Margaret Atwood on what AI can’t replace | ReThinking with Adam Grant

Adam Grant 0:00 Do you have enemies now?

Margaret Atwood 0:02 Oh, so many. But lots of them are dead, Adam.

Adam Grant 0:06 How do you feel about having enemies?

Margaret Atwood 0:08 I think it's a part of life. And anyway, if you didn't have any, what sort of boring person are you? [upbeat music]

Adam Grant 0:19 Margaret, it's lovely to see you again.

Margaret Atwood 0:22 Lovely to see you, but you're not looking at me, you're looking at your screen.

Adam Grant 0:26 I know. I know. Are those all your books behind you?

Margaret Atwood 0:29 They're all my books, but not all the editions of all my books.

Adam Grant 0:33 Wow. So I have so many things I wanna ask you about, but I think the... maybe the place that I would love to start this conversation is around AI. You, as far as I'm concerned, have been the most interesting voice on AI and creativity. And as I understand it, you've written dozens of books that AI companies have ingested to train th- their large language models.

Margaret Atwood 0:56 Yes.

Adam Grant 0:57 But you're not worried that AI is gonna outwrite us.

Margaret Atwood 1:01 Well, it's quite bad so far, uh, but it depends what you're writing. So if you want to write the equivalent of, uh, George Orwell's 1984 romantic schlock for mass consumers, uh, it can probably do that because there's a formula, and it likes formulas. So right now, you know, it, it data scrapes and, and, uh, sticks things together, and you can't actually get anything out of it if... unless it's... unless something about that has put- been put into it. So it is what they used to say, garbage in, garbage out. Uh, but not everything that it's scraping is garbage. So I think you could probably get some moderately competent, uh, things out of it, including a lot of student essays, which has transformed educational methods already. The write-it-at-home essay is gone. It's already gone. But when it comes to original voiced quality writing, I think it probably cannot do that because it can't, uh, so far, write original writing. It will never be, uh, Shakespeare, although it can probably do a good imitation of Shakespeare now, as we all can.

Adam Grant 2:23 I'm reminded of a brilliant Atlantic piece that you wrote where you mentioned that you used to write in the style of different famous authors when you were younger.

Margaret Atwood 2:33 Absolutely. It's good training.

Adam Grant 2:35 Tell me about that.

Margaret Atwood 2:37 Well, it's just something we did as part of being graduate students in the, uh, early '60s. We used to have to identify passages, uh, and guess what century they were from, and then if you were... had really read a lot of books with very small print, uh, you might be able to guess who the author was. So identifying authors by their style and period. And we did another thing later on when I was teaching, in which I, I assigned them a whole bunch of passages and got them to try to guess whether the writer was male or female. And they were quite bad at that. Uh, and it became clear that, uh, you can identify a writer's century, you know, and roughly their period even within that century, so late 19th century isn't the same as mid-19th century. Uh, but it was hard to guess, uh, gender, and you, you couldn't even do it through the concerns in the book. So, uh, you might think that women were writing more about women and men were writing more about men. That's not true, or not in the 19th century. So I give you Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, uh, you know, by men, et cetera, who used to hide under the kitchen table when their mothers were gossiping with their friends. But, but women, on the other hand, uh, were not allowed into men's clubs, so they didn't really know what they were talking about in there. But on the other hand, that was probably unprintable in the 19th century anyway. Anyway, it's an interesting exercise, and we used to do it quite a lot.

Adam Grant 4:24 So go, go back to then, the, the writing and the voice of different authors. Can you still do it?

Margaret Atwood 4:28 If you read the introduction to my new memoir, you will see what I came up with when they said they wanted a memoir in a literary style. And I said, "Whatever would that be? Like, whose style? [laughs] Do we want heroic couplets like Pope? What do we want here?" I could, uh, read them to you.

Adam Grant 4:49 Oh.

Margaret Atwood 4:50 So this is the subject of pastiche, uh, and writing in the style of other writers. Uh, when the idea of writing a, quotes, literary memoir first sprang up, from whom, memory shrugs, but it was someone in publishing, I replied to her or him or them, "That would be tedious." You've heard the bad joke about the old East Coast fisherman counting fish. One fish, two fish, another fish, another fish, another fish. So my literary memoir would go, "I wrote a book, I wrote a second book, I wrote another book, I wrote another book." Dead boring. Who wants to read about someone sitting at a desk messing up blank sheets of paper? "Oh, that's not what we meant," they said. "We meant a memoir in, you know, a literary style." This was even more baffling. What would that be like? 18th century mock-heroic couplets? Lo, when dawn's rosy fingers did the curtains part, down sit I at my desk to labor at mine art. Or something more in the Gothic flamboyant style of, for instance, Poe. A thousand brightly hued images whirled within my dizzied brain, and menacing phantoms thronged the shadowy corners of my tapestried chamber. In a frenzy, I seized my enchanted quill, and ignoring the large blot of ink now taking demonic shape on the dazzling sheet of snowy parchment before me, I... No, it would not do.

