George Saunders has no faith in Christian nationalism

0:00Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com.

0:30The New Statesman.

0:35Hi, George. This is Tanjil Rashid from The New Statesman. I'm very, very excited to be meeting you very shortly. Very interested in getting stuck into your new book, your life, your very interesting life, your faith, which is a topic of great interest to me. Yeah, very excited to be speaking to you soon. Thank you. Hatanjo, so nice to hear from you, and I can't wait to meet you momentarily and talk about all things large and small and amaze your audience with our wit. See you soon. For decades, George Saunders was known for his short stories. In 2013, in a Time magazine 100 Most Influential People listing, he was described as the best short story writer in English.

1:22But then something changed, both for Saunders and for the literary world. In 2017, he released his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, a reimagining of Abraham Lincoln's grief in the aftermath of his son Willie's death. It's a genre-defying piece of literature narrated by no less than 166 ghosts. Lincoln in the Bardo won the Booker Prize. This year, it's being transformed into an opera. The Bardo is a concept borrowed from Saunders' adopted faith, Buddhism, an intermediate state between death and reincarnation. In his latest novel, Vigil, Saunders returns to the in-between, this time through a dying oil baron grappling with his morality at the 11th hour in a burning world.

2:08I'm Tanjal Rashid and you're listening to The Exchange from The New Statesman. I sat down with George Saunders earlier this year to discuss faith in his writing as a means of optimism and as a political weapon in today's world.

2:24do you believe in ghosts i do because i saw i've seen one in my life and it was my uh my grandfather passed away when i was 10 and um you know kind of unexpectedly and uh the night of the funeral i think or maybe the next night i woke up in bed and i wasn't afraid but i just knew there was something at the edge of bed it was kind of a dark form i just sat and i just got a real strong feeling of it's okay. Don't worry about me. It's okay. And you're going to be fine too. And I think the reason I believe it, because it wasn't frightening. And in the middle of it, I thought, am I asleep? And I wasn't.

2:59So one ghost so far. So you actually met a ghost? I didn't meet him. I knew him already. Yeah. I mean, I kind of make light of it, but it was quite deep because in my mind, it was the first death that I'd known about. And so as a 10-year-old, it's kind of the finality of, or alleged finality is shocking. And so just to have that little reassurance that whatever it was, it wasn't completely tragic or completely unworkable somehow, you know. I mean, you can understand why I might ask you that question as a reader of your books, right? Yes, yes. I mean, I've recently read your new book and I found myself wondering, is this character who falls from the sky, having been on Earth previously alive, whether this character is indeed a ghost.

3:55She's something. I think she'd be offended to produce her in that way, but she's kind of an angel, kind of a guardian angel. But the way I think of these characters, and also in Lincoln and the Bardo, the previous book, is that they're kind of like interrupted energies. So the energy comes out of the body and it's they're still conscious and still somewhat communicative. And so whatever habits they had in life or obsessions or feelings of shortcoming that that just sort of jumps over the cliff and is there for us to to witness. You know, they're not they're not in white sheets. They're just kind of in their human form.

4:31Yes. I mean, it's interesting you mentioned angels because that was my other my other interpretation. You know, is Jill an angel or a ghost? I mean, I've heard a lot of interesting concepts here, you know, ghosts, angels, God, energy, karma. The Bardo, a crucial concept in Lincoln in the Bardo, the concept of the afterlife or this sort of not the afterlife, but a liminal space, transitional space. You know, in my religion, we call it the Baza. So lots of different concepts. I mean, what actually are your beliefs? I mean, some would wonder. Well, I'm a Buddhist, but kind of a beginner. One of our friends who's a real Buddhist said I'm a fellow traveler in Buddhism.

5:18But I think I was Catholic as a young kid. And I suppose, I mean, I think I'm a Tibetan Buddhist in the Nyingma tradition. so um i guess for me the the primary thing i believe in is that we a person has the ability to um watch the mind at work you know see treat the mind as kind of a a thing and and you can watch it and then you can also uh train it you know to um well in my case to try to quiet it down a little bit and then in the quieting down i notice there's often kind of an uprush of more positive emotions. So that's about as far as I've got with it. I mean, how does someone from Texas end up as a Tibetan Buddhist?

