George Saunders on Anger, Ambition and Sin

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Ezra Klein Show

Episode: George Saunders on Anger, Ambition and Sin
Date: February 10, 2026
Host: Ezra Klein
Guest: George Saunders

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Overview

In this episode, Ezra Klein sits down with acclaimed novelist George Saunders to discuss themes from Saunders’s new novel Vigil. Their conversation navigates the interconnected concepts of anger, ambition, sin, judgment, capitalism, climate change, and the nature of truth. They examine what lies beyond kindness, interrogate the modern temptation of greatness and power, and grapple with the tension between judgment and understanding—both in literature and in life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Saunders’s New Novel and the Shift Beyond Kindness

• The conversation opens examining Saunders’s reputation as a literary champion of kindness—a role that evolved after his viral commencement speech.
• Reading Saunders’s latest work, Vigil, Klein observes a shift:
  • The novel centers on K.J. Boone, an oil tycoon on his deathbed, visited by angels and figures from his past, who try to prompt his self-examination.
  • Klein notes, “Saunders is more interested in something else now. Not kindness, but the question of judgment… it’s about free will and whether or not we have it. There’s a very fundamental tension between the side of Saunders that does not want to judge, and the side that thinks judgment is necessary.” [02:20]

Ambition, Power, and Self-Delusion

• Saunders discusses the prayer Boone offers on his deathbed, thanking God for his uniqueness and power:
  • “From my perspective, a moment of extreme delusion… where he’s getting exactly the wrong message from the moment he’s in.” [04:24]
• The pursuit of power as a response to deep insecurity, and how society prizes such striving:
  • “If you say power is everything, if I get that power, I’m safe. That’s completely bs... There’s not a world where one person could have so much power as to be above suffering.” [05:55]
• Both host and guest reflect personally on the temptation to fall back on worldly validation and praise to protect against self-doubt.

Oil, Capitalism, and Exploitation

• Saunders shares his own past as a geophysical prospector and the Kafkaesque absurdity he witnessed:
  • “[For] like 10 years they’ve been drilling, spending millions of dollars on this information and then randomizing it and drilling anyway, and then they just decided to keep it quiet. So Kafka.” [09:31]
• He acknowledges the thrill and adventure of that work during his youth, but now recognizes its environmental and cultural destructiveness.
• Saunders uses his experience as a corollary for Boone but also as a meditation on how early pride and adventure can become justification for systemic harm.

The “Great Men” of History

• Ezra probes how the recent cultural debate about historical “great men”—and the backlash against critiquing them—informs the book.
• Saunders focuses on specificity over abstraction:
  • “When I think about the great men of history in general, I don’t come up with much… but if I locate it in the person of this K.J. Boone, then I can work through it.” [14:38]
• Reading from the novel, they explore how the comfort of modern life (e.g., air-conditioning, food from around the world) is both a miracle and the product of exploitative systems.

Complicity, Desire, and the Self

• Ezra and Saunders discuss the consumer’s complicity in these systems—not just as passive recipients, but as agents of desire.
• Saunders questions the very existence of the “I” who desires:
  • “From any of the great traditions, the self is a temporary illusion that appears maybe at birth… So from the very beginning, if you define I the way we conventionally do… there’s a problem.” [25:00]
• The illusion of the self is seen as the source of much suffering and error.

Sin, Judgment, and Free Will

• Saunders’s view of sin as being “out of step with truth, whatever it might be,” diverges from traditional Catholic understandings. [30:01]
• The novel wrestles with whether people’s actions are inevitable and therefore unjudgeable:
  • Quoting an angel from the novel: “He came to seem… inevitable. An inevitable occurrence upon which, therefore, it would be impossible, even ludicrous, to pass judgment.” [31:56]
• The struggle between compassion (understanding people as creations of their circumstances) and the necessity for moral judgment grounds both the novel and the conversation.

Comfort, Grace, and Truth

• Saunders and Klein debate the meaning of comfort:
  • Saunders: “Truth. If you and I are in a cabin and we can hear there are wolves outside… if you look at each other and go, fuck, there’s wolves, that’s comfort.” [41:10]
  • Klein oscillates between comfort as truth and comfort as presence and unconditional love (grace).
• Jill, the angelic figure in the book, is critiqued for offering “idiot compassion”—comfort that skirts painful truths or fails to foster needed moral reckoning. [47:44]

The Politics of Judgment and Understanding

• Klein connects the book’s tension to current political/moral dilemmas: How do we judge public figures—do we empathize or demand accountability?
  • “Is it to look at J.D. Vance and his cruelties… and think, I see how much trauma you went through as a child, and I understand that on some level that all made you who you are today… Or is it to say, you’re an adult man imbued with enormous power… shape up, be who you claim to be?” [54:01]
• Saunders, citing a Buddhist teacher, suggests that true compassion means both protecting victims and stopping perpetrators for their own sake: “If you have compassion for the victims of this cruelty, that’s important… but if you run around the other side… when you think about the karmic consequences of the sins they’re committing… I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.” [55:02]

Specificity Versus Abstract Judgment

• Getting concrete about real people or situations “squeezes out facile judgment.”
  • “If you move towards specificity, the facile judgment goes away.” [56:22]
• Specificity leads to diagnostic, actionable moral and practical judgments, not tribal, emotional reactions.

The Messiness of Empathy

• Empathy must be scientific and objective, not sentimental; it can clarify judgment, not necessarily soften it.
• “You can understand somebody deeply and dislike them, or, let’s say, oppose them.” [60:25]
• Host and guest agree that the delusion that “bad people look bad” is a persistent and dangerous one.

Kindness, Anger, and Truth

• Saunders reacts to his reputation as “the kindness guy,” expressing discomfort and clarifying that true kindness involves a much deeper, often harsher grappling with reality.
• He discusses his own struggles with anger and agitation:
  • “Most days I’m just a little agitated and kind of entitled and pissed off… So in the Buddhist tradition, that’s a course. I mean, you have negative emotions. Who doesn’t? And the whole thing is to try to work with those somehow.” [67:52]
• Klein talks about finding wisdom in negative emotions like anger rather than suppressing them for the sake of kindness.
• Saunders reframes anxiety and anger as forms of high energy or high standards that can be redirected toward positive outcomes.

Truth in Writing and Life

• Klein observes a shift in Saunders’s central focus from kindness to truth.
• Saunders defines truth as “just the way things are, the way things actually are, for you now… but also with a dose of skepticism about the way my mind answers that question.” [73:14]

On Change, Surprise, and Aging

• Klein and Saunders trade notes on how aging affects their openness to change and surprise:
  • “As you get older… your blind spots sit there very happily, and they just expand, you know, so that can be… scary. But I think that for me, writing is the one way where a lot of that gets overturned.” [83:26]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

The Nature of Power and Safety

• “If you say power is everything, if I get that power, I’m safe. That’s completely bs… There’s not a world where one person could have so much power as to be above suffering.” — George Saunders [05:55]

On the Illusion of the Self

• “The self is a temporary illusion… from the very beginning, if you define I the way we conventionally do… there’s a problem.” — George Saunders [25:00]
• “The error is that… when you go looking for what that I consists of, there’s nothing there. It’s an illusion.” — George Saunders [26:12]

On Sin and Truth

• “Sin just means you’re out of step with truth, whatever it might be… Cause and effect is God. Basically, God acts by cause and effect.” — George Saunders [30:01]

On Judgment and Compassion

• “You can understand somebody deeply and dislike them, or, let’s say, oppose them… you can oppose somebody in this way we’re talking about, which is lacking facile judgment, but very firm.” — George Saunders [60:25]

Comfort as Truth

• “Truth. If you and I are in a cabin and we can hear there are wolves outside… if you look at each other and go, fuck, there’s wolves, that’s comfort.” — George Saunders [41:10]

Specificity Dismissing Easy Judgments

• “If you move towards specificity, the facile judgment goes away.” — George Saunders [56:22]

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Suggested Book Recommendations

(from George Saunders, at [85:00])

• I Will Bear Witness by Victor Klemperer
• Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel
• The Place of Tides by James Rebanks

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Noteworthy Timestamps

• [02:20] – Ezra Klein introduces themes of Saunders’ new novel and this transition from “kindness” to “judgment”
• [04:24] – Discussion of Boone’s deathbed prayer, ambition, and delusion
• [09:31] – Saunders recounts a Kafkaesque episode from his oil field days
• [16:41] – Saunders connects personal experience to the central drive of capitalism and avoidance of insecurity
• [25:00] – The conversation dives into the self as illusion and desire’s complicity
• [30:01] – Saunders defines sin as being out of alignment with truth
• [31:56] – On the inevitability of character and choices; the tension between determinism and judgment
• [41:10] – The nature of true comfort
• [54:01] – Political application of judgment versus understanding
• [56:22] – How specificity outcompetes abstract, tribal judgments
• [67:52] – Saunders’s relationship to anger and frustration with the “kindness” label
• [73:14] – Saunders’s working conception of truth: lowercase, contextual, skeptical

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Tone and Style

The conversation is reflective, searching, and often self-deprecating. Saunders’s wry humor coexists with deep philosophical seriousness. Both Saunders and Klein frequently admit uncertainty, invite nuance, and push each other toward greater specificity and depth. The discussion is intellectually rich, philosophically wide-ranging, and animated by a humane, meditative spirit.

