Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist Jennifer Egan On: Panic, Awe, Fetishizing Authenticity, and Our Possible AI Futures

Episode Date: July 31, 2023

Jennifer Egan is not only a novelist, she's also written short stories and award-winning magazine journalism. She's one of those writers who can both spin a fascinating yarn and load it up with insights into everything from human nature to the future of technology, all while pulling off bewitching turns of phrase; what the writer Jonathan Franzen has called “micro felicities.” Egan is as funny, fascinating, and open IRL as she is on the page although it’s not clear she feels that way given she talks about how much smarter she feels in writing than in speaking!In this episode we talk about:Egan’s writing process The power of writing by hand The shocking, relentless, ruthless discipline that she imposes on herself to never do the same thing twice as she’s writingCuriosity, awe, and panic attacksHow she handles feedbackHer feelings of insubstantiality Our cultures fetishization of authenticityThe impact of success on her workAI and our possible technological futuresFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/jennifer-eganSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody. This is another one of those episodes where I test that old adage about never meeting your heroes because they'll inevitably let you down. I am a massive fan of Jennifer Egan. I just finished reading two of her novels, a visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize back in 2011, and then the companion novel, the Candy House, which was one of President Obama's favorite reads of 2022. Jennifer again, is not only a novelist, she's also written short stories and award-winning magazine journalism. She's one of those writers who can both spin a fascinating yarn and load it up

with insights into everything from human nature to the future of technology, all while pulling off these bew to the future of technology, all while pulling off these bewitching turns of phrase or with the writer Jonathan Franz and has called micro-fulsities. I love that term. As I continue to toil away at my own book, Egan's work gives me that pleasantly unpleasant feeling of being a complete hack. Anyway, the good news is that she did not let me down at all. As you will hear, she is as funny and interesting and open IRL as she is on the page. Although I'm not sure she feels that way.

One of the things we discuss here is how much smarter she feels in writing than in speaking. We talk a lot about her writing process. In fact, the power of writing by hand and this truly shocking, relentless, ruthless discipline that she imposes on herself. Basically, she never allows herself to do the same thing twice as she's writing. We also talk about curiosity, awe, panic attacks, how she handles feedback, her feelings of insubstantiality, our culture's fetishization of authenticity, the impact of success on her work.

And we spend quite a bit of time talking about AI and our possible technological futures. I've been thinking about this a lot, and I thought Egan would be a great conversation partner on this subject, given that in the candy house, her most recent novel, she plays out some wild ideas about uploading our consciousness to the matrix. So she thinks a lot about technology. I wanted to hear what she had to say. Have you been considering starting or restarting your meditation practice? Well in the words of highway billboards across America.

If you're looking for a sign, this is it. To help you get started, we're offering subscriptions at a 40% discount until September 3rd. Of course, nothing is permanent. So get this deal before it ends by going to 10%.com slash 40. That's 10% one word all spelled out.com slash 40 for 40% off your subscription. Jennifer Egan, welcome to the show. I can't believe I'm sitting here face to face, albeit digitally with you. I've just finished reading two of your books and absolutely loved them.

So, so nice to meet you. Well, thank you so much, and I'm happy to be here. You write the kind of books that when they end, I'm really sad. It's just like I miss the book. I'm happy to hear that, because I love that feeling, myself as a reader.

So I read, visit from the Goonsquad on Candy House, and I have read recently that there's some effort to turn them into film entertainment, which I'm excited about the chance to sort of dive back into the world in a different way. Yeah, well, see what happens. I mean, Goonsquad has had many deals, and none has yet resulted in a show,

but maybe the addition of Candy House and a new team will be the magical combination. I've had that experience with 10% happier, like a lot of interest and even at times lots of work and then something happens or nothing happens. Yeah, so Hollywood is a tricky, treacherous place. It always makes me so happy to be a fiction writer, where I can actually just write my book. Well, I'm happy you're a fiction writer.

I mean, it's like I get the same feeling, reading or writing that I get when I'm like looking at the Grand Canyon. It's like I'm in awe that a human mind can produce words in that order that provoke dopamine and serotonin to go off in my brain. And so it's so cool what you can do. So, thank you. I didn't actually know much about you until I started to prepare for this podcast. I kind of didn't want to know anything about you.

Maybe that was somehow pierced the mystery, but in asking my team whether we can somehow invagal you into the podcast, I then had to learn a little bit about you. And I'm glad I did because one of the things that sort of left out to me from your life is something that I think we share, which is panic attacks. And you've talked about how panic attacks in a strange way got you into writing. Am I right about that?

Well, I think they helped me to realize how essential writing was to whatever kind of experience I was having. I really started having panic attacks when I was taking a year off between high school and college and traveling in Europe with a backpack on my own. And I had worked for most of that year

to earn money to do that. And now I was on the awaited trip. And I started having these, I called it the terror because I'd actually never heard of a panic attack. And I thought that I was having drug flashbacks, which says something about my high school years, which had just concluded. And you know, all of us red go ask Alice. This supposedly, this was, these were journal entries from a teen who took too many drugs and lost her mind, but I think it turned out later that it was actually a concerned mother

who had written this book to scare teens away from drugs. But anyway, I was convinced that I was like Alice and losing my mind. So it was pretty scary on and off, mixed with other amazing adventures of being an 18-year-old backpacking in Europe. And I think the discovery was that whatever was going on, whether terrifying or joyous, writing was the thing that not only completed the experience, but somehow gave it meaning. And so I just emerged from all of that with

a strong sense of the essentialness of writing for my experience of the world. Like you couldn't process it without somehow writing it down. I don't know if it was exactly that. It was that the experience wasn't complete without that component of writing. And amazingly enough, I even was able to write during the panic attacks sometimes, which created an amazing record, I have to say. I still have that journal. So I think it was something about the recognition

that without writing, the world simply was missing a really important aspect. And so it wasn't so much a sense that I had amazing talent and visions to share as the fact that I knew that for me writing was just the essential thing that had to happen. It's interesting you say that the experience wasn't complete without writing it down.

I don't know if this is gonna work, but I feel like nothing's real until I've told my wife. That's lovely, it's so sweet. But does that make sense to you or am I making a connection that is inappropriate? No, I think that makes total sense actually. And I think maybe in my case, it's I have to tell myself,

there's some sort of loop that needs to be completed for the experience to feel entirely real. And I also find as sort of ancillary benefits. I feel like I'm able to think more clearly on the page than I can just sitting down and thinking. And I think I'm measurably smarter if I'm writing. I just feel like I make discoveries when writing that I simply cannot make, for example, in conversation.

