Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, and More

Tim Ferriss 0:00 [upbeat theme music] I really appreciate you taking the time to do this today, and I've been looking forward to it.

Margaret Atwood 0:20 My pleasure.

Tim Ferriss 0:21 We're gonna bounce around quite a bit. I will make sure that we touch on burning questions and, uh, certainly practical utopias, but I have so many questions about just your life and life energy, [chuckles] and we can come at it from so many different directions. I wanna begin with a few questions, if it's okay with you, from someone on my team who is a huge fan of yours, and it relates to your writing or I should say creative process. And in the research that I've done, it seems like you tend not to outline books before you start writing them. At least the quote that I have here is, "Never map it out. Just get into it. Jump in like going swimming." Is that accurate?

Margaret Atwood 1:02 That's pretty, pretty right. Yes, you, you have to, uh, factor in that the going swimming part is about a very cold lake, so we're not talking about Florida here, uh-

Tim Ferriss 1:15 [chuckles]

Margaret Atwood 1:15 ... or pools. We're talking about screaming. [chuckles]

Tim Ferriss 1:19 [chuckles]

Margaret Atwood 1:19 Run in screaming. Right.

Tim Ferriss 1:21 So when you sit down to write, and this is her question, one of her questions, do you know at the start whether it will be poetry or prose or a specific project?

Margaret Atwood 1:29 Yeah, I do know that.

Tim Ferriss 1:30 You do?

Margaret Atwood 1:31 Yeah. I actually do know that, and poetry is more likely to be written on the run or on the fly and not necessarily sitting down.

Tim Ferriss 1:42 Could you expand on that, please?

Margaret Atwood 1:44 I always write poetry in, in something called cursive. You may have forgotten about that, Tim.

Tim Ferriss 1:50 I know cursive. [chuckles]

Margaret Atwood 1:52 [chuckles] Apparently, they're not always teaching cur- cursive to young people, so we're gonna have a whole generation who don't know how to sign their names. They'll only know how to print their names.

Tim Ferriss 2:02 [chuckles]

Margaret Atwood 2:03 Anyway, yes, cursive, which we were all taught in school with scratchy little metal nibs that you dipped in inkwells. You probably didn't do that because they probably had ball points by your day.

Tim Ferriss 2:15 I used ball points, but my grandfather was an actual-- well, he was in part a calligrapher, so I spent a lot of time around inkwells. My grandfather spent a lot of time in calligraphy.

Margaret Atwood 2:25 Oh, extremely classy.

Tim Ferriss 2:28 Yeah, [chuckles] very classy.

Margaret Atwood 2:29 Yes, I've bought several calligraphy sets intending to use them, but Tim, I haven't used them yet. But I'm going to.

Tim Ferriss 2:36 [chuckles]

Margaret Atwood 2:36 I'm going to. I'm going to do that. [chuckles]

Tim Ferriss 2:39 [chuckles] If we look at the poetry and the prose, do they come from different places within yourself? Do they have a different feeling?

Margaret Atwood 2:46 It's my theory, but you can't ever test it out or without great cruelty. [chuckles]

Tim Ferriss 2:51 [chuckles]

Margaret Atwood 2:52 Now guess what? Cats don't write poetry or anything else.

Tim Ferriss 2:55 [chuckles]

Margaret Atwood 2:56 Um, so it has to be people that you would practice the great cruelty on. So you would have to wire up their heads. You can wire up their heads for novels, no problem, because you know novels it's ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration, so you actually have to work at writing novels. It's called work. You have to sit down. It's like a job. You have to put in the hours. But with poetry, it's exactly the, the opposite. You don't know when something may strike you, and that's why poets are so annoying to people who are not poets because they'll be looking out the window, and you'll say, "Could you please mow the lawn?" And they'll say, "Shh, shh, don't interrupt. No, no. Go away."

Tim Ferriss 3:38 [chuckles]

Margaret Atwood 3:39 I mean, it can be very annoying.

Tim Ferriss 3:40 [chuckles]

Margaret Atwood 3:42 So we, we understand why poets often have quite interesting lives, but I was lucky to be able to do both. So people think I'm moderately sane, you know, in the, in the bell curve of poets and novelists with, let's say... Well, I don't know. I mean, I guess a lot of novelists drank a lot too, but, um, [chuckles]

Tim Ferriss 4:02 [chuckles]

Margaret Atwood 4:02 let us say that poets are often, let's say their life trajectory is frequently more erratic than that of novelists.

Tim Ferriss 4:11 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 4:11 How can we put this gently? And especially female poets, I mean, it was just assumed in the, in the fifties that they were sort of crazy.

Tim Ferriss 4:21 [chuckles] You don't seem crazy to me.

Margaret Atwood 4:25 Well, I'm not, but, um, you know, I'm, I'm the living demonstration that this isn't true. But it's my theory that poetry comes from a different part of the brain and the part that's more closely allied to patterning of music, mathematics like that. Whereas novels come from the part that is more closely associated with, um, gossip. [chuckles]

Tim Ferriss 4:53 [chuckles]

Margaret Atwood 4:53 Gossip, telling stories about people, telling stories about just about anything, and narrative. So this happens, that happens, this happens, that happens, and, um, that goes all the way back to, for instance, Homer. So you read the Iliad and the Odyssey, you can see that there's a narrative approach, uh, very useful. The Iliad starts in the middle of things. And so do a lot of novels, so you've got several ways you can start. You can start at the beginning and go on until you reach the end, or you can start in the middle, or you can start at the end and then go back and pick it up. But, but poetry, lyric poetry is different. Epic poetry is more like novels-

Tim Ferriss 5:37 Hmm

Margaret Atwood 5:37 ... 'cause it's got lots of stories in it. So my thing about The Odyssey is that it's [chuckles] you know all those Westerns in which they were holding the fort and the cavalry was riding to the rescue?

