discuss the themes of Saunders' new novel Vigil, the psychological realities behind our inner critics and self-deception, and the complex interplay between understanding, empathy, and effective action in a tumultuous world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Premise and Playfulness of Vigil

• Book Overview (04:35):
  Saunders describes "Vigil" as the story of Jill, a young woman who died in 1976, became a ghostly "death doula," and now comforts the dying—including a climate change-denying oil executive.
• On Why Write About Ghosts and the Afterlife (05:49):
  Saunders frames writing as driven by "anticipatory frolic." Ghosts allow him to inject both humor and serious reflection, making the process of writing more joyful and stretched beyond routine realism.

"If I put a ghost of a former waiter in there, suddenly I'm like, oh, that could be funny." (05:49, George Saunders)

2. Mortality as a Lifelong Theme

• Childhood Dread (07:42):
  Saunders has always felt mortality's "dread," intensified but not originated by aging:

"It's getting a little worse now that I'm, you know, in my 300th decade. But I remember as a little kid ... life was intrinsically a morally urgent thing." (07:42, George Saunders)

• Living in the Face of Impermanence (08:53):
  Harris likens mortality to being pulled aside at a great party and told you must leave at an unknown moment—provoking both savoring and anxiety.

3. Afterlife, Mindset, and the Moment of Death

• Cosmology and Experience (09:52):
  Saunders suspects that "something happens" after death, possibly linked to the mind’s state at the moment of passing, reflecting both Buddhist and Western anxieties about “getting it right” at the end.

"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." (09:52, George Saunders)

• Buddhist Perspective (13:26):
  Harris explains that Buddhist cosmology gives importance to mental training throughout life, so that "even if you're in a state of horror or anger or pain or delusion... you've got a fighting chance of a next act that's pleasant." (13:26, Dan Harris)

4. Living with Delusion and Self-Deception

• Suffering as a State of Mind (15:08):
  Saunders contends that "existing in a delusional relation to reality" breeds suffering every minute. He draws parallels between ghostly stuckness and real-life denial or unfulfilled desires.

"If you go through your whole life not listening to other people ... there's some kind of negativity that accrues ... the punishment and reward is being collected in every instant, whether or not you ever learn about it." (15:08, George Saunders)

5. The Blind Spots of Self-Deception

• Having Sympathy for Others, Not for Self (16:32):
  The hallmark of delusion is its invisibility to oneself:

"It's a blind spot... What's that thing about me? And it's really hard to know." (16:32, Dan Harris)

6. Authorial Challenges and ‘Fun’

• Embracing Difficulty (18:33):
  Saunders discusses how getting “stuck” in writing, while hard, can also be a source of creative energy; recognizing and working through the discomfort is an inherent part of the process.

"The harder it is in the middle, the greater the problem the book is trying to solve." (18:47, George Saunders)

7. Getting Unstuck: The Importance of Warm Self-Dialogue

• Moving Past Anxiety (20:30):
  Saunders’s approach to stuckness involves compassionate self-inquiry:

“Not, ‘oh, damn it, I'm stuck, I'm worthless.’ But, ‘oh, okay, I'm stuck.’” (20:30, George Saunders)

• Curiosity Over Judgment:
  He recommends nurturing curiosity and a willingness to accept any answer—even unwelcome ones—in both writing and life.

8. Warm Metacognition and Scalability to Dharma Practice

• Layers of Introspection (24:39):
  Harris describes Saunder’s process as “a habit of warm metacognition,” adding grandfatherly layers of gentle remove to his self-assessment, a practice akin to Buddhist mindfulness.

"You're adding in levels of warm remove over and over. Is that a decent description?" (24:39, Dan Harris) "A warm metacognition. I'll remember that. That's exactly it." (25:19, George Saunders)

9. Good Intention, Revision, and Imagination

• Writers’ Responsibility (26:50):
  Saunders strives for sincerity and a sense that each work is done with “good intention,” imagining a discerning, beloved reader.

10. The Value and Limits of Empathy

• Lavish Empathy (29:56, 32:41):
  Saunders explores “radical empathy” through his character Jill, who inhabits the minds of others, even her killer, to understand them without judgment.