6:04I mean, you know, marry my wife. Paul is very wise. And we're both, she was from South Dakota and she was, her family was quite religious in the kind of, what would you call it, like an evangelical tradition and i was a from chicago actually at the beginning strong roman catholic so what we had in common was we had some kind of spiritual you know spiritual basis and then when we got together we were just kind of you know humanitarian you know kind of just writers and then we had kids we both started looking around and we got into the episcopal church and then at one point she wanted to learn about meditation and went to a tibetan retreat and came home just like really interested.

6:45And then I, so as always, I just followed her lead. Clearly that, that, um, faith of yours, uh, Buddhism is very influential on your, on your work. How would you characterize the exact relationship between Buddhism and your writing? I mean, would you consider yourself a, but not just a Buddhist, but a Buddhist writer? Yes. I think for me, I was a Buddhist before I knew what it was. And that was through writing because the early, with my first book, uh, just first having the idea that you could, read your text as if you hadn't written it and react to it very freshly, just whatever you felt like you could act on it.

7:22And I think that's somewhat similar to meditation. Because in other words, when I was younger, I had the idea you mentioned earlier, I have an idea and I'm going to impose it on the text. But in this new way of writing, it was much more playful and kind of open and you would read a text and see your text and see how it was and then you could change it. So I think in a similar way with what little I know about meditation has something to do with recognizing that your mind is always making projective thoughts and analytical thoughts. And we mistake those thoughts for ourselves. But actually, there's just kind of brain fartage, you know.

7:56And so just to be able to say there is such a thing as perception with a quieter mind, which is actually more accurate. I think I got that from writing. One way that it seems your writing is quite influenced by Buddhism or spirituality is your use of the surreal and the supernatural and symbolism. And these are all things that I think people with especially a background or belief in Eastern religions are kind of more inclined to. And Rishi talks about the way coming from India where gods and demons are completely real and so on. It becomes a lot easier to innovate something like magic realism because it's a natural evolution.

8:50Would you say something similar is at play in the relationship between your use of the surreal and your faith? I would say it goes back earlier than that to growing up in Chicago as a Catholic kid. because there was in the Catholic Church, there's a lot of symbols and a lot of rituals and so on. And then also, honestly, I mean, the pop culture of that time was, you know, we were really interested in the 1940s monster movies with the Wolfman and so on. So I think, I'm not sure, but I would say somewhere in there, there's the idea that if you want to break through the plane of conventionality, the supernatural is the way to do it.

9:30whether you believe in it or not you know if you if you put a ghost in a story even if you don't believe in ghosts it it adds an extra dimension of temporality because now you can have a ghost from long ago uh it also changes the rhetoric because suddenly a ghost can have a very strange belief system and be in your story so um you know i i had a strange experience with the movie jaws when i was a young kid i wasn't much of a reader i went to movies and that movie just i found it amazing, mostly the emotional reaction of the room. I couldn't, I could feel the power of that, that somebody had put this thing together and it had a whole room of adults quaking in fear and screaming and laughing.

10:11So I saw that movie something like six times in the theater. And I think that, but that's a very crazy movie. I mean, but it has a certain mythic power. It does. We're talking about it, you know, years hence and people keep watching it again and again. It's a classic. And that shark's not a real shark. I mean, it's not, it's a mechanical shark, but also no shark in history behaved like that. So even there I could see that the pushing of the envelope past the realistic was part of the power of the thing. So I think I internalized it even that early. Let's go back to your childhood, which you've alluded to a little.

10:40I mean, where are you from? What was your childhood like? What kind of world did you come from? I mean, many of your readers would like to know because in some ways your books are not place-specific in the way other writers clearly draw on their childhoods and so on. So tell us a bit about that. Well, I was born in Texas, and my dad was in the Air Force and met my mom in a dance, and they got married there. And then when I was one, they moved to Chicago, the South Side, working class neighborhood. And my dad sold coal to apartment buildings, so kind of a pretty interesting life, and he would come home from work with these people.

11:19What year is this? um i was born in 58 so we moved to chicago in 59 and it was all through the 70s we lived in the same house so we moved once but he would come home from his job and just um he's a great storyteller and he would come home and say you're never going to believe i got held up against a coke machine with a gun to my head today and you know so but he always had a happy and he was always um excited what was this were these made up stories no did they actually happen no it was during the 60s in Chicago were quite tumultuous. So he had at one point, a mob tried to overturn his car. And so a lot of things, but what I took from that was he always came home kind of overjoyed to have had the experience.

