Welcome to Zero, I am Akshatrati. This week an Oil CEO in the Bardo. A decade ago, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh gave a series of lectures titled The Great Derangement, where he argued that contemporary fiction in all forms has been ignoring the climate crisis and that was adding to the peril humans already faced. Many have heeded his call sins in the form of books, movies, plays, even oratorio.
So this year on Zero, we are running a series called Imagine to delve into what some of our most creative minds can do to help us better understand our predicament. My guest today is George Saunders, one of America's best storytellers. You may know him for his twenty seventeen novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize. This week, George has a new novel out titled.
Vigil in a Nutshell.
We find ourselves at the bedside of somebody who I imagined to be kind of a nineteen ninety eight to two thousand era oil executive. The last night of his life, the last hours of his life, were joined by a woman, the ghost of a woman who died in nineteen seventy six, so somewhat I guess, like as in a Christmas Carol, she's there to help him, but then it kind of goes, it goes a little sideways from there.
I wanted to bring George on the show to ask him how he approached writing this book and what his exploration of climate change revealed. The first half of my interview focuses largely on visual and in the second half we brought in the conversation hearing George's takes on AI while literature matters, and even get to talk about games to get writing as a beginner. This conversation was a lot of fun, and I hope you enjoy it as much.
As I did.
Send your suggestions and book reviews on Zero port at Bloomberg dot net. And sorry about this wise, I have a little bit of a cold jeoorgh. Welcome to Zero.
It's very nice to be here. Thank you for having me.
Fiction opens up a vast expanse of subjects that a writer can touch on throughout your career. You know you've touched on things like theme parks and the afterlife, but in Vigil you put climate at the heart of the conversation why climate change and why now?
Well, honestly, I was starting this book back when Biden was still president and when it looked like some strides were being made maybe in the direction of at least acknowledging the reality of climate change. Little did I know where we were headed, But at that time I thought, well, it's kind of the most.
Important thing for the world and in.
The world, So I'll try to put climate on the table. I don't think I, you know, the idea of climate change novel seems a little bit daunting. So I think sometimes you put a topic on the table and you don't really know what the novel will be about or what it will end up being. But if you put significant things on the table, at least the book won't be trivial.
So my thought was, what.
Would it be like some of these people who were so working so hard to deny climate change, now they're getting old. If one of those guys was dying and he looked back at his life's work, would it be a shred of honesty about what he had done? Or you know, is he still feel like he's in the right place, Which then raises a question of how much does a person like that know when do they know it? So it opened out into all kinds of questions that are probably I think relevant for anybody who's lived a
life and expended their energy. And at the end you get to look back and go, how did I do?
So?
It seemed like an intriguing challenge at any rate, and at this stage of my career, I just want a challenge is going to be some fun.
One of the funnest part of writing is to do the research to try and find out more about the world as you describe it to the reader while working on visual What kind of research did you end up doing?
I did some I would say medium intense research at the beginning. And what I tend to do is I do some a deep dive and I read nothing but that topic for quite a while.
I compile it all on.
A folder, and then I put the folder away and never look at it again. Because as a fiction writer, you know, one of the big problems is you could become sort of attached to your research to the extent that the book just becomes a book report about your researchers.
Nobody wants.
So my thought is, and this was true in my previous novel, Lincoln in the Bartow I thought, I just get as well informed as a pretty well informed amateur, so that when you invent, you're not inventing totally divorced from reality, you know. So there was probably two or three months of intense reading and then just okay, you know something, and now you can go ahead and make up some crazy stuff.
There's also the that your father, I understand, worked for a coal company, that you yourself are an engineer, you studied at the Colorado School of Minds, and that for a period you worked in Sumatra in Indonesia on an oil exploration crew. How did that experience shape any of this that's come in the novel?
It gave me a sense that I could write this character. In other words, I if I had chosen, you know, given my background a very wealthy politician, I don't really know where to start with somebody like that. I don't I don't have a way in. But with the oil business, especially the stuff that I did, it made me have a little taste, as a young man, of what would be like to be part of that group, to have an adventure.
I worked in Sumatra and we had some really you know, for a twenty two year old, great adventures in the jungle and tigers and you know, all kinds of the things that you that would seem appealing to a young person. And I also got a taste of that feeling of kind of being, you know, even then in the eighties, part of an embattled but noble crew of technocrats, you know that that we were doing something that was keeping the world turning and no one appreciated it, you know.
