The Braindead Megaphone | George Saunders | Talks at Google

I'd like to welcome everyone to today's Authors at Google event. We have George Saunders here today. George is the author of several collections of short stories and a book for children. His first collection of essays is the one that you have in your hands, the Braindead Megaphone, and it was published last week. Saunders has been compared to an impressive array of authors and humorists that I'm going to try to list for you. They include Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Flannery o', Connor, Matt Groening, and Mark Twain. In the Brain Dead Megaphone, he covers topics as familiar as U.S. immigration policies and media, and as otherworldly as the Buddha boy of Nepal and luxurious hotels in Dubai, all with his trademark wit, honesty, and sharp sense of right and wrong. His writing is satirical and seriously funny, but it's also been called redemptive. Saunders exposes the absurdity of life as we know it while simultaneously exhibiting a sincere belief in, and perhaps hope for the goodness of mankind. He currently teaches creative writing at Syracuse university, and in 2006, he was awarded the MacArthur foundation genius grant. Please join me in welcoming George Saunders.

Thank you very much for coming here. I'm honored to be here. I appreciate it. I always worry about these events because it's that initial sort of public nervousness about whether people will laugh or not. So I have a funny piece that I could start with, but I also have, you know, in my bag I have an alternate in case this is a more serious event. It's kind of just. I'm really proud of it. It's kind of a short. It's not that short. It's a kind of a lengthy history of the legume in American agriculture. So if this. I start to read this and no one laughs, I'll just go with the legumes. So basically I'm asking you to tell me your feelings by laughing or not. But it's very. The beans are very interesting. I think you like it. So, anyway, this is kind of a. First of all, I apologize in advance for this cough. I'm trying to emulate my hero, Anton Chekhov. So I've got tb. This is a piece, more serious piece, actually, that talks about my feelings as I go into midlife. I'm now 80, and I've noticed that, you know, if the brain could be said to have a sphincter, mine is tightening up a little bit. So this piece is called Nostalgia. The other day I was watching TV and it occurred to me that I'd become a prude. The show in Question was innocuous enough. Nothing shocking, really. Just an episode of Hottie Leader featuring computer simulations of what various female world leaders would look like naked and in the throes of orgasm. But somehow between that and the Pizza Hut commercial where Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson engage in some girl on girl action in a vast field of pizza sauce, something snapped. I mean, I know what the problem is. I'm old. I came of age in a simpler sexual time. Back in those ancient prelapsarian days, girl on girl hadn't even been invented yet. At that time, girl on guy had only recently been invented. I remember my parents and their neighbors standing in the yard with a pair of crude human figures made of wood, trying to work out all the details. Sometimes a couple would get all worked up and forget where things were supposed to go. And the husband would have to call a friend. Only phones were new too, so he'd go over to visit a friend from school and there'd be his dad, just standing there naked, phone in hand, totally flummoxed. Women could get pregnant from merely watching a kiss in a movie. Girls, or at least the good girls, would go to movies blindfolded. I remember once in fourth grade, I had to get engaged to a girl whose coat I'd brushed up against in the cloakroom. Those are simpler times, but in some ways, I think better times. Same deal with violence. I remember how shocked we all were when the whole Cain and Abel thing happened. What? What we kept saying he bludgeoned his brother with a rock. I remember the first time a severed limb was ever shown on tv. People were running out of their houses screaming, and it was just a fake leg in a cartoon. Imagine how shocked those screaming people would be now when, for example, you can log onto the Evidence of Evil website and they'll send you a box full of bloody prosthetics, which you reassemble into a crack addicted whore who will then emit some clues through her computerized voice box. And when you think you know who murdered her, you enter the name of the killer on the website. And if you write, you get to see a short porn of her making love with her killer moments before he hacks her to bits while she has a flashback of her mother beating her with a chair leg. I mean, okay, there was violence when I was a kid, but nobody really talked about it. If you got strangled and dismembered, you just got up the next day whistling a happy tune and went down and did some riveting for the war effort. As far as computer simulations, sorry no. All we had was sketch pads and pencils. If we wanted to see what various female world leaders looked like naked in the throes of orgasm, we had to use a little thing called the imagination. Plus, all the world leaders were men back then. And believe me, once you've drawn Richard Nixon naked and in the throes of orgasm, you never have quite the same interest in using your imagination