Tim Ferriss 5:49 Yes.

Margaret Atwood 5:49 So the people in the fort didn't know that, and the cavalry didn't know what was happening in the fort, so you've got a lot of tension.

Tim Ferriss 5:58 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 5:58 So that's The Odyssey. So here comes Odysseus. Nobody knows where he's been all these years, [chuckles]

Tim Ferriss 6:04 [chuckles]

Margaret Atwood 6:05 and there's Penelope holding out Uh, and just as she's about to give in, he turns up in disguise. You know, a lot of stories involve in disguise. And, uh, then we go on from there with a, a great finale.

Tim Ferriss 6:21 Do you feel like poetry enables you or enlivens you in a way that fuels the prose work? Uh, in other words, is there a synergistic relationship for you between, uh, having both of those outlets or vehicles?

Margaret Atwood 6:39 Yeah. So why do I do that? 'Cause nobody told me not to. There weren't any [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 6:44 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 6:46 Once upon a time, Tim, a long, long time ago, and you aren't gonna believe this, but there were no creative writing schools. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 6:52 I believe it.

Margaret Atwood 6:53 So essentially, it was open season. You could do whatever you, what you wanted, and there weren't people saying you have to do either this or that. There were no people like that. So we just did whatever.

Tim Ferriss 7:08 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 7:09 And it seems to have been true that I will have written poems about something, and then some years later, that will turn up in some other form.

Tim Ferriss 7:20 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 7:21 So for instance, I wrote some poetry in which this character called Grace Marks makes an appearance, and then some years later, I wrote a television play about that back when television was still black and white. You don't remember that, Tim. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 7:40 I do. I know, it's true.

Margaret Atwood 7:41 There's so many things you don't remember.

Tim Ferriss 7:43 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 7:43 So it was black and white and, but I, I was using only one source for that 'cause this is an historical person, and the person who had been writing about Grace had got a lot of things wrong.

Tim Ferriss 7:55 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 7:56 So I did the play for television, and then years passed, a number of years passed, maybe about 12 years, and there I was in Switzerland. [laughs] It would be Switzerland, you know, home of Carl Jung, and I started writing this piece of prose, and I thought, "So who is this?" It's Grace Marks, and she's dissatisfied with the job I did in that play. She wants me to go back and take another look. So this time we went to a lot of sources, not just the one, and, uh, we found this extremely interesting story because it was, it was several stories and, and there was no resolution. You know, we never actually found out through the historical record whether Grace Marks had murdered anybody or not. So I, I wrote a novel called Alias Grace, and then that gets turned into a, a Netflix series, mini-series by Sarah Polley. And Sarah Polley is an actress, director, producer, scriptwriter who wrote to me when she was 17 years old and said, "I have to do this."

Tim Ferriss 9:12 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 9:12 She was 17. I said, "Mm-hmm." [laughs] It was so cute.

Tim Ferriss 9:16 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 9:17 But she did it finally. She said, "It only took me, like, 20 years."

Tim Ferriss 9:20 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 9:21 And she did a great job of it. So that's that story. So yeah, started as a poem, turned into a television play, turned into a novel, and then turned back into a television series, only this time a more accurate one.

Tim Ferriss 9:36 I- I'm already having so much fun.

Margaret Atwood 9:38 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 9:39 I have to ask you, I'm gonna put all of my questions aside. I have just pages and pages of notes and plans and research, and I'm gonna push it all aside for a second just to ask, what are the things that you do, if anything, maybe it's just out of the box genetics, you could speak to that too, to maintain such a s- vital life energy at 82 years young? Because, uh, I'm, I'm looking for any playbook, and I don't know how much of it is nature versus nurture, but I would just love any, any tips from the field because I've, I've been impressed with watching videos of you certainly. It's entirely more impressive to be having the conversation with you. What, what are some of your other activities or things that you do?

Margaret Atwood 10:30 Let's begin with the genetics. My mom lived to 97. My dad not quite so long, 86. But my mom was very-- They were both very curious about things. So there's always something new coming along, and, um, you may have noticed that I dabble in those things [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 10:55 Yes

Margaret Atwood 10:55 ... from time to time because I'm interested in them. I've-- I want to know how they work. I want to know there's a, there's a good and a bad for every human technology that we make. I wanna know what's the upside, what's the downside, cost benefit, but also what are, what are people using this for? Because it, it's so frequently that we invent something for one purpose, and then people find a whole different purpose for it, or lots of purposes. For instance, Velcro. Whoever invented Velcro had no idea what it was for. [laughs] But now we know it's for putting on your shoes, Tim. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 11:38 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 11:39 So curiosity, yep, genetics, curiosity, and if you wanna go to the astrology, we can do that too. You wanna go there?