11:59And he would always quickly convert it into a pretty funny narrative. He had a way of shaping the stories that made them very funny. So they were dark and they were funny and they had a real core of truth in them. And especially what I noticed is people love to hear him. He'd come a party and everybody would kind of come by to hear him tell a story so um we're in a working class life lots of joking a lot of i mean in this 60s 70s the currency was stand up or you know like sitcom so or rather like like snl kind of stuff so one of the ways that we could get some attention in the neighborhood is to tell jokes or to do voices to do stay in character so that was just for fun.

12:40But then years later, I was kind of stuck as a writer. I wasn't doing much. And that door opened up. I thought, of course, humor, funny, dark stuff that has maybe a slightly sentimental edge. And that all kind of came pouring in. So in a way, you imbibed these sort of popular narrative traditions, but it didn't occur to you to draw on them. No, not for an embarrassingly long time. Because for me as a working class kid, I thought, well, yeah that's the neighborhood but literature is something much something i can't do you know anything i can't do is literature so there was a crisis where i i think for probably six or seven years through grad school i was writing very serious kind of hemingway hemingway-esque narratives and they weren't going anywhere and so after one particular disaster i just uh i was at work and i just wrote these i kind of in despair really i wrote these kind of scatological Dr.

13:35Seussian poems that were kind of off color and funny. And then I would, and I illustrated them on the opposite page of cartoons and brought that home and just kind of put it aside. And my wife found it and she started laughing and she really, so for the first time in about 10 years, somebody was actually enjoying my writing and a little valve throughout my mind, like I had that, of course, of course you want the reader to have fun. So then how do you have fun? And then it turns out that if you have fun, for me, that's how the meaning gets made. It doesn't get made by me constructing it and then delivering it.

14:07It's the actual process of having fun on the page somehow lets the world in. And then you get into this enviable state where you're having fun and suddenly you don't know what to do next. That's the best because then you're like, well, okay, I don't know what to do, but at least the world is in the book. And now we can, you know, find out. A lot of writers describe this trying period when they don't realize that the resources of their life are valid for literary treatment. I mean, you know, Roth talks about, Philip Roth talks about how, you know, it didn't occur to him that, you know, his garrulous sort of Jewish childhood friends, you know, could be characters in literature or, you know, his parents and that kind of thing.

14:54and eventually you know you know the penny drops yes and it seems so obvious when yeah that's beautiful that's beautifully put and i work with my students at syracuse and that's part of the job is to not say that but to be aware of it and watch and see when do they uh inadvertently become themselves for a few paragraphs and often that's tied in with some kind of suppression you know if a kid is from a very difficult economic background they cleanse that out or if a person has another situation, they cleanse it out. And there are actually technical tells in the language where you can see that someone has done a little avoidance.

15:31So it's very... I mean, you mentioned Syracuse. This is Syracuse University where you're a very distinguished professor of creative writing. But let's go back. I mean, getting to that point, it's a long journey, let's say. Very long, yeah. So you were growing up in Chicago. Did you enjoy school? No. Well, I enjoyed it because I didn't do anything. I just showed up and goofed around. And then you had this extraordinary period where you were doing jobs like roofing and working in slaughterhouses. Tell me about that time. Well, there was something before that. I had a teacher named Joe Lindblom and his wife, Sherry Lindblom, who saw something in me in high school.

16:13and they actually made a phone call to the School of Mines in Colorado and talked me into the school. So I went to college for engineering, but all the time I had writing in my mind. And then through that job, I got to go to Asia and work in the oil fields, and then got sick and came home, and then I started doing every job I could get, roofing and everything. So you already had a trained— I had a degree, yeah. You had a profession. I did. You were a geophysicist, an engineer. But then I goofed around so long that the degree kind of lost its value. So then I was just doing – and part of my mind was like, well, yes, these are bad jobs, but also I'm learning about the American system and now, you know, for my writing.

16:53Yeah, yeah. And I mean, to study at the Colorado School of Mining, I mean, you studied engineering, physics? Geophysical engineering. Geophysical engineering, which is very different from – well, I don't know. Maybe it's very similar to writing, but ordinarily one wouldn't think of it as being particularly literary. Do you have a scientific imagination as well as a literary one? It turns out no. I had really struggled. But what it taught me was, one, it taught me that a valuable thing for writers is that effort doesn't equal result. So I worked so hard in that school. I studied ungodly hours, and it was still sub-mediocre.

