George Saunders

If his mind could be correctly aligned, you saved him.

Do you believe in free will?

Depends where you put the point of view.

At this moment, I mean, in terms of like, I don't know what I'm going to do when I leave here.

That feels like free will.

I think if you could run the whole clock of reality from the beginning, you'd see that the decision I made was, of course, pre-encoded by everything that came before.

So the book was me kind of looking at that question.

And I don't know, I mean, except move the point of view around.

That's the book.

Some people that I've talked to, they're reading the book and they think I'm endorsing Jill's position, which I'm 100% not.

Yeah.

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

It becomes beautiful, yes.

If the person that you love has this tendency, the judgment kind of goes away.

It's just something to accommodate and even be fond of.

So I think that's...

That's kind of Jill's thing.

And she came to it in a moment of kind of trauma and inspiration.

And you know how sometimes you have such a peak experience that you attempt to recreate it or you think, well, that felt so deep to me.

It must be true.