Tim Ferriss 11:48 Oh, wow. You know, I didn't see that coming, but yes, let's go to the astrology.

Margaret Atwood 11:52 Of course you didn't. So what do I know about astrology?

Tim Ferriss 11:55 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 11:55 Because a long, long time ago, [laughs] I was in English literature, and I was a Victorianist, and, uh, one of the things that you had to know for the kind of English literature that I was in at that time, which began with Anglo-Saxon and ended with T.S. Eliot, was people's worldviews And especially as you get into the Renaissance, that's what people believed. They believed in astrology. They believed in palmistry, which is connected. And therefore, it was interesting to know about things because you could see, you could, for instance, look at a portrait, a Renaissance portrait, and look at the f- rings on the fingers, because what fingers those rings were on meant something to the people looking at the picture.

Tim Ferriss 12:46 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 12:46 And the positions of the hands meant something. So like this, you see a lot of saints going like this.

Tim Ferriss 12:52 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 12:53 Let me see if I can show you.

Tim Ferriss 12:54 Got it. So it's sort of palm facing in.

Margaret Atwood 12:57 Uh, well, no, it's the little finger. It's the little finger that's separate from the rest of the hand.

Tim Ferriss 13:02 Oh, I see.

Margaret Atwood 13:03 Oh, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 13:04 I see. I see, yes.

Margaret Atwood 13:05 Oh, yeah. We do that too, you know.

Tim Ferriss 13:06 Oh, this is the, the Vulcan hand signal.

Margaret Atwood 13:08 We go, uh, live, live well and prosper. Uh [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 13:11 Yes, exactly. [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 13:13 Yeah, so our hand gestures still mean things, but our hand gestures have changed over the years. Anyway, back into the Renaissance, they believed in astrology, and that's when the tarot cards arise. So if you were studying T.S. Eliot, you had to know something about the tarot because it turns up in The Wasteland. So lucky me, I had somebody called Jetske Sibatma living below me and when I was living in a, you know, an apartment, and she was from Holland, and she was studying Hieronymus Bosch, the painter. And it was her thesis back in 1969 that these funny little figures in Hieronymus Bosch's weird paintings were not figments of his Freudian subconscious, but they were astrological symbols. So she set about demonstrating that, and during the long, cold Edmonton winter nights when nobody went out because it was very slippery and cold, and people's car tires froze in squares, Jetske Sibatma taught me astrology and palmistry. So I know those things. So if you want to do the astrology, we can go there, Tim.

Tim Ferriss 14:36 I do. Well, uh, with that type of lead in, I, I can't say no.

Margaret Atwood 14:40 Okay. All I need to tell you is Gemini rising, and you will know what that means.

Tim Ferriss 14:47 I will not know what that means. I need a footnote.

Margaret Atwood 14:49 You will not know what that means. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 14:51 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 14:53 Okay. Very curious, Tim. Very curious and a bit flighty.

Tim Ferriss 15:00 So do you identify then with your Gemini rising assessment? Would you agree with the astrological read of yourself?

Margaret Atwood 15:08 Well, it kind of doesn't matter whether I agree or not. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 15:11 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 15:12 It is what it is. I just throw it out there for you because you wanted an explanation as to why I'm always sticking my nose into things-

Tim Ferriss 15:19 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 15:20 ... and what keeps me going. So what keeps me going is you never know. And the other thing that keeps me going is, don't open that door. Well, uh, never mind. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 15:32 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 15:33 Why not? I'm gonna open the door.

Tim Ferriss 15:35 Is the you never know a reference to why not trying something new? Is, is that what that means, or does it mean something else?

Margaret Atwood 15:42 It means that. E- exactly, it means that. So just to go a little deeper into the astrology, the, the governing planet of Gemini is Hermes, okay? Otherwise known as Mercury.

Tim Ferriss 15:58 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 15:58 And what is Hermes the god of? He is the god of [laughs] thieves, jokes-

Tim Ferriss 16:06 I was gonna say handbags, but I don't have my mythology. [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 16:09 Handbags, yeah, they get into it. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 16:11 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 16:11 They get into it. There's a reason it's called Hermes. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 16:14 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 16:15 Okay. Thieves, jokes, money, communications, travel.

Tim Ferriss 16:20 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 16:21 He's the opener and closer of doors, the guarder of secrets, and, uh, also the revealer of secrets, and the only one of the gods that go- can go down to the underworld and return from it. So he is the conductor-

Tim Ferriss 16:39 Hmm

Margaret Atwood 16:39 ... of souls to the underworld. And as you'll recall, Tim, from the end of The Odyssey, when, uh [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 16:47 Of course.

Margaret Atwood 16:49 When Odysseus shoots all these people, he shoots a lot of them, really. Good shot. It is, it is Hermes who conducts these souls to the underworld. He's what we call a psychopomp, a conductor of souls to the underworld. So people in my configuration are very interested in, uh, plumbing, [laughs] the sewer system-

Tim Ferriss 17:14 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 17:15 ... underwear, [laughs] thieves, criminals, uh, secrets, and anything that's buried.

Tim Ferriss 17:22 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 17:23 Like that. So that's where the curiosity comes in. Let's dig this up.

Tim Ferriss 17:28 Let's dig this up.

Margaret Atwood 17:29 Let's open this door. Yes.