So there's a kind of enhancement or maybe a clarity that it gives me that allows me to understand my own thinking in ways that I can't without it. What do you think is going on there? Why is it that you're smarter when writing than talking? Well, one thing is when I write fiction, I write my first drafts by hand, so in cursive. And I feel like there's something about that act that has a kind of meditative or concentrating quality. I don't actually meditate, but I feel when it's going well,

like I do have a slightly different state of mind if I'm handwriting, and it seems to detach me a little bit from the world around me in ways that somehow adds to my ability to get to some deeper level of thinking, which maybe is where intelligence lies. I find myself thinking a lot about groupthink lately because of ChachyBT and the general freak out about it. And, you know, Chatchy BT seems to be literally the embodiment of groupthink. That's what it is. It's pulling on all this language that's floating around out there. I feel like when I write in a more surface way, say if I'm just on my

computer writing, I feel like I partake of group thing. And somehow I'm trying to get beyond that. And handwriting helps me to do that. So there's something about writing in all its forms that seems to push past more familiar language and familiar thinking in me and allow me to access something deeper and more original. First of all, I want to come back to chat GBT at some point, but we'll get there. My writing is not on your level at all, but when I write, mostly I'm standing at a computer

and I'm in abject misery. But the best stuff is when I print it out, and I only put this together when I read about your interest in handwriting, when I print it out and make notes on the page, or if I'm on a meditation retreat and I don't have a computer and I bring a journal and I'm writing stuff, that is always when the best stuff comes. It's never at the computer. I don't know if it's because of groupthink or what, but I didn't crystallize that until I read about your process. What, but I didn't crystallize that until I read about your process. Well, you know, one thing it might be, too, is the critical part of all of our brains that essentially starts censoring us before we've said a word. So what I find is that if I'm looking

at a screen and seeing what I'm writing in print, I immediately see what's wrong with it, and I start trying to fix it. So I'm kind of going backwards practically before I've gone forward. Whereas handwriting, even if you have nice handwriting, which I do not, is not really as easy to read as print. And so there's a way in which it remains a little mysterious. And I think that blindness, that handwriting can can give us is also really useful. It just sort of relaxes that critical tension of wanting to fix things. I also edit my hand on hard copies what you just described.

And I feel like a lot of really good stuff comes along that way. In fact, that's almost the most fun because trying to create something out of nothing is always really hard and kind of scary, you know, the so-called blank page, but having something there already on a page and making it better is just such a joy. I don't think I ever, or maybe maybe 2% of the time feel anything resembling joy when writing. It's mostly just dissociation, self-hatred, things in that zone. Well, I guess I'm lucky that I do sometimes feel that joy, not always by any means. I mean, there are definitely miseries for sure, but the sense that I'm solving a problem, having a flight of fancy that might make something better is really exciting.

And it can be really absorbing. Like I have edited hard copies by hand on an escalator. I've done it in an elevator. I've gotten off the subway and sat in a smelly, dank station just to kind of finish what I'm doing before I have to walk down the street. So it can really be absorbing. And such a thrill, honestly. It feels like there's this alternate world that I'm inhabiting that is so compelling

that I can even engage with it in these odd situations. Maybe I'm underplaying the joy quotient here because I do remember being so absorbed in, I was on a shoot in Brazil and I was in a crack house in Rio and I had a minute and I edited some pages from my first book in the corner of a crack house. Maybe I was just high, but I didn't know that. Anyway, let me get back to your panic attack for a second because in your description of it to the New Yorker,

I saw something that really resonated with me. I'm just gonna read it. Other people are real, you said, and the world recognizes their reality, but I'm kind of a figment. I'm just a wannabe person. That was a really hard way to live. And I think when those panic attacks came,

there may have been sort of a weird existential aspect to them. I kind of felt like I was disappearing or my brain was crumbling. It wasn't like dying. It was like vanishing. I'll tell you why that hit me. But can you just elaborate upon what I just read if you're up to it? Yeah, I mean, when I was younger, especially, I really did have a sense that other people were more real than I was. By which I mean that I thought that their lives were more valid and also more intense. So there was kind of a sensory aspect to it and also a kind of, I don't know, a sense of, I guess, status or legitimacy. I just felt like I was a kind of half person and that if I were only someone else, everything would be more vivid and somehow more complete. And that was, of course, a terrible way to feel. And I think there were a lot of reasons for that

that are biographical. I mean, I was a step kid and I didn't really exactly have a family unit where I felt like I played a totally integral and Necessary part, but I also think maybe it was just my personality because Later I've come to feel like the ease of disappearing without the negative Contestions like I'm not real other people are more real that sense of disappearing is actually something that I really like and I'm not real, other people are more real. That sense of disappearing is actually something that I really like. And I think when I talk about being so absorbed in creating a fictional world that I can write on a escalator or an elevator,

that's an expression of my own disappearance. I mean, if you think about it, for example, Catholicism, which is the religion I was born into and have not really observed past about the age of 10. But you know, the whole idea of transcendence of an afterlife, this whole notion of somehow rising above the everyday ordinarianess of our lives, in a way that's a description of what I'm talking about, this sense of being lifted out of my life. So that's a more exciting and spiritual way of describing what as a teen felt really scary,

which was that somehow my life was disposable or dispensable. And there was a relationship between this everyday sense of disposability and the panic attack where it heightened to a vanishing. every day sense of disposability and the panic attack where it heightened to a vanishing. Yeah, I mean, I think what really was prompting the panic attacks was just a loneliness because this was 1981.

There was no internet, there were no cell phones. My home was in California, which was nine hours behind Europe where I was. So I think I just was feeling anxious. I mean, I think it really just came down to anxiety and then anxiety about anxiety about anxiety. A sense that something was wrong. I think that was the fundamental drumbeat of those panic attacks was something is wrong.

And that's a disaster. I'm terrified. So I don't know. I'm not sure exactly how it relates to the disappearance, but I think all of it is an expression of the fact that I didn't have a strong sense of self yet. And I was not able to calm myself down at all. In fact, I was just noticing my fear

and that made me more afraid. I was an anxious teen. I mean, that's putting it kind of in a humdrum way. But it really did come to a head because I had isolated myself so extremely. And in a way, that's the strangest part of this story. Why is an anxious teen? Was I wandering around Europe with a backpack

with a nine hour time difference from home? You know, why did I put myself in that position? Well, I think that I wanted that intensity in some way and I got a big reward out of it even though it was very uncomfortable in moments. It was like a birthing, like maybe in some ways like that was you starting to kind of make a claim toward a self.

I think it was actually because it's not that I stopped being anxious after that. in some ways like that was you starting to kind of make a claim toward a self. I think it was actually because it's not that I stopped being anxious after that. I'm still anxious. But I do think of that as the time when I pointed in a direction that I'm still pointed in, or I returned from that trip. And I had to leave unceremoniously and not as planned. Like, I reached a point where I couldn't go on. And I was really bummed out because I had to spend all of this hard earned money buying a ticket like on the spot and flying home. But I do think that from that point on,

I was beginning to live the life that I'm still living. And up until then, I had just been flailing around trying to figure out who was cool and how to be real. There's so much in what you've just discussed that I relate to as somebody who's had panic attacks and also who does his best to practice Buddhism. Maybe I'll go with the Buddhism route for a second. And I don't know if I'm going to be able to make this into a coherent question, so forgive me. But it reminded me of something that I've heard, there's a guy named Dr. Mark Epstein

who's been a really informative figure in my life. He's a psychiatrist and he writes books about the overlap between psychology and Buddhism. And I don't know if he's ever written this, or it's just something I've heard him say, or both, but he talks about how a lot of us feel unreal on some level. Like we look around, everybody else seems real, but we seem insubstantial.