17:34so that was character building to think okay and so when later when i started writing it didn't really matter i mean sometimes someone will say i did 40 drafts it must be good not true if it's not good it's not good so i had a lot i still have a lot of patience for that you know if it if it um i don't i don't say i've i've already worked this long on it it doesn't matter so that was one thing and then the other thing is there was something in the in that training that was very logical and rational and it helps uh for for story logic you know in other words if sort of an if then world where if you have said this much in a story then this these things are precluded and so i think um sometimes i think a story is a bit like a proof like a mathematical proof you know it has to it has to be shapely and it has to be to the point and if it gets if somewhere in the proof there's an inefficiency it it's not good you have to take it out so that That's kind of helped me in writing.

18:28That's wonderful. And, you know, I mean, there's something mathematical about writing. Yes, there is. Yeah. And you worked in the oil industry. I mean, what was that like? Was that tough? Was it, I mean, you know, you're interested in the environment and, you know, tell me a bit about that. Oh, it was just glorious at that age. I was 22 and I'd never been out of the States. And I got a job for pretty good money working in Indonesia. never you know so went on sumatra for a couple years and uh you know we we were quite imperialist oppressors we just went into these virgin rainforests and cut trails and and showed told the company where to drill and so for a 22 year old it was just um an adventure and at the same time i i could think ah this is there's something funny about the way this group of expatriates is behaving and I didn't feel comfortable with that.

19:22But I loved that I could get kind of behind the curtain of that. In other words, if a journalist had gone to that place and said, what do you do? They would only gotten the outside story, but I got to be in the meetings. So there was one that was kind of, I've never forgotten, this is very Kafka or early Kafka experience. I was in the next room and I could hear the kind of bosses talking about the progress of that month. And it soon became clear that we were reporting results on one grid and they were translating those results to another grid, which meant that all of this millions of dollars they were spending to be told where to drill was being randomized.

20:02And they were drilling, you know, because we had two different maps, we were using two different grids. So we would give them a location, they would drill in exactly the wrong place. And that had been going on for five or six years, millions of dollars of, and they were still hitting pretty often, you know, so, but then there was this, this really beautiful, maybe it was the, this beautiful silence where everybody at the table realized this colossal mistake they'd been making and also realized it would be harmful for everybody in the room to admit it. So there's a lot of polite talk. Well, this was unfortunate, but certainly we should agree to not, you know, And it just died on the line.

20:39So a journalist would never have gotten into that position. So it was valuable in some ways. If you're enjoying this conversation, please subscribe to receive all episodes of The Exchange. Stay with us. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back after this.

20:58This message is brought to you by Coligard. If you recorded songs off the radio for a mixtape, it might be time to scream for colon cancer. The Cologuard test is non-invasive, requires no special prep or time off, and you start screening right from your home. It's just three simple steps. Set up, sample, and ship. If you're 45 or older and at average risk, ask your doctor about the Cologuard test. Available by prescription only. Learn more or request a prescription at Cologuard.com slash podcast. Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you.

21:42Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com.

21:59i mean sumatra i think you know it's it's a place with a history of buddhist hindu etc um spirituality and you know religion is in the cult that religion is in the culture do you have any at that time any exposure to that well actually yes there were i mean it was funny I hadn't thought of this in years but there were we worked with there were two or three expats on a large crew of Sumatrans and there was a quite animist and how do you say it and yeah there was an idea of spirits and of yeah and and I saw several things that made me think that it was true there was a you know for example there was a man who used to come to the crew He was a contractor, kind of a powerful guy.

22:49And they called him Hatchet because he couldn't be killed by a hatchet. And I thought, oh, that's quaint. And then I talked to several people. No, it's true. We've seen it. Or there were other stories. Would you be inclined to believe that? Well, normally no, but in that place, yes. I absolutely – I felt almost like you're in a different world. that the um somehow it just felt like the the environment was different and that was kind of deep because i i'd never really you know i guess i would have thought there's the real and there's the unreal but in that place it felt it felt different so it's just a slight opening of my mind to some of those ideas you know because there was something um you could feel you could feel that my attitude was actually not correct you know and that there's something more powerful going on So that was a kind of beautiful experience.