Tim Ferriss 17:30 Well, you mentioned, you know, Hermes, and aside from the handbag reference, which [laughs] was only partially joking, but-

Margaret Atwood 17:37 Well, that's pretty good. Hermes, Hermes governs money. I mean, it all makes sense.

Tim Ferriss 17:42 I- I know for those people listening are offended, Hermes, I get it. But the opening and closing of doors, the opener and closer of doors, it made me think of a book that I really enjoyed called Trickster Makes This World.

Margaret Atwood 17:53 Great book. I love-- I know the author.

Tim Ferriss 17:55 Oh, really? Lewis Hyde.

Margaret Atwood 17:56 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 17:57 I loved that book.

Margaret Atwood 17:59 Well, have you read The Gift, the-- his first book?

Tim Ferriss 18:02 The Gift didn't grab me in the same way, although I know many, many, many people who would put that up in their top three, five books in terms of influence in their lives. So I should probably give it another shot.

Margaret Atwood 18:16 Well, I think Trickster Make This-- Makes This World is, is more pertinent to you.

Tim Ferriss 18:20 Oh, as a trickster. I like that

Margaret Atwood 18:25 I'm just gonna let that float in the, in the air. Yes. Well, no, this is, this is a business that you're in. You're, you're in that, that side of the Hermes constellation.

Tim Ferriss 18:34 [laughs] Ah.

Margaret Atwood 18:36 Gift, on the other hand, is very useful for people going into the arts because it differentiates quite clearly the world of, of commerce, uh, from-

Tim Ferriss 18:46 Mm-hmm

Margaret Atwood 18:47 ... the world of the arts. Although if you're in the arts, uh, you may get your inspiration as a gift, but at some point you have to go through the valley of the shadow of commerce-

Tim Ferriss 18:57 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 18:58 ... um, to get to the other side where your, your thing, whatever it is, turns back into a gift in the hands of the recipient, say, the ideal reader.

Tim Ferriss 19:07 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 19:08 So you write the book that's in the world of gift. It then gets turned into this thing with pages and everything, and it gets some- something called sold. So it's in the world of commerce.

Tim Ferriss 19:19 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 19:20 But somebody who then reads your book on the other hand and loves it doesn't say, "Uh, well I didn't get $22.95 worth out of this book." I mean, some people do, [laughs] but usually they don't say that.

Tim Ferriss 19:32 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 19:33 Whereas they might say that about an automobile that they've bought. You know, the, the seat belts don't work. I want you to fix them. Uh-

Tim Ferriss 19:40 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 19:40 ... you do that with, with things that you have bought. Uh, but things that you have received as a gift, you d- you do not do that to.

Tim Ferriss 19:47 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 19:48 You o- you do, however, have obligations towards gifts. You need to pass them on. You do not keep them. You need to either give somebody else a gift or pass on the gift that you have received in some way. So I do recommend it if you want to understand some of the odd ways of artists.

Tim Ferriss 20:07 I did very much enjoy the sections I did read about gift economies and the circulation-

Margaret Atwood 20:14 Exactly

Tim Ferriss 20:15 ... of, of gift.

Margaret Atwood 20:16 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 20:16 I think Trickster Makes This World applies to you as well, and the reason I say that is there's a term used in that book that I very much loved and I highlighted. I think the description was related to Coyote as one of the archetypes here, but as a boundary walker. And I view you also as a, a- as a boundary walker-

Margaret Atwood 20:37 Yes

Tim Ferriss 20:37 ... between the, the present and the possible, right? And there have-- I've, in the course of doing research for this conversation, read about the, the, the different ways we could look at the semantics of, say, science fiction, some other planet with creatures never before seen versus-

Margaret Atwood 20:52 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 20:52 ... speculative fiction, where you're taking something that exists or is in the process of it becoming and then taking it a few steps out. And you seem to be a master of that, which would make you a master, in my mind, of boundary walking. I'd love to hear what you think has, has led you, and this also made me think of how people, some people describe you as clairvoyant [laughs] when you were discussing the astrology and the palmistry because of your adeptness in this boundary area. Or what types of structured thinking or observation or lend themselves to your ability to write speculative fiction?

Margaret Atwood 21:32 You might say the lack of the qualities that make it difficult for me to write science fiction, [laughs] which I read a lot of-

Tim Ferriss 21:39 Sure, yeah

Margaret Atwood 21:39 ... plus, plus, uh, dragons. You know, I'm keen on dragons.

Tim Ferriss 21:43 Me too.

Margaret Atwood 21:43 I just cannot do them. So there are some things that you can, that you can do, that you have the ability to do, and other things that you may admire, but you cannot do.

Tim Ferriss 21:54 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 21:54 Dragons outside my range of capabilities in any way, Ursula K. Le Guin has kind of sewn up dragons. She got sort of the dragon franchise. [laughs] Best dragons.

Tim Ferriss 22:06 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 22:06 Yeah, so Game of Thrones, the dragons are basically sort of like bazookas, but her dragons have a great intellect and different powers and other things that are usually attributed to dragons in the English tradition, but they are in the-

Tim Ferriss 22:21 Mm-hmm

Margaret Atwood 22:21 ... Chinese tradition, et cetera. We could go on about that, but we won't today.

Tim Ferriss 22:25 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 22:26 Now, you wanted to know sort of what's behind it.