Adam Grant 6:34 I love this. I could listen to you write in other people's voices all day, but-

Margaret Atwood 6:39 Oh, could you? [laughs]

Adam Grant 6:40 I prefer when you write in your own, I have to say. So I'm curious about how that exercise, when you do it, Margaret, is different from what AI does.

Margaret Atwood 6:50 Um, probably not that different, except it seems there's quite a few things it doesn't yet know. Uh, so it could do probably fairly short, um, rip-offs of other authors. Uh, but it couldn't then go anywhere very original with that, I don't think. We did propose a couple of tests to it earlier on. I'm sure it's better now. But, um, The Walrus magazine in Canada proposed to it that it should write a dystopian short story, uh, set in Winnipeg [laughs] in the style of Margaret Atwood. So what it came up with was something called The Weeping Willows of Winnipeg, but it did not grasp the essential thing about a dystopia, which is, in a dystopia, you can't just move out. So it didn't put any wall around Winnipeg where all these unhappy people were, and it didn't also tell us what exactly was making them so unhappy, except that it seemed to rain and snow a lot. But that's not a dystopia. [laughs] Dystopias have to be made by people. So we didn't have any sort of evil genius, Big Brother type of person. Uh, we just had some unhappy people in Winnipeg who could've moved out. You know, they just could've moved. [laughs] So a few essentials were not grasped. And we also asked it to write a, a poem about our Pelee Island bird observatory, um, where the bird banding does pl- take place in a fairly swampy area, and we asked it to include chiggers and mud. W- but to be, uh, to write a positive thing about this. So we had luxuriant, nourishing mud, and we had singing chiggers. So the AI evidently didn't know what a chigger was. They don't sing. [laughs] They just make your life hell. [laughs]

Adam Grant 8:52 [laughs] Well, a couple things. One, it's just, it's fun to see these examples. Two, it's delightful to see you proving what AI can't do.

Margaret Atwood 9:00 Well, it could possibly later with a few twitches. So for instance, we asked it to give us a picture, uh, of our, of our earlier resident residents for our bird banders, which had snakes in the shower. So we asked it to include some holes in the floor, which there were, and some snakes, which there also were. And it showed us the, something that looked like, uh, the floor had been hit by a bomb, and underneath it were these gigantic, huge boa constrictors. So you have to be very specific with it. You have to say, "Make the snakes smaller." [laughs]

Adam Grant 9:39 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 9:40 Make, make realistic snakes for Southern Ontario. Um, and make, uh, you know, by hole in the floor, we don't mean no floor.

Adam Grant 9:50 Have you been using AI in your writing at all?

Margaret Atwood 9:53 Are you mad?

Adam Grant 9:54 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 9:54 Why would I do such a thing? [laughs]

Adam Grant 9:57 I assumed it was gonna be an emphatic no, but I had to confirm.

Margaret Atwood 10:00 Yes. Well, it's confirmed. No, I would never do that.

Adam Grant 10:04 Why not?

Margaret Atwood 10:06 Well, it's lazy. I'm of the, uh, workaholic, uh, generation, not the hippies.

Adam Grant 10:13 As a, a fellow recovering workaholic, uh, I subscribe wholeheartedly to the I would never write a word with AI philosophy.

Margaret Atwood 10:21 Well, thank you for reassuring us about that.

Adam Grant 10:25 But, and what I will say is, I've found it useful for writing adjacent tasks. Sometimes it's a more efficient thesaurus, for example.

Margaret Atwood 10:33 Yeah. It can, it can tell you various word definitions and refer you to this and that dictionary, and I'm told it's reasonably good at travel schedules, though, though guess what? Its mapping abilities are not very good. We asked it to tell us the exact location of a supermarket at Christie and Dupont in Toronto, and it said that that store was in the Maple Leaf Gardens, which is the old hockey stadium [laughs] down by the waterfront now.

Adam Grant 11:01 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 11:01 Wherever did it get that idea? I don't know. So I wouldn't trust it.

Adam Grant 11:06 I wonder if, if those hallucinations that you're describing, though, are dead ends or if they might be paths to new perspectives.

Margaret Atwood 11:16 Just a minute now. The hallucinations are hallucinations that AI is having?

Adam Grant 11:21 Potentially, right? So when it gives-

Margaret Atwood 11:22 Yeah

Adam Grant 11:22 ... you wrong information, and it's, it's misbelieving things or it's misrepresenting facts, um, that seems like a version of what a novelist does.