Transcript

[A]

Hi, my name is Dana. I am a subscriber to the New York Times, but my husband isn't and it would be really nice to be able to share a recipe or an article or compete with him in wordle or connections.

[B]

Thank you Dana.

[A]

We heard you introducing the New York Times Family Subscription One subscription, up to.

[B]

Four separate logins for anyone in your life. Find out [e-mail] family.

[A]

I think there tend to be two ways to know the novelist George Saunders. One is through his amazing novels and short story collections. Lincoln and the Bardo is, I think, one of my favorite books of all time. The other is in his public facing role as one of America's leading prophets, proselytizers of kindness. And this role is built on the virality of this beautiful commencement speech he gave some years ago about kindness.

[B]

What I regret most of my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was right there in front of me suffering, and I responded sensibly, reservedly, mildly.

[A]

I've talked to Sanders about that speech. He was on the show in 2021 in an episode that many people tell me is their favorite.

[B]

I mean, I think one of the things that the left has to do is recognize that we really are at a very basic level defending virtues like kindness and decency and equality. To me, that's the thing we have to concentrate on that actually we're the true defenders of the constitutional ideas that say we really are hopeful that we'll have a beautiful country where everybody is equal. That's actually what we're working for. And don't get too distracted by the small storms.

[A]

And I've always thought of Sanders a little bit in that mode, the kindness guy. But reading his new novel Vigil, which is about an oil tycoon on his deathbed being visited by angels and people from his past trying to get him to reassess his own life, I began to realize that Sanders is more interested in something else now. Not kindness, but the question of judgment. Not just how do we treat others, but how do we understand our own lives. In this book you can feel Saunders searching for bigger, darker game. This is a book about sin and judgment. It's about free will and whether or not we have it. And in it. There's a very fundamental tension between the side of Sanders that does not want to judge. It wants to explain who we are in terms of the conditions we came from, we, which is a stance of very deep compassion, and the side of him that thinks judgment is necessary, that sin needs to be recognized and that you cannot have truth if you are not willing to open up to ideas of fundamental wrongdoing. And so I wanted to renegotiate some of these questions with Sanders. I wanted to see for him right now, in this moment, what lies beyond kindness. As always, my email, Ezra kleinshowytimes.com. George Saunders, welcome back to the show.

[B]

It's so nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

[A]

So there's a moment in your new book, Visual, where one of the main characters is on his deathbed and he offers this prayer. He says, thank you, Lord. Thank you for making me who I was and not some little squirming, powerless nincompoop. Thank you for making me unique. One of a kind, incomparable, victorious. Tell me about that prayer.

[B]

Well, he's a guy who has been driven by ambition his whole life, and it served him pretty well. You know, he's a big, really powerful oil executive, and he had some, as I imagined him, some early kind of insecurity instillers. And then his whole life he was working against that to try to sort of assert himself and give himself enough power that he'd never feel that again. And he did it. And I think he's just kind of turning to God and saying, I'm correct, aren't I? Like, I did it right. That's why you gave me all this power. Yes. He hears God saying, you did great. You know, so it's, from my perspective, a moment of extreme delusion, you know, where he's getting exactly the wrong message from the moment he's in. But, you know, from my own experience of being a person, you develop a certain approach to life to kind of keep anxiety at bay, to sort of solidify your view of yourself, to make it easier to get through life. And then it's really hard to peel that away. He has an opportunity to maybe have a different perspective on his life, and he just passes.

[A]

Do you think there's a question inside of that, A question that maybe feels very culturally relevant to me right now, which is whether the greatness that the world rewards, the power that the world offers, is something to be lauded or is actually something to be feared and ashamed of?

[B]

Well, I think it's something to look askance at, even if. I mean, I think everybody to a greater or lesser extent, is involved in that, of trying to get over in some way, you know, you know, trying to push back on the natural fear that we have of being out of control and being life. But I think what should be becoming clear to Us is that if you say power is everything, if I get that power, I'm safe. That's completely bs. And there's not a world where one person could have so much power as to be above suffering. There just isn't. So I think our culture is in a particular moment where we have sort of forgotten that for various reasons. So it's easy politically and maybe personally to think, if I just get enough of this thing, this power, then I'm safe. But that's, you know, clearly delusional.

[A]

And if this validation. I was thinking about reading that you have a safer form of social acclaim. You're a novelist and a writer and very beloved, and people quote your work on kindness. And so there's a lot of social praise that has come into you. I have my own version of this. And it can be, I think, pretty easy if you're having a moment of self doubt to fall back on these things the world has told you about yourself. So I wondered when I read this whether any part of you identified with that prayer, the feelings within it.

[B]

Oh, I mean, when you write a book like this, everybody is you and you both believe in them and you think they're full of it. That's the whole game of being a novel. So in that part, I remember thinking, okay, George, if you were on your deathbed and some evidence was presented that you'd wasted your life, what would your response be? And of course you want to think it would be, oh, I am corrected. But in fact, you double down. You say, yeah, but, you know, I wrote books, you know, and so that's a big, big danger, I think, for anybody, and certainly for me. The praise comes in and you accept it very happily and it inflates you. The blame comes in and you don't accept it quite so easily and you deflect it, you know, I find it.

[A]

To be the opposite.

[B]

No, right. That's right. That's a good point.

[A]

The praise goes off the back.

[B]

Well, that's true.

[A]

Off a duck. And then it's like you get one mean comment and you're thinking about it for two weeks.

[B]

Yes, yes, but, but for sure. And one of the cool things about getting older actually is that you realize that everything in the universe is giving you the memo that you're temporary, you know, and that you're on the way out, your, your hairline, your, you know, your body, the way you feel. But then in a moment where you get praise, that information contradicts that somehow and the ego goes, oh, we are important. You know, we are permanent. I'm still growing in import and, you.

[A]

Know, so I was actually thinking about a different moment in your life as I was reading the book, because obviously it's about KJ Boon, an oil company CEO. But you worked early in your life as a geophysical prospector. What is a geophysical prospector?

[B]

Well, I was trained at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. And what we would do is we go into an area where there might be oil and then we'd plant a dynamite charge 10 or 15ft underground, blow it off, and then with a sort of sophisticated system of sensors, we would record the sound waves as they came back up. And then that could be used in these complex computer things to predict the sort of three dimensional topography underground, which then in turn could be used to locate wells. Yeah.

[A]

How did you get into that?

[B]

Well, I trained for it. I mean it was. I was the geophysics major. Yeah, I just thought I trained.

[A]

They don't just send you out dynamite.

[B]

And that was at that time in the 80s, that was kind of what they were teaching at the School of Mines in Geophysics. So, yeah, highly mathematical and technical and it was kind of. I mean, one of the things that happened that was kind of life informing was I was kind of a trainee and I was in a room and they're having a meeting in the next room of the kind of higher ups. And it became clear, I could overhear it, that the grid that we were using to submit our drilling recommendations and the grid that the national oil company of Indonesia was using were different. So we would say drill here and they would take it onto their map and drill in a completely randomized location. And so as the conversation unfolded, everybody's getting kind of awkwardly quiet in there, you know, and then there was a kind of a group agreement that this was unfortunate, but it could be overlooked and we wouldn't, it wouldn't go any further up the line. So for like 10 years they've been drilling, They've been spending millions of dollars on this information and then randomizing it and drilling anyway, and then they just decided to keep it quiet. So Kafka.

[A]

So what was. That does sound very Kafkaesque. So what was. And what is your relationship to oil, to energy, to this fundamental engine of human existence and use it? Progress and destruction.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I have a kind of a. At that time it was very simple. I mean, it was just an adventure. And at that time, I think people weren't really talking climate change much. There was some sense that I saw firsthand of the. That we were kind of running roughshod over the environment in that area and also kind of over the culture. We were just sort of imperialist, you know. But mostly for me, it was just thrilling. You know, we would go into these rainforests where no one had ever set foot, and we'd drill these, or not drill, but we'd have the loca guys cut a very narrow path and we'd go in and there were tigers. And it was, you know, for a 22 year old, it was a thrill. So, you know, I use that in the book just to get a way into his mind, like somebody who feels positively about this endeavor. And I could see if I'd been a little more talented at it, I might have become an executive. And those early feelings of tribal pride would probably have just grown and grown, you know.

[A]

So, K.J. boone, oil company CEO, as I mentioned, did you research him? Is he based on anyone? For you? How did you put yourself in the mind of a robber baron of sorts?

[B]

Right, right. What I do is I research a bunch for a month. I just read everything I can find and then I take notes and then I just put it away. The purpose of that is not to ever give someone's biography or to have a real life basis, but just so that the invention is within the realm of the plausible. And for the voice and the attitude in fiction, I'm always trying to find a corollary to that person in my mind and then try to build that corollary out. So with him taking that early oil experience, also kind of superimposing my writing life, the pride I feel in that and the investment I have in that, and then just sort of growing that out line by line. And so the game is to kind of make sure that with each one of those, you've done them the service of really listening and really trying to inhabit the world through their point of view.

[A]

What are the years? You're writing this book.

[B]

What are the years?

[A]

Yeah. What are you writing?

[B]

Kind of the last three. The last three.