again. Every time you even see a pencil, you get a little pukey and have to go sit down. You know, whenever I talk to a young person, like some of the teenagers in my neighborhood, or this one toddler Maxie, or even a couple of fetuses I run into occasionally, I say to them, trust me, guys, enjoy your youth, because the level of sex and violence is going to continue to escalate, and by the time you're my age, the world of your youth will seem like a distant, innocent paradise. Well, the teenagers and the toddler Maxie, sometimes they seem to get it. But the fetuses, well, you know fetuses, they're arrogant. To them, it's always going to be a soft, gentle ride in a warm, comfortable space. And I'm like, okay, smart guy, call me in nine months and we'll talk. Or I will. You'll just be lying there, pink and newborn, with a terrified look on your face, apologizing to me with those little shocked eyes. Things just keep getting worse. I suspect that in 40 years, when I'm 87, I'll look back at the present level of sex and violence and just go, oh, man. You called that sex and violence? That was nothing. That was puritanism. That was pacifism compared to now. But then I'll have to go because it'll be stripper night at the old folks home and I'll have to find my costume and my back brace. But on the way there, I'll be killed by a mysterious old folks home invader who actually works for FOX and is committing and filming my murder for a later broadcast on when codgers on their way to strip look terrified. Same with music though, right? I used to love music back when it had melody and chords and lyrics. But now it has no melody and no chords, just thwack, thwacking. And they even seem to be cutting back on the thwack thwacking. So now it's sometimes just wah. As far as lyrics, do you consider these lyrics? Hump my hump my stumpy lumpy hump Hump my dump, you lumpy, slumpy dump. I'll dump your hump and then just hump your dump, you lumpy, frumply clump. I'm sorry, to me, those are not lyrics. In my day, lyrics were used to express real emotion, like the emotion of being totally stoned and trying to talk this totally stoned chick into sleeping with you in the name of love, which lasted forever if only you held on to your dreams. These kids today, I don't know. I don't know what they believe. I mean, I don't even know what I believe anymore. But what I do not believe is that watching Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson roll around in pizza sauce is helping our youth as they go forth and try to figure out what they believe. Scientific evidence suggests that even the fetuses inside of mothers watching that commercial are getting one dumber and two. Two little baby boners. I don't go for that. I think that when a fetus is in the womb, it should just be floating around with its undersized, arrogant head empty and its little nascent penis just, you know, inactive. We grow these kids up too fast, and next thing you know, out come the Indian and the Chinese fetuses, and they start taking away the jobs of our homeland fetuses. And why? Because the foreign fetuses aren't jaded. They're innocent. Like I was. Like my whole generation was when we were fetuses, back in those long forgotten, idyllic days when American fetuses walked the earth like happy, unsoiled giants doing algebra and reading the classics. There's a little more, but it's much more disgusting, so I'll just pause there for a second. So that's kind of a funnier piece, theoretically. How's everybody? Everybody okay? All right. So I thought I'd read a little bit of. Just a short bit from this piece about Dubai. I was fortunate enough a few years ago, GQ approached me and asked if I would do some journalism for them. And never done it before. And because my short stories are kind of like, you know, they're set in these futuristic dystopias where the haves are beating up the have nots in these disgusting artificial environments. They said, hey, Dubai, that would be perfect for you. So they were very sweet, and they sent me to do this big piece with no audition or anything. And of course, as is often the case, I think. Excuse me, before you go on a trip like that, as a writer, you're anxious because you don't want to screw it up and you don't have to give them money back and so on. So for a writer And I suppose for any creative person, the anxiety takes the form of massive conceptualizing on the front end. Right. You want to know exactly what you're going to do before you actually do the trip. So for me, the thrill was to have this sort of parent package story, haves, have nots and all the things, and then go there and see the way it's disrupted in reality. So one of the kind of mini themes that runs through this book is this idea that to the extent that we can imagine the world, we always imagine it smaller than it actually is. So when we imagine the world small and then act boldly, we often make terrible mistakes. In my view, that's a perfect description of the run up to the war in Iraq was incomplete conceptualization of a place and then two bold action into that place. But anyway, Dubai was a smaller, kind of more silly version of that experience. So this first section is called put that stately pleasure palace there between those other two. If you're like I was before I went to Dubai, you may not know exactly where Dubai is. Near Venezuela. No, sorry, that's incorrect. Somewhere north of Pakistan. An