Margaret Atwood 11:32 Well, first of all, I wouldn't call those hallucinations. I would just call them errors. [laughs] So-

Adam Grant 11:39 Touché

Margaret Atwood 11:39 ... to me, a hallucinat- a hallucination has got much more to it than just factual inaccuracy. I don't think that's what a novelist does at all. Uh, novelists tell stories, uh, with characters and things we used to call plots. So that's the part so far where I think it's, it's rather falling down. So I think it could have, you know, somebody called Bob doing something or other, but it probably wouldn't be able to tell you much about Bob's inner life. And that's what novels do really better than any other art form.

Adam Grant 12:14 I'm just thinking about your statement that a hallucination is, is different from an error. It's, it's striking because the AI community has referred to these kinds of mistakes as hallucinations.

Margaret Atwood 12:23 That's because they want to make AI sound human. So humans have hallucinations. Um, machines don't. They just make mistakes.

Adam Grant 12:33 What's the difference? Is it, is it... I, I'm just thinking a h- a hallucination is an emotional experience. Is that, is that the-

Margaret Atwood 12:41 Yeah

Adam Grant 12:41 ... fundamental difference?

Margaret Atwood 12:42 So is eating breakfast. Uh, [laughs] it's not necessarily a hallucination.

Adam Grant 12:48 [laughs] Okay. So what's different for you between a hallucination and an error?

Margaret Atwood 12:54 What makes you think I have hallucinations? I said I w- wasn't a hippie, right? [laughs]

Adam Grant 12:59 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 13:01 Yeah, I think you have hallucinations when you're very ill or else on drugs.

Adam Grant 13:05 Not something a machine can experience in either case.

Margaret Atwood 13:07 No, I wouldn't think so.

Adam Grant 13:10 Okay. So I'm just thinking about your point of view on AI as a writer.

Margaret Atwood 13:15 Yeah. I don't think that's, um, the most important thing about it. I think it's mo- the most important thing about it is its ability to create deep fakes for political propaganda purposes. Uh, I don't think writers are gonna use AI much because why would they be writers if they can write their own writing? If they can't write their own writing, why are they pretending to be writers?

Adam Grant 13:41 I'm curious about what that means for the future of creative careers in your view. Uh, it sounds like you don't think writers should be worried, but what about other kinds of creativity?

Margaret Atwood 13:49 Depends what kinds of writers we're talking about. If you mean writers of ad copies, I think they should be worried, uh, if people are still even writing ad copy and not just making pictures. Ads used to be very verbal, and now it's, it is really billboards a lot without many words on them at all. So those kinds of writers have already been expelled from their ad copy jobs. Or if you're thinking of newspaper writers, uh, people writing stuff up, I think they might be worried. But, you know, I think people are still interested in hearing, uh, personal points of view from real people. You could, of course, invent a person who was the purported writer. I think the Nancy Drew books were written that way. Uh, but not by AI, by, by ghostwriters, and there have, of course, been a lot of ghostwriters. And they are channeling the, they hope, the voice and the thoughts of the person they're writing them the book for, but they're not AI.

Adam Grant 15:00 All right. So let us then take this as an invitation to go to your memoir. Uh, I've, I've had a chance to open The Book of Lives.

Margaret Atwood 15:12 Yes.

Adam Grant 15:12 And I was very surprised to see Margaret Atwood writing a memoir.

Margaret Atwood 15:17 So was I.

Adam Grant 15:17 You don't normally write about your own life.

Margaret Atwood 15:19 [laughs] I don't.

Adam Grant 15:20 Why?

Margaret Atwood 15:20 Except of-

Adam Grant 15:21 Where did this come from?

Margaret Atwood 15:21 Except of lately. Well, I don't know. You know, they said, "Why don't you write a memoir?" "No, no, no, no. I never wanna do that." "Oh, come on." But then I realized that a memoir is not the same as an autobiography. I wouldn't have to go through all my old travel schedules and say where I'd been, when, uh, I could put into it what a memoir really should be, which is what you can remember. Surely, that is why it is called a memoir. Uh, so what you remember is usually stupid things you did, uh, stupid and evil things other people did to you. Not so much the evil things you did to other people. You tend to forget those. Uh, and catastrophes, near-death experiences, uh, and, and high points.

Adam Grant 16:08 So as you reflected on your memories and decided what you wanted to include, what surprised you?

Margaret Atwood 16:14 What surprised me? I think it was pleasurable to write about a lot of these things, even though they were not enjoyable at the time. So it is a bit like war stories. So you almost died, but hey, you didn't, and now it's a story.

Adam Grant 16:32 One of the, one of the stories that really stands out in The Book of Lives is the, I think, what, a trio of nine-year-old girls who tormented you in school.