[A]

So the last three years, I think specifically have been a fight over what we should think about the quote, unquote, great men of history. What should you think about? And this goes back before the last few years, but the last decade, let's call it, which is certainly, I think, in your head, what should you think about the founding fathers of this country? What should you think about somebody with a personality of Donald Trump, clearly a man who has bent the river of history himself, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg? Yeah, I just said the Frick Gallery. And I mean, what a beautiful gallery. And then you read a little bit about Henry Frick, and there's a lot of. It's built on some blood, you know, that incredible museum. And there's both the critique of them and then also in the period in which you're writing, specifically the backlash to that critique. The backlash to the idea that we have swept away the need for these conquerors, these human beings who are engines of a certain kind of progress. And you may not like what that progress requires, but that is how we have America. That is how we'll one day go to Mars. That is how we got to the moon. That it's not all nice, but there has been, I think, a cultural. Five years ago, 10 years ago, it felt like the critique was winning. Now it feels like a very joined battle. And I'm curious how all this was sitting in your mind during it.

[B]

Watch me evade this question, because for me, that kind of question puts my head in a spin. Your question is very good and it is in my heart. But for me, the way to work it out is on the page. So the thing is, I think a person can access more truth as he seeks greater specificity. The specificity has to be in a locale. So when I think about the great men of history in general, I don't come up with much that any drunk uncle at a party couldn't come up with. But if I locate it in the person of this K.J. boone, then I can kind of work through it.

[A]

Well, let's talk about the way you work it out on the page, because I think we're not saying something different. You working out what actually feels to me like a very live social argument on the page. I'd like to have you read. Much of the book is an argument between Boone and his critics in the form of angels and visitations at the time of his death. And I want to have you read this section. On page 18.

[B]

There is a story often told. Perhaps you've heard this one. Don't stop me if you have, though. Ha ha, I'd really love to tell it. Little boys grousing. Doesn't like cars because of the pollution. You know where this one's going. I bet the father pulls the car over to the side of the road. Then I suppose you'll want to walk. End of objections from El Kiddo. Your choice. Shock. Dying in the back of a horse cart, stuck in the mud or zinging toward help. Aircon blasting anyone with a lick of Sense would choose the ladder we had, the world had. That was what was so damn stupid about it. People forgot the empty larder, forgot drought, forgot famine, forgot what it was like to be at the mercy of the.

[A]

World, forgot what it was like to be at the mercy of the world. This is part of his self conception. He is one of these people who have removed to some degree humanity from the mercy of the world. Tell me about the feelings, the argument, the life experience. You're channeling there.

[B]

Well, there was a time when I was in my 20s that my dad had a restaurant and it burned down. So things were rough and we were living in Texas and I just got that first sense that in our country if things got tough below a certain level, nobody was coming, you know, accept your friends and family. And that, that landed on me. I mean, I was kind of a upbeat, optimistic at that time, Ayn Rand kind of guy. But still it landed. And then many years later, when we had our family, you know, we didn't have any money saved. We were just kind of going paycheck to paycheck. That feeling kind of came back almost like a flashback. Oh God. You know, for all of the kind of surface glitter of the culture, if you drop below a certain level, you're an embarrassment and no, the cavalry isn't coming. So I think, and I'll add a third thing. There was a. When I first got out of college, there was a friend of mine from high school and I went to visit him and he was living in his mom's basement and he had a good job and very like attractive, intelligent guy. And the question kind of hovered over, like, why are you still at your mom's? You know. And he said that he'd had certain experiences when he was young and they were very poor that were quite humiliating for him and he'd internalize them. And he said, I'm not moving out of this basement until I'm a millionaire. And it really struck me because he was not somebody who was at all off center or deficient in any way. He was a high achieving guy, but that early pain had stung him. So I think that's what this guy's tapping into, maybe in a more general sense. I think that's what capitalism is about, really. It's beautiful if you're above the line and if you're below the line. Capitalism was that line that Terry Ealing Capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body. So that's. I thought, well, if I want to have a motivation for him that isn't Easily dismissed. That's a pretty good one. And I could feel it. I could just really feel it.

[A]

Let me actually try to argue that even more strongly than you did. That last line. You just made me think about it, because I actually agree that capitalism can plunder the sensuality of the body. I think if you're working in lithium mining in unsafe conditions to feed the world's desire for various electronics, the sensuality of your body is being pretty plundered. On the other hand, what plunders the sensuality of the body is half of all human beings dying before they're 15 years old and a quarter of them before they're one year old. It was interesting to me that in that answer you sort of went towards the question of money and the social safety net.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Which I even understood in the way you wrote this. You're talking about something much more fundamental, which is, to what degree do we live insulated from nature by technology versus to what degree are we at the mercy of nature? To what degree do we control the world, which is what we're always trying to do as human beings, for better and for worse, versus to what degree does the world control us? I mean, the lines are dying in the back of a horse cart, stuck in the mud, or zinging toward help. Air con, air conditioning blasting. Your book talks a lot about the death from natural disasters that are worsened by climate change. But I think the numbers are something like we have a fifth as many deaths from natural disasters as we did in 1960. That's partially because we are so much better at building and getting emergency response to places and telling people where to go. And so there's this really deep. Janice faced nature to this modernity we've built, and yet I think we also look around it and think something's gone terribly wrong.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, in the local sense, I think about when our kids were little and I was working and it was a great job, a fine tech writer, you know, but. And this is maybe a fact of contemporary life, for 10 hours a day, I was doing something that had no relation to anything that I cared about except providing for, you know, so within that workspace, I would do whatever. I was photocopying, I was, you know, mopping up spills. I mean, it didn't really matter writing technical reports. And so when I think about that plundering of the body, I think of that now. Again, it's part of this huge system that you're alluding to. But I think for the individual, the journey through Capitalism, and especially, I think in my lifetime, it's become one of increasingly handing over everything to sustenance. And as corporations become so powerful, the feeling that one should naturally give up more of one's private space, more of one's peace of mind, in order to sort of live within the system. I feel that's something that's really happened in my lifetime.

[A]

I want to have you read one more part from actually, that same page that I think also gets at an interesting way in which you make this argument through his voice.

[B]

Right. Whereas nowadays, folks padded past climate controlled cases of out of seasoned vegetables and fish from faraway seas and meat from animals who fed in meadows under mountain ranges whose names a person could hardly pronounce, thinking, yap, yap, yap, big deal. Pork from Denmark, salmon from the Bering Strai, loaves of woven bread from Ferrara. All of this is my right, when what it was, was a goddamn miracle. How had that bounty made its way here? Did it walk? Just magically appear? Go waltz on someone else's feet?

[A]

Henri, I was so struck by that phrase. All of this is my right. And I feel like the thing you do really effectively when you're inhabiting Boone's voice is get at the idea. It's not a rite, it's not a miracle. We want it to be a miracle. What it is is a supply chain. And nobody wants a supply chain.

[B]

Right, Right. I was thinking, when our kids were little, we lived in Syracuse, and there's this incredible store called Wegmans. And you'd go in there and it was just. It was like Bosch painting of bounty, you know. And so, yeah, I mean, I'm big into contradictions. And so the idea that all of that, you know, it doesn't just magically appear. I agree with him. You know, the part of me that I summoned there was the part that says, yeah, well, okay, let's get rid of oil. Let's see what you know. And the real life corollary of these guys, they made a lot of hay out of that idea that if we eliminate oil, which I don't think anyone's really calling for that, but if you do that, you end up with punishment of the poor, primarily. That was one of the big lines in the 90s, you know, who suffers the most? The poor. If you disrupt the supply chains, disrupt things as they are, the rich people are gonna do okay, but the poor are gonna suffer. That was the line.

[A]

Anyway, one of the things I thought about reading that because I struggle with these questions. I mean, I wrote A book about abundance, which is all about technological prosperity, but also about, in some ways, the ways it can go wrong. If you have the abundance of the wrong thing, abundance of fossil fuel, you will choke on the air. One of the things that makes my stomach turn is you're usually not getting animals feeding in meadows under mountain ranges. You're getting animals in a hellish industrial factory that you cannot even imagine and that we often make it illegal to look into, because if people knew what we were doing to the animals we kill for food, they would stop eating that meat. But I thought a thing you were playing with, and you can tell me if this is right or wrong, it's not just complicity. I think that's too small. It's desire. We talk about the great men of history, but at least under capitalism, you have the great wants of society. There needs to be a match between what is provided and what is desired. But, you know, as somebody who thinks about some of those questions, you're so often dealing with the power of what we want, even if we don't really want to know how we get it.

[B]

Yes. And let me. Okay, So I think we have maybe different approaches based on our abilities. And my ability to think larger and more abstract is not so good. So for me, when I think about. I agree with what you say about wants. And so what I think is within the individual person as personified in a character or just the individual person. When I say I want. There's a lot of errors in that already. You know, what's the I? If you look deeply into it from any of the great traditions, the self is a temporary illusion that appears maybe at birth or maybe a little after birth. Some people think. And so from the very beginning, if you define I the way we conventionally do, from the minute we open our eyes in the world, there's a problem because my wanting means, at some level, I'm taking from you. Or it could mean we're cooperating, but mostly it means I'm protecting that perimeter that makes I, Makes me. There's a great error in that. From the very beginning. That, of course, is Darwinian and we can't get around it. But when you start from that point of view, all the problems come from that.

[A]

Wait, but hold on. I want to know what the error was.