And this is in some ways the fundamental thing that the Buddha was pointing to that actually, there is no self. You know, we can look in the mirror and see that there's somebody there, but you close your eyes and look for Jennifer Egan, you won't find her. We're just a yawning chasm of knowing.

We're a mixture of lots of things that are coming going all the time. And to me, your story of feeling unreal kind of fits right into that. I'm now at the point where I'm yammering too much. But does any of what I've said land for you in any way? Yes, very much so. I mean, one thing that's kind of strange or ironic about the idea that we all feel in substantial on some level and unreal and that other people are more real than we are, is the fact that our own consciousnesses are the only things that we know.

So we actually have no access, zero, to the interior lives of anyone else. And that's kind of what obsessed me in writing the candy house, this strange barrier, I mean, it says firm as the barrier between life and death, and it's as impossible to negotiate as the barrier between life and death, no matter how close you are to someone,

you cannot actually enter into their consciousness. So it's so strange to think that our conclusion from that is that we are somehow insubstantial when we are the only one we know. But I think that another way that I really connect to what you're saying is that maybe the sense that we are in substantial is an expression of how much our minds and our imaginations are always reaching beyond ourselves. I mean, in my case, I'm so curious about other people's lives. I'm much more curious about their lives than I am about mine. That's why I never write about myself.

If I get a whiff that someone like me is entering the picture, I go dead because the fun of it is actually finding it about other people. It's the sense of discovery. So that in a way is exactly the same thing as feeling unreal. It's just that I've now owned it and taken it on as a pleasure to disappear or to forget about myself and imagine my way over that impermeable barrier between myself and other people's minds.

Okay, but you say that as soon as you get a whiff of Jennifer Egan entering the scene as you create these characters, you go dead. But of course, Jennifer Egan is creating all of these characters, so they're of course a part of you anyway. Yes, that's true, and I feel a deep connection to all of them. In fact, I have to. That is the job. You know, if I can't empathize so deeply with someone I'm writing about that their choices, no matter how crazy feel

essential and inevitable that I cannot write about them well because that is the job. But it feels much more like I've become them than that they are me. Okay. You know, it strikes me maybe there's like a good and bad, that's probably too binary, but there's a pleasant or an unpleasant disappearing. You know, we have this deep desire to be blown away. I mean, Nirvana itself is described as a blowing out of the self, a pleasant extinguishing.

And yet, you know, you take the wrong kind of psychedelics. For me, it was being 14 years old and smoking too much weed, and you disappear, and it's fucking terrifying. And that's what was happening for you in your panic attacks. It sounds like. And for you, you can have this really pleasant snuffing out of the self while creating these characters and getting lost in the story and you're stuck in a stinky New York City subway station as it's all happening. And yet it's still pleasant.

And then you can have this terrifying sense through your teens of not being fully real. Like this unreality, I think is non-negotiably true. And there are pleasant ways and unpleasant ways to experience it. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, for me, you know, I also smoked a lot of pot and took psychedelics as a teenager. And none of that really worked for me. I feel like that stuff always tipped me into too much cogitation, too much awareness of my own separation, which would tip into fear really, really easily. So those are just not for me. And I have zero inclination toward them now as an adult.

Yeah, I have a lot of inclination toward them, but a lot of fear at the same time. I'm curious and also scared. But for me, what you just described is exactly what's happening. It's like, my ego is a vampire confronted by garlic. It recoils. And the ego goes crazy in the face of impending destruction. The ego death that's talked about on psychedelics.

And what happens is I tip over into panic, which is the last refuge of the ego death that's talked about on psychedelics, and what happens is I tip over in Dapanik, which is the last refuge of the ego. Well, one thing too, though, I wonder whether in both our cases, but certainly mine, I am so ready to leave myself behind that, and maybe that what some of these drugs deliver is a kind of transcendence that allows a separation from oneself that's harder in real life, but that separation comes so easily and naturally to me that I think actually with these enhancements, it goes too far somehow. And I feel almost like I can't get back.

You know, my brother was schizophrenic and his first psychotic break came about after taking a hallucinogen. So there are some people for whom this is just too much. Their brains are maybe inclined too much that way anyway. No, I'm too ego maniacal, like I, I am not so easily slipped into other people's stories. I'm ready firmly in my own. I'm not so proud to report. But anyway, I tend to agree with your diagnosis. And also, I have had that feeling of being so high

that I feel like I'm never gonna come back and I'm gonna be locked in this hell realm forever. And I can't think of a worse feeling that I've ever had. Well, it's true. I think another thing about panic attacks is that they bore so deeply into the moment that there is no sense that time passing will help. There's something about the intensity of it

that seems to just undercut any possibility that just waiting will offer any kind of deliverance. So there's a strange aspect of panic. It feels almost like time starts to go backwards. It certainly doesn't go backwards. It certainly doesn't go forward. And therefore, there seems to be no exit, as you say. Except you intuitively did this thing when you were a teenager that is, I believe, in any psychiatrist or psychologist or CBT expert out there can hit me up on Twitter and tell me

I'm wrong here. But I believe what you were doing by writing it down was actually very smart from a neurological standpoint. You were activating the prefrontal cortex and deactivating the amygdala, the amygdala, the fear center of the prefrontal cortex allows us to think in a reason. If you can bring the thinking brain online, that does cut the panic. You intuitively moved towards something quite therapeutic. You know, I think writing for me naturally instills a sense of control. I mean, it is an act of control in a certain sense. It is saying, you know, I am empowered to respond to the world around me. And so somehow even releasing that voice

creates some sense of steadiness, I think. And I think it must have done that for me while I was panicking, because I don't think I would have been able to write about it as it was happening. And it's not like I was able to do that forever. You know what's interesting? I was also able to read oddly enough. I could read fiction while having a panic attack. I remember reading some short stories by Dickens, as I was

holed up in a little euthostal in Rome. And I think fiction, for whatever reason, even as a reader, it seems to touch some part of my brain that calms me. Yeah, yes. I don't know. If you had gone out and had some pasta, I think those carbs would have cut the panic too. Not to mention a good glass of red wine. Sure. Absolutely. Whatever it takes. Much more Jennifer Egan coming up. So you mentioned the candy house and I'm not proceeding here in any particularly orderly fashion here through this interview, but you brought up the candy house, which is your most recent novel, which is unbelievably good. And you talked about this idea that you explored in the candy house of this human mystery that

we can never really understand somebody else's consciousness. Although there's a tech fix that you invent in the book that I'd love to have you describe. And maybe this actually will bring us to AI and chat GPT at some point. But you have a character who is a tech mogul who invents this thing called own your consciousness. Can you explain that storyline? Sure, on your unconscious actually. Oh, you're unconscious. Sorry. Yes.