23:47And then you go back to the States, you leave the industry, and then you have this sort of apprenticeship of kind of working life. That's a very generous way of putting it. Yeah. And were you conscious at that point that I need to become a writer and this is what writers do? Yeah, more of that. And I wasn't reading very much and I wasn't writing very much. I liked the idea of being a writer, but I wasn't doing the work. And actually, I had an experience when I was in Asia. So we would work four weeks on and get two weeks off paid so you could go all over the world. And I went to the Afghan border.

24:24And with Hemingway in mind, I thought, oh, I'll go in and then I'll write about it. So I got - What was this, sorry? It was while the Russians were there. Oh, my God. So in 83, 84, something like that. So in the middle of a war. Yeah. And that was my - I thought, that'll be great. I'll just go in there and type it up. You know, kind of an idiot. So I managed to get into a – the Mujahideen had a kind of an R &R building just over the border. Somehow I found it and I went there several days in a row, interviewed, took photos. And finally one of the men said, okay, we kind of know you, but you can go into Afghanistan tomorrow.

25:00We're sending in some soldiers. And he said, however, you have to get clothing that's appropriate. Okay, no problem. and you can't wear your glasses because the gunships will see the glint. And I'm kind of a little bit blind without them, but okay, I can do that. So I was ready to go. I mean, did none of this frighten you? No, because I was a macho idiot. And I thought, well, Hemingway did it. That's how you become a great writer. So this was a big moment. I went back to the hotel and I was going to go at 8 in the morning with these men and quit my job and vanish into the Hindu Kush. And I sat there all night and I thought of my mother.

25:38and I thought if I get killed she's going to be devastated you know and then part of my mind said well that's just how it is you know I said and then the other part said no it isn't that's your mother you know and and I thought oh I'm chickening out you know and I had a long talk with myself and one of the exchanges went like this um why do you want to let's be honest with ourselves this is important why do you want to go there the other part said because I want to be a great writer the first part says, have you written anything lately? Second part, sheepishly, well, no, not really. Other part, why do you think Hemingway is famous?

26:15Because he went to a war? A lot of people went to that war. And so I realized that it was a quite empty thing to be going into this dangerous situation for an idiotic reason. When in fact, what I needed to do was figure out how to write. And then it didn't have to be a war. It could be a scene at a grocery store or a family drama. great writing is great because it's you know it's human so that was really difficult because all my macho impulses said you can't back out but this kind of almost like i think it was my future 40 year old self was talking to me more reasonably and so i just didn't go i came back to the job and didn't go thank goodness you know that would have been a very uh wasteful thing to do actually but it led to quite a profound realization that you know you didn't have to go out into the world to mine the world for stories.

27:05I mean, stories are everywhere. Exactly, yeah. And you realize that eventually. Yes, and the corollary of that was you can talk about writing as much as you like. In order to do it, you have to be a practitioner. You have to be a crafts person. You have to read and you have to sit down. So that was a big turning point because I kind of called myself on my own bluff and therefore experience was not the metric. It was the actual sitting down and writing something. despite having led such an interesting life in reality i mean in sumatra afghanistan this is a reality that you haven't written about maybe in memoir form or or you know i mean why is that um i mean the simplest answer is i can't make it come alive flannery o 'connor says a writer can choose what he writes but he can't choose what he makes live so i when i was younger i did i wrote the, you know, the Asia oil field book.

28:00And it just sat there. It wasn't, there was no magic in it. So then you're kind of left to say, well, I want to convey something essential about what life feels like to me, but I don't necessarily have to use the facts of my life to get there. You know, so I sometimes use example, if you want it to be a writer of string quartets, and you wrote them and everybody fell asleep. All right. But if you pick up an accordion, and people dance, then that's your mode. So I think to concentrate more on the actual experience of reading a story and know that all my experience is in there. If the story is about a theme park, all of that working experience is in there.

28:40So I think fiction can exist to tell a kind of higher order truth than just the biographical truth. And so for me, it was a big day when I realized that I probably would never write an autobiographical story. It just doesn't doesn't interest me because it doesn't come alive because it doesn't interest me. But you are seemingly at least inspired by certain historical characters, you know, Abraham Lincoln. Tell me a bit more about that. I mean, what are your other interests? I don't have too many. I have the music, my family, music, dog. I don't have, I'm not someone who... So you're not interested in history?