[B]

The error is that, in fact, when you go looking for what that I consists of, there's nothing there. It's an illusion that we create with, I think, philosophers and Buddhists who say thought. You reify Ezra by thinking, I gotta Put a sweater on and I like this one. And whatever, I'm going to do my show that you think that. So it's totally natural and you can't get around it. But from the minute you have that construction, you are making a fundamental error because you're not centered, not permanent. But also the construction of the eye is a neurological thing that is very fraught with illusion. It tells us that we're perceiving correctly, but we're constructing in every instant. So, I mean, it sounds very woo woo. But the truth is that that's where a lot the big problems come from because that central delusion gets multiplied. So when we think about power. Okay, what would power look like if we had the correct understanding of our sort of being? Well, it would have a lot to do with cooperation. First, because the idea that you and I are separate is actually demonstrably false. If you look on a small cellular level, it's just a bunch of molecules. So I think the big struggle of the human race is can we figure out a way to make an accommodation with the essential truth that actually this illusion of self isn't true? What would that community look like? And so when I'm thinking about characters, I'm thinking about that really this person has certain desires. How do those desires square with sort of metaphysical reality? And then how does that character's actions get him into trouble? Because he is acting on that delusion of a central self. If that makes sense.

[A]

How do you think about that? And I'm gonna not let us get too deep into the Buddhism here because.

[B]

I love talking about it and also. Cause I'm not. I don't really know that much about it.

[A]

I love talking with you about the Buddhism, but I'm gonna take it in another direction in a second.

[B]

Good luck.

[A]

As you were saying, when the empty self I.e. ezra puts on a sweater and he.

[B]

Looks good in it, by the way, it's okay.

[A]

It's not. I need some new sweaters. That I am cold. You're not cold. The other people in this room aren't cold. That myself might be empty, but it is me that wants to not be cold. I am having an experience that the other selves are not. And as interdependent and connected to everything as I may be, I do want things. I want them all the time.

[B]

Right. No, of course. And I mean, that's really what the book is about. There's a relative truth. Of course we want what we want. And it's beautiful to want what we want to a certain Extent, but on the absolute sense, it isn't true. So to the extent that we go through life embracing that illusion wholeheartedly, I think we cause suffering. And, of course, there's a position where you can go, yeah, I wanna wear my sweater. And also, I recognize that this self is something that my mind is creating. And I think that's where we get into, you know, spiritual ideas.

[A]

Well, let's do that. Because one thing that struck me about this book, you were talking about the great traditions a moment ago. And in past conversations, we've talked a lot about, you and I, meditation and Buddhism. There was a deep Catholicism in this book. And you grew up Catholic, but you said that the central problem of the book is what to do with the sinner in the bed. You say in the book that Boone's sins were grievous. And so I want to start with the word sin. How do you understand sin, and what is your relationship to the idea of sin?

[B]

I think sin is what we were just talking about. This is not the Catholic understanding. But my understanding is sin just means you're out of step with truth, whatever it might be. And the world has a way of, either internally or from outside of punishing sin in that way. So, again, if I think I'm a really tough guy and I'm still me, and I go out and challenge somebody and I get my ass kicked, I've committed a sin, the sin of misunderstanding who I am, and then there's a punishment. So for me, in the book, sin is just being out of touch with the way things actually are. That's it, you know? And so again in Buddhism, karma. But what that really means is cause and effect. So basically, the view is cause and effect is absolutely undeniable. When you do something, there's a reaction. Now, this sort of comic tragedy, part of it is that we don't. We aren't very good at predicting causes from effect. We think this action will cause this reaction, but we're often so wrong. So cause and effect is God. Basically, God acts by cause and effect. And in every moment, if we're out of alignment with cause and effect, we suffer. It may not be overt, but we suffer. That's what my idea of sin is.

[A]

Now I'm thinking about your idea of truth. It sounds like what you were saying. Sorry, I want to be. I'm processing what you just said. Cause and effect is God. Cause and effect in this vision of the world is also a form of truth, right? There's a truth to cause and effect. And if you're out of alignment with it, yeah.

[B]

Truth would be just what is. So whatever you do, whatever your action is, the universe reacts to it however it likes it. And to the extent that we can posit what that is, we're in alignment with truth. And if we're not, then we're out of alignment with truth.

[A]

It's interesting because it did feel to me that there was a tension in the book between a much more traditional idea of sin and choices made and repentance needed, in fact, particularly repentance needed through good works. And then what I would call a more Buddhist concept of everything is cause and effect. Everything is karmic and conditioned and must be looked at nonjudgmentally and compassionately. The other big idea alongside sin that keeps coming up in the book use the phrase an inevitable occurrence seven times. And there's this one in which the angel Jill describes looking at the soul and the life of the man who murdered her. And she says, he came to seem, if I may say it this way, inevitable. An inevitable occurrence upon which, therefore, it would be impossible, even ludicrous, to pass judgment. Who else could he have been but who he was? And I feel like there is this tension between there is sin and we should pass judgment on it, and people should be judged and they must repent. And who could we be but who we are? How can you ask somebody to be anybody but the person they've become?

[B]

Yes, that's exactly the tension of the book. Thank you. So Jill had an experience at her own death. And the experience was that she spontaneously inhabited the mind of the person responsible for her death. So this was kind of like she's had on the costume of her Jill self her whole life. And of course, like we do, she mistook that for the universe. Things are her Qualia was the universe. Then in that split second, she took that costume off, put on the costume of this kind of repellent person who was quite. In real life, would have been quite disgusting to her. And from that point of view, she's like, oh, okay, I understand him. I am him. And so this leads to this idea that from his point of view, and given that time only goes in one direction, how could he be any different than he is? It's kind of an absurd thing to say, he's done so if he could have been more understanding, why wasn't he? So, again, time going in one direction. He's finished. He was what he was. And that kind of complexity is what she feels that in a certain way, we Understand that height, for example, is not negotiable. You didn't choose to be the height you are. I think we also understand intelligence. You got the intelligence you wanted, but then we get into some murky areas when people say, well, you could work harder, you could work at it, and freedom of choice, which is true, but even there, there's a limit to it. And I would say if you think of it in sort of calcul terms, if I want to improve my physical shape, for example, which would be a good idea.

[A]

You look great.

[B]

Oh, thank you.

[A]

Don't say this.

[B]

It's layers. It's layers. But if you want us to do that, okay, so you know, you have to go to the gym. You're going to find out that you have certain built in limitations. Your body and your muscle type, all that kind of thing, but also your willpower, your interest. So my thought is that even those things are kind of pre given to you at birth. Now I think people sometimes struggle with this and I struggle with it. But the idea is this. If you could imagine somebody that you cared about and maybe you had a fraught relationship with that person, they just died, and they're lying there in front of you and you say, ah, I wish he'd been more X, I wish he'd been more understanding. If he should have been more articulate, why wasn't he? And I think if we dig deeply enough into it in this absolute sense, you'll find that there is a kind of inevitability to that. Now that's Jill's point of view. What she's doing is saying, it's fine, whatever you did is fine. Just leave the self and all is forgiven. It's kind of my point of view, but as I wrote the book, I got more and more skeptical about it as I examined it. There's a guy in the book called the Frenchman. His point of view is bullshit. Don't give me that. You know, when that guy was alive, somebody could have kicked his butt enough to get him to be more of quantity X. So he's urging her to get after Boone and do whatever's necessary to get him in relation to truth. The Frenchman's saying he's still breathing. So you have a chance, if you approach it skillfully, to put him in alignment with truth. And that's where the salvation would come from. Even though he can't move, he's never gonna move again. If his mind could be correctly aligned, you saved him.

[A]

Do you believe in free will?

[B]

Depends where you put the point. Of view. Do you believe in free will at this moment? I mean, in terms of, like, I don't know what I'm going to do when I leave here, that feels like free will. I think if you could run the whole clock of reality from the beginning, you'd see that the decision I made was, of course, pre encoded by everything that came before. So the book was me kind of looking at that question and I don't know. I mean, except move the point of view around. That's the book. Some people that I've talked to, they're reading the book and they think I'm endorsing Jill's position, which I'm 100% not.

[A]

I'm gonna stand free will for a moment. If you'd asked me seven years ago, my older son is about to turn seven, I would have told you that I believe that the space of decision making that can truly be called free will is not absent, but is incredibly more narrow than we like to think it is. And now, having had two kids and seeing how much they were themselves from the first moment, I believe it is even more narrow than that. And it's not that we don't make choices, but as you were saying when you were saying, if you want to change your shape, you go to the gym and you're limited by things like willpower. Willpower does not seem to me to be something that we choose to generate. And again, it's not that I feel like I make a lot of decisions in a day that I could make better or worse, but the me who makes them is much more conditioned.

[B]

Yeah. And I think when you love somebody like you love your kids, it becomes kind of beautifully true.

[A]

It becomes beautiful. Yes.

[B]

If the person that you love has this tendency, the judgment kind of goes away. It's just something to accommodate and even be fond of, you know? So I think that's kind of Jill's thing. And she came to it in a moment of kind of trauma and inspiration. And you know how sometimes you have such a peak experience that you attempt to recreate it, or you think, well, that felt so deep to me, it must be true. And that's how I understand her. She's had that experience, and now in her horror, really, to find that at 22, she's dead, you know, she's clinging to that idea, and she's, in a sense, hiding behind it. So I think that's why I kind of loved about her was that she's in a real fix, you know, But I see her as primarily kind of fearful. You know, fearful to come out of that position.