So yes, so here's what it is. Oh, you're unconscious allows you to externalize the entirety of your consciousness. All of your memories and perceptions starting in the moment of birth onto a beautiful cube that comes in a variety of colors. And what that lets you do is review the entirety of your life, any portion of it from a present day perspective. And if you want to purely voluntary, you can share all or part of this consciousness to a collective consciousness online. And in exchange for doing that,

you will also have access to a proportionate quantity of that collective consciousness, i.e., you will have the ability to experience consciousnesses of other people anonymously. So this is the machine. And the guy who invented it thought that the point of it would just be to own all of your memories. Because of course, we don't have access to the lion's share of our experience.

I think maybe our brains just can't hold it in a conscious way. Anyway, his thought was great. Now all your memories are really yours. You can see them anew. But what he didn't expect was that it was the sharing part that becomes the huge cultural force. And in the world of this book, social media is completely replaced by this possibility

of actually experiencing other people's consciousnesses. And it has all kinds of cultural impacts, including, of course, a movement in resistance to it. A lot of people who decide this is horrifying, they don't want to be represented in this collective, and so they do something called eluding, which means that they actually cast off their identities. They sort of seed their identities to the collective and start over as new people. Who are the counters?

Well, the counters, that's basically a kind of a casual term for people who are in the business of data. That's basically what it is in this book. They call themselves counters in a casual way. And what are gray grabs? Gray grabs are little snippets of people's memories. So for example, there's a character in one chapter who has gotten over a terrible drug habit and has lived a somewhat compromised life since then, but is not on drugs anymore, but he has this lingering curiosity about the guy who used to sell him drugs.

He doesn't even know the guy's full name, possibly not even his real first name, but he's just filled with this sense of wanting to know what's happened to this guy. So he externalizes his specific memories of this guy, meaning he wears electrodes, he remembers his encounters with this guy, thereby releasing those memories to the collective. Then there's a kind of process where using facial recognition, the program matches his memories of this guy with other anonymous memories from the collective of this guy. And he's able to view snippets of this guy's life

using so-called gray grabs, these anonymous memories that other people have of him. So he sees him as a kid, he sees him on a kind of wilderness program, he sees him in college, he sees him selling stolen stereo equipment. And finally, he sees him, you know, in orange, in a penitentiary. So he has a question about what happened to the sky is somewhat answered without ever knowing his name. So this aspect of your art, this storyline, what does that say about your view of technology

in our lives? Well, I don't know if it reveals what I think about technology because what I think about it as a civilian is not very interesting. I mean, I'm a boomer. Like I'm scared of it. Surprise. I grew up without all this stuff. I think it's kind of bad.

I'm worried about people's attention spans. That's boring. No one wants to hear that. So what fiction lets me do is be curious about it and discover things. And sometimes through that discovery process, I realized that I don't really think what I thought I thought about something.

So the Cadi House is a much more optimistic book than I would have expected to write. It is, I think, pretty affirming of people's ingenuity and the idea that in the end, we're still people no matter what technology we're dealing with. I'm not sure that is exactly what I walk around with in my conscious life, but that is exactly what I walk around with in my conscious life is not that useful for fiction.

It's too much, it's too predictable based on my age and circumstances. It's so interesting that you can go through this process that reveals what you really think. Like you would think what you think would be readily available to you. I know. Isn't that funny? And in this case, it was really a happy surprise because I finished it during the pandemic a time of such massive uncertainty and confusion and dread. And what I ended up feeling was,

and I'm very concerned about the climate crisis, et cetera. But to me, the message of the book delivers is, humans can really solve any problem if we decide to do it. There's a line in the book, human beings are superhuman. I certainly don't think that all the time in my conscious mind, but I found myself affirmed in what the book revealed to me about my vision of humanity. Okay, so that brings us to chat GPT and all of this freaking out that's going on with AI.

Maybe I'm provoking you to say something boring and predictable. I don't know, but I'd love to hear what your thoughts are as we stand at what could be the cusp of, you know, world-shaking history-making technological developments. Well, I should start by saying I've never used chat GPT. So, am I even qualified to say a word? All I can comment on is the freak out. And I'm willing to do that. I mean, I'm going to say a word, all I can comment on is the freak out. And I'm willing to do that. I mean, I'm going to say a few things. One is, I think that the very fact that any topic or any

conversation is so amplified, so constant, so easily tending toward hysteria, sometimes has a distorting effect on the topic. So, as I've witnessed the freak out about J.G.B.T., there's some part of me that thinks, okay, is this really as big a deal as everyone's saying? And again, I don't know. I'm not sure what it means at all, except that, you know, I think about other technological things that seemed impossible like that a computer would ever beat a human being at chess. Or later, go. You know, there was a feeling like, no way. But then, computers did.

It didn't stop people from playing chess. In fact, it seems that people are crazy for chess right now. And knowing what the computer would do has just been absorbed into the process of playing chess and actually seems to be an additional dimension that does not in any way diminish human accomplishment at playing chess. So I don't know. I guess what I'm really saying is I'm a bystander right now, sort of watching this unfold. To me, the most frightening part is certainly the Frankenstein idea of Chatchy

PT somehow setting off nuclear weapons or something like that. I mean, that's appalling and horrifying and so familiar to us from many dystopian backstories and also scary movies, but that's just what's already out there in the popular culture. But if we apply the lesson of the candy house to the current fears around AI, setting aside the nuclear scenario, we could conclude that, and maybe you did conclude that we can figure it out as dark as it may get. Yeah, I like to hope so. One thing that hasn't come through as strongly in this initial conversation about chat GPT as I would have expected, where is the utopian vision of what this is going to do for

us? Because usually that's what leads. And the unintended consequences follow, you know, sometimes on a very long timetable. I mean, look at the combustion engine, you the time we figured out that was killing us, we were so deeply intertwined with it that we still haven't remotely begun to extricate ourselves. So I guess with Chatchy BT, I am not understanding what the utopian argument is.

The dystopian seems to be leading. And that's a little bit of a change. That's interesting to me. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It may just be that we have really stopped believing. And I mean, we collectively as a culture are so wary of technology at this point that we are perceiving the potential negatives

almost before or alongside the promised positives. I mean, that's my guess actually, and it really is just a guess. I'm not qualified to opine here, and I'm gonna do it anyway. My guess is we now know enough from looking at waves of technological revolutions, from the industrial revolution,

which was amazing on some level, but also led to the massive income inequality and lots of other negative externalities in the clinical language. The internet and social media, which appear to have had mental health ramifications that are quite negative, depending on which studies you read. Over and over, we see that the utopian visions are, if not totally wrong, at the very least, accompanied with something at the opposite end of the spectrum.