idyllic mountain kingdom ruled by gentle goat herds. No, Dubai actually is in the UAE, on the Arabian Peninsula, 100 miles across the Gulf from Iran, about 600 miles from Basra, 1100 from Kabul. You might also not know, as I didn't know what Dubai is all about or why someone would want to send you there, you might wonder, is it dangerous? Will I be beheaded? Will I need a translator? Will my translator be beheaded? Just before we're beheaded, will my translator try to get out of it by blaming everything on me? But no, not to worry. Dubai, turns out, is quite possibly the safest great city in the world. It's also the newest great city in the world. In the 1950s, before oil was discovered there, Dubai was just a cluster of mud huts and Bedouin tents along Dubai Creek. The entire city has actually basically been built in the last 50 years. And actually the cool parts, the parts that have won Dubai its reputation as the Vegas of the Middle east or the Venice of the Middle east, or the Disney World of the Middle east, if Disney World were the size of San Francisco and out in the desert, have been built in the last 10 years. And the super cool parts, the parts that when someone tells you about them, your attention drifts, because these morons have to be lying. No one dreams this big or has that much available capital. Those parts are all going to be built in the next five years. So by 2010, if all goes according to plan. Dubai will have the world's tallest skyscraper, largest mall, biggest theme park, longest indoor ski run, most luxurious underwater hotel accessible by submarine train. A huge 60,000 resident development called international City, divided into nation neighborhoods. England, China, France, etc. Within which all homes will be required to reflect the national architectural style. Not to mention four artificially constructed island mega archipelagos, three shaped like giant palm trees, the fourth like a map of the world, built using a specially designed boat that dredges up tons of ocean bottom sand each day and sprays it into place. Before I saw Dubai for myself, I assumed this was all bluster. Brag about 10 upcoming projects, finally build one smaller than you'd brag. Hope everyone forgets about the other nine. But no, I've been to Dubai and I believe if America was looking for a pluralistic, tax free, laissez faire, diverse, inclusive, tolerant, no holds barred, daringly capitalist country to serve as a shining city on the hill for the entire Middle east, we should have left Iraq alone and sponsored a national peaceful tourist excursion to Dubai and spent our 90, quadrillion Iraq war dollars there. Maybe. And this section is called. Well, this is called the Wild Wadi Epiphany and I stayed in this hotel called the Madinat Jumeirah, which didn't exist two years ago. It was just desert. And they built this incredibly beautiful Arabian village, complete with all these fake creeks that have these abras that are rode by what I can only describe as fake Arabs because they're all from Nepal, but they're wearing Arabic clothing. And so it's just crazy. And of course your first reaction is, ew, Vegas. You know, and then after a couple days you're like, I am not leaving. I love it here. It was so lush and, you know, the wildflowers and just simulated wind towers and just a gorgeous artificial environment. It's actually more platonically beautiful than any real environment could ever be. So I got a little seduced by this. But finally, I did leave the green zone there and went to an even greener zone. This is called the Wild Wadi Epiphany. A short complimentary golf cart ride down the beach from the Madnat is Wild Wadi, a sprawling themed water park whose theme is a wadi is flooding once an hour. The sound of thunder cracking trees, rushing waves blares through the facility. Wide PA and a waterfall begins dropping 1000 gallons of water a minute into an empty pond, which then violently overflows down the pedestrian walkways past the gift shop. Waiting in line. I'm part of a sort of United nations of partial nudity. Me, a couple of sunburned German girls, three angry looking Arab teenagers, kind of like the Marx Brothers, if the Marx Brothers were Arabs in bathing suits with cigarettes behind their ears, who I notice are muttering to one another while glowering. Then I see what they're muttering and glowering about. Several like 15 members of the US Navy on shore leave. You can tell they're Navy because they're huge and tattooed and innocently happy and keep bellowing things like dude, fuck that. I'm all about dancing while punching each other lovingly in the tattoos and shooting what I recognize as rural smiles of shyness and apprehension at all the people staring at them because they're so freaking loud. Then the Navy guys notice the glowering, muttering Arabs and it gets weirdly tense there in line. Luckily it's my turn to awkwardly blop into my tube and off I go. The ride involves a series of tremendous water jets that blast you on your tube gradually to the top of Wild Wadi where your recently purchased swim trunks having been driven up your rear by the jets. You pause looking out over the entire city, the miles of stone white villas, the Burj Al Arab Hotel sail shaped, iconic, the world's only seven star hotel even though the rating system only goes up to five out in the green blue bay just before you fly down so fast that you momentarily fear