So and I also worked in the Texas oil fields quite a bit, so I knew that some of the some of the technical stuff, some of the jargon, but mostly the mindset, you know. So again that it for me, the way in is always I use the word fun. I don't know if it's really fun, but the idea that of overflow, like I could I knew I could write about oil from that perspective with some overflow, given the people I'd known and the things I'd done.
And do you have to speak to, especially for your main characters, the type of person who you're going to represent, So did you end up speaking to an oil executive for example?
No?
I For me, it's more I really trust my internal person generator is funny. The working assumption is that we contain everybody. So even though I'm a progressive, you know, kind of new college professor, I used to be a different person. And not only that, a lot of different people that I never actually was do exist within me. So one of the great thrills of being a fiction writers. You can say, Okay, could I be a gigly fifteen year old girl in Montreal. I'm like, yeah, I could
do that, you know, I could try. I could sort of imitate her. So for me to interview people is not again, it sort of pins you down a little bit. You know, if someone says something you feel, okay, I have to be true to that. But the game of the novelist, as I understand it, is much more kind of fanciful. It's almost like the Shakespearean jester. You know, you're just trying to make some sparks, make some laughs
by any means necessary. So for me that means just giving myself license to invent, and at the same time trying to have a generosity of spirit and a precision so that I'm being specific about what I'm saying. And then I think, well, yeah, I can you know, I can imagine being anyone. You as a reader, are also part of this experiment that you're saying, Oh, George is
playing a game. He's pretending to be an eighty five year old oil executive with different political views, and he holds, Okay, I can play that game as well, since I'm also large enough and I contain all these multitudes of personality. So I think it's a little bit playful. Both reader and writer sign up for this kind of parlor game in a certain way, and then the fund comes from there.
And this is true of many of your pieces of work, where the story is fantastic, there are these funny moments, and then at the end you also realize, oh my god, that was a dark story that I just read. So you touch on these themes in a very interesting way. But going back to this idea that you said, you know, a climate change novel feels like a hard thing. This
is something that others have expressed. So a decade ago, the Indian novelist Amaitav Koch gave us series of lectures he called the Great Derangement, where he argued that contemporary literature and contemporary writers had really ignor the climate crisis, and that ignorance is adding to the peril that humans face. Do you think, in that ten year sense, and especially now that you're doing this research, that the literary world has improved in bringing climate change more into the conversation.
I think so, and I think there's more of an intention to do so. But for me, the question is how does one do that given given the features of the form itself. So, in other words, if I'm if I'm a writer of string quartets, you know, and some says, oh, you know, your stream quartets are ignorant of climate change, think, well, it's a you know, the form has requirements, and the form has certain ways of producing delight, and we ignore those at our peril. So again, to me, I think
the idea is to with this book. I think I started thinking, all right, I'm going to prove to all the skeptics that climate change is real, and then as you get into the research, you're like that that isn't. One, that's not what a novel does. But two, anyone who
looks into it is already convinced, so that's not it. Instead, I'm going to use it as a backdrop or kind of a feature in the same way that you know, if you look at a novel like Schindler's List or the movie, people always say, oh, it's about the Holocaust, but actually it's not. It's set it's you know, it's immersed in the Holocaust, but it's about something much more specific and human and universal, which is, for example, how does one within an evil system? How does one strive
to do good? So anytime we start writing a novel, we find out that the thing we thought it was about, it's not about that. And and what I found is if you write a novel or a story and it ends up being about what you thought it was going to be about, you probably failed because the reader feels that condescension. You know, Okay, he's given me a lecture. He's still giving me a lecture. The lecture is finished,
I wish I'd read a different book. But on the other hand, if we enter into it as teammates, let's let's try to stumble on some mystery, let's open some questions up that I think is more the valid function of the novel. The book that might need to be written about climate change might not have climate change in it at all. It might be about denial mindset, It might be about corporate hegemony, but or might be three people on an island somewhere, so we don't know.
Yeah, it is interesting. I noted that there were only three mentions of the word climate in the entire book, and one of them is not about climate change at all. So it is a very interesting way in which you touch on the subject without being so literal. In many cases, so crises in general do make for interesting storytelling moments, like we have great novels that feature volcanoes and tsunamis and earthquakes. There are great novels about financial crises and
terrorist attacks. War, of course features in many, many great novels. Is there something about the disaster that is climate change that makes it difficult?