"Maybe we should judge a little less harshly and praise with a little more reserve because none of us designed ourselves." (32:41, George Saunders)

• Empathy, Without Naivete (35:45):
  Empathy, for Saunders, doesn’t preclude stern action; understanding “the sorrows of your enemy” makes you a more effective actor.

“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.” (35:45, George Saunders)

11. On Fiction as a “Reconsideration Machine”

• The Power of Story (43:00):
  Saunders references Chekhov and Tolstoy, describing great fiction as an engine that slows down the rush to judgment:

“In a 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.” (43:00, George Saunders)

• Harris aspires to turn his own mind into “a reconsideration machine.” (44:31, Dan Harris)

12. Absolution, Karma, and Last-Minute Redemption

• K.J. Boone’s Fate (48:43):
  Can there be salvation for someone who recognizes his errors only on his deathbed? Saunders believes an honest internal reckoning is valuable but does not undo external harm:

“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. It doesn't undo anything that they did.” (48:43, George Saunders)

13. Creative Stretching in Aging

• Stretching Against Fading Habits (53:39, 55:51):
  As Saunders ages, stretching creatively is essential to keep discovering unexplored parts of the self and to avoid shrinking into habitual patterns:

“Anything that can pop you out of that is so welcome... 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.” (55:51, George Saunders)

14. Mortality, Meditation, and Tenderness

• Death Awareness (57:21):
  Mortality is now more real than ever for Saunders at 67, not so much fear as "consciousness, alertness, awareness."
• Art as Preparation for Tenderness (60:04):
  Saunders sees both writing and spiritual practice as ways to deeply realize that “everything matters. Suffering is real, death is imminent.”

“Chekhov said that art prepares us for tenderness. And I think that this is also what spiritual practice can do.” (60:09, George Saunders)

15. The Challenge of Method and Genuine Engagement

• Talking about Writing vs. Writing (60:38):
  Saunders notes a tendency to overconfidently talk about method, which can obscure openness to the work itself. True creativity means "being willing to accept any answer."

16. The Art of Listening and Communication (62:18)

• Harris on Learning to Listen (62:48): Hosting the podcast has made Harris a better listener, lessening his habit of “flooding” with information—a skill drawn from meditation and communication coaching.
• Saunders Echoes in Teaching:
  As a writing professor, he too now leans back, allowing his students to reach their own insights, reserving “judo-like” interventions for the right moment.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On mortality and celebration:
  "If you were at a really amazing party... and somebody came up to you and said, you're going to have to leave, but I can't tell you when... you'd want to say this party is even better and I've got to submerge myself into the pleasures of this." (07:42, George Saunders)
• On self-accusation and warm self-talk:
  "Not, ‘oh, damn it, I'm stuck, I'm worthless.’ But, ‘oh, okay, I'm stuck.’" (20:30, George Saunders)
• On empathy and political action:
  “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 [to empathy].” (35:45, George Saunders)
• On the value of revision:
  "Revision is something that does that for sure... 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." (55:51, George Saunders)
• On the tension between talking and doing:
  "When you talk about it, you always fuck it up, you kind of reduce it. 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..." (60:38, George Saunders)

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Key Timestamps

• 04:35 – Saunders introduces "Vigil" and the concept of a “death doula” ghost.
• 05:49 – Why ghosts and the afterlife? Balancing fun and serious topics in writing.
• 07:42 – Mortality as a central preoccupation since childhood.
• 13:26 – Buddhist views of the afterlife; importance of mind state at death.
• 15:08 – Living in delusion, suffering as everyday experience.
• 18:33 – The “fun” and value of overcoming creative difficulty.
• 20:30 – Warm metacognitive self-talk; getting unstuck in writing and life.
• 24:39 – Harris introduces “warm metacognition” as a guiding term.
• 32:41 – Saunders’ worldview: empathy driven by the knowledge that no one “chooses” themselves.
• 35:45 – Saunders on how empathy doesn't mean weakness.
• 43:00 – On fiction as a “brief reconsideration machine.”
• 48:43 – Is last-minute redemption possible? The limits and value of remorse.
• 53:39 – The importance of stretching creatively, especially with age.
• 57:21 – Death awareness and life’s uncertainty intensifies with age.
• 60:09 – Art, tenderness, and spiritual practice.
• 62:48 – How podcasting and teaching have made both men better listeners.