the next morning's headline will read Middle Aged American Dies in Freak Waterslide Mishap Bathing Suit Found Far Up Ass. Afterward, I reconvene with my former line mates in a sort of faux river bend, becalmed traffic jammed, we bob around in our tubes trying to keep off one another via impotent little hand flips, bare feet accidentally touching. Oh, sorry. Legs splayed belly up in the blinding 112° Arabian sun, self conscious and expectant, as in are we the like stuck here? Will we go soon? I hope I'm not the one who drifts under that dang waterfall over there. No one's glowering or muttering now. We're sated, enjoying that little dopey buzz of quasi accomplishment you feel after a surprisingly intense theme park ride. One of the Arab kids, the one with the chico hair, passes a drenched cigarette to me to pass to his friend and then a lighter and suddenly everybody's smiling. Me, the Arab Marxes, the sunburned German girls, the US Navy, a disclaimer. It may be that when you're 46 and Pearl White and wearing a new bathing suit at a theme park on Your first full day in Arabia, you're especially prone to big, naive philosophical realizations. Be that as it may, in my tube at Wild Wadi, I have a mini epiphany. Given enough time, I realize statistically, despite what it may look like at any given moment, we will all be brothers. All differences will be bred out. There will be no pure Arab, no pure Jew, no pure American American. The old dividers, nation, race, religion will be overpowered by cross breeding and by our mass media, our world culture owe enjoyment. Look what just happened here. Hatred and tension were diffused by sudden fun still bobbing around three days before the resort bombings in Cairo, two weeks after the London bombings. I think mumble a little prayer for the great homogenizing effect of pop culture. Same us out, Lord, mtv. Even if in the process we're left a little dumber. Please proceed. Let us brothers and sisters, leave the intolerant, the ideologues, the religious Islamist Bolsheviks, our own solvers of problems. With troops behind, fully clothed on the banks of Wild Wadi, we, the new people, desire fun and the good things of life. And through fun we will be saved. Then the logjam breaks and we surge forward down a mini waterfall. Without exception, regardless of nationality, each of us makes the same sound as we disappear, a thrilled little self forgetting whoop. And let me just read one more section from this. This is called Cleaning among the Mayhem. Dubai is a city of people who come from elsewhere and are going back there soon. To start a good conversation with a fellow tourist with the help with just about anybody, simply ask, where are you from? Everyone wants to tell you. If white, they're usually from England, South Africa or Ukraine. If not, they're from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Kenya, Nepal or India. One hotel seems to hire only Nepalese, one bar has only Ukrainians. You discover a pocket of Sri Lankan golf cart drivers all anxious to talk about the tsunami one day. Inexplicably, everyone you meet, everywhere you go is from the Philippines. Where you from? You say all day and all day people brightly answer, Philippines. That night at a club called Boudoir, I meet El, an employee of Ford in Dubai. Manic, funny, Stanley Tucci looking guy from Detroit. He welcomes me into his party, gets me free champagne, mourns the circa 1990 state of inner city Detroit. Feral dogs roaming the streets, trees growing out of upper stories of skyscrapers where, you know, formerly commerce was being done. The real 1960s automobile fucking world class commerce, man. The night kind of explodes. This, I think this is the repressive Arabian Peninsula. Apparently anything is permitted as long as it stays within the space within which it's permitted. Here's a Palestinian who lives in LA and his T shirt says lapd, where everybody is king. A couple of blonde Russian girls dance on a rail among balloons. On the dance floor, two other blondes dance alone. A guy comes up behind one and starts passionately grinding her. This goes on a while, then he stops, introduces himself, she shakes his hand. He goes back to grinding her. His friend comes up, starts grinding her friend. I don't get it. Prostitutes. Some new youthful social code? I am possibly too old to be in here. The dance floor is packed. The whole place becomes a dance floor. The rails are now packed with dancers. A Lebanese kid petulantly shouts that if this was fucking Beirut, the girls would be stripped off by now, then gives me a snotty look and stomps away as if it's my fault the girls are still dressed. I drop my wallet, look down and see the tiniest little woman imaginable with a whisk broom, struggling against the surge of the crowd like some kind of cursed cleaning fairy trying to find a small swath of Florida sweep while being bashed by this teeming mass of gyrating international hipsters. She's tiny. I mean tiny, like 3ft tall, her head barely reaching all the gyrating waists, with thick glasses and bowl cut hair. Dear little person, it seems impossible she's trying to sweep the dance floor at a time like this. She seems uncommonly heroically dedicated, like some kind of OCD janitor on the Titanic. Where are you from? I shout. Philippines. She shouts and goes back to her sweeping. So I'll pause there and we can talk a little bit if you'd like. Thank you.