Tim Ferriss 22:29 What's, yeah, what's behind the speculative fiction? [laughs] What makes you good at it?

Margaret Atwood 22:34 I grew up in the, in the '50s as a teenager, and I read a lot of those things. So I read 1984 just after it came out. So I read it in the paperback version with the typically sleazy cover of the early '50s. They put classics into these quite, what shall we say about those covers? They made you think that you were buying a really trashy book. So I think a lot of people got enticed into reading, like, War and Peace and things because they thought it was about ladies in negligees lying on beds-

Tim Ferriss 23:06 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 23:07 ... uh, which it partly was. So my copy of 1984 had this, this woman with an enormous cleavage in the foreground and, and a guy standing behind her looking down her front, which does get in there a bit, but that's not the general import. I s- mainlined all of those books. I, I read Ray Bradbury a lot. You'll notice that I ended up writing in one of his obits, I think for The Guardian. I went to Comic-Con for the first time because we thought we were on our way to see Ray, but, but unfortunately he died before we got there, so we ended up having-

Tim Ferriss 23:41 Oh, sorry

Margaret Atwood 23:41 ... a memorial service at, at Comic-Con for Ray Bradbury, one of the great inventors in several fields, really. Read all of those things. John Wyndham I was reading in the '50s, and I think what you read as a teenage person often goes on to influence what you are then writing when you're able to, you know, when you have the skills. So I think I had it in my mind for a while. I would like to write a, a 1984 only with women. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 24:12 Hmm. [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 24:13 Like that. So meanwhile, along comes Ursula K.-

Tim Ferriss 24:17 Mm-hmm

Margaret Atwood 24:18 ... and, uh, a number of other, uh, people that I was following. It's, it's part what you're drawn to and partly what you have the skills to do. As I say, I can't do dragons.

Tim Ferriss 24:29 [laughs] Well, I can't do dragons or speculative fiction, so you have me beat. [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 24:33 I can't do podcasts.

Tim Ferriss 24:35 Well, you know, podcasts are just ephemera in the mist. I think you, that your, your works will have much more permanence, but I can hope, I can hope that someday the audio will-

Margaret Atwood 24:44 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 24:44 ... will have the same, get locked in the amber in the same way that words are.

Margaret Atwood 24:48 I'm sure it will. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 24:50 [laughs] I wanna, I wanna go back in time from your teenage years, because I was, I've, I've read about your experience of growing up in a cabin in the woods, and some of the benefits of that, the lack of distractions giving you the concentration that perhaps helped you become a writer later, and so on. I'm thinking about having kids in the very near future.

Margaret Atwood 25:11 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 25:12 And I fantasize about living in the woods because I feel most at home in the woods.

Margaret Atwood 25:17 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 25:17 Were there any downsides?

Margaret Atwood 25:19 Okay. What, which woods are you thinking of, Tim?

Tim Ferriss 25:22 Uh, I like, uh, varied terrain, so I-

Margaret Atwood 25:27 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 25:27 ... I, I would prefer something that isn't flat, so we could think, uh, American West, we could think Upstate New York, we could think British Columbia in certain locations. I would prefer not to hear or see any neighbors.

Margaret Atwood 25:41 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 25:41 I would like to have lots of trails that I can explore with my dog or dogs or family.

Margaret Atwood 25:51 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 25:51 And running water of some type and a lake or a pond, having access to both of those, or one of those at least. So that's-

Margaret Atwood 26:01 Okay

Tim Ferriss 26:01 ... that is my... I grew up-

Margaret Atwood 26:02 Um-

Tim Ferriss 26:02 I grew up on Long Island, more or less in the woods.

Margaret Atwood 26:05 Okay.

Tim Ferriss 26:05 Uh, but, and, and so that's, that's my idealized version, but I don't know what it's like to raise kids in the woods. I'm curious if there are any downsides.

Margaret Atwood 26:12 Well, you should ask my mum, except she's not here. But, uh, I can tell you what she said.

Tim Ferriss 26:20 Yes, please.

Margaret Atwood 26:21 So my mum was an unusual person, liked being outdoors most of the time. She was very athletic. She grew up in rural Nova Scotia. She was a big horse person. She loved horses. She had horses, and, uh, she rode them hither and thither, and she was also a speed skater, uh, and of course a skier and this kind of thing. So I think she married my dad because he was a very bushy guy, and he grew up in, grew up in even more rural Nova Scotia, like really rural. So they were so rural that I don't think they got electricity until the late '50s. So I, I was lucky enough to be able to see a 19th century farm operating pretty much the way it would have done.

Tim Ferriss 27:14 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 27:15 I think she, who didn't like hats, little white gloves, tea parties, didn't fancy it. She liked dancing, like fast and furious waltzing and things like that, square dancing, but she didn't like the frilly part. And up in the woods was great for her because she said you didn't actually have to do much housework. You just swept the dirt out the door. You didn't have to worry about, you know, all of the stuff that people have in their houses usually, like bric-a-brac and china and things like that. You don't have to worry about those. So she didn't. And she doesn't seem to have had a problem in the woods, except my brother almost drowned once because he, he got out and fell off the dock. But, uh, apart from that and a few other somewhat hairy moments [laughs] uh, it was probably safer on the whole than being in a city. Anyway, she seems to have managed pretty well, although some of her city friends, because they were in cities during the winter, okay? My dad was a forest entomologist. It meant he was up in the woods when the insects were doing things. But as a rule, in fact, [laughs] uh, you could take it as almost 100%, they don't do much in the winter, insects.