Margaret Atwood 16:42 They did. Yes, that got a lot of reaction when I put it into a novel. Struck a chord with that, yes. Universal experience, it seems.

Adam Grant 16:53 It makes me wonder how did that dynamic play out, and how did the tables turn later?

Margaret Atwood 16:57 Well, in real life or in the novel?

Adam Grant 17:01 In real life.

Margaret Atwood 17:02 Okay. So Alice in Wonderland has been an inspiration to many. And I think it's the moment when the Queen of Hearts has been threatening to behead everybody. She says, "You're nothing but a pack of cards," and at this point, they, the cards all flutter through the air, and she wakes up. So I think it's the moment when you can say, "You're nothing but a pack of cards," and walk away if you're in a situation where that is possible. You're not always. Uh, but if you are, uh, you realize that the, the power of those people is dependent on your believing that they have that power.

Adam Grant 17:43 For listeners who haven't had a chance to read yet, uh, what was the, what was the worst of the torment?

Margaret Atwood 17:51 I think [laughs] that's a very personal question. How can I choose amongst the torments? [laughs]

Adam Grant 17:59 [laughs] You can choose at random if you like. But-

Margaret Atwood 18:01 Yeah, I don't know. See, remember that I had not known any little girls before this period in my life. I grew up with basically boys, so My older brother was a boy, my dad was a boy, and my mother was a tomboy, so I didn't have any, uh, models of frilly behavior. I was the most girly person, uh, in my family, believe it or not. Uh, so I didn't have... You know, I, I didn't know the, the etiquette of girls much at all. So I also tended to believe what people told me because I hadn't had a lot of role models of lying. So I actually believed what these people were telling me. Uh, anyway, you can read Cat's Eye and have... revel in torments if, if you wish, but I have to say that some of the letters that I got from, from readers after publishing this book had much worse torments in them, uh, to the extent that you wondered why these people were still alive.

Adam Grant 19:07 Have those letters changed the way that you reflect on having been bullied?

Margaret Atwood 19:11 Well, they simply underlined the fact that, uh, this is a pretty universal experience amongst kids, and that is, it is, uh, it's inaccurate to say that little girls are, uh, made of sugar and spice and everything nice.

Adam Grant 19:31 Yeah.

Margaret Atwood 19:32 And little boys are made of snakes and snails and puppy dog's tails. [laughs]

Adam Grant 19:37 Yeah, I think we can retire that refrain, for sure.

Margaret Atwood 19:40 It's not anti-feminist to say so. Uh, it is simply underlining the fact that human beings are human, and they come in all shapes and sizes and do all kinds of things. So if you stop believing that they are supernatural and all-empowered, uh, then you can either walk away, or if they are at that point the dragon, you can find the weak spot and shoot your Hobbity arrow, uh [laughs]

Adam Grant 20:09 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 20:10 ... into, is it the armpit? I think it's the armpit. Uh, the weak spot.

Adam Grant 20:16 This, this reminds me of something I say, I find myself saying often as a psychologist when, when someone is hurt or upset by someone else's behavior. I just want to ask them, "Why are you giving that person power over your emotions?"

Margaret Atwood 20:28 Yes, or the popular saying these days are, "Why are you letting them live rent-free in your head?" [laughs] Yeah, I'm sure you've seen that one quoted.

Adam Grant 20:37 Oh, yes. Do you, do you have any lessons learned about how to charge them rent or remove them from your head?

Margaret Atwood 20:45 [laughs] Well, you're probably asking the wrong person. Um, yes, I suppose I would, I ought to say something about compassion and forgiveness and things like that, and those can be helpful because the moment at which you let them off the hook, they're no longer in your head as this vengeful presence. And I think it was Nelson Mandela who, who decided to just let it go as he was being let out of prison. You know, he could go for revenge or he could just let that go. Uh, so that's one approach. Uh, the other one is to get them back, which is very tempting, you know? [laughs]

Adam Grant 21:29 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 21:29 It's very tempting. I try not to indulge. I try to be a good and virtuous person. I don't always succeed.

Adam Grant 21:36 What... Do, do you... You must have, though, had a triumphant moment of revenge at some point in this saga.

Margaret Atwood 21:42 Uh, not a single triumphant moment of revenge. I would just say as a, as a teenager, the realization that the power was no longer residing in this other person, it was residing in me. And, um, I didn't s- do terribly mean things, but I did marginally mean things.

Adam Grant 22:02 Such as?

Margaret Atwood 22:04 "Let's walk home through the cemetery, Adam. Of course, I'm not really alive, and I will show you the mausoleum where I spend all the morning hours." "No, no, no, that's too scary." "Oh, come on. I won't hurt you, will I?" [laughs]

Adam Grant 22:24 Oh, I would... I do not want to ever end up on your bad side, Margaret, ever.