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Takeaway

This episode is a wide-ranging yet deeply personal conversation about how to greet life's stuckness, self-doubt, and moral complexity with curiosity, warmth, and the most effective kind of empathy. George Saunders champions an approach to creativity (and life) that stretches past habit, acknowledges pain, and prizes gentle awareness—without losing necessary edge. Storytelling, meditation, and everyday mindful communication all become laboratories for practicing these liberating perspectives.

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Resources Mentioned

• Vigil by George Saunders (Random House, Jan 27)
• Story Club – George Saunders’ Substack community
• “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” – Saunders’ book of literary analysis
• Joseph Goldstein – Meditation teacher
• Sharon Salzberg – Meditation teacher; “use your umbrella and compassionately smack them” story

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For more guidance, empathy, and humor in the face of suffering—fictional or otherwise—listen to the full podcast or check out George Saunders’ latest work.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign. This is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello my fellow suffering beings. How 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 and 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, 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 [e-mail] 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 and A sessions so you can get your questions 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. It's a new year, colder days for many of us, so therefore this is a moment where your winter wardrobe really has to be on point, really has to deliver. If you're craving a winter reset, start with pieces truly made to last season after season. Quince brings together premium materials, thoughtful design and enduring quality so you stay warm, you look sharp and feel your best all season long. Quince has everything you need. Men's Mongolian cashmere sweaters. I got a bunch of those wool coats, leather and suede outerwear that actually holds up to daily wear and still looks good. Each piece is made from premium materials by trusted factories that meet rigorous standards for craftsmanship and ethical production. By cutting out the middlemen and traditional markups, Quince delivers the same quality as luxury brands, but at a fraction of the price. Price as I've told you before, I actually order this stuff on my own dime. Even though I do get some free stuff because they're a sponsor. But I like them so much I spend my own dough on quints. I actually just recently made an order. I got a bunch of boring stuff like socks and underwear. But then I got. I love sweaters that kind of you can button up. Kind of like a shirt. I don't know what they're called. Anyway, I got one of those. Digging that. Anyway, hearty endorsement for quints. Refresh your winter wardrobe with quints. Go to quinte.com happier for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quincee.com happier free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com happier.

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[A]

George Saunders, welcome back to the show.

[B]

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

[A]

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.

[B]

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.

[A]

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.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, this is always the hard part for me because this always sounds so wacky. But basically there's a woman who died in 1976 in her early 20s. 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. To sort of be like a death doula who's already dead, I guess. So she'd been doing this since the 70s, 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 90s climate change denial. So he's kind of a stubborn old guy. And she's put to the task comforting him and hilarity ensues.

[A]

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, etc. Etc.

[B]

The truth is, what I found about writing is it has to come out of a place of, if you 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, how 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 feel laugh a little bit. I kind of feel interested in it. So there's a sort of a technical 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 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. As 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.

[A]

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?

[B]

Well, I can dispense with the second 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. 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, you're going to 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.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

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 clench up, you know, and start eating a bunch of treats and snacks, drinking more, dancing more wildly, you know.

[A]

Wasn't there some Catholic saint who said, lord, make me chaste? Just not yet.

[B]

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.

[A]

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?

[B]

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, 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 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 Navardo. 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, 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.

[A]

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

[B]

I hope not.

[A]

No, it's.

[B]

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, to state the.

[A]

Obvious, just to get it out there? I don't know. I do find, as you said, I find it horrifying that 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 make the quality of my mind be. If I'm being murdered.

[B]

Right.

[A]

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.

[B]

End, even start a little early, you know.

[A]

Well, I've tried that just in case, just.

[B]

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.

[A]

I don't know.

[B]

I like that Woody Allen thing.

[A]

I'm not.

[B]

I'm not afraid of death. I just don't want to be there when it happens.

[A]

I feel so guilty quoting Woody Allen and yet. Yeah, dude has a lot of good lines.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

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 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 practice. But like in Lincoln and the Bardo, 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 it interesting to 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, you know, so salvation in this moment, what does that look like? Hell in this moment, what does that look like?