Tim Ferriss 28:38 [laughs] Yeah.

Margaret Atwood 28:40 Pretty quiet insect-wise in the winter. So h- they would go up in, say, April or so, and they would go back in, for instance, November. But this is, I think, quite a lot further north than you were thinking of being in the woods, Tim. I think you're thinking of a more southerly location.

Tim Ferriss 28:56 It is.

Margaret Atwood 28:57 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 28:57 I think probably not, you know, Baffin Island or anything like that. Uh, [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 29:01 No, they weren't up there. There aren't any trees there.

Tim Ferriss 29:04 I know. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.

Margaret Atwood 29:05 No.

Tim Ferriss 29:05 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 29:06 Insects who live in trees. He was a forest entomologist, right? So there had to be a forest.

Tim Ferriss 29:12 There had to be the forest.

Margaret Atwood 29:13 Yeah. They had running water, but it was out of a pump, and they didn't have electricity.

Tim Ferriss 29:19 Wow.

Margaret Atwood 29:19 And the transportation was by boat, so no roads.

Tim Ferriss 29:24 Wow.

Margaret Atwood 29:25 You could get to, I think by 1939, there was this horrible road, which I remember very well. You'd always get carsick going over it, and then you'd get to a place where you left the car, and then you would get in a boat.

Tim Ferriss 29:37 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 29:38 So then it was during the war, so there, there weren't even a lot of, uh, motorboats because gasoline was rationed. So canoes.

Tim Ferriss 29:47 I would love to hear you describe an experience that came up in my reading. It relates to a day you found yourself walking across a football field.

Margaret Atwood 29:56 Oh, yeah. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 29:56 I don't know if that's enough of a cue.

Margaret Atwood 29:59 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 29:59 But I would love to hear you expand on this because I did read about it, but I, I feel like there's probably more to the story. So could you please just provide-

Margaret Atwood 30:08 Sure

Tim Ferriss 30:08 ... some color and tell the story?

Margaret Atwood 30:10 Writers make stuff up, Tim.

Tim Ferriss 30:11 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 30:12 You, you ask them questions that essentially have no answers, but they make stuff up anyway. So I, I'll tell you what I made up.

Tim Ferriss 30:19 Yes, please.

Margaret Atwood 30:19 But it, it's kind of true. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 30:21 [laughs] Sounds like my life.

Margaret Atwood 30:24 Yeah, right. It's like that. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 30:27 Mostly kind of true.

Margaret Atwood 30:28 Yeah, sort of true. Your previous question, what did growing up in the woods have to do with being a writer? There wasn't anything to do Except-

Tim Ferriss 30:37 Yeah

Margaret Atwood 30:37 ... when it was raining, except reading, writing, and, and drawing. So there were no other things to do, like no theaters, no schools, no television, no what else can you think of? None of those things. So therefore, I fixated on writing pretty early, and it was a narrative family. People told stories.

Tim Ferriss 31:02 Mm.

Margaret Atwood 31:03 And my older brother was a gung-ho writer. He wrote lots of things at, at that age. He, he turned into a scientist, but he was very narrative when he was say, 10, 9. Anyway, back to the football field. There I am, uh, having written my first novel at the age of seven. It was about an ant. Some structural difficulties there, Tim, because ants don't do anything until they're in the [both laugh] fourth stage of their life, so they don't do anything when they're an egg, they don't do anything when they're a larva, they do nothing when they're a pupa, and it's only when you get to, you know, the last part of the story that they actually have any legs. So I, I don't start books that way anymore, Tim, but I did then. So then I stopped writing. I, I, I, I took to drawing. I drew a lot. And then I ended up in high school at slightly too early an age. Uh, they skipped people then. I think they've stopped doing that. So I was 12, and some of the people in my class were almost 16, 'cause they failed people then, Tim. [both laugh] So-

Tim Ferriss 32:16 Got it

Margaret Atwood 32:16 ... it was a slightly daunting experience, but-

Tim Ferriss 32:18 I can imagine

Margaret Atwood 32:19 ... but things evened out after that, yes. I was quite short. In fact, I'm still quite short.

Tim Ferriss 32:24 I'm still quite short.

Margaret Atwood 32:25 Uh, people got bigger.

Tim Ferriss 32:26 Yeah, that's both of us. [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 32:27 For a while, I was sort of normal size, but that's no longer true. There's all these, you know, enormous kids who drank a lot of milk with vitamins in it. Anyway, there I was in high school, and, uh, I loved my grade 11 teacher. That would be one, two, the third year of high school. What do you call that? In the States, it's something else.

Tim Ferriss 32:50 Uh, I guess junior, junior year, but we f- like what do you guys call it? Fifth form? I don't know if you use the British system. I have no idea.

Margaret Atwood 32:57 No, that's English.

Tim Ferriss 32:58 What do you guys call it in Canada?

Margaret Atwood 33:00 Well, we called it different grades, like nine, 10, 11, 12, and in those days, 13, but they've done away with that.