Margaret Atwood 22:28 That's a wise choice, Adam. [laughs]

Adam Grant 22:32 [laughs] You know, this, this reminds me of w- the f- I think the f- the first time I laughed out loud, uh, as I was, I was starting to read, uh, you quoted Julian Porter who said, "Don't piss her off or you will live forever."

Margaret Atwood 22:46 Yes. [laughs] He did say that. Oh, yeah, so I, I put it in my epigraphs, and he was very pleased to be in the epigraphs.

Adam Grant 22:58 Yeah, I think one of the, one of the more evocative lines was you realized that while heroes need the monster, the monster does not need the hero. Talk to me about that.

Margaret Atwood 23:07 Absolutely not. Uh, well, let's see. I was not the first person to say that. I think it's a... People will remember having heard that before. But what would a monster need a hero for? Because it's the hero's quest to slay the monster. So unless you're a very, very masochistic dragon-

Adam Grant 23:31 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 23:31 ... you don't welcome [laughs] you do not welcome the advent of the dragon slayer. Uh, but in order to be a hero, in order to be the monster slayer and everybody saying, "Hooray for you," you do have to have a monster to slay. Or put another way around, I knew some people who'd been in resistance movements during World War II, and one of them who had been in the, uh, Polish Resistance said, uh, "Pray, uh, that you will never have the opportunity to be a hero."

Adam Grant 24:08 Wow.

Margaret Atwood 24:08 Because those opportunities always involve monsters. And quite usually the monster slays quite a few Beowulfs before the actual Beowulf gets there

Adam Grant 24:20 That's powerful. So you've made the case that the hero needs the monster, and it makes me wonder, do you have enemies now?

Margaret Atwood 24:30 Oh, so many. But lots of them are dead, Adam [laughs]

Adam Grant 24:35 Hopefully by, not by your own doing

Margaret Atwood 24:38 Not directly [laughs]

Adam Grant 24:41 [laughs] Uh, I'm starting to picture just around the corner where we can't see behind you, your enemies list

Margaret Atwood 24:47 Oh, I don't have a list, no. Um, not as such particularly, and, uh, I think, I think the list you would be interested in more, uh, would be the lists in which I feature as an enemy

Adam Grant 25:02 Do tell

Margaret Atwood 25:02 So when you say, "Do you have enemies?" Uh, and I said, "So many," um, I was referring to the fact that a lot of p- people probably think I'm an enemy of theirs in, in some way, either for taking political stands, uh, or taking some other kind of stand, or for being short, uh [laughs] . "Why aren't you taller?" Uh, no, scrap that. That was frivolous. So reasons like that, and if you're associated, for instance, with an organization like PEN International, uh, which is stand up for the rights of people who've been imprisoned or indeed exiled or, uh, tortured or killed for, uh, what they've written, you're going to have some enemies

Adam Grant 25:53 Okay. This is a good segue to book bans, which I have to ask you about. Uh, I loved when you had an unburnable copy of The Handmaid’s Tale created, and then-

Margaret Atwood 26:03 Yes

Adam Grant 26:03 ... you torched it

Margaret Atwood 26:05 I did, and I made everybody in the room very nervous. They were saying, "Just point it at the book, Margaret. Just the book." And then they said, "You can give that flamethrower back to us now" [laughs]

Adam Grant 26:17 [laughs] It's one of the best videos on the internet

Margaret Atwood 26:20 You think?

Adam Grant 26:21 I do. And to set up the question, uh, the, the best evidence that I've found shows a couple of things. Number one, when books are banned, they, that completely fails to reduce reader interest in them and sometimes draws attention. And number two, that kids are not nearly as fragile as some parents fear. Uh, there was a, a study that, that came out about a decade ago looking at teenagers in Texas and just tracking how much exposure they had to frequently banned books. So Huck Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, Kite Runner, Hunger Games, Twilight, Harry Potter, perhaps even a Margaret Atwood selection or two

Margaret Atwood 27:01 What, what's, what is this perhaps? [laughs]

Adam Grant 27:04 Definitely. Definitely on the list. Uh, it turns out that how much exposure you've had to those books has no bearing on your grades, no bearing on illicit behavior, and actually predicts spending more time reading for fun and higher involvement in volunteering, charity, and civic behavior

Margaret Atwood 27:22 Well, why are we not surprised? And why do we not give awards to the book banners? Because from what you've told me, their, their net result is positive

Adam Grant 27:34 It may well be. I don't know if it's causal, but it's at least correlational

Margaret Atwood 27:39 Yeah, so the other thing that's correlational is the existence of school libraries. Uh, so if there is a school library with a librarian who helps kids find stuff they're interested in, their marks go up. Uh, so why would you do away with those unless you wish people to be stupid?