[A]

Sam.

[B]

I'm opening up Crossplay. I've been playing against Dan, my colleague at the New York Times. I'm going to play Stoop S, T, U, P, E across the triple word multiplier square.

[A]

Cats played another move.

[B]

Ugh.

[A]

And she did have an S. She played Stoop for 36 points.

[B]

I've got a Z, which is 10 points. If I can put my X over there, I can make box.

[A]

I have two A's in and T's. I'm guessing Tenga is not a word. Let's see.

[B]

Tenga is a word. Oh. Don't know what tenga means, so I'm going to press down on the word and. Oh. Definition popped up. Former monetary unit of Tajikistan. Learn something. Every time I play this game, even.

[A]

Though I'm about 50 points ahead, one thing I've learned in crossplay is that the game is never over.

[B]

I just got a notification. And Dan played his last turn. Let's see who won. It's so close. But I did win Crossplay, the first.

[A]

Two player word game from New York Times Games. Download it for free today. It's devastating when you see a game that you could have won. Jill's fundamental purpose is comfort. She is there to comfort. The mission she has been given or the salvation she has been given is to comfort. What does comfort mean to you?

[B]

Truth. You know, if you and I are in a cabin and we can hear there are wolves outside, you know, if I say it's cool, they're probably, you know, dogs. That's not comfort. But if you look at each other and go, fuck these. There's wolves, that's. That's comfort. But she doesn't have the capability to communicate that to him.

[A]

I'm very skeptical of this. I'm trying to think about this. That comfort is truth.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I don't want to say I've never been comforted by the truth.

[B]

Oh, but you.

[A]

That I have more often been comforted.

[B]

But you seek comfort for it in your work. Every day you come into work and you try to get to the bottom of complicated things and you're seeking comfort.

[A]

I don't find it comfortable.

[B]

Well, you. But you're seeking. In biological terms, you're seeking homeostasis.

[A]

That might be right.

[B]

No, you want to calm yourself. Comfort yourself by getting in closer relation to the truth so the world doesn't seem so anarchic.

[A]

I think comfort. I'm just thinking about this now, Hutches. I'm interested in this Topic. I was going to ask you in a moment about the idea of grace and your relationship to grace. But I think for me, I think about comforting my children. I think about being comforted by my mother. That comfort seems closer to grace to me.

[B]

And what Jill seems to me define grace.

[A]

I think of grace. And I'm not Christian, I'm not Catholic. And grace is one of these ideas that I find very beautiful without feeling like I have a deep understanding of it. So I want to be honest about where I'm coming from here. But I understand grace is for as at its core, that there is a love God or the universe has for you that has nothing to do with what you've done, that does not judge you, that exists despite all the reasons. You may not have earned it, and it will always be there for you.

[B]

Can I say that's the inverse or the shadow side of this elevation idea? Jill believes in that.

[A]

Why don't you describe the elevation idea then? I'd like to hear your description of.

[B]

Well, Jill. Elevation is how Jill refers to this luminous event that she had and her death, where she understands people as inevitable occurrences. But that is another way, I think. I haven't really thought through this, but of saying grace, that everything is okay. That ultimately you're not to blame and you're not to praise. You're just an embodiment of God's will. Something like that, you know.

[A]

But I guess I took elevation. It almost had a coldness to it. You're an inevitable occurrence. Is very different than you are loved.

[B]

I'm not sure, because if you think of now, this is getting a little deep. But I think if you say it's my hope. Yeah, yeah. Here's a question. Have you ever been comforted by a falsehood?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Which one?

[A]

When I was young, I had a terrible fear of vomiting. And night after night I would ask my parents to promise me before I went to sleep that I wouldn't throw up. And in that time I was comforted by that.

[B]

And did it work?

[A]

I did not throw up in those years.

[B]

So they were telling you the truth.

[A]

Although right now, one of my. I never even made this connection till the second. But one of my sons asked me to do a little spell every night to keep away bad dreams. And it has not always worked. It's just a little rhyme.

[B]

But I think in.

[A]

But he asks me for it every night anyway.

[B]

Because you're working on it together, in a sense. What you're saying is all will be well, you know. And I think that That's a form of you extending grace to him, which isn't exactly truthful. The spell isn't exactly truthful. But the substrate or the sort of foundation of the spell is true, I.

[A]

Think, to bring it back to comfort, which, again, I think is related for me to grace. But here's how I describe comfort. The fundamental exchange of comfort. When I think I offer it to my children or when it's been offered to me or when I offer to. It is somebody sitting there, no matter what is happening with you, and saying, I am here and I love you.

[B]

Yeah, that's it.

[A]

That is what comforts another human being. And I think of Jill doing that in this book, right? You are dying and I am here, and on some level, I love you. And it's not that. It is. I mean, the love has to be true, or it's better if it's true, I think. But it's not so much about being in a space of truth or a space of falsehood so much as a space of there is presence here.

[B]

There is, but where she gets into trouble. And again, I discovered this about halfway through. If you are beating the shit out of another human being and I say to you, ezra, I'm here and I love you, that's bullshit. That's false. I think in her situation, she says, I'm here and I love you and I don't care what you did. Okay? Now, from his point of view, I'd say KE knows what he did and he cares. And as the book goes on, he's increasingly tormented by this denial. So I think certainly saying, I love you, I'm here, is 100% beautiful in the right condition. But it also. Her problem is, I think she's got a bit of denial built into herself, too. So, you know, for example, the end condition, let's say that he was a murdering rapist and she came down to his bed and said, I'm here. You know, that that somehow doesn't seem sufficient, although by her definition, it is. So this is where the book really exploded into being interesting to me, because I don't really know the answer to these things.

[A]

And of course, that murdering rapist is an inevitable occurrence and so cannot be judged.

[B]

Right. And I think she would say in her peak elevation, you say, yeah, yeah, but we feel. I mean, I think in the book readers have talked to me about in the middle section, like, God, Jill, you're pissing me off. You know, that's a result of the fact that she isn't really giving comfort. She's doing what in Buddhism we call idiot compassion. You know, where, like, somebody drives a spike through your head and you say, thanks for the coat rack, that thing. So she's not really doing what she claims to be doing. That's. I think her kind of sin or her tragedy is that I think she had a genuine insight. But when you go to apply it, it's gonna take a little less autopilot than she's on.

[A]

You know, this is such a weird thing to say to a person sitting in front of you. You wrote something a while back in a substack conversation you were having, you were talking about to what degree should we judge people who write books and to what degree should their moral failings change the way we read the book. I wish I had the quote in front of me, because I love the quote, but he said something along the lines of, the person who wrote the book doesn't exist. Whoever even that person was in the moment they were writing that book is gone when they look up from channeling that moment of inspiration. Who George Saunders is right now is different than who George Saunders was when he was writing page 112 of Vigil. And it's interesting because. And I'm hearing you talk about sin and talking about it as being out of alignment with truth and just what is. And the book, as I read it, certainly had a much more traditional view of sin. I mean, the question of what is truth and what is. That's. I mean, who among us is capable of understanding what is actually unfolding in time? But the book is very concerned. I mean, there is Jill, who has this elevation and this belief that everybody is exactly who they are. And then there is this idea of sin that is, you chose, you did horrible things, you denied what you knew, you fooled other people, and you justified it to yourself.

[B]

That's the hinge.

[A]

But it feels like more than being out of alignment with truth. I mean, I feel like the world as it is could be all kinds of different ways, but it feels like you believe in morality here. There's good and bad and evil and.

[B]

Good in any specific situation. There is, because in the. Specifically the book, this guy spent many, many years knowing a truth and denying it. Now, the mechanism by which he did that or the rationale is interesting, but he knew that climate change was a thing, and he consciously or unconsciously denied it. That's where he was out of sync with truth. One of the books I had in mind while I was writing this was Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy. And in that book, it's a much more modest sinner. And his sin is just that. He lived his life by the credo that I just want to do what everybody else is doing. I want to be normal. So at the end of his life, he gets stomach cancer and was based on a real thing. Tolstoy's neighbor supposedly screamed for four straight days at the end of his life. And Tolstoy heard the story of, like, wow, what would make you do that? So in the book, the guy has this intense physical pain, of course. But Tolstoy has layered in this idea that Ivan is starting to realize that he wasted his life by this idea of being normal. And there's a beautiful moment where after many, many days of saying, why am I suffering so much when I live the perfect life? He finally says, kind of to God, all right, maybe I didn't. You know, maybe I didn't. I lived out of alignment with truth. And at that point, he begins this rapid transformation. Salvation in that moment is align yourself with what is actually true. The truth is you lived your life in the wrong way. And at some point he says, all right, I can't go back in time, but I can start now. Essentially, I can start being in alignment with truth. I didn't live in the right way. And you can feel the pain start to go out of them. So the idea that there's physical suffering and then there's the suffering of denial on top of it. And we all know that if your leg hurts but you can't let it hurt, it kind of hurts more, you know? So I think that's what in the book, the Frenchman correctly posits that if they could just get Booned to say, yeah, I lied. I really did. I'm sorry, that that would represent a better state of being for him than the one in which he actually dies, in which he continues to deny it. So that's the truth.

[A]

So before there's repentance, there has to be acceptance.