Maybe?
I mean, I'm just thinking this for the first time, but it might just be that it's it's in some ways gradual on the human scale as gradual, and it's also disseminated so widely in so many different places. So I think that's difficult to come up with a narrative stance that could describe that naturally.
I think Richard Powers.
Did a really great job in the Overstory, but you know, to say a crisis that's happening quite quickly, of course in geologic time, but in human time it can appear gradual. It's not happening everywhere all the time. It's a little bit it's a little bit difficult. But again for me, I would never even early in this book, I thought, Okay, it's not a climate change novel. It's a novel about the end of life. And you know, and then because you know, one of the things that will really block
or writer up is pressure. You know, I must do this, I must communicate this. That's not a formula for fun. You know, if you went on a date, you know, I must make her love me. That's a very bad vibe, you know. So I think for writing a novel a certain amount of relaxation. And also, you know, you really are, no matter how dark the topic, you really are trying to make some love, you know, make some some positive energy for the reader.
And I think the endgame of a.
Novel is somehow to make both parties, reader and writer feel a little bit more alert to the fact that they're still alive.
That you know.
So that is in a certain way, if you think of writers like Google or Flammery O'Connor, that's something that happens regardless of topic or regardless of darkness. You know, it's the It's the in the same way that a really well beautifully done horror movie can kind of make you feel alive. It's that's the game.
So the other theme that I want to explore here is about guilt and regret, which feature in the book in interesting ways, and they don't have to be about climate related. They're just sort of at the end of your life. What do you feel regret for? What are you guilty about? Is something that all of us have thoughts about, and not just at the end of your life. Sometimes as you go through life, in trying to address the guilt, is there something that you hope to get
out of it? You know, say an oil executive reads a visual, which I am sure they will, you know, what do you hope they might learn from it?
That's another question I feel I have to as a writer, I have to really be careful of that because it puts me in innately sort of condescending position for me to teach you something. I am not sure that I have much to teach, but I do feel I can put an oil executive or anybody through a certain experience so in that way, I think of myself more as a roller coaster designer. You know, I don't have to know your profession to make you gasp at the bottom
of a steep hill. And then embedded in that is the idea that that's a fun, it's a I suppose it's a positive experience to go through. And I think mostly what happens when when I read fiction that's good, All my certainties get wobbly.
You know.
I'm made aware of how quickly I normally rush to judgment, uh from and from what a limited place. You know, it's a fairly small aspiration. But you know, to say to somebody, come on this journey with me, I don't care who you are, I don't care what you've done. But at the end of it, we're both going to feel a little something, a little more i'd say a little more open, but you can say it however you like.
That really is it?
I mean, if we think about a songwriter, what does a songwriter try to do? It tries to remind you you're alive for a couple of minutes, you know. So you know, I don't really have a very a sort of a toutological or a brother a educational intent. Really, I don't because that if I do that, I'd become a you know, a pedent.
Yeah, I mean, a great novel is also giving you an experience of being somebody else, putting yourself as a reader in somebody else's shoes for that period of time to really acknowledge the reality of another being, and that can be very powerful, regardless of the type of person you're empathizing with or what cause you're empathizing with them for. And in this case it's an oil executive. You know,
it's very clear. Some of the dialogues are very direct, calling out the horrors that may have happened as a result of his direct actions. But the reader is empathizing with the characters. Is there a limit to that empathy? You know, because people can do horrible things, and those horrible things are very real. But is there a limit to that?
Well, that's where I get in a bit of a tangle because the words empathy, compassion, and sympathy those are sometimes confusing. I think there's not a limit to the interest we can feel in another human being, even the most terrible and I think there's no It's all positive phenomenon, just to be more interested in somebody and therefore to understand them better. The tricky part is that sometimes I think in the West, we confuse that activity with permission
giving somehow, or a kind of a pre forgiveness. So if I empathize with somebody, it doesn't matter what they do to me, I don't. I think that's a misunderstanding of compassion, for example. So to me, I have no problem trying to imagine even the inner process of even the worst person in the world. The difficulty, I think is it's almost like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. When you narrate somebody from inside, you warm them up. You can't help it.