Adam Grant 27:59 I love the way you framed that. Now, I should say in this last study, there were 283 students, and 19 of them showed both high levels of engagement with banned books and also some mental health symptoms. And my, my interpretation of that is there's a subset, a small subset of students with mental health challenges who seek, who seek out this kind of literature. Not that engaging with this literature causes mental health symptoms, but you've produced some of this literature, [laughs] so I'd love to hear your take

Margaret Atwood 28:32 Our literary festival in Toronto was founded by a guy who had, was told at school, "Don't you ever, ever read Ulysses by James Joyce. It's an evil, evil, evil book, and your soul will be irrevocably damned." So he rushed out and got one [laughs] and started reading it, looking for the soul-damning dirty parts, and, uh, really liked it. So he thought, "If this is literature, I would like to know more about that." Uh, and that's what turned him into a reader. So I'll go from that story to me being absolutely traumatized by reading Peyton Place on top of the garage roof where nobody could see me doing it. And, uh, what was the traumatizing part? Varicose veins. I didn't know there were-

Adam Grant 29:18 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 29:19 ... varicose veins. Ick [laughs] . Yes, 'cause so you never know what, what people are gonna find, uh, alarming or what is unknown to them, and, and that's one of the reasons for reading. You, you discover all sorts of interesting things like varicose veins, uh, in the- in these [laughs] forbidden books. But we had three kinds of books, uh, those we studied in school, a pretty Victorian curriculum, not lots of sex in it except off the page in the shrubbery where you couldn't really figure out what was going on. Uh, books your parents might have, which were, uh, in m- my case, of a, a wide variety, including science books and history books and, and, uh, historical romances. I liked those. And a lot of detective stories And science fiction. My dad liked science fiction. He used to get a big laugh out of it. Oh, he was a scientist, so, "Ha ha," he would say. [laughs]

Adam Grant 30:27 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 30:28 Quite a yarn. [laughs] And then the really things you were not supposed to read, which you usually got hold of either in the drugstore, it was the age of, of paperbacks in the drugstores with absolutely trashy covers on them. But it would be like, um, War and Peace, you know, woman in a negligee, cleavage. [laughs] 1984, woman in a tight-fitting uniform, cleavage. There was a lot of cleavage. And you would end up reading world classics because you thought you were getting some kind of forbidden book. And, um, ones that you read at houses where you were babysitting, those were the best. [laughs]

Adam Grant 31:10 And you're saying your life was not ruined by any of these memories [clears throat] at all, and-

Margaret Atwood 31:16 Uh

Adam Grant 31:16 ... although it sounds like you've really, you haven't been able to remove the image of varicose veins from your mind.

Margaret Atwood 31:22 Absolutely not. No, no, seared into my brain. [laughs]

Adam Grant 31:27 Otherwise, uh, I think you've survived the experience.

Margaret Atwood 31:30 I seem to have done anyway. It gave me a wide range of, of reading references and, um, was on the whole pretty educational, especially since I was a flashlight under the covers reader and, uh, a procrastinator. So instead of, instead of doing my homework, I would be reading one of those Dell mysteries that had the keyhole with the eyeball in it.

Adam Grant 31:53 I feel like that choice of how you spent your time has worked out okay for you.

Margaret Atwood 31:58 Yeah, but it could have been otherwise, you know? I could have been a mere wastrel and dilettante. A- I mean, a mere only, l- shall I say, a wastrel and dilettante.

Adam Grant 32:10 Highly doubtful. All right, it's time for a lightning round. What is the worst writing advice you hear?

Margaret Atwood 32:15 I think the only, the worst writing advice I was given was, uh, by somebody who was supposed to be my student advisor in my final year of undergraduate, who said, "Why don't you just forget this writing stuff and going to graduate school and find an, a nice man and marry him?"

Adam Grant 32:34 [sighs]

Margaret Atwood 32:36 [laughs] Well, I just thought he was an idiot.

Adam Grant 32:38 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 32:39 I was, I was quite opinionated even then.

Adam Grant 32:42 I'll endorse that. He was an idiot. What's your favorite writing tip to give?

Margaret Atwood 32:48 You have to actually do the writing. You have to set the words down. You, you need to make the hours, and you need to actually do it. And it is l- it is one of those things that, uh, you would, like playing the piano. You don't sit down at the piano and expect to rip off a sonata without ever learning how to play. So it's a learning and it's work.

Adam Grant 33:15 If you were hosting a dream dinner party, who would you invite, dead or alive?

Margaret Atwood 33:20 Dead or alive, I would invite the best conversationalists. So people who are known to be people of few words I would not invite, even though they might be quite interesting if you could ever get them to say anything. So I might invite Emily Bronte, but she wouldn't come. [laughs]

Adam Grant 33:39 [laughs] Why are you pre-judging Emily Bronte?