Tim Ferriss 33:06 Yeah, we would call it 11- probably, I guess 11th or junior year.

Margaret Atwood 33:10 Junior, yeah. So my great English teacher, who I put in a book, 'cause she was so peculiar, people go back and they do documentaries about you, right? And usually the teacher says, "Oh, yes, I could see instantly great, brilliant Sean, right out of her head, and I could tell she was, you know, slated for greatness." But she told the truth. She said, "She showed no particular ability in my class," which was true. I, I didn't show any particular ability [both laugh] in her class. Uh, and I had no idea then that I was, uh, gonna be a writer. Didn't strike me until the next year when I had a different English teacher, who I've also put into a story because she was a, a legend in her own time. She, she, she took hold of the people in her class and she yanked them through the curriculum. [both laugh] No matter what, no matter what, she got us through. And her name was Miss Bessie Billings, and she made the immortal comment, 'cause I showed her one of my poems, she said, [laughs] "I don't understand this at all, dear, so it must be good." [both laugh] Isn't that wonderful? I love it.

Tim Ferriss 34:24 That is great. That is great.

Margaret Atwood 34:25 Yeah, so I, I started writing poetry in, in grade 12, and, uh, the story I tell about that is that I was crossing the football field in a pink princess line dress that I had sewed myself, a work of art, Tim.

Tim Ferriss 34:42 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 34:43 You don't know what that is, do you? [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 34:45 Oh, I can envision based on some of the words what it might look like. [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 34:49 Princess line. It had these panels and then it sort of flared out. Anyway, it was great. Loved it. I kept the button. It had a beautiful sort of button on the front, which I still have. Oh, yes. Well, I, I'd made a terrible mistake. I'd gone into home economics instead of the secretarial sciences, which I should have done. Had I known, I would have done that, and then I would know how to touch type, which I don't, and it's too late now, Tim. So there I was in my pink princess line dress crossing the football field, and a poem occurred to me. It wasn't a very good poem, but it was a poem. I was very excited about it, and this is how these things start. You write some pretty terrible poetry that you're very excited about, and luckily there's nobody there to tell you this is really terrible poetry. [laughs] And then you go on from there.

Tim Ferriss 35:49 What did it feel like when this poem came to you? I mean, the, the li-- [laughs] Now, you can tell me how much of this is, uh, you know, a, a sort of a revisionist history and storytelling and how much of it is a reflection of your experience, but, quote, "A large invisible thumb descended from the sky and-"

Margaret Atwood 36:05 It's the eureka moment, Tim. [both laugh] Yeah, a big thumb came out of the sky. If you believe that, what else would you like me to tell you that you will also believe?

Tim Ferriss 36:16 Well, I already asked about astrology, so you got me.

Margaret Atwood 36:18 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 36:19 You can tell me anything.

Margaret Atwood 36:21 Yes, it was very interesting to me, and, uh, I had been trying out these potential careers like I was going to be a, a painter and then I revised that. I was gonna be a fashion designer and then I revised that and I went into home economics because in the Textbook was called Guidance. In grade nine, you were supposed to decide what your career was gonna be. Can you imagine? Who knows anything when they're that old?

Tim Ferriss 36:48 Uh, yeah. Yeah, not me.

Margaret Atwood 36:50 So the guidance textbook had, had five things that, that girls could do, and they did not include astrophysicist.

Tim Ferriss 36:59 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 36:59 Let's see if you can guess what they were in 1952.

Tim Ferriss 37:04 I think I can, but I'm cheating. Nurse, secretary, school teacher, airline stewardess, as they were known, and home economist.

Margaret Atwood 37:12 You've read what I wrote.

Tim Ferriss 37:13 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 37:13 Bad cheater.

Tim Ferriss 37:14 Yeah, I have. I know. [laughs] I am a bad cheater. I am, or a very good cheater. I don't know. [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 37:20 [laughs] Well, you didn't get away with it.

Tim Ferriss 37:22 Uh, yeah, I know, I know.

Margaret Atwood 37:24 Well, yes, that's, that's what was on offer, and being a mercenary child, I, I looked up what they made-

Tim Ferriss 37:29 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 37:31 ... because I did grow up in a family in which it, it was expected that you would support yourself.

Tim Ferriss 37:36 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 37:37 So the home economists made the most, believe it or not, so I went into that.

Tim Ferriss 37:44 Huh.

Margaret Atwood 37:45 But then I decided, no, this is not for me. I'm gonna be a biologist. I was gonna be a botanist 'cause I was actually quite good at it, and but then along came this writing, and, uh, much to my parents' dismay, but being the bite-your-tongue kind of parents, I think they just hoped it would be a phase, that I would grow out of it.

Tim Ferriss 38:08 [laughs] It's been a long phase.

Margaret Atwood 38:10 A phase.

Tim Ferriss 38:11 It would seem. [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 38:11 Yeah. Well, they did say the very practical thing right off the bat. They said, "Well, how are you gonna support yourself?" I said, "You know, I'll get a job," which I did. I got lots of jobs, and then my mother said rather caustically, [laughs] "If you're gonna be a writer, you better learn to spell." And I said, "Others will do that for me," and you know, they have. Now we have spellcheck. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 38:33 [laughs] All good things come to those who wait, I guess. [laughs] That's true. You were right.