And so I'm just wondering whether there might be something healthy about the reaction to AI, which is like, okay, let's really reckon at the front end here with all that could be brought as a result of this technology rather than getting sucked into a utopian story and not dealing with it until several generations later. Yeah, I agree. I mean, if you think about the internet at the beginning,

sort of the mid to late 90s and things like Napster coming along. So this is something I didn't experience firsthand, but I've done research on it and it kind of comes up in both the Candy House and a visit from the Goons Squad. You know, the feeling in discovering Napster was like, oh my God, we can get things for free.

And actually, that was, I think, a feeling that people had generally on the internet, like, wow, we can just have things. This is so amazing. Why isn't it like this in real life? But it turned out that the reason things were free was that there was a different economy setting in that most of us in no way understood.

And I remember for me, the penny dropped in 2003 when I was writing a nonfiction piece for the Times Magazine about online dating. And I was interviewing someone from match.com and I couldn't get my mind around why match.com as a business had such a high monetary valuation. I was thinking like, what are you? Why are you so valuable?

And I essentially asked that question. And the person I was interviewing said, oh, well, because of all the personal information we have about everyone who uses match.com. And in that moment, I really had a kind of, oh my God moment. I got it suddenly. It took a long time for many of us who are not technologically oriented to understand that none of this was free. We were just paying in a different way. We're paying with our attention and with our data. So it seems like Chet GPT may be introducing a new paradigm of value and transaction.

And maybe it is a good thing, as you say, that there's a reaction of terror, because it seems like, you know, I guess the question is, why are we creating technology that makes us obsolete? What good are we doing there? And so I think that's a really useful question to be asking. Although everyone says there's no putting the genie back in the bottle, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't know. And again, as a non-chat GPT user, I can only say so much from my state of ignorance about it.

Given our mutual ignorance, I will gently usher us into other topics, but that was actually very interesting. The candy house. So since we're on that, there are many parts of the candy house. I mean, I'd love to all of it. There was one part in particular that actually made me laugh out loud, and I don't know if that was, first of all, that's hard to do with me. And second, I don't know if it was intentional, but there's a character early in the book who takes to screaming in public places. And I thought that was just hilarious, but maybe that's why TikTok regularly serves up prank videos to me because I love that kind of shit.

And the guy's doing it if memory serves because he wants to see genuine reactions. And he thinks everybody's such phonies that if he can scream at the top of his lungs for 10 minutes in a crowded place, he's actually going to cease everybody drop the mask. Am I stating that correctly? Totally. Yeah.

I mean, he's obsessed. You know, I think as a culture, we're pretty obsessed with authenticity. We fetishize it to some degree, which is always kind of interesting because usually we fetishize things that feel scarce. But yes, he feels that people are fake. He feels that they're playing themselves and that they're too influenced by, you know, basically generic popular culture.

So he starts screaming and it becomes a little bit of an addiction in the sense that once he has had this experience of seeing the mask fall, as you say, seeing these genuine reactions, which of course are really negative. I mean, imagine what, you know, at one point he likenes them to the expressions of people in a plane plunging toward the sea. He loves that.

And of course, if you get a taste for that, real lifesters seem really boring. So he'll get this kind of itch to scream, sometimes very inappropriate, but I mean, it's almost never appropriate to do that. And it's problematic. And we basically in the book, witness his final screaming episode, which goes awry. But I too found him pretty funny, I have to say.

And I'm glad you left out loud, because I love writing about things that become really absurd and yet still make sense. And I think that's another reason I like writing by hand in this kind of blind way because it's very improvisational. And if you think about a lot of improv that we see on stage is comedy, I think improvisation tends toward the comic, because if you push a logical situation to its extreme, it often becomes funny. And I like to get there if I can, because it's just one more note to hit. And the idea is to try to do as much as possible in this little space as one can in writing fiction.

If memory serves, there's a moment where the character is standing on a crowded bus, and his girlfriend standing next to him and she senses, oh shit, he's about to do this. And it reminded me of my wife can tell when I'm going to say something stupid. Sometimes she'll just look at me and pull it up her hand and say garbage. Because you know, some garbage is going to come out of my mouth, and I thought that was really funny. But there's a deeper level here and I wanna go back to authenticity

and I'm gonna quote you back to you. By the way, this is from the point of view of another character who's studying authenticity and is interested in the screamer. So this academic says, I believe to herself, why study authenticity if not to seek it? Try to ring some last truth from that word before it's so leeched of meaning that it becomes a word casing, a shell without a bullet, a term that can only be used inside quotation marks. I love that. It's beautiful writing. And I

think you're pointing to something really true, which is that it's hard to talk about authenticity. It's hard to use that word without lapsing right into cliche. Yeah. Well, I think about this so much because it's a little bit what I was saying about why I don't want to talk about what I think about technology. It's so predictable. Even the language I can find to articulate it is predictable. And I hate that feeling. I mean, that gets back to groupthink. That's exactly what I'm always trying to avoid when I write, or at least get beyond, because often I do have to start there.

But I think that there is this thing that happens with language and with argument, where the language is speaking us as much as we're speaking it. We are basically just using words, phrases, and arguments that we have heard and expressing them maybe with feeling, but also with a sense that we're not getting to the real thing. But I think the problem with how hackneyed authenticity is and how hard it is to say that word with a straight face or to say that word and expect other people around you to have a straight face is that it's actually

really important. Being real, not wearing a mask, this seems like a really important human capacity that we ought to be talking about quite a bit. True, but I think that it's one of those things that if you have to talk about it, there's already a problem. Yes. And it's hard for me not to think that it has a lot to do with mediation. You know, so much of our experience is mediated. And actually none of this thinking is my own. So I'm just going to quote my source, a historian named Daniel Borson, who wrote a book called The Image, published in 1961. So before Mass Media, as we know it, he is the man who coined the phrase

famous for being famous. And he isolated some really interesting things about the way media works, even at that very early stage. And one of the things he points out is that mediated experience feels artificial. It is, in some sense. And that artificiality is something we as the consumers perceive, and it causes us to crave something more authentic, and then mass media tries to satisfy that craving. So you just mentioned the need to be real. Well, my mind immediately goes to the app, be real, which notifies people at a particular moment when to take pictures of themselves so that they won't be curating or, you know,

docturing the photos, and that will somehow be more authentic. And maybe it is, but it does feel a little like looking for authenticity in all the wrong places. To me, this connects back to the beginning of this conversation about this feeling of insubstantiality we have. And Dr. Mark Epstein, this Buddhist shrink who talks about this feeling of insubstantiality

that we have can result in like a performativity, you know, there's a poem once that my meditation teacher sent me. I think it was a line from a poem. I'm tired of walking around pretending to be me. Yeah. Well, I also think, you know, social media encourages everyone to pretend to be themselves or certainly to commodify themselves effectively. And that is a pressure that I think young people certainly feel. I think it adds to the sense of one's own unreality because a lot of what I hear from younger people is that other people's lives seem better, more intense, more perfect, more perfect, more all of it, you know, the image culture plays into that deep human sense of insubstantiality and heightens it. And it does, I think, leave a kind of craving for

authentic experience, which I'm not sure can be answered by the world of media. It may be something that is only solved by the so-called real world. I don't know. Again, I question my own perspective here because I grew up without an internet. I even was an adult before the internet. So, you know, even I have to take any opinion I might have with a big grain of salt on this. Much more of my conversation with Jennifer Egan coming up.