29:15Only in a very amateur way. So where did this Lincoln idea come from? I just many years ago, we drove past that cemetery. Right. And my wife's cousin pointed up and said, did you know that Lincoln, his son died and was buried in that crypt? And Lincoln went into the crypt on several occasions. I thought, my God, what? That's amazing, you know. So it was just hearing that story. And then over the next 20 years, I kind of casually would read about that, you know, or read around it. And so it wasn't really – it was the human component of that, that a father would be so grief-stricken that he would go in and actually interact with the body.

29:52That seemed otherworldly. And also at that time, the idea – this was during the Clinton administration. And the idea that the president could leave the White House and go there by himself was interesting. So I don't really – I mean, I do like certain pockets of history, but not obsessively. What about politics? I'm interested in them, but I don't know very much. so i'm just another old progressive you know i mean i mean now and you are a progressive yeah oh well i would i mean now i'm a centrist because everything's gone so far right you know but yes i'm a progressive and um i'm kind of a steinbeck progressive you know i think that the uh the american idea is a very good one and even though we've never retained it it would be worth to continue trying so of course it's a very so you still have faith in american ideals ideas yeah Yeah, execution, I'm not sure.

30:40Because, you know, I recently saw this documentary on Seymour Hirsch, who was the journalist who discovered My Lai. And you think, okay, this isn't exactly new. It's out of proportion, but it's not new. This right-wing sort of Christian nationalism, it's not new at all. So I think the ideas are very sound, but the execution is who knows. How do you feel about Christian nationalism or Christian revivalism in the United States? It's not, I mean, by my lights, it's not Christianity. It's just a, you're taking some very conventional, somewhat obnoxious beliefs and cloaking them in Christ. And if one was to study Christ's teachings, that I think we did as Catholics, it would make you more compassionate and more open like the Pope is.

31:30So I think it's a way to be ultra-conventional and act as if you're in touch with something spiritual. But it's anything that makes a person harsh and cruel and denies the existence of another person to me is not religion. So religious conservatism is just a sort of misnomer. It's just – I think so. I mean, I know there are – in any religion there are exceptions. But if you look at Christian nationalism movement, it's so mean-spirited and it works to exclude so many people. And I just don't. Why do so many Christians go in for that? I think it, I mean, I don't know, but I think there's an American middle-mindedness that's been with us forever.

32:16You know, kind of the stolid center that isn't particularly interested in self-critique or in literature. And I think there's some kind of a conflation of God and whatever I happen to already believe. And so it's very comforting to say, my intuition is this. Oh, look, God is with me. And I think that's what a lot of this Christian national, you know, there's old ideas of bias against people of color and gay people and queer people of all kinds. And that's been in existence forever. And now we just invoke Christ. and I don't think Christ would be wild about that actually. You know, he teaches us something quite different.

32:57But are there some legitimate forms of political Christianity? Well, you know, let's say of the left or, you know, let's say Martin Luther King and so on. I mean, Christianity can have a role in politics. Of course, of course. I mean, when I was a kid, Dorothy Day was a big figure in the Chicago Catholic and she was all about good actions and inspires. So I think it's just, you know, Christ has been claimed by so many people. And so if someone is in open-hearted, genuine, curious relationship with Christ, of course, it's wonderful. But I think what we're seeing is that it's very easy to just say the word, you know, like the churches that are about success, you know, and they say if you believe in Christ, you'll have a nice house.

33:44The prosperity gospel. Prosperity gospel. why you know so i i like so many things you know we can have um the devil's in the details and so is god you know you have how do you practice it how do you um and goes back to humility that we discussed earlier you know if you if you are um hoping to have god in your life then humility is a big part you should say i i can't know god god is beyond me but i can hope that some of whatever god is will percolate into me but i have to be very careful not to use it to oppress other people or to stifle my own curiosity or humility. This kind of politics is obviously, everyone knows, strongest in the South.

34:24You have some roots there. But now you live on the East Coast? In California, actually. Oh, in California, right. What's your relationship to America, your sense of American places? I mean, you know, what's home for you? Actually, home is where my wife and kids are. we've moved a lot so i i uh as a as a sort of older dude my inclination is to know how to answer that question but as an artist i think i don't actually know america is so different now even than when i was a kid and you'll go to texas and there are incredible uh blue enclaves and red enclaves and purple and the shifts so i don't really um i'm just curious about all of it i i like to travel i like to talk to people so you're a kind of migrant within within well yeah i mean we certainly move as much fairly often.