You know, you have somebody in the esset and you narrate a childhood memory, they suddenly are warming up. And that's a really complicated question. It's one of the reasons that, I mean, this guy in the book is bad, but he's bad in that sort of two thousand George Bush kind of way. He hasn't rejected a rules based order. He gives lip.
Service to Enlightenment values and so on.
So he's kind of compared to some of the stuff that's going on now, he's kind of a lightweight, but that I feel I can do him. Could I do somebody worse what I want to? That's a really interesting question, and honestly I don't know until I try, but it would be interesting for me. I have the idea of trying to write something about the current administration, and then you get into some tricky stuff. What does the mental phenomenon of megalomaniac look like?
Can you do it? Is it interesting to read it?
All?
You know? Important questions?
Yeah, it's a difficult one as a journalist too. I mean, you know, I've had all executives on the podcast before, and there is this immasuate judgment that comes from a lot of the green climate crowd saying you should never platform these people. You shouldn't give them a voice. They
already have a platform of their own. And we've got into this sort of territory, especially with the conversation on the Internet, where people don't want to hear the other side, and a novel of yours kind like breaks through and enables people to look at the other side. Are there other ways in which we could do this, not just a novel.
Well, I think the conversations that you're describing would be really interesting. But from as someone who does these conversations, the trick is to get somebody off their stick, you know. So if an oil executive comes in and he's just going to resist you, then you.
Know, I don't know.
I mean, for me, the question that's in my mind right now is, Okay, I'm a natural tally conflict averse person. That's why I'm a writer, and I love to think the best of people, and I love to pretend I can inhabit anybody's mind. But your earlier question really haunts me. You know, is there are there people one that you couldn't inhabit and two that you shouldn't you know? And
that's interesting. But I think, to me, okay, I think that understanding another person's point of view is always a superpower, even if your intent is to resist them.
It's a great tool. You know.
If you were in a football game or something and someone said, hey, would you like the chance to inhabit the mind of the opposing coach for five seconds?
You'd be crazy not to take that chance, you know.
So to me, it's kind of a win win to try to empathize or sympathize with other people as long as we don't slide over into enabling and and you know, like for example, now here in the US, the press is really doing, in my opinion, a pretty poor job of dealing with these Hedgemonts that are taking over. There's a lot of enacting of older models of journalism, which is, well,
you know, we've got to show both sides. So but it sometimes becomes you know, this site says hippos can fly, this site says they can't.
Okay, we'll meet in the middle. They fly sometimes, you know.
So there's a kind of institutional sternness that that we're struggling with.
I think to.
Call it, call it a spade of spade and describe these things that are being done. But it's difficult in the old model of journalistic fairness.
I does that? Does that seem true? Yeah?
It is. It is definitely a challenge because as soon as you are firm about something, somebody will say that's a biased point of view, and it's a it's a tricky balance to play out. But maybe one other thing that I've you know, in preparation to talk to you, I read a bunch of your work, but I also listened to you talk and give interviews, And I've interviewed hundreds of people in my life, and there is a type of person who says I don't know often, and
that typically is a writer. And I've heard you say I don't know, I don't know. How I feel about that, I don't know. I am sure about that particular point of view. That uncertainty of not knowing is not comfortable for most people, and that's why we get so much judgment online. Is there a way in which you can make somebody be comfortable with that uncertainty without having to be what you and I are, which is writing, which is a writer, which is what our profession is.
I'm going to answer this question kind of backwards, maybe, but it occurs to me that one of the reasons people have become uncomfortable with uncertainty is that there's so much space for opining. You know, we have the Internet, and it seems to be saying, hey, what do you think? Even if you don't know anything, what do you think? And so there's a kind of an implied pressure that
we never don't know. For me, as a lifelong anxious person, and when I started doing interviews, I found that it was so much easier just to say I have no idea than to falsify an answer that later I would regret. So for me, it's kind of an anxiety reducing move, but I think for most people these days, it's a sign of weakness to not have an opinion. Which actually some of the most powerful people I have ever known were quite reserved, and they recognize that, you know, an
opinion costs you. To have an opinion costs you because it nails you down at a certain point in a world that is always changing and always uncertain. So a person who can resist a facile opinion stays open three hundred and sixty degrees, and they also receive more data. That's a very, I think, a very powerful thing for someone to recognize that their integrity and ultimately their ability to act when needed are all improved by a certain sort of reserved quality. So I tried to make it
a point not to express an opinion. Well, when I don't know anything, that's a good one, but also when the opinion isn't needed. You know, the abstract opinion is a hallmark of contemporary life. What do you think about these idiots who climb mount Everest? First of all, I don't know, And second of all, is the world really waiting for me to oppine? I don't think so, and I found it really comforting to go. You don't have to know everything. You don't have to know almost anything.