How real do you feel now? Because you have all of these titles, that Pulitzer Prize winning novelists, very successful. Do you feel sometimes like, oh my god, I'm full of shit? Or do you feel real? And like you're behaving publicly and privately as you feel yourself to be to the extent that you can feel yourself at all. I think I tend to think that I can't do anything. That's my resting point of view. I mean, there are things I want to do, and I worry that I can't do any of them. I I worry that I can't do any of them. I even suspect that I can't do any of them. So I guess in that way nothing has changed.

I'll think, oh, oh, I'm pretending to write an article, but I know I can't ever really do it. Uh oh, there are a couple of books I want to write that I probably can't write, but I'm gonna kind of pretend I can so I can sell them and keep moving through this process even as I suspect it might never work out. I think the thing that's changed over time is that I'm very used to feeling that way. And so it's easier for me to make the leap of faith and say, well, I think I can't do

any of this stuff, but I always think that. And so far, I've usually been able to do it. So I'm just going to take a flyer here and just for the sake of argument, assume and speak as if I really can do these things. But I guess what I'm really hearing as I'm saying this to you is not that much has really changed. I think the only thing that's changed is that I'm much older

and I've been feeling this way for a long time. I don't get as frightened as I used to, so that the panic isn't there. And I have a little more faith that the fact that I feel that way does not mean I cannot do the thing. Well, I'm not in your head. We're not in the world of own your unconscious, but I think you're not giving yourself enough credit. I hear enormous growth. We're not, even I think I was interviewing somebody today who's very interested in Buddhism and some Buddhist teacher had said to him, if you're an asshole and you become enlightened, you're going

to be an enlightened asshole. Like, there are aspects of our character that are really deeply ingrained and personal growth, no matter what flavor it comes in, is most likely for us mere mortals not going to uproot them entirely. And yet, you've now found a way to talk to yourself when these, let's call them, imposter thoughts come up that gets you to move forward nonetheless. And that seems like a big deal. Yeah, you know, it's funny. It's less about talk and more about action. In other words,

what I learned early was that thinking I can't do it doesn't stop me from actually being able to do it. And so I have a high tolerance for discomfort. And that is a huge asset. Because what I've found is that actually doing the thing is what solves the problem. If the thing I'm afraid of is that I can't do it, you know, doing it is a big help. So I just try to proceed. I mean, I think I'm pretty dog-ed, honestly.

And it's a very unsexy asset, but it is actually really useful. But just to say, there is some talk in there because you described it. It's like, okay, you feel this way, but let's take a flyer. I mean, there's a lot of data on this kind of, and I'm not talking about Stuart Smalley cheesy affirmations here. I'm talking about like talking to yourself the way a good coach would talk to a player. You are just saying, yeah, so do you feel this way?

You felt this way before, but look at the way to the evidence, A, and B, let's just try it. That actually is self-talk that then leads to the action. Unless I'm misunderstanding you. No, I think it's true. I mean, but again, the writing and the strength I feel when I'm writing is also a really important part of this, because often the thing I'm trying to do or the thing I'm worried I can't do is some writing project and Actually just writing in and of itself gives me a feeling of control and Possibility, so that's a huge help. I can be a very abusive boss. I thought about this

I had an abusive boss for about three years and she talked to me in ways that I should never have tolerated, although she also paid me really well, so no regrets because I got a couple of books written in those years. But you know, I can speak to myself very harshly in ways that even I as an employee would not tolerate. So my working environment is not always good. It really isn't. But I've learned that the best answer for all that is just to do the work.

Hopefully over time we at least get better at managing ourselves. I think that's kind of what I've gotten better at. I'll think, okay, okay, this is one of those days where every thought I have is gonna be, yeah, and you you did it wrong or yeah, and you screwed that up. Yeah, you failed. This is a day to not listen to myself or honestly exercise. Huge help. So I just try to work around it when I get in that state of mind. Okay, so let's talk about another aspect of your work that I think will flow very nicely

into it. And again, I didn't know this while reading your books. I only learned it in the last couple of days as I was reading about you, but you are ferocious in your hunt for new ways to tell stories. Let me just read to you a couple of quotes from you that I found in the New Yorker. Obviously, I didn't have to dig that hard to find it in the New Yorker. And anyway, it was sent to me by Gabrielle, who's the producer of this episode. So no credit here to me.

Here are the quotes. One, I feel such a hunger to do things that I don't feel I've done before. Two, I like to work against what I've done before. It's not as simple as even just wanting novelty. I want to repudiate its too strong a word, but if I've gotten used to doing something, I like to cut off that possibility to see what happens next. It's the little like pruning. You prune to encourage growth in new ways, and I try to prune my own habits to keep growing and getting better. This sounds like, first of all, you made me feel extremely

lazy as a writer, but this just sounds like quite a brutal process you're opposing on yourself. You know, it has a moment where it's very uncomfortable to be cut off from something that I want to do, but usually there's such an immediate reward. There's something very freeing about it. You know, for example, when I was working on my novel, Manhattan Beach, which I published after a visit from the Goons Squad. I brought with me some narrative habits from a visit from the Goons Squad

and started trying to use them to write a historical novel, a New Irish thriller set in New York during World War II. And I thought that it would be really fresh and new to bring these devices to a historical novel. But in fact, they were ill-suited to the material. It wasn't working. It was what I had been doing. It felt very familiar to me, and I'd also, you know, gotten a lot of rewards for doing them with a visit from the Goons Squad. So it was uncomfortable to learn from my readers, my writing group, that this was terrible. And actually,

not only did they not like it, it actually made them angry. So that was not fun. I mean, no one likes negative feedback. But then when I resigned myself to the fact that this stuff really wasn't working and just let it go, I felt such a sense of relief and possibility. So brief discomfort is sometimes the cost of what a company is a transition for me, but on the other side of it is freshness, and I really crave that. So it doesn't really feel brutal. It feels uncomfortable in moments, but ultimately thrilling. Because again, you again, I do this for the discovery. I'm a thrill seeker. And I can't find thrills if I'm repeating myself.