[B]

I think there has to be. Yeah, you have to be in relation to what you actually did. So sin. It's a word I brought from my Catholic childh. But now I understand it as. I mean, it can be so infinitesimal. You're feeling X, and you say you're feeling X prime. That's gonna cause you a little pain. You know, that's the idea. And, yeah, that's sin. And that's the sin. Now the characters will use that word. The Frenchman, you know, he died in 1890 or something. So he's using it in a traditional sense, but I think it's compatible with this other sense.

[A]

I felt like the Frenchman was too hard on himself in his character. He's somebody who helped invent the engine and now he's haunting the world, trying to make everybody aware of how much damage the engine has done.

[B]

But yeah, no, you're exactly right. The engine's pretty great and so does Jill. But one of the fun things about writing a book for me and in this method I use is a lot of iteration and, you know, so I think early in the book I thought Jill was kind of right, you know, and then as I kept revising it, the Frenchman seemed to be right. And then I started to see, oh, they're both kind of out of their minds. They're dead. So the Frenchman, he's very much kind of neurotic in that way. They're these manic spirits who aren't quite focused on. They've got some truth in them, but they're expressing it kind of inefficiently. And poor K.J. boone is. These are his two guardian angels and they're both kind of mess ups. So I think that in the final analysis of the book, I went, oh, this is so sad. He does need some help, but neither of these people is willing to give it to him. The Frenchman comes in so hot and so angry that anybody would resist him. And Jill assuages so in such a sort of cozy way that nobody could take correction from her either. So Boone floats through and in, in a sense, he's. He's not saved. Actually.

[A]

I was thinking about this tension in the book because I think it is one that we exist in in a very intense way right now, both in our own lives, people around us, but also politically, internationally, between what is the path of truth, of kindness? Is it to be judgmental or is it to be understanding? Is it to look at J.D. vance and his cruelties? And I'm not necessarily asking you to comment on J.D. vance and think, well, I've read your book and I see how much trauma you went through as a child, and I understand that on some level that all made you who you are today and the cruelty you were inflicting on others comes from a insecurity and a fear. Or is it to say you're an adult man imbued with enormous power, who claims to be a Catholic, shape up, be who you claim to be. And that's the book. That's the book.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But it's also the life.

[B]

Yeah, no, it is. And I think the answer is yes, you do have to do both. There's a beautiful Buddhist teacher named Francesca Freemantle and she has a talk, it's on Tibetan Book of the Dead. And she has the most mind blowing answer. Because what she says is there's no difference. If you have compassion for the victims of this cruelty, that's important, of course, protect them. But if you run around the other side of the table and she says, the way she puts it is when you think about the karmic consequences of the sins they're committing, the harm that they're doing, she says, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. So if you want to help them, if you have any bandwidth for that, then what you would do is stop them within your principles, within your nonviolence, and you stop them. Then you save the victims and you save the perpetrators. So I think in a high realm, it's an identical act. It's also true, as you said, that these people aren't doing these horribly cruel things out of nowhere. But again, I think, you know, we'd want to avoid that idiot compassion of somehow in our attempt to understand them, we enable them. That's also a danger of narrative or excuse them.

[A]

Yes, you have a line and forgive me because I don't have it in front of me, it's something like specificity. It's how specificity and judgment are opposed to each other. But what is the.

[B]

I think the idea. And again, I get this from writing workshop and then from writing, if you move towards specificity, the facile judgment goes away. So in a workshop, for example, somebody will say, oh, I think your story's boring, you can't work with that. So then you ask, be more specific, where is it boring? And what do you mean by boring? And as you go through that process, it becomes diagnostic. You know, it's. Oh, actually there's a thought that's repeated three times in the paragraph on page six. Oh, okay. Could you choose one of those repetitions? And a writer can hear that, they can hear. Eliminate one repetition, that's all good. Whereas you're boring is, you know, less appealing. I mean, the example I've thought of before is if you had, you know, five Republicans and five Democrats on the town board and you ask them to discuss immigration, you're going to get a fight because they're all pre programmed with their media inputs and it's going to just be, just turn on MSNBC and Fox and let them, and everybody can go out and have lunch and they're going to the TVs can fight. But if you said, okay, we've got $10,000 to fix potholes in our little town, and we've got $20,000 worth of potholes, what do we do? Suddenly the politics is gone. You know, you're like, well, we should probably fix the one in front of the er. And then as you start talking about individual potholes, it's just science. So I think that's what I mean by specificity squeezes out facile judgment. I mean, you don't want to squeeze out judgment, but you want to squeeze out that kind of quality of. Of empty, agitated, abstract opining that seems to be prevalent right now, which I don't think really produces much except angst.

[A]

Yeah. It's one of the reasons I loved the central tension of the book, because I feel this tension every day right now that there is wisdom and grace and a path at times to a higher version of myself in trying to understand. And I took the specificity point differently. The specificity of other people, how they became who they are, how they're doing things that I cannot imagine, or supporting things. Right. Forget the people doing them who I think bear much more culpability. Just people who are just voting for it.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And I am angry at some of them, and I love them. I love some of them individually and then also as my neighbors and my countrymen. But if you go too far down that path of just trying to explain how everything becomes an inevitable occurrence, I do think your ability to make judgments and to work for a different world can become compromised. You know, Buddhism, Catholicism, all of them, in addition to having practices of how do I make it possible to love my enemy? How do I understand that everything has interdependent arising. Also very tight moral codes about what is right and what is wrong.

[B]

Sure. But I think all those things are compatible. I think the problem is when you start trying to understand your enemy. Okay. I come from a scientific background, so for me to say, can you understand a geological problem? Of course there's no problem. And there's no limit to the length you can go to understand that problem. It doesn't incriminate you. It doesn't involve you. So likewise, if the goal was to try to understand your enemies, I think the point of that is it's kind of strategic. I mean, if you're a football coach and you're playing the other team, if you could inhabit the mind of the other coach for five minutes, that would be unbelievably great.

[A]

I deeply agree with this.

[B]

Yeah. But the problem is, I think in that process of trying to understand, there's something. I certainly have it where as I try to understand, I think I'm trying to quote, unquote, empathize. That's where I think it gets a little. For me personally, it gets a little mushy because then you start to feel a kind of overinvestment that then interferes with the judgment that you have to have. Like this guy in the book, he kind of is a pretty good father, I think. Pretty good. Maybe. We don't really know, but he. At least he would say he is.

[A]

His daughter loves him. We can say that.

[B]

Yes, she does. And she's disappointed in him, and he seems to love her. If I had said, oh, he's evil. I don't want him. He's gonna be a terrible father, I think that's a less convincing portrait of him. So for me, the empathy thing, both in a book, but when we're imagining our political enemies, it has to be scientific, it has to be objective, and then you can get to where you need to be emotionally. But I think that the feeling maybe on the left especially, is I'm gonna understand the Trump supporters, and then I won't have this anxiety about disliking them. But you can understand somebody deeply and dislike them, or, let's say, oppose them. And I think at the highest level, you can oppose somebody in this way we're talking about, which is lacking facile judgment, but very firm.

[A]

I think one of the strangest political delusions that I see that does not seem to go away is the idea that people who do bad things will present as bad people.

[B]

Right. It's the Cruella de Vil falsity.

[A]

Yeah, the Cruella de Vil falsity. You know, one of the things that affected me a lot over the last year was I read this book by Philippe Sands called East west street, and he was on the show. And it's a book about the development of the concept of. Of genocide and war crimes. And it's a book about the Holocaust. And, you know, he's writing at great length about, among other people, the man Hitler puts in charge of governing Poland. And this person has an incredible artistic sensitivity. He truly loves art and music. And, you know, he's a beautiful player of the piano. And you read so much. I mean, you've made arguments like this, but I wasn't thinking about it here, about the way art is supposed to enlarge your soul. And then the Nazis really cared about aesthetics. Say, what you will about them.

[B]

They really cared about aesthetics. But I don't think I've ever made the argument that art enlarges everyone's soul and will therefore solve everything. I think of it more like if you say somebody went into a gym and said, this doesn't work. They're still chubby people, people in here, you know, it's just from my own experience.

[A]

I'm not accusing you of that claim. What I'm saying more is it. And I've seen so many people go and meet with Donald Trump and come and be like, oh, he's really charming and personable. And I'm like, of course he's charming and personable. Like, what were you expecting?

[B]

Right? But this is where the science comes in. Because if you go in and you see charming and personal, you just add it to your data set. Okay? Note it. He's doing these incoherent things. He seems to be kind of largely incoherent in his views and in his plans. He seems to have a terrific mean streak. And when I talk to him, he's so nice. Okay, so now we have a new portrait of the man, you know, and I think that would totally enable one to oppose him. Better. Better than if you had a caricature of him that didn't comply with truth. To me, as a scientist, I'm like, well, yeah, of course you'd want all the information you could have. And if it's hard to process or it's complicated, that's okay. That's just part of the game. So I think that's part of maybe the. There's so much emotion right now, so much agitation and fear and that. I think that somehow, for some reason, that makes people crave autopilot, you know, a set of beliefs that's very simple and is sturdy in every circumstance. And that's not really what human beings are good at. I mean, we like it. We like it. But out of that comes violence and extremity. And I would say that's what the right is doing right now. They're somehow. I think they know they're looting the house, and they know the time is limited. And so they're agitated and they're on autopilot. And anybody who opposes them is a leftist lunatic. You know, you have the evidence of your senses. Says this in Minneapolis is a murder. They fictionalize the fact that he was, quote, unquote, brandishing a gun. That's panic. You know, that's panic. But it's also autopilot, because a person not on Autopilot would watch the damn video and would adjust their viewpoint accordingly. That's what intelligent people do.