Margaret Atwood 33:43 I'm not pre-judging her. I'm just, I'm judging her. [laughs]

Adam Grant 33:46 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 33:47 I've read the descriptions of what she was like. She'd, she'd probably say, "I'd rather stick pins in my eyes, uh, than waste my time in your dining room, rather than running across the moors." Uh, yes, I wouldn't invite her, but I might invite... Would I invite Samuel Johnson? He was said to be a great conversationalist, but a very piggy eater. So would you be inviting people for their table manners or their conversation? I would definitely invite Oscar Wilde. He would be very good as a dinner guest. And, um, Nancy Mitford would be very good. Uh, so we could go on dividing people into talkers and, and silent people and narrow the list down from there.

Adam Grant 34:37 That's a great group. I feel like Samuel Johnson would, uh, would give us... He would actually, he would ace the game you introduced me to at the beginning of the conversation around-

Margaret Atwood 34:46 Yes

Adam Grant 34:46 ... redefining words.

Margaret Atwood 34:48 Uh, yes, he'd be very good at that, but, but he might put the other guests off.

Adam Grant 34:53 Might be, might be a know-it-all. Um-

Margaret Atwood 34:56 No, he might be a piggy eater [laughs]

Adam Grant 34:59 [laughs] I, I risk-

Margaret Atwood 35:01 Which he was. [laughs]

Adam Grant 35:03 Uh, so Margaret, what is something you've changed your mind about or re-thought lately?

Margaret Atwood 35:08 Uh, I'm changing my mind fairly frequently about what the Trump regime is liable to do next. And of course, that is their aim amongst o- either that or, or somebody has really lost their mind. So, uh, [laughs] are they intending to be deliberately der- destabilizing, or are they just erratic? Or they throw it out there, see who salutes, if it's not working, cancel it? What, what is going on? I don't know.

Adam Grant 35:41 A friend of mine, uh, photographed Trump, uh, for Time Magazine and asked him how he deals with all the chaos. And he just said, "It seems like there's always a storm surrounding you." And Trump stared him in the eye and said, "I am the storm."

Margaret Atwood 35:58 Well, that was pretty witty. [laughs]

Adam Grant 36:00 Yeah, unexpectedly so, I would say.

Margaret Atwood 36:02 How, how long ago was that? [laughs]

Adam Grant 36:03 This was a decade ago now.

Margaret Atwood 36:05 Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, okay.

Adam Grant 36:07 Somebody asked me before this conversation, "What is Margaret Atwood like?" And I was thinking about the first time we spoke, and I said, "She's entirely original. I've never met anyone like her, and she's delightfully disagreeable

Margaret Atwood 36:22 Oh. Well, I'll think about that

Adam Grant 36:25 What I found so charming about the way that you engage with people is you are utterly fearless about saying something that might be unpopular or challenge conventional wisdom or, uh, maybe lead people to question their own assumptions. And, uh, it seems like you don't worry too much about what other people think of you

Margaret Atwood 36:47 Not at my age. It's not that I didn't used to in some circumstances, but, uh, let's put it this way. I'm not likely to say any career-destroying thing, and nobody can fire me [laughs]

Adam Grant 37:02 You're uncancelable

Margaret Atwood 37:04 Oh, more or less in the usual sense. I, I think I might do something that would be, uh, really bad. For instance, if I wrote a really terrible book, and it somehow got past my editors, that would be bad because-

Adam Grant 37:22 Well-

Margaret Atwood 37:22 ... people would, people would no longer trust that when they opened the book, they might get, um, an, an experience they might enjoy. They would think, "Oh, well, she's past it."

Adam Grant 37:33 Well, that goes to something you said a few years ago, and I quote, "Writers don't retire. They only get worse."

Margaret Atwood 37:40 I know. That was bad of me [laughs]

Adam Grant 37:43 But you haven't. You haven't gotten worse. How?

Margaret Atwood 37:46 Not yet [laughs] but I will. You mean, how have I managed not to get worse?

Adam Grant 37:53 Yes

Margaret Atwood 37:54 I think that's probably a question for your department

Adam Grant 37:59 A colleague of mine who was asked, "Why did you become a professor?" And he said, "Having students keeps you young."

Margaret Atwood 38:06 Some people would say the opposite [laughs]

Adam Grant 38:09 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 38:09 It ages you prematurely [laughs]

Adam Grant 38:12 I suppose it depends on the students and also the kinds of-

Margaret Atwood 38:15 Yeah, a lot

Adam Grant 38:15 ... relationships you build with, with them

Margaret Atwood 38:17 Yes

Adam Grant 38:18 Uh, Margaret, what's a question you have for me as a psychologist?