So it's very worth it to me to experience the feeling of being hamstrung briefly in order to get somewhere else that is new and to grow in some way. That's the whole fun of it. But it takes a real discipline. I mean, you've said if I figured out how to do something my first goal is to not let myself do it. To me, that sounds like, because I'm so lazy,

like if I figured out how to do something, I'm just gonna beat that horse until it's seven times dead. Well, I think you're not really giving yourself credit either. Like, you're trying new things on your podcast, you're going in some new directions, so I think you know what I mean a little more than you're saying. But, you know, I love the sense of novelty. In that way, I really do think I am a thrill seeker in writing. So I'm happy to do something once, and it's a joy to get there. Sometimes these things are hard to do, like just to be concrete about it. You know, using PowerPoint, for example, to write fiction.

And it visited from the Goon Squad. Or the piece I wrote for Twitter at 140 characters in the Candy House, which is a kind of a genre-esque spy story. the Goon Squad, or the piece I wrote for Twitter at 140 characters in the candy house, which is a kind of a genre-esque spy story. Those were really hard things to pull off, because these are genres that don't lend themselves to narrative fiction in a number of ways. But the biggest reward for finally making it work, which involves so much trial and error, and lots of dead pages that I couldn't use.

But the real payoff for me is that if I can make it work, it's only because I've found a story I cannot tell any other way. That's the only time it works. And that's just exciting because it means that I actually have threaded a needle and I'm doing something that's precious. Because this is the only way it can be done. But then, as you can imagine, having done it, am I rushing back to PowerPoint? No, first of all, it's hell trying to write fiction at PowerPoint. And second of all, at best, it's going to be an also ran.

You talked about the importance of having readers, like you have a writing group that gives you feedback on your work and sounds like these people are really honest, which is invaluable. How did you curate this group and what does it like to submit yourself to that kind of feedback on the regular? Well, the group began as a class and I was a paying student. So we were all paying a poet named Ruth Dannon, who's a very gifted teacher to orchestrate a workshop.

And this is very common in New York. I mean, there are lots of writers who do this out of their living rooms and, of course, also in through institutions. Then after a few years, we reached a point where I think Ruth also wanted to bring some work in and it felt more like we were just a group of peers. So we morphed into a group of peers. And the personnel has changed a little over the years, but it's a small, pretty stable group. What I find so helpful about it, it seems most helpful to me at two phases. One is really early,

when I'm trying to define a new approach, when I'm trying to find the voice of a new piece. So that process I just described with Manhattan Beach where they hated my narrator in certain moments, and I had to let go of certain narrative bells and whistles that I had been rather attached to. That's an example of early intervention being incredibly helpful. I could have wasted a lot of time trying to make this narrative approach work, and I'm so glad I let it go early. And then, you know, they're very helpful later to answer questions like, where is this slow? Where does this chapter feel like it needs more work?

You know, more refined questions that come much later. And then I have other readers who are not in the writing group who also read my work. So I get lots and lots of feedback. It's unbelievably uncomfortable. I can't overemphasize how much I hate hearing criticism. Sometimes I forget to say that and it sounds like I'm just a glutton for punishment.

I hate it. I have sat there more times than I can count thinking, okay, we're finished. You know, it's been a great run where I'm not coming back. You don't understand me, et cetera. You know, basically just planning my goodbye. And then in some other part of my brain, I can almost feel a scurrying of problem solving. It's like a problem solving sc re. And ultimately, that completely distracts me from my hatred of the people who have just given me extremely good advice, which is already helping me

solve the problem. So it's sort of another iteration of what I said before, which is a discomfort that brings an incredibly rich reward. And once I have a sense of how to solve the problem, then I'm excited again and back in problem-solving mode. It's that I know at a certain point, later in the writing process, I do know what I'm trying to do,

but I can't tell if I'm doing it. And I don't wanna find out too late to try to do it better. Yeah, so what you're describing here seems like a kind of enlightened self-interest. It's like it's gonna suck, but on the other side of it are so many rewards. 100%. It is really uncomfortable, but I'm a perfectionist. I don't want to fall short of the vision that I'm trying to complete. And at a certain point, I just cannot judge that myself. It's amazing how I become less and less able to read what I'm doing in a fresh way.

So as that diminishing of my own authority happens, I'm more and more dependent on the voices of other people to help me. There's one friend who's very critical, who's not in the writing group, who hadn't read The Candy House at an earlier phase because she was really, really busy. And I was moving really, very close to my final draft

having gotten lots and lots of feedback. It was just troubling me that she hadn't seen it. And I kind of didn't want to give it to her because I knew that I would find out there was more that I needed to do. But I finally did of course. And when she responded at first, I felt rage. And how dare you? And then I was just so grateful

because she had found all these problems that other people hadn't picked up on. And each time I improved something, other things become foregrounded. Like if you solve big problems, suddenly problems that weren't big enough to really be noticeable before seem kind of big. So it's just a constant back and forth and trying to solve every problem I can. Yes, I do the same thing with my books. And I thought I was almost done with my next book about a year ago, and I gave it out to

a bunch of people to look at. And I've spent the last year rewriting, and I'm probably going to take another six to nine months to continue rewriting, it's just what it is. And I actually think this is very scalable advice. Whatever endeavor we're engaged in, we should all be looking for feedback quite frequently. You know, I never want to presume to tell someone else how to create, because I do think everyone's process is so radically different. It's almost shocking how differently we all do what we do. But I can't see a downside to at least hearing what someone else thinks,

and ideally, you know, several people. And one other thing I'll say is that because I don't knowingly write about myself or people who live the way I do, there's a kind of due diligence that I always have to do with my work, whether it's something very simple, like in the first chapter of the Candy House, there's an academic discussion group. And I was, you know, there's some kind of humorous aspects to this conversation, and they talk in a kind of vernacular, but at a certain point, I thought, you know, the truth is, I'm not an academic. And so with every case like that in my work, I will give it to at least one person who knows better what this kind of event would really sound like, and I always get feedback

that causes me to make changes. So I'm really accustomed to a level of due diligence that I think adds to my openness to getting feedback on what I'm doing. Yeah, I mean, I think this is a muscle, right? The willingness to hear and act upon other people's feedback. And I don't think it's just something that you would apply in creative endeavors. I think it's like, how am I doing at work, whatever I'm doing, or how am I doing in this relationship?

Or, you know, I'll sometimes ask my son, how are we doing? And I think that's just a habit we can get into that is generally quite positive in my experience. Yeah, that's interesting. I haven't thought I'm doing that with my kids. Maybe I should. But I do think sometimes there's a fear of other voices getting into the mix in a way that's bad, like muddying the result. But what I find is that in the end, I am the one who decides what feedback really resonates. And if not everyone always agrees, like even in the writing group, people will radically disagree on something. Someone likes it. Someone doesn't.