[A]

Or it's funny. I wonder if it's autopilot or.

[B]

One of the things it is, is autopilot.

[A]

It is an attempt to impose the domination that power can have over other people on reality itself.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

When I see that, when I am lied to in that way, I understand it as an act of domination 100%. They do not expect me to believe it.

[B]

Right. Well, you know what it's like. It's like if you went into a really nice restaurant and somebody, the waiter brought you three turds on a tray and put it down. Enjoy. There's a kind of a disbelief that he just did that. If you don't stand up and say, get these turds out of here, you know, bring me my lasagna, then. Then he's won. And if he keeps bringing the turds and you don't call him on it, then you erode. Your belief in truth erodes and you start to shrink and pretty soon all bets are off. So I think that's where. And now what amazes me is that they want that and they know how to do it. That's the part that if I was going to write a book about this time, I would really want to understand because as you said, I don't think anyone gets up in the morning and goes, yaha, time to be evil. I don't think. I mean, there are probably some sociopaths and so on, but mostly I think J.D. vance wakes up in the morning and he feels like a good Catholic. And that's fascinating to me. I don't quite. I don't.

[A]

Despite being repeatedly rebuked by popes.

[B]

Yes. Just a couple of years after he turned Catholic. It is interesting. And as a writer, that's such rich stuff to go towards that which you don't understand and vow not to falsify it in either direction. Just look at it, look at it, look at it. That's rich.

[A]

You know, your. For a long time you've been known as the kindness guy. You gave this famous speech. Yeah. See, there it is. And I can see you in interviews recently pushing back on it. Either way, you've become very uncomfortable with it. And I was thinking as we were talking, that compared to other times when I've spoken to you, it feels to me like the concept of the virtue, the practice you are circling has changed. It's truth. You've developed a view about truth that is lying at the core of what you're doing, certainly in this conversation.

[B]

I think so, yeah. I mean, the kindness thing. I made that one speech, you know, and I stand behind it, but it was kind of a simple.

[A]

It's your fault for making a good marriage, right?

[B]

No, but also, the speech says I suck at kindness, and it's too bad, you know? So then, of course, the way that things work is you talk about. If we had to talk about squirrels, and I said, I really love squirrels. That's gonna show up in the next seven interviews. So let's talk about your relation to squirrels. So it does kind of. It sort of replicates, you know, and I'm certainly for kindness, and I try to be nice, and I try to have good, good public manners. But in truth, it starts to work into people's interpretation of your work, as if that's what I'm trying to do, is model kindness in my work, which is so far from the truth of.

[A]

Your work, has always had a bite. What's your relationship to anger?

[B]

I have it all the time. I've had a rough couple years, and we had a lot of illness in the family and dog sick and all kinds of weird things. And most days I'm just a little agitated and kind of entitled and pissed off. A lot of days I'm struggling with that. So in the Buddhist tradition, that's a course. I mean, you have negative emotions. Who doesn't? And the whole thing is to try to work with those somehow. Maybe in some traditions, you. You could take a negative emotion and convert it to a positive emotion. So, I mean, this is the thing about this kindness shtick that bugs me is I can be struggling through a day with, say, with our sick dog. And what I'm doing all day is just trying to do the right thing for her and interrupt narratives of anxiety that I'm having about what I should be doing. How long do I have to do this before I have to rush off? That's a whole day. And then you get on a call and someone says, tell me about your approach to kindness. It seems so hypocritical that. And it seems so partial because, yes, kindness, of course, and empathy and all that stuff, but if you are an adult, that stuff has to take place on a much higher level than just intending to be kind.

[A]

I've been in my own period of change and growth and rupture, and part of that has been actually developing a closer relationship to anger. That there are many ways in which I have found trying to be kind sort of cut me off from my Own anger was so much more frightening an emotion to me. So I need to say nothing of an action than kindness. But there were things I wasn't seeing because I wasn't allowing that in. And part of what I've been going through personally is letting myself feel, if not act on more of my own negative emotions because there is truth in them, too, 100%. So tell me about the relationship for you between anger, between fury, between judgment and truth.

[B]

Well, I think, first of all, I think I had, or maybe still have a misunderstanding of kindness being niceness. Kindness is a deep concept, and it's not about nice. I think it's about being beneficial in the moment you're in. So kindness wouldn't have to be tidy and mincing. It's something else. And so I almost feel like striking that word from my personal vocabulary because it's confusing. So if you have. Have anger, then I would say the primary thing is to go, yeah, you know, it's almost like if you had hunger, what would it be like to go, oh, no, I'm not hungry, because that's not virtuous. You're hungry, that's all right. And then. So if you're angry, then I think the idea would be to think about, well, one, controlling it. I mean, that's okay. It's okay to control your anger and then also to think about the source of it and so on. All those kind of things we all do that could be construed as ultimately a form of kindness because you're dealing with what is true. You know, I had a young woman come up at this event, and she said, I can't write because I'm so anxious. And she was so sweet and so heartfelt about it, and you could see she was really struggling. And I thought, well, okay. And I said, well, what if you.

[A]

Said if I wasn't so anxious, I couldn't write.

[B]

That's what I said. That's what I said. I said, actually, your anxiety. Let's just not call it that. Let's turn a little bit and call it beautiful. High standards. Can you think of it that way? You know? And she goes, oh, maybe. I said, yeah, because you're anxious because you love this form so much, you don't want to mess it up. That's good, you know, so anyway, that whole process of taking anger going, yeah, of course I'm pissed off, you know, and in my work, that's exactly what I'm doing. I think I'm taking darkness and neurosis and OCD and anger and all that stuff and then putting it on the page and trying to work with it.

[A]

I find anxiety a lot easier to feel than anger and a lot easier to talk about than anger, because anxiety is like I am feeling, you know, that that elicits sympathy as opposed to.

[B]

It's a little glamorous in a way. Anxiety is a little glamorous.

[A]

Well, it's also become trendy.

[B]

I agree with that.

[A]

But what you just made me think of with that conversation you had with that woman is over the years, I've looked very deeply into my own anxiety. What I always noticed to be at its very bottom is energy.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And I really don't think I could do my work. A large amount of my work is the energy in me that becomes anxiety. Just harnessed to productivity.

[B]

I think it was. I don't remember who said it, but maybe Tina Fey said that. You could say, I'm nervous, or you could say, I'm excited. And they're similar. So the writers I work with at Syracuse, you can't truncate them. You can't say, don't be what you are. But you can say, can we together reconceptualize that thing that you're naming in a negative way? Just turn it slightly and see if it's not a virtue. Because it has to be. For a person to write a book that's powerful, they have to take everything that they have, and even the stuff that they've habitually labeled as negative can be turned. So anger. Well, really, in some situations, anger is just an appropriate reaction to injustice or to disalignment and misalignment. But for me, writing that's what you're doing. In every second, you're taking a sentence that's a little messed up and you're putting it on the table and going, ooh, okay, let's make that more specific. Let's just turn it a little bit. And suddenly it pops into something that's more truthful.

[A]

I am saying that I think you are. Something in your is changing, or something in the way you're at least presenting yourself is changing. I can feel your discomfort with one. But I want it because we've talked about truth so much here. I don't have any questions here on truth, because it's not a word that is coming up constantly in the book. You haven't done a big speech on it.

[B]

And it's lowercase truth. It's just truth.

[A]

But what is it? The way things are, the way they're supposed to be?

[B]

It's for you now, the way they are, the way. No, no, no. I don't know enough about it. It's the way things are. It's. I mean, but you can be out.

[A]

Of alignment with the way things are. So somehow.

[B]

Yeah, that's sin, as we said.

[A]

You said it's sin. But then what do you mean by the way things are? Because somebody out of alignment with the way things are is part of the way things are.

[B]

Yes. Truth just means from. From my. My point of view, what's happening right now. But also with a dose of skepticism about the way my mind answers that question, I read a beautiful quote by Tranko Rinpoche. He said everything that you. You feel and enjoy and hate and crave, he said it's all memory. So a certain loose relation to appearances that says this is all a dream or it's all a form of memory that's happening. So let's not get too attached to the way things appear and in our actions. Let's factor that in. So truth is just. Well, let's say what's not truth? What's not truth is your mind straight extreme. In a given situation, you walk into a party and you feel judged. You feel judged. Are people actually judging you? Maybe now you go into the party and you can sort of see, you.

[A]

Know, oh, honestly, man, nowadays, if you're me, they kind of are.

[B]

Okay, so. Right. But. But I mean that. That truth is not. I don't think it's anything lofty, but I think it's just saying in a given moment, can I sort through the various scale models that my mind is presenting to a quieter place? And in the quieter place, you're processing more data. So if you go to that party and your mind is quiet and you see somebody smiling at you, you go, oh, okay, note it. Or see somebody giving the side eye, you just note it more honestly. So I think truth is something you can. It's very simple. And again, for me to go local in a book, this is weird, and I can't really defend this in a piece of writing. Truth is what works. So if a certain. And of course, it's all by your standards as a writer, but if a certain part of the prose comes alive, there's truth in it.