I have the microphone, so whoever has a question, let me know and I'll give it to you.

Don't be shy. State capitals are fine.

Hey, how are you?

Good, how are you?

Not bad. So it seems that you were talking about kind of two parallel themes in those two passages, and they seem contradictory to me, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on them. One kind of spoke about how pop culture is kind of making us worse off and, you know, dumber and, you know, kind of just more kind of zombie ish in a sense. And the other one's kind of like how pop culture is our savior and it'll bring us together. So my question is, does it bring us together by just turning us all into zombies?

Kind of, you know, I.

And what does that. What does that say about hatred? Also that is hatred, in a sense, an enlightened state to. To some extent.

Yeah. I don't. God, I hope not. But you know what? I think I'll tell you a story. In response to a very intelligent question. There's this thing that happened. It's actually. It's in Gorky, the Russian writer Gorky, his notebooks. And he tells about being with Tolstoy in Moscow. And at this point, Tolstoy is like 190 years old and has just declared himself celibate, you know, and he's very righteous. So they're walking down the street and these hussars come towards him. Kind of the Russian or the Russian Green Beret, basically. You know, these young swaggering guys. And Tolstoy says, that's what's wrong with Russia. These young men, they believe only in power and aggression, obliterating the rights of others. That will be the downfall of our nation. And Gorky's like, wow, you know, I never thought of it that way. It's brilliant. And so then these guys walk by on either side of the two writers, and little Tolstoy turns on his heel, and he says, on the other hand, that's everything that's great about Russia. The confidence, the urge to action, the idea that life can be ours, we can change it. So Gorky stops there. But my assumption is that what he's saying is a very deep sort of thing, which is, in art and maybe just in general, the idea is to be able to be really comfortable with contradictory ideas. In other words, wisdom might be seen to be two contradictory ideas, both expressed at their highest level and just left to sit in the same cage, sort of vibrating, you know? So I think as a writer, I'm really never sure of what I really believe. But some things I know are true, and I write them. Something. I'm paraphrasing Dylan here. Some things I know are true and I write, some things I know are false, and I write them, and some things I'm not sure, and I write them. And the idea, I think, is that in honestly confronting ourselves with those kind of contradictions, because actually, I believe both things that you just said, said mass culture is killing us. Mass culture is saving us. I think the highest form of sort of human existence is to be able to have both those things vibrating in your mind and then hold off on action until it's absolutely necessary. To me, that's what wisdom is. So for me, writing is to try to contradict myself constantly, as sort of energetically as I can. In each case, if that makes sense. I mean, I dodged it, but thanks. Thanks for your question. Thanks. Oh, this isn't a tacky question. I forgot to ask Jonathan Letham when he was here. But winning the MacArthur Award, like, allows for you to have some sort of freedom, I'm assuming. Yeah. And I know being a short story writer, as opposed to a novel writer, isn't the way to go if you want to be a best selling giant type. Yeah, exactly. So I was just curious, imagining that you must have some more sense of freedom now that you have the grant. And so is nonfiction what you had already planned, or is that kind of like, now that without these constraints, this is what I want to do? How does that work? Well, this book, actually, some of the pieces are as old as 98, so it's just sort of coincidence that it was basically all done except for one piece when I got the MacArthur. So that's just kind of.

Oh.

So if you don't mind, if that's true about the freedom, then what are your plans, you know, for. My wife and I, we. I'm from a Kind of a. Well, when we got married, we had no money, basically, and so we kind of just blundered ahead. We had kids, and we were always living check to check. So, honestly, and kind of unglamorously, the most exciting thing about it has just been that the ceiling lifted just a little. You know, I still teach at Syracuse, although they were nice enough to put me on Halftime, which is great, but really, it's more. It's not so much. It's psychological in a way. My daughter had. She's 17, and she had a beautiful way of saying it. She said, you should think about it not as an award, but as something you should try to live up to, you know? So for me, it's not really anything at this point, particularly material, except a little more breathing room. And then also again, embarrassingly, because I'm kind of a neurotic Catholic. But the inner none in me has been a bit silent. You know, like the voice that says, oh, Mr. Smythe Pants, type in your stories. You know, suddenly I feel like, yeah, the MacArthur likes me. You know, and it actually, you know, many times a day, you're at a crossroads, and I find myself erring on the side of boldness, which is actually a real blessing. And apparently, my original plan was to buy, like, 90 jet skis. It's contractual. You can't do it in the MacArthur. I didn't. There are some of that. Hi.