And if you factor in time, like what time do I need to know that thing about Mount Everest, the answer is probably never. So so much of are the opining we do online is speculative and abstract, and I think it also costs us something.
After the break, I asked George, what do you thinks about AI and whether it complements or compromises human creativity? What do you think? Write to the show at zero pod at Bloomberg dot net, And while you're at it, writer's a review on Apple podcasts, Spotify and YouTube. It helps new listeners find the show. You know, you've been writing at a time and you've found success at a time where the written word in general is in perhaps the most fierce competition that it has been in against
other type of media. It's not cinema, Netflix streaming these days, it's TikTok and Instagram and reels. Do you think that the written word is losing to audio and video? And if it is, then what are we losing as a result.
I think it kind of depends how you define losing. I figured out a long time ago that if you have a handful of dedicated reads who really know how to read, that's kind of a super dense pod of potential influence. People who really read deeply, they go out into the world. They take that into themselves very deeply, and it affects their actions. Whereas you take twenty million people watching a cat fall off a counter, that's just you know, as they say, like poop through a goose,
You know doesn't it doesn't. So those people have seen the cat fall off the counter, and they go in the world and nothing. So I become a kind of a believer in super encoding my stuff with density and care. I give it to you obviously, a deeply thoughtful person who's very involved in living. It comes to you, it opens up in your mind, and that's that's all I need to know.
The other thing that has been encroaching on writing and reading and thinking these days is artificial intelligence. And a lot of good writing is about making somebody think. When it comes from one human to the other, there's a level of transfer that is amazing. Whereas with AI. You're getting these machine generated answers to questions that every day people have. What is your view of AI, and you know, how do you think it compliments or destroys human creativity?
This might be one of those I don't know, I don't know questions. I mean, I don't have a strong I don't know. I don't have much knowledge about it's use in math or science. But in writing, I can just say de facto it's It shouldn't be a problem because, as you intimated, I'm over here in California, I'm having my day. I'm feeling things, I'm tasting things, I'm touching things, I'm thinking things. I go to my desk, I somehow get all of that into a made up story. But
it's so infused with qualitiya. You know my experience of being in the world, then I send it to you. And the magic is, even though we have completely different experiences, it opens up in your mind. AI can imitate that all it likes, but it isn't the same. It can't
be the same. The danger, I think is just that if as AI inundates the world, our standards go down, and that part of the mind that can be developed to pick up that human message might go a little dull, And of course, economically it means that a lot of human writers may be put out of work by the poor simulation of human writing. So I think that's worth fighting for fighting about.
I mean, it's not.
My sense is that AI is kind of just being driven by investments, but when we're not really asking why we need it. You know, there's efficiency, but who efficiency always means more money for somebody, don't you know?
It doesn't there's no in the abstract.
Efficiency isn't necessarily better. I mean, I if I can get my garden done efficiently by a robot, that's nice. But it's nice to work in a garden. So I'm not I'm not a fan of AI for writing, and I think we should be very skeptical of it because in all the sort of fun around AI to see what it can do, every one of those experiments involves a sacrifice, of course, of resources, but also of human involvement.
You know, I saw something. There's a sort of a wave of commercials here where you know, there's one where a man is having a woman over for dinner, and he asked AI is to design a menu that will indicate I'm interested but not ready for a commitment with.
The straight face.
So the AI cranks out the thing, he cooks it, and you see the two of them dancing around the kitchen. I'm like, dude, that's your job, you know, that's your job.
To come up with that menu.
So or another one is about a brother and sister going on a road trip and the brother asked AI to design the road trip. What a what a default? Or what are giving up of responsibility? So those kind of things, I think intelligent people can look at that and go, I don't want I don't want that.
No, thanks, I don't want it. So I'm not I'm not a fan. But maybe when I need brain surgery. Maybe when I need brain surgery, I will be I don't know.