35:16But also I do some reporting and I covered the Trump campaign in 2016. And I actually love that. Yeah. Just to kind of open my curiosity up and just let the data, you know, and ultimately I think it helps your fiction writing, you know, because whatever is up here is going to come into the invention. So the more you can put in there, and you don't have to judge it or decide about it. You just have to expose yourself to it. So I lived in a homeless camp for a week in Fresno and drove to a whole Mexican border and went to the Trump rallies. And I just think, yeah, I don't have to decide. I just have to have that experience and then it'll percolate down into my writing.

35:53What's next for you? Oh, I don't know. I mean, I'd like to write another novel, but at this point I have no idea what about it. You have to discover it. Yeah. Yeah. Discover it. And I think the one idea I always have is that there's some representation of life, or maybe let's say American life, that would have just the right mix of humor and pathos and seriousness, and especially good and evil. I'm really curious about these things we call good and evil and how they work together, because I don't think anybody wakes up in the morning saying, I plan to be evil today, and yet there's so much evil in the world.

36:30Do you believe in evil, good and evil? Well, I believe they're concepts, and I don't think they're quite capacious enough to... Do they have a metaphysical reality? Do you believe in something like the devil? I don't, actually. I think it's a very useful concept. And I believe that people can be demonic, you know. But in my epistemology, I don't really believe in a paternalistic god or a devil. That doesn't really... It seems to me like by Occam's razor, you don't need that. you know if you look at the mind you can you can understand everything about good and evil so for me it's more uh interesting both as a person as a writer to say what if we disable the word good and evil to just take those out of vocabulary then look and see what's happening that that's very interesting to me because clearly there are there is good and evil by that conventional you know use of the word but what if we took those conceptual markers out what could be learned about the way human beings you know interact and of course it's all present in every one of us but at times your worldview as it comes across in your fiction can seem a little bleak sometimes you've come over as skeptical of progress um yeah well that's something i'd like to i mean i i one of my goals is to try to if that's true to sort of correct the balance because i've certainly had beautiful experiences and been so fortunate in so many ways so if the if that view is slanted in favor of the bleak it might just be a technical problem on my part so so to i'd love to have an authentic representation of bounty and beauty and generosity alongside a equally uh beautiful presentation of nastiness and ugliness because that seems to be what the world is the flux between those two but leaving aside the technical question what do you believe i mean is the world getting better or worse no i don't i don't i mean it would be uh you know is the ocean warmer or cooler well it kind of depends where you're standing and i don't i don't think in general the world is getting better or worse i think if you look at it from um well from a buddhist perspective there's uh we we suffer and we suffer because we're out of touch with reality you know we're deluded but i don't i don't really think um i i don't think the world is going to get better or worse it's just it's just a big broiling system you know and for many one of the comforts of faith is being able to look forward to a better world whether in this world or the afterlife what do you think i think that's valid but in what i know of buddhism the way to make the world better is to get your mind trained because there's no uh there's a buddhist saying that you know you you couldn't pave the entire world but you could have better shoes you know so i so i i do believe that very strongly and i've experienced it i've had times where i was for some reason more awake and alert and less tortured by monkey mind and those were good times and other times where my neurotic mind has taken over and that's close to hell so for me that's that's enough to work with is what's my mind doing in this moment is there anything i can do to um make my mind more open and positive and there are practices to do that.

39:50I actually learned that story as a child. The Bengali poet Tagore wrote the story that it's rather than pave the whole world with leather, invent shoes. Right, right, right. That's it. And I think that, I mean, for me, especially at this age, you think, when I was younger, I thought, well, what will happen in this generation is all the problems will be fixed. That's not going to happen. But it's so, So just from experientially the range of the very best day I ever had and the worst day, the difference was actually my mind. Not circumstance, but it was the way that my mind was receiving it. So that's, I think, a fundamentally optimistic idea because at least you could change it.

40:34Well, whether the world is getting better or worse, I guess, you know, we'll find out. We'll find out, yeah.

40:45You've been listening to The Exchange with me, Tanjil Rashid and George Saunders. This episode was produced by Catherine Hughes. The Exchange will be back next week.

41:10finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com.