[A]

That's why I asked about. And I'm not a daoist either, and I don't know that much about the dao, but what you were describing to me sounds a little bit more like the idea that there is a flow to the world. And I know people who are Facet of my life that I've been privileged to know. Some people who I think are fundamentally mystics and they're a little more in touch with something.

[B]

I thought you said mystics.

[A]

Mystics, mystics. They are a little more in touch with something than I am, and they move with less resistance than I do, and they feel currents that I don't. And to maybe make the argument for K.J. boone here for a moment, they are not the people trying to master nature, to make it possible to fly from Brazil to Japan or wipe out certain forms of illnesses and childhood illnesses. That there's something that is. Is a fascinating tension. I do believe there is something that you keep calling it truth. I think of it as a kind of current in life. And I think people who are at a higher level of spiritual attainment than I am can sometimes sense it.

[B]

Yeah, I know people like that, too. And I've heard it described as basic sanity. Like, are you in relation to what actually is?

[A]

And then there is the. There is something beautifully human and amazing about the struggle with the world as it is. The effort to change it. Not to master it, but to alter it. The way Keiji Boone is a villain in this book. The villainy to him is that he was an oil executive. He knew that climate change was happening and he lied and he sowed out about it. If you took that out, though, if you just said. If you actually separately imagine somebody who is the KJ Boon of clean energy, the KJ Boon of solar panels, that person might have all of his ambition and his energy and his ferocity and his aggression and his cruelty. They may have paddled over huge amounts of forest and that the people you can be trying to. To remake this world and be not obviously villainous about it, but it's gonna have villainy in it. There's going to be cost. There's going to be. I think there's something interesting in this being close to truth and then also this kind of trying to act upon the world and make it fundamentally different than the way it is.

[B]

Yeah, I'm not sure I feel that question.

[A]

Yeah. It doesn't feel true to you?

[B]

No, I mean, it's got a. Accepting that I don't. So I think if you. If you could put anybody in this book, in that bed, you know, but I think the reason it's him is because he's almost cartoonishly sinful. You know, he's done something. And I just, you know, I was back in maybe 2022, there was a string of weather disasters you know, and I was watching it almost funny, like, what would a climate change and I make of this? Could they still say nothing's happening? So it's really just an attempt to put somebody exaggeratedly evil into the book and let the world work on him. So I don't know.

[A]

But you don't feel any recognition of this other thing I'm saying, which is that you're circling this idea of truth. And the idea of truth to you is the world as it is.

[B]

A person's ability in a given moment to be open to what's actually happening.

[A]

Yes. And you don't feel that there is to some degree a tension between that and the better side of KJ Boon, which is a person's ability to look at the world and say, it should be radically different than it is.

[B]

Oh, I think it's beautiful. There's no problem. It's the thing that makes him problematic, is that he did that with something under his cloak. You know, he really wasn't in. He was both in and out of relation with what was real. He knew in some way that he was shilling a falsehood. So he wasn't in relation to things as they were, except in this false way. So, yeah, I don't see it. In other words, from a novelistic standpoint, everything is sacred. Everything is interesting, in other words. And ideally, you're just like in the 60s parliament digging it. Like, oh, wow, look at that. You know, a hustler, a con man, a criminal, a saint. It all occurs, and therefore it's worthy of your attention. And the best book would be one that I have not written yet, which lets all of that in with very minimal judgment and even, I think, a feeling of. Of, if we define it correctly, celebration. Like, oh, look, look at this universe. It's amazing.

[A]

Has anyone written that book?

[B]

Oh, yeah, Shakespeare. I mean, I think every great book has some, like, a little hint of that in there, you know, so the idea that you would. I mean, it kind of resonates what we talked earlier about specificity in the Best of Shakespeare. I think what you feel is a God's eye view of someone going, whoa, this is amazing. And laying out on altar without fear or favor and without the hardest thing to do for a writer, without tilting the board based on your own viewpoint, the vastness that you feel in him. And with this book, I worried a lot about because of the point of view. We're mostly in his point of view as mediated by Jill. I didn't have a chance to tell you my political Beliefs, my beliefs about climate change, I only could signal over the character's head to you. And that was. I could feel that as an act of tension and a sign of my immaturity as a writer, because I want you to know that I know he's a bad guy. Well, I think a more mature writer would be somewhat more open about that. Wouldn't be quite so fearful that his political agenda and his shtick was being hidden.

[A]

How old are you now?

[B]

300. Yeah, but I feel like somebody asked.

[A]

Me how old I feel the other day, and the number that came into my mind before I had thought up an answer was 58. I was like, oh, my God.

[B]

Wow, that's 41. That's very specific. I'm 67. Just turned 67.

[A]

Do you surprise yourself more now than you did when you were 40 or less?

[B]

Probably less, I think. I mean, in a way. Not in a negative sense, but the places where I expect surprise, that's narrowed. So I expect surprise when I'm writing, and that comes more. More. More surprises there. As a person, I would say. Well, actually, probably, yeah. I think less. I think, you know, things are a little more. More. More patterned, I think.

[A]

I ask from my own personal.

[B]

How do you feel about it?

[A]

I find I'm surprising myself, particularly recently, more than I did when I was in my twenties.

[B]

In what flavor? Professionally? Personally?

[A]

No, I mean professionally. A lot of things are surprising, but that's not what I mean here. I think I am. I think, in some ways, because I'm more settled in myself, I have noticed myself allowing myself to change more than I did at other times. I think I was more afraid of being out of control, of parts of me cracking or having to open. And now I've been through that process of internal rupture a few times, and.

[B]

You can survive it.

[A]

And so I think I'm more open to the idea that in different periods, I will have to change.

[B]

I think at this point, one of the things that gets a little scary is that the blind spots get bigger. You know, there are things when you're younger, I think the world hits you in ways that makes you aware of the blind spots. And I think as you get older, and especially as you get, like, you know, I have a teaching life, and I have most of the areas of my life allow me to think I'm all right, you know? And so then your blind spots sit there very happily, and they just expand, you know, so that can be. That can be scary. But I think that for me, writing is the one way where a lot of that gets overturned. But then also I guess just in terms of like repetition, the number of things that you've done and seen and thought, just the sheer volume over the years, it starts to put you into a better relation with truth. So, for example, I remember this is when I turned 40, but I was walking to teach at Syracuse and I was having a certain thought stream, a certain kind of pre teaching nervous, you know, mind fart basically. And I thought, oh my God, I've been having this since I was 8 years old. You know, kind of the little pep talk you give yourself when you're feeling nervous. And at that point I thought, I wonder if I'll be doing this when I'm 90. And a little boy said, yeah, of course you will. That's, you know, so that stuff happens more and more and you start to see yourself as a kind of pattern, repetitive being for better or worse. And that kind of makes for a certain relaxation, like, oh, I'm just trapped. I'm trapped inside this guy and I can work with him a little more, maybe something like that.

[A]

I think that's a lovely place to end. Always. Our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

[B]

Well, there's one, I'm sure you read this, but I Will Bear Witness by Victor Klemperer. It's an incredible.

[A]

I bought this recently, but I have not read it yet.

[B]

It's incredible. And there's one volume that covers it.

[A]

Can you describe what it is?

[B]

Yeah, somebody described it well as, as the first book that shows the Holocaust in color as opposed to black and white. So he's a professor, I think he's in Dresden. And there's this unforgettable scene where he goes into the butcher who he's known for years, and the butcher says, herr Professor, I'm so sorry, but I, you know, it's not me, it's Berlin. And he can't sell him meat anymore. And so his world gets constricted. He loses his office, then he loses his job, then he loses his house. But it happens over, I think about a five year period. So reading that now, it's kind of amazing how relatively slowly it's happening and then every so often something seeps in. So it's a really interesting read for right now. And then the other one, I would recommend, I maybe have recommended it before because I love it so much, but it's Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel, the Jewish Russian writer. And I think what speaks to me about that book right now is it's so chaotic. It's written from different points of view. You. And it doesn't really underscore who's speaking to you. And the kind of very, very understated through line of the book is this Jewish kid throws him at the revolution and they go back and forth over Poland, mistreating Jews and mistreating everybody. And so his heart slowly starts to turn against the revolution. So I think it speaks to me of the way I feel about the country right now. That symbol, as you sit on a truth, it gets knocked out from under you. And that kind of kaleidoscopic feeling. And then the third one would be maybe more of an antidote. It's a beautiful book called the Place of Tides by James Rebanks. Nonfiction. And he goes to an island, I think it's off Iceland. And he lives with this woman who is. Her job is to collect eiderdown. And there's an elaborate process where you lure the ducks in by being very quiet, basically, and setting up little environments that they'll like. And then they come in and they leave Eider down, which is then collected and sold. But it's such a quiet, beautiful, meditative book. It's got true, like what I would call rising action, but so subtle. And it just made me think a lot about how much we miss with the speed of our lives and the technology. And this book works that way. You start reading it and it really announces that it's going to take its time. And then slowly, it's just buildings, this beautiful kind of color crescendo at the end.

[A]

George Saunders, thank you very much.

[B]

Thank you so much for having me.

[A]

This episode of the Israel Clancho is produced by Annie Galvin. Fact Checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones Jones, Efim Shapiro and Amit Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Marie Cassion, Marina King, Jack McCordick, Kristin Lin, Emma Kelbeck and Jan Kobel. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Semiluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times pending audio is Annie Rosedraw.