Yes, that's true. There are other aspects of air that might be quite interesting. Two other aspects of writing that I want to touch on. So one thing that good novels do, they're almost philosophical texts. While being entertaining, you don't have to read philosophy, but you learn things about life and how to be a person and how to be a good person in the world. It is also
a tool of critical thinking. Because you've put yourself in somebody else's mind and you see how they've thought about a certain situation, and maybe you will never encounter the exact same situation, but that logical steps that you've taken teach you something about the world. Do you think the
media landscape as it exists? We talked about how it's hard for a journalist, but do you think it's also a problem on the reader side, that they are not critical thinkers today, that they are not seeing what is misinformation? What is disinformation, what it is that non responsible players of information are doing with information, and if so, what could be done to improve critical thinking among readers?
Yeah? I think this.
Studies show that what you're saying is true that as you read less, read read a complex text less, your ability to follow a long argument erodes. And I believe also there was some study that made a connection from that to the ability to empathize, which it all makes sense, you know, of course it does. I think, yes, it's
a big I think it's a big problem. I think here in the States it's the biggest problem there there are You know, you hear some of these things that our leadership says, and you can't believe that anybody can get through that text without walking, and yet people people swallow it. So I don't know, but anecdotally in my lifetime, I started out in Chicago as a young kid in
a Catholic school, and books were sacred. I've had experiences in my life where from and I know you have to an intense period of reading, I could feel my mind shifting, my vocabulary improved, my ability to express myself improved, and therefore the world changed. The world became a more workable place because of the internal change. I'm sure of that, as I am in my shoe size that that happened.
So if that isn't happening, then that means that the millions of minds aren't being kicked up into this higher gear, aren't being made more confident and more empathy friendly.
That has to have a cultural effect.
There was a wonderful piece in The Times Ezra Klein and I think Master Guessen talking about how important it is in a time like this to claim the space, meaning what we're doing right now. Let's just say, let's just say that reading long text is a gift to yourself and it's necessary for a culture. Let's just say that out loud, and other people who agree with us will go, yeah, that's right, I'm all good, I'm not wrong.
It sounds like a small effect, but I think it can be world changing just for people to occupy the space of truth, a benevolence of patients, of fellow feeling. It's a time where I think demonstrations of those things are so meaningful. You know, on Instagram you see somebody here standing up to ice and being articulate, and you can feel the thrill running through your body and a little surge of courage.
Another writing question for you, So I, as a writer, came out of the age during the Internet era. So I really started with blogging all my life. My main form of writing has been typing on a screen, and then over the past year I have actually started writing
with pen and paper, longhand I'm writing letters. I'm writing sometimes first draft of my story, and it's really changed how I think and how I then convert my thinking into that writing because it's a physical action that is different from what I used to do, so it's just a variation. Has made a difference, but it's also improved my mental health. And I wondered, you know, you've taught writing for so many years. Obviously you teach creative writing.
You teach them to some of the best writers out there. But if you had to give a fun exercise to someone who's not a writer, just to get going on writing, what would that exercise be.
I have one that I give and it's kind of a party game. So the game is this, You're going to write a two hundred word story and it has to be exactly two hundreds, not one ninety nine, not two oh one. But you can only use fifty words to do it. So the way you play is you get a piece of paper and you start your story and you say, the cat sat on the table. Well, that's cats. That's five words. You write those down at the bottom, enumerated at the bottom of the sheet, and
this way you keep track of where you are. At some point you hit your fifty and there's no new words. So and then the other thing is you try to do this in fifteen minutes. It's a lot of imposed pressure and that exercise, I, you know, for it to be at its best, I shouldn't say any more about it. But if someone tries to do that, what they'll find is that a lot of the normal anxieties associated with writing go away under the pressure of the rules, and
people will find. You know, the one of the key things in a work of fiction is rising action, you know, to have that feeling of increasing complexity that automatically happens in this exercise. For reasons I don't quite understand. So often, if I have a young writer at Syracuse who's kind of pend herself in with certain ideas and dictums and mantras about how she is as a writer, you get in this exercise and they don't have time to think
about those things. They're just trying to get the thing done, and often a different writer will emerge on the page, and it's very, very exciting if you can do it. The other condition is do it in a group and let everybody know that they have to read theirs at the end. So then introduces a kind of entertainment function. And so it's funny, you know, if you ever believe that we contain many writers within us, this is a great exercise to get a different one than usual to come out.