A particular part or feels this language is off, others disagree. In the end, I'm the one who makes those calls. Again, I just don't see the problem with having some more voices in the mix. How are you as a giver of feedback? I've found that I crave feedback at every step of the way in a creative project, and also just like, I'm looking for feedback and like how I'm doing in many areas of my life. And I love people who are willing to give me

the unvarnished truth. And I'm actually not necessarily that brave all the time to do it for other people, or that generous to do it for other people. You know, I was talking to a friend the other day, and I'd given her a copy of my book, I'd given it to like six people about a year ago and everybody else came back with like all these notes and she was just like, I love it. And I've been thinking about that for a long time. I was like, maybe she just didn't read it. And I saw her the other night and she said, no,

no, no, I if I generally like a thing, I just stop getting critical. I'm just kind of along for the ride. Anyway, I'm saying a lot here, but how are you at giving feedback? I think I look very carefully for the signals that the person asking for the feedback is sending to me because I think sometimes people actually want to hear what your friend said. It's great, I love it.

I also look carefully at what phase in the process someone is in. If a book is published or already in Galleys, they're not going to be fixing anything. So they're not looking for a rigorous, critical appraisal. It's not a helpful thing. But I am very willing to be pretty granular to apply my perfectionistic tendencies toward helping someone fulfill their vision as I see it.

Is it seems to be expressed to me in the work if that's what they're looking for and if there's time to respond to it? Yeah, I'll do that. It's a pleasure, actually. It's just a fun process to say, okay, here's what we've got. This is what it clearly wants to be and in some moments it feels like that's being fulfilled, where are the weak points, and how might they be addressed? It's just a fun, critical process.

Yeah, I wish I could say it was fun. Maybe it's never fun receiving it, but yes, to participate for other people, that is fun, for sure. As the clock is ticking here or running out of time, I see that on my list of questions, one that I haven't gotten to, that I'm tempted to

get to. I know it's not a super original idea and you've owned that, but you have talked about the power of curiosity. You've said, if I could pick one tool to bring with me into the world, it would probably be curiosity. This is almost like authenticity and that can be a word casing, but why curiosity? What is the power there for you personally? I think it's maybe even not a power so much as a joy.

If I'm genuinely curious, everything is interesting. Like there's no such thing as boredom. The more closely I look at anything, the more complicated it becomes. And curiosity is what gives me access to those complications. I just feel like it's a kind of joy provider because it wakes up my surroundings. And it makes me feel like the world is just full of possibilities and treasures really and stories. I mean, that's why I love journalism, because just having people

talk about their lives is so thrilling and exciting. I think maybe it's a selfish tool to have curiosity. Maybe there are more altruistic things I should want to have with me, but just as a way of interacting with the world, I really am grateful for being a curious person. It's actually like a pretty, I think, to the extent that I've thought about it. It's a pretty altruistic kind of selfishness because yes, it feels good. I mean, I did my whole career.

The two careers built around being curious. But people like it when you're curious about them too, and you're making them happy, and seen and understood if you're doing it right. And so it seems like a kind of victimless crime if it's selfish. I agree. Yes. As self-indulgences go, the price of curiosity is low, and maybe there isn't one. I mean, actually there can be. I think I can be nosy. Yeah, yes. You know, I really do just delight in caring people's stories or learning really about anything. And the more I learn, the more I want to fill in every blank I can find.

But I think I'm so grateful for it because in a way without curiosity, our worlds are defined by those extremely severe limits of our individual experience, which is so tiny compared to the enormity of what surrounds us. So it's that enormity that fascinates me, and that actually gets back to what we were talking about before, which is the feeling of disappearing. You know, I think it's hard to perceive and honor and appreciate the enormity of really the mystery of what surrounds us without also feeling the tini-ness, tini-ness to the point of vanishing of our own individualize. It's all the same process.

I mean, that is awe. Yeah, exactly. We touched on this a little bit earlier, but you spent so much time as a young person, those formative years feeling unseen by people around you, not being able to even see yourself, find yourself. You felt insubstantial, not uncomfortable way. But now that you, you know, your name's on the cover of mega best-selling books, some of which might become TV shows or movies or whatever, you get awards, how substantial do you feel and how does success scan for you? That's an interesting question. I mean I'm very grateful for

it because our world really cares about that. One time a friend said, shortly after I won the Pulitzer, she said, what is it like? And I, in the moment, the metaphor that came to me was, I said, it's sort of like driving a really kind of fancy, rare car and having people look at the car and therefore at you because you're in the car. So I feel extremely grateful for that and lucky to even have a

readership, you know. A lot of the success came to me later in my career. I was already in my late forties. I knew very much what it was like the other way. So I really had a point of comparison of what it's like to have accolades. It makes a lot of things easier. I also feel really keenly aware of how easily that could not have happened. There's so much luck to all of this. I've judged prizes. I know how it works.

In the end, it has an iconic quality because we're very oriented toward icons as humans. But it's just people making a choice. That's really how it happens. And that's always about luck. It's the luck of pleasing the right group of people at the right time. And so along with that, I feel very aware that there are other people who could easily have gotten that and haven't yet. And I'm always aware of that. It's sort of like it's a shadow that comes along with my good luck is the knowledge that it could easily not have happened and it hasn't happened to a lot of people who deserve it

just as much if not more. And this is not false humility. This is just fact. I speak from 60 years of experience. So I try to hold all of that in my mind. And I guess above all, I just want to keep getting better and do what I love to do in fresh ways. So ultimately, what needs to happen

is that all of that goes to the side because that's just distraction. And I re-enter the world of generating language, which is the thing I love. And to the degree that any of that stuff is in my head, it's always going to be to the detriment of the writing. So I try to be realistic about all of it, very aware of my good fortune,

and then forget all of it, forget myself, and all the things that have happened to me, and just move forward into some new world. Well, I'm glad you keep doing it because it's certainly benefited me as a reader of yours. Is there something that I should have asked you but failed to ask you? I don't know. I feel like we've covered a lot of ground here.

I'm really enjoyed it. Yes, it's fun to be nosy. You've mentioned a couple of your books, but can you just throw out some names of your books just for people who haven't absorbed them, haven't written them down yet, haven't yet looked at the show notes where we'll have all the links for people who might be looking for their next read. Sure. Well, the new one that we've really been talking about is called the candy house. And it's part of the same world

as an earlier book, a visit from the Goons Squad. There's not a prequel sequel because neither is chronological. Noirish wartime thriller in the middle called Manhattan Beach, then some earlier books. My novel Look at Me is actually connected to Goons Squad and Candy House. There's a sort of small Easter egg connection there. A gothic thriller called The Keep. My first novel, The Invisible Circus, which actually did become a movie in 2001 and a story collection Emerald City.

Such a pleasure and truly really an honor to meet you. Thank you so much for doing this. It's been a joy. Thank you. Thanks again to Jennifer Egan, so cool to meet her. Thank you for listening. Go give us a rating or a review. It actually helps. And thanks most of all to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justin Davy Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson, DJ Cashmere is our senior producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor and Kimmy Regler is our senior producer, Marissa Schneidermann is our senior editor and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer, we get our scoring and mixing from Peter Bonaventure

over at Ultraviolet Audio and our theme music comes from Nick Thorburn of the great Indy Rock Band Islands. We'll see you soon for a brand new episode. Hey, hey prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.