This is more of a craft question. For you, I'm wondering how much of what you write comes out being funny and how much you really spend revising and how you kind of resolve those two things. Because I imagine you could revise the humor right out of your pieces.

Are you a writer?

My husband is, actually. You met him yesterday.

Oh, I did.

Oh, we're stalking you.

Okay, good. Well, thank God someone finally is. I've been working all my life and I never got to stalk you. No, I'm a real fanatic reviser. And I think, yeah, I think basically, I know for a fact that I revise myself when I'm lucky if, you know, if I do it right, from a kind of banality into a kind of sharpness. So often in revision, I'll have three versions of the same joke and I'll cut two. Or there'll be a little bit too much padding on either side of the joke, and you pop that out because I think basically, humor is, as I say in the book, is being honest a little quicker than is expected. You know, so we have, you know, we go through life in a sense, in a deluded state. You know, like, we all got up and came to work today. And your mind habitually normalizes the circumstances. What are we doing? We're having a lecture. Where are we? We're at a corporate headquarters. Although not a normal headquarters, don't get me wrong. But we're all here having a day, and I'm talking and you're playlist. But on the other hand, you could say just as honestly, just as objectively, 200 future corpses sat in an auditorium earlier that day. At some point, all of them had been standing in their underwear. You know, 200 years hence, all will be moldering in the grave. You know, and in a way, that's kind of funny, you know, it's sort of odd, but it's just as true as the first expression of it. So I think humor is really just a way of sort of saying. Taking off a bit of the politeness gloves and saying, let's really talk about our actual situation. But revision, oddly, I think it does help you get to that place. The first draft is always kind of banal and always kind of, you know, which is one of the things I wonder about with blogging and stuff. Because the first pass of something, you know, if everybody. If we said here, everybody in this room, write a description of your first kiss, they would mostly be the same, right? I mean, there would be some variations. There'd be a slight Gaussian curve. But basically, my Feeling is revision attenuates the Gaussian curve. So the people who are really good are going to get way out ahead of that curve by revising. Because revising is just basically sorting through your own BS and your own falsehood and trying to take it out. You know, much like in a recording studio, if you have to go over many, many times in splice, you might get a purer version of the thing. Although sometimes funny things just come out and revision means leave them alone. Leave that little thing alone. Because it was.

I know you've had various career paths over time, and at what point did you turn around and were able to embrace the creative part of your personality that probably kept on popping up over those career paths and you maybe didn't listen to it or knew you wanted to at some point, or just decided to beat the internum into submission or ever.

I had a brief. I got into grad school, so for a couple years I had that. But at that point, I was so terrified I couldn't really produce much. But then I was an engineer and I went to work at an environmental engineering company in Rochester, and we had our two kids really quickly, I think on the same day, but they're not twins. So it was weird. It was like morning and night. But it was suddenly, it was clear that if I wanted to be a writer, it wasn't going to happen in a writer's colony. It was going to happen at work. So I did what you at Google don't have to do, which is I stole a bunch of time, or maybe you do, I don't know, but. But I stole a bunch of time from my employer. I had sort of calculated the exact number of steps from the door to my cubicle, and it turned the computer so the person really had to be trying to see the screen. And then I had. This was back in the DOS days. So it was. Shift F3 was still the kind of toggle thing. So I would set it up like that, put a story on one screen and my engineering work on the other. And I actually developed this tick where I'd be writing and I'd be really excited. And as soon as somebody came in, I hit shift F3 and go like that, you know. So all of that, the whole first book was written under those conditions at work. So actually it was kind of great because it wasn't like I got my writer's cabin. It was the opposite. It was, you know, people were trying to catch me. At one point, I got in the story in the New Yorker and That's when suddenly it was clear that I was doing something at work. And my boss said, he said, george, congratulations on your success and all, but we're going to have to insist that you don't do your. You don't use corporate equipment to manufacture your writer thingies, you know. So there we had to bill our time, you know, so if you were going to the bathroom, Kodak was sort of paying for it. So I developed this system where if somebody offended me, which they constantly were because I'm very touchy, I would take like the George Saunders grant for the arts. So someone would go, george, this cover is completely messed up. Do it again. And I'd say, okay, asshole, you've just given me a three hour grant for the arts. And I would. Then, you know, then the next time he came in, he'd say, how long does it take to get this? Because I was the COVID guy, that's what I did. And this is such an unsophisticated group that because I knew word perfect well enough to center, you know, and I knew how to go down like nine lines and three lines, I was the COVID guru. So let me say next time that asshole said, how many hours do you need? I'd say, oh, for the COVID that's going to be a tough one. Give me four hours or two hours or whatever. And when it took 12 minutes, so then I would work. So anyway, a long way of saying that creative moment didn't really come. It came for six years at work in little bits and pieces, which actually was kind of purifying because if there are writers in the crowd, when you get too much time, what you start doing is researching. Like someone has a cup of hot chocolate and you're like, hmm, I wonder what the history of hot chocolate is. You know, I better take a trip to Bolivia and check it out. You know, Whereas in this, in this situation, it was just I wouldn't sit down unless I knew what something was urgent. And then I sit down, da da da da, shift F3 run out again. So it was kind of a different way of working. And after five or six years of that, the book came out and then that sort of bigger, bigger space opened up. So I still simulate that. Now I kind of like interrupt myself and try to, you know, feel as guilty as possible while I'm working. On the Dubai piece. I know you spent some time also talking about the workers that in essence, these buildings were built on the back of. And I was just wondering if you.