I'll also tell you a little story that happened last night that you'd appreciate because you mentioned in a swim in a pond in the rain a book that you've written about writing and reading, that you could do some of these exercises that you do in the book with others. And you gave the example of doing it with the story of Honest Hemingway called Cat in the Rain and it's twelve hundred words, and you said, cut it into
six sections and do the exercise. And last night I was commuting back home with my wife and I told her it's the perfect length. Can I do a story exercise with you? It was the end of the day. She was tired. She's like, do you really want to I'm like, yes, John Saunders has convinced me this is the exercise. I think you'll love it.
He sounds like a very good wife.
And we did the exercise, and this morning she wakes up and she said, can we do it again when we commute back? Oh?
Oh, that's beautiful. Tell her thank you. You know, if there's another of his stories called Indian Camp, and that's a it's a darker story and it's but that it works the same way. Yeah, that's that's a really uh that's a fun exercise. Thank you for telling me that that really is nice to hear.
So one last sort of more an advice for writers like me, for nonfiction writers, people who write about climate change. It's going to be a topic that we stick with for decades to come. It is going to go through as we are seeing political upswings and down swings. Thinking as a fiction writer, but from a nonfiction context, how do you think we can tell better climate stories?
Well, I'm always a big believer in particular particularity. I've done some casual humor type pieces for GQ in the New Yorker, and I always go in with a big idea, but I'm looking for specific things to contradict or complicate that idea.
So I think.
My thought is to ground it in the cost to actual people. I mean, that seems to be the one thing that we can't we can't deny, you know, I actually be interested in your thoughts. One of the kind of unspoken hardships that I found in nonfiction writing but also in fiction, is that the people, I'll put it, the people I would like to convert, don't read my books.
You know, they don't come to my events. So often you're preaching to the choir, And I wonder if if you have any insights about in your experience of how maybe success stories or when you've been able to reach across that divide and maybe not change somebody's mind, but communicate in a meaningful way with somebody who wouldn't be predisposed to your ideas.
It is a constant struggle. I will say the fact that I have interviewed for this podcast, but in general, people who do not act in good faith on climate change, like oil executives, which, as you said, it's an interview where it is an honest conversation. I'm going to push back.
I'm not going to allow somebody to lie. But those conversations the other side also walks away with respect because they've come back on the podcast because even though the questions were hard and they were pushed back, they felt like it was a conversation where I heard them and that they felt it was a fair conversation. I think the value of fairness in journalism is being questioned all
the time. But it's good to be questioning that value because that is a value that we need to live up to, because that's one way at least that I find you can break to the other side.
You know, with the oil executives you've interviewed at their core, are they well, this is maybe too broad a question, but do they really believe that climate change isn't real?
Or are they being strategically dishonest?
No oil executive I have interviewed now does not believe that climate change is real. Now, yes, And you know, I've been a journalist doing this for ten years. So for the last ten years I have not met an oil executive that denies climate change. I will say I have mostly spoken to oil executives of multinational public corporations, and so they have shareholders and their shareholders, our pension funds are large asset managers who have clear understanding of
the science. If you're going to make money, you need to know reality.
That needs to go on a bumper sticker.
If you make money, you have to understand reality.
Amen.
But you know, there are, of course climate deniers in other places. And I haven't yet interviewed a private oil company executives. I haven't interviewed the Cooke Corporation executive, for example, or Harold Ham, and I would be very open to interviewing them if they'd ever be interested in coming on the show.
But then you know that for me this book with the interesting part, especially towards the end, was uh, what does what does denial look like in a phased approach? You know, and when somebody is in full denial they're here, what are the steps they go through as they get closer to admitting the truth? And that was really interesting because of course, you know, you can look at yourself to figure that one out.
Yes, and a lot of the justifications. That's why even though you didn't speak to an executive and you simulated this exercise through your understanding, it is the kind of stuff that they actually go through in reality. There is this truth that comes out even in a fictional context, in which is I enjoyed reading visual quite a lot.
Thank you, George, it was such a pleasure. You've got an amazing mind. I hope to encounter it again sometime.
And thank you for listening to zero Now for the sound of the week. That is the sound of a new long distance express train being inaugurated in India. India is planning to build out a huge network of new and improved train lines to better the service across the country, including its first bullet train line, which is due to start running in twenty twenty seven. If you liked this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. This episode was produced by
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