[A]

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

[B]

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 it 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 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 instance.

[A]

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.

[B]

Yeah, that's. It's a blind spot. That was something in this book that I think I'm talking about because I found it in. 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, as 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 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 it'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've made myself a little bit of a problem here.

[A]

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? Oh, yeah, and tearing your hair out?

[B]

I'm defining the word fun kind of widely for me, what the fun is howling at the moon and going, oh, look at that. I'm hauling 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?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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 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 straight jacket and some chains and he dropped him in the Hudson, then you're like, okay. So there's a feeling of, like, the subconscious is very trickster, you know, and it'll give you some really, really difficult obstruction. And for me, it just grind is come back day and 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? Maybe. Depends, I guess, if you've done before, you understand the stages and that kind of thing.

[A]

I'm interested in what you said about getting yourself out of stuckness, because whether 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 no, 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 the stuckness over time.

[B]

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 want 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, 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 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 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 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 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 a something that I discovered in writing, and it's interesting for me now to try to think, is there a real world version of this, you know, where you. You have that kind of attitude?

[A]

Yeah, A real world version meaning outside of writing?

[B]

Yeah. To me, the answer is, 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 to get to a place where I was getting all the data that a moment offered? 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.

[A]

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. You're adding in levels of warm remove over and over. Is that a decent description?

[B]

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. 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.

[A]

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?

[B]

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 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, I know in 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. 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. That's my beloved friend who's smarter than me, who's been around the world, who I'm not going to compel if I just 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 want to 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.

[A]

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. 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 a 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. Are you cool with that?

[B]

Good segue? Yeah, I love it.

[A]

Okay. Okay. So at one point, there's the main character who we keep talking about, Jill. And then her nickname is Doll. Jill Dahl. 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?

[B]

Yeah, I think you can say that.

[A]

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 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 and 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, 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 used, 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.

[B]

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 given 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. 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, decide 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 askance 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 it 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. 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. 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 sort of 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, you know, suddenly you want a gun. So.

[A]

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?

[B]

Yeah, it's a little complicated. 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. 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 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. I don't see any limitation in empathy as long as you're. You don't do, like, idiot compassion and start just thinking, I know how you're feeling. You know, go ahead and hit me with that stick. That's fine. You know, or that kind of idea where somebody drives a spike through your head and you're like, oh, thank you for that coat rack. You know, I don't think that's. 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 it seemed to me that's what he was doing is through some kind of power, maybe just of. Of alertness, he was able to meet a person, 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.

[A]

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.

[B]

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 zinging 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 georged 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 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 into 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 in times like these that are so difficult, I still contend that 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 know, if you said, I'm going to fix that car, well, you 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.

[A]

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.

[B]

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

[A]

Yes.

[B]

An interesting. Yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

Well, I think it's whatever happened to her in that passage you just read where she Inhabits the person who 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 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 fact that she's not stuck in a body until she decides that she does. You know, she kind of does like being stuck in a body. So that was one of the tensions of the book, was 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.

[A]

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

[B]

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 had 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. 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 recheck, I'll often the experiences I'm having, my proclivity for facile judgment shown to me and I. Oh, I can actually wait. I can wait, I can wait. I can get more information, more information. And often at the. In a 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.

[A]

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

[B]

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 toll story called Master and Man. And there's a real stinker, 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 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, or. 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're 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.

[A]

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.

[B]

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 experience 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 told stories too, they were writing a story and they were feeling a certain way about a character that maybe wasn't entirely fair. They noticed, 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 did no 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 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.