Could address that a little bit.

Yeah, it's actually a defect in the piece because I was only there for a week and the conditions are really bad for them. But the thing, you know, when you do a piece like this, you're trying to find a thing that hasn't been said before. And you can find the fact that there are these very low wage workers from South Asia and Dubai. But in talking to them, what was interesting to me was that they actually, to them, the ones I spoke with, their life was much better there certainly than it was at home and certainly better than it was in Saudi Arabia. So there was a kind of interesting thing where I was looking for the story I'd gone to find, which is I'm so oppressed. I hate this place. I didn't find that particular one. I think I could have found it, but I didn't find it.

And we.

And instead what I found was people who said, yeah, I haven't been home in three years, but my mother has a house because I'm here. The truth is they live, these guys, you see them, they work 24 hour days, I mean in shifts of course, but any time of the day or night you'll see these mostly, I think South Indian laborers in blue jumpsuits. So they're in construction sites and they work non stop and get very little money. And they live in these sort of labor camps which are. I didn't get into one, but they're apparently pretty bad out on the outskirts of town. Town. So that's kind of the secret shame of Dubai. And yet, as I say in the piece, the same people in Saudi Arabia are much worse off. So it's tricky. There's also these crazy sex clubs where you go in and they're beautiful, beautiful nightclubs. Hundred dollars to get in. And all the prostitutes are basically arranged by nationality or they self arrange by nationality. So the bathroom is what they call Koreatown. And then there's the Moldavians and then there's the Thai girls. And it's just really the most futuristic, surreal thing. And of course a good number of the women are not there voluntarily. I mean, they thought they were in for something else and they got shipped there. So I didn't have the time or actually just the intelligence to be investigative about it. But I tried to give a taste of all that different kind of stuff. So other more serious journalists have gone in and kind of told that story. You, I think more than I did.

We actually had Casper Hauser visit a little while ago and they commented they were asked a question about kind of the State of satire and comedy and how they keep in touch with a sense of community in North America in general, but also just across the board. And maybe you could comment a bit. I know writing is a pretty lonely profession and if you establish a community, if it's specific to kind of satire in that area, or if you also just try to actively connect with different.