Margaret Atwood 38:22 Hmm. Oh, boy. Well, we could go into that. Psychologist or psychiatrist?

Adam Grant 38:29 Definitely psychologist

Margaret Atwood 38:31 Okay. Well, I did know a forensic psychiatrist who said to me at one point, "If you knew what was walking around on the street out there, you'd never go out." So my question to you is, what do you think of that?

Adam Grant 38:42 [laughs] That's a great question. I think I see where that, that observation is coming from, but it's also, I think, a biased sample of some of the worst of humanity

Margaret Atwood 38:56 That's true

Adam Grant 38:57 And, and so I think-

Margaret Atwood 38:57 So you could also give a sample of people being helpful

Adam Grant 39:00 I think we know from good evidence that the default human response to tragedy and suffering is kindness

Margaret Atwood 39:06 That's one of the default responses

Adam Grant 39:10 Not the only one

Margaret Atwood 39:10 It's one of them. It is not the only one. So some pe- some people take advantage of chaos, uh, and tragedy to go in and nick the silverware and, uh, do things that, that normal civil society would not permit. So there's that side too, and that's, that's us as human beings, the, the very good, the very bad, and then degrees of goodness and badness leading up to the center, which most, where most of us live

Adam Grant 39:44 I think that's, that's really well articulated, and I think humanity certainly is capable of both extremes. Most of us-

Margaret Atwood 39:51 Without a doubt

Adam Grant 39:52 ... do hover in the center

Margaret Atwood 39:54 So far, yeah. Most of us also have different definitions of, of good and evil. Uh, so is it really bad, and this is the, one of the questions that Ann Landers, the newspaper columnist, get, got most often, is it really bad to put the toilet paper on with the sheet coming out the bottom? [laughs]

Adam Grant 40:17 How dare you

Margaret Atwood 40:19 How dare you [laughs]

Adam Grant 40:19 Morally wrong

Margaret Atwood 40:21 Yeah, the other one is-

Adam Grant 40:22 You're dead to me

Margaret Atwood 40:23 ... with tea, milk in first or milk after you've put in the tea? Great arguments about that

Adam Grant 40:29 Oh. Oh, my, my ver- my version of that is you have to put the cereal in before you pour the milk

Margaret Atwood 40:36 Who would do it the other way around? [laughs]

Adam Grant 40:38 My brother-in-law. He's a barbarian

Margaret Atwood 40:39 Oh. [laughs]

Adam Grant 40:42 I couldn't believe it when I watched him put the milk in and then pour cereal on top. What are you doing?

Margaret Atwood 40:47 Well, at least you'd know how much milk you'd put in, whereas if the cereal's in first, the milk can sort of get lost amongst all those cereal pieces

Adam Grant 40:56 Which is why my cereal bowl overflows sometimes

Margaret Atwood 40:59 [laughs]

Adam Grant 41:00 Point taken. You've made me rethink that

Margaret Atwood 41:02 All right. [laughs]

Adam Grant 41:03 As we close, you are about to head out on book tour as I understand

Margaret Atwood 41:08 Yes

Adam Grant 41:08 What are you hoping people will ask or not ask?

Margaret Atwood 41:11 Well, um, of the many questions that I've been asked over the years, I've probably answered most of them by now. In the very early days, I would go to places where they had never had a writer before, uh, and they would ask very direct questions that had nothing to do with your symbolic meaning. And, uh, one of my favorites, "Why are there so many eggs in your books?" I had to think about that. Why are there so many eggs in my books? [laughs]

Adam Grant 41:44 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 41:44 "Why are there so many glass jars in your books?" Ooh, you've counted them. Uh, but my best one was, "Why is your... You know, is your hair really like that, or do you get it done?"

Adam Grant 41:56 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 41:58 So that's, that's a pretty non-writer's school type of question. Let's just point out that-

Adam Grant 42:04 And the answer is

Margaret Atwood 42:05 The answer is if I got it done would I do this?

Adam Grant 42:08 [laughs] Shades of Abraham Lincoln. If I had another face, would I wear this one?

Margaret Atwood 42:14 Yeah, exactly. There you go

Adam Grant 42:17 That's very good. Well, Margaret-

Margaret Atwood 42:18 But I, but I-

Adam Grant 42:18 ... thank you for, thank you for taking the time to do this. This has been such a joy, and, uh, uh, having grown up in Michigan and been called an honorary Canadian, uh, I would like to call you a national treasure, but I suppose it would be more accurate to call you an international treasure

Margaret Atwood 42:34 Well, that's very kind

Adam Grant 42:36 Thank you for taking time and sharing your wit and wisdom

Margaret Atwood 42:40 And thank you [outro music]