[A]

Coming up, more from Dr. George Saunders on empathy for his characters, plus his thoughts about salvation, absolution and karma. It's a new year, colder days for many of us. So therefore, this is a moment where your winter wardrobe really has to be on point, really has to deliver. If you're craving a winter reset, start with pieces truly made to last season after season. Quince brings together together premium materials, thoughtful design and enduring quality. So you stay warm, you look sharp and feel your best all season long. Quince has everything you need. Men's Mongolian cashmere sweaters. I got a bunch of those wool coats, leather and suede outerwear that actually holds up to daily wear and still looks good. Each piece is made from premium materials by trusted factories that meet rigorous standards for craftsmanship and ethical production. By cutting out the middlemen and traditional markups, Quince delivers the same quality as luxury brands, but at a fraction of the price. As I've told you before, I actually order this stuff on my own dime, even though I do get some free stuff because they're a sponsor. But I like them so much I spend my own dough on quints. I actually just recently made an order. I got a bunch of boring stuff like socks and underwear. But then I got. I love sweaters that kind of you can button up kind of like a shirt. I don't know what they're called. Anyway, I got one of those. Digging that. Anyway, hearty endorsement for Quint. Refresh your winter wardrobe with quint. Go to quint.com happier for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Quincom. Happier free shipping and 365 day returns. Quint.com Happier foreign. You mentioned K.J. boon, the 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?

[B]

Yeah, it was interesting because I, 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. 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. You're like, okay, I think he saw that he was doomed, but did he see he was wrong? And, you know, did 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. 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 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 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. And basically just reads a laundry list of all this guy's sins. 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.

[A]

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.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. 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. 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.

[A]

Let me go back to something you said at the beginning that I said I was going to follow up on, but didn't about the notion of stretching. I'm just going to 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 older, you feel it's even more important to stretch yourself. Why?

[B]

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 going to 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 want to have fun when I write. I want to 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. 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 been neglected. In this book there was a lot of, you know, 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? And 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 hours a day maybe.

[A]

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, I need to take on more audacious projects as a result.

[B]

Yes, I think that's exactly right. I remember that like the first kind of breakthrough I had in writing and 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, I had to kind of walk around with a secret knowledge that you just nailed three really good paragraphs that the world would 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. But now let's see if we can find some unexplored quadrants of yourself before it's too late.

[A]

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?

[B]

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. I mean, 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. 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're 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'll still have a lot of ambitions and it'll come, you know, So I. 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.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah. And I think I can also feel my mind going, yeah, but not really, you know, it's not. I mean, it's going to happen to you, but not really. Or not. Not soon. I guess that's the other thing. But then, you know, again, I mean, I think 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. 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 to get 6% less under 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.

[A]

Meaning doing more meditation.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

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.

[B]

I don't know if it's articulate. It didn't.

[A]

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. Chekhov said that art prepares us for tenderness. And I think that this is also what spiritual practice can do.

[B]

Yeah, I'd agree with that. 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 an 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 kind of reduce it. 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. 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.

[A]

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?

[B]

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.

[A]

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

[B]

Oh, happy anniversary.

[A]

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 mind stream. 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 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.

[B]

Well, that's pretty good. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, yeah. No, no, I think that's. 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, 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 comment, which they wouldn't hear, and then we missed that moment.

[A]

So, yeah, you use the word flood and I mention these guys all the time on the show. But 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 Clerman and Budita 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. 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 hole, 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. 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 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.

[B]

And the prefrontal is. Is it awareness versus monkey mind? Is that kind of the. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

[A]

Rationality versus fear.

[B]

Right. 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 good dialogue is. You're answering out of your thought stream.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And I'm answering your distorted response out of my thought stream. And we go zing past each other.

[A]

Know. Yes.

[B]

No, I. I love that. Yeah.

[A]

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.

[B]

You want boring dialogue, boring heartfelt communication. That's going to be the name of my next book. Boring, heartfelt, efficient communication. A novel.

[A]

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.

[B]

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 A Swim in a Pond 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 the 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 going to just do it for a year, 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. The world of the news and kind of feeling despairing about human communication and then drop in there and you've got like two or three hundred people talking about a Tolstoy story with a great deal of interest in each other, you know, so. So I've really loved that I know.

[A]

Why the community is great over on Story Club because. And that this is going to sound negative, but the fish rots from the head. So in this case, the fridge fish isn't. The head of the fish is not rotten, therefore the. The body of the fish is thriving.

[B]

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

[A]

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.

[B]

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.

[A]

Thanks again to George. Always loved talking to that dude. Don't forget to check out my app 10% with Dan Harris. You can sign [e-mail] we've got lots of guided meditations and we do weekly live meditation and Q 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 Vasily. A 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.