Folks across the board, you know, really, I don't. I am such a. I'm not a recluse, but I'm kind of a lazy ass and I just basically sit around my house most times. I mean, I have friends like Dave Eggers as a friend and David Foster Wallace is a friend and Jonathan Franz and a lot of people. But we kind of communicate occasionally and not, not so, you know, and when I was younger, I always imagined we'd all be hanging around in a coffee shop, but I don't really have that kind of community. I mean, I've got, you know, my wife and kids in a sort of little neighborhood. And so I don't really, you know, have it actually, to be honest with you. And maybe it's a defect, but I tend to just spend nine or 10 hours in my study just waiting for something to happen. And then occasionally little bursts of trips like out to New York or something. And then the nice thing is I do know because of the being published, I get to meet a lot of people really quickly. Like I met Sarah Vall the other day and that was really like an incredible conversation, you know, just like a 15 minute burst of sheer, you know, intelligence and wit. So that's the community is sort of. It's almost like it's a little bit like an online community in that it's occasional and it's sort of rarefied and then you feed on it for many, for many months afterwards. Well, can I close with one more? Would you indulge me with one little three more three page piece that I'd like to leave with. And this one, I always kind of cringe to read it because I like it, but it's a little bit tough. So I apologize if it's, you know, offensive but also supposed to be. This is called Manifesto, a press release from prka. Now it can be told. Last Thursday, my organization, people reluctant to kill for an abstraction, PRKA orchestrated an overwhelming show of force around the globe at precisely nine in the morning. Working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously being beheading no one. At 9:30, we embarked upon phase two, during which our entire membership simultaneously did not force a single man to simulate sex with another man. At 10, phase three began, during which not a single one of us blew himself or herself up in a crowded public place. No civilians were literally turned inside out via our powerful explosives. No previously funny person was reduced to a baggy pile of bloody leaking flesh by us during this phase of our operation. In addition, at 11 in Phase 4,00 planes were flown into buildings. All of this was accomplished so surreptitiously it attracted little public notice. During phase five, just after lunch, while continuing to avoid the activities listed above, we were able to avoid bulldozing a single home. Furthermore, we sat on roads in every city, in every nation in the world. A total of 00 roadside bombs, which, not being there, did not explode. Killing, maiming, a total of nobody. No bombs, cluster bombs or rockets were launched into crowded civilian neighborhoods from which it was observed, no post bomb sickening momentary silences could be heard. These silences were in all cases followed by no unimaginable grief stricken bellows of rage and loss. No sleeping babies were awakened from sleep by the sudden collapse and or bursting into flame of his or her domicile, followed by the tortured screams of his or her family members. During phase five, in the early afternoon phase six, our membership focused on using 00 trained dogs to bite terrorized naked prisoners. In addition, no stun guns, rubber batons, rubber bullets, tear gas or real bullets were used by our membership on any individual anywhere in the world. No one was forced to don a hood, no teeth were pulled in darkened rooms. Drills were not used on human flesh, nor were whips or flames. No one was reduced to hysterical tears via a series of blows to the head or body by us. Our membership, while casting no racial or ethnic aspersions, skillfully continued not to rape, gang rape or sexually assault a single person. On the contrary, during this afternoon phase, many of our membership engaged in tender, loving sexual acts, flirted happily and even consoled in a non sexual way. Individuals to whom they were attracted, putting aside their sexual feelings out of a sudden welling of empathy as night fell, our membership harbored no secret feelings of rage or hatred, or if they did, prayed, meditated or discussed these feelings with a friend until such time as the feelings abated or were understood to be symptomatic of some deeper sadness, at which time they made silent promises to continue to struggle with these feelings. It should be noted that in addition to the above listed and planned activities completed by our members, a number of unplanned activities were completed by part time members or even non members in Chitral Pakistan, for example, a new Al Qaeda recruit rec remembered an elderly American woman who'd once made him laugh with a snide remark about an ugly lampshade and the way that as she made the remark, she touched his arm like a mother. In Gaza, an Israeli soldier and a young Palestinian exchanged a brief look of mutual shame. In London, a bitter, homophobic grandfather whose grocery bag broke open gave a loaf of nice bread to a balding gay man who stopped to help him. A stooped, toothless woman in Tokyo pounded her head with her hands, tired beyond belief over lifelong feelings of anger and negativity, and silently prayed that her heart would somehow miraculously be opened before it was too late. In Syracuse, New York, holding the broken body of his kitten, a man wept, who are we? A word about our membership. Since the world began, we've gone about our work quietly, resisting the urge to generalize, insisting upon valuing the individual over the group, the actual over the conceptual, the inherent sweetness of a peaceful moment over the theoretically peaceful future supposedly to be obtained via murder or massacre. Many of us have trouble sleeping and lie awake at night worrying about something catastrophic befalling someone we love. We rise in the morning with no plans to convert anyone via beating, humiliation, murder, or invasion. To tell the truth, we are tired. We work. We would just like some peace and quiet. When wrong, we think about it a while, then apologize. We stand on our awnings during urban thunderstorms, moved to thoughtfulness by the beautiful, troubled, umbrella tinged faces rushing by. In moments of crisis, we pat one another awkwardly on the back, mumbling shy truisms, rushing to an appointment, remembering a friend who has passed away. Our eyes well with tears, and we think, well, my God, I was lucky just to have known him. This is us. This is who we are. This is prka. To those who would oppose us, I would simply say, we are many, we are worldwide. We in fact outnumber you, though you are louder, though you create a momentary ripple on the water of life. We will endure and prevail. Join us. Resistance is futile. Thank you very much.