Margaret Atwood 38:37 I had to wait a while, but... [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 38:39 Yeah. [laughs] It, it panned out. So you, you wrote, if I'm getting the chronology right, you wrote for 16 years before you could make a living out of it.

Margaret Atwood 38:49 That's right.

Tim Ferriss 38:49 You had all these different jobs, a- as you mentioned-

Margaret Atwood 38:52 Yep

Tim Ferriss 38:52 ... as a cashier in a coffee shop and many others.

Margaret Atwood 38:55 Was bad at that.

Tim Ferriss 38:56 [laughs] Over those 16 years, did you-- were you maintaining the belief that someday it would pay the bills and, uh, you would be able to make a living out of it? Or was it just a labor of love while you did these other things?

Margaret Atwood 39:09 Oh, the writing?

Tim Ferriss 39:11 Yes.

Margaret Atwood 39:11 You mean, did I ever think I would make a living out of it? No.

Tim Ferriss 39:14 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 39:15 People in my age group in my country at that time didn't think that way. They might have thought that way in the '30s, uh, and even in the '40s, where there were a couple of bestsellers written by people in our country. But right after the war, during the '50s, a couple of things had happened, and one of them was that the paperback book industry had taken off, and, uh, I think it started with, uh, Penguin in the UK, and then it was Pocket Books, and, and Canada didn't have-- It had some nascent book publishers, but paperbacks were not included in them. So the glossy magazine market was also drying up, so a writer like Morley Callaghan, who wrote a lot of short stories in the '20s and '30s, made a living out of selling to glossies.

Tim Ferriss 40:17 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 40:18 But that was, that was dwindling by that time. Some of them still existed, but, uh, but not in the same way that, that they had. So we weren't really thinking in those terms, and there, there were no agents in Canada at that time. We, we didn't even really quite understand what they were. There were some publishers, but they didn't publish very many Canadian books because it was thought there wasn't a market for them. So if you wanted to publish a novel, your publisher would say, "Well, we have to get a partner, you know, either in London or in New York," and that was easier said than done. So the, the book publishing that had been going on in the '30s of cheap hardbacks kind of dried up. In fact, let me just be a little more certain about that. It was gone, having had paperbacks take its place. So it was hardbacks, and, um, I've always been interested in the underpinnings to all of these things. In fact, I was associated with a small publishing company in the late '60s and early '70s, and a lot of it was about money. Like, how many can we sell? What can we, what can we publish to support these works of, uh, cutting edge, [laughs] cutting edge experimental fiction that nobody's gonna buy?

Tim Ferriss 41:48 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 41:48 Uh, what can we publish? So we, we did. We published the first book on venereal disease. It was called VD. These, these were sort of, you know idiots' guides. These were sort of idiots' guides before there were idiots' guides. We got as far as warts-

Tim Ferriss 42:05 Wow

Margaret Atwood 42:05 ... but we didn't get to AIDS because nobody knew about it yet.

Tim Ferriss 42:08 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 42:09 Like that.

Tim Ferriss 42:10 So let me, let me hop in for just a second. When you're writing for 16 years, not thinking you can make a living from it-

Margaret Atwood 42:16 That's right

Tim Ferriss 42:16 ... what did you get from the writing, and did you share your writing with anyone?

Margaret Atwood 42:21 Oh, absolutely. We were all, uh, sharing our stuff around because we were editing each other's work. We were publishing each other's work. We were-- All of the, the poets were connected through this kind of spiderweb network of little magazines.

Tim Ferriss 42:41 Ah, I got it.

Margaret Atwood 42:42 Yeah, both in Canada, the US, England, there were these little magazines That published, uh, poetry and people knew each other through them. So the, the poets knew one another before the novelists did in our country

Tim Ferriss 42:57 Huh

Margaret Atwood 42:58 Well, the poets were m- more peripatetic. They would get on the Greyhound bus and turn up at your door and, uh, sleep on your rug. And you, in your turn, might [laughs] uh, get on the Greyhound bus and, and turn up at somebody else's door and sleep on their rug. So it was a sort of a rug exchange of poets. They would turn up here and there and give readings in out-of-the-way places. And, uh, uh, some of them, they're-- Do you remember? No, you don't. Sorry. Coffee shops, coffee shop readings.

Tim Ferriss 43:32 I know coffee shops. No, I, I do. I do.

Margaret Atwood 43:34 Well, a different kind of coffee shop

Tim Ferriss 43:35 I have been to a coffee shop reading

Margaret Atwood 43:37 These, let me not say shops. That's, it should be houses

Tim Ferriss 43:40 Ah, yes

Margaret Atwood 43:40 So they didn't have liquor licenses, so basically people brought flasks in their handbags, pockets, and things like that. And you had the usually condemned warehouse or something, and the little tables with the checkered tablecloths, the little, uh, wine bottles with the candles stuck in them, and the open mic. So poetry night usually on a Tuesday [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 44:11 Sounds great. That sounds like a lot of fun

Margaret Atwood 44:13 Down part of the week. And all the folk singing and jazz went on, on, on other nights of the week, such as Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. That's how they, you know, supported the poetry readings. So we did that in the early '60s, and then the poetry readings spread to universities, some of them, and then to bookstores. They decided that they could do that too. And the big festivals didn't start happening until the mid-70s, I would say

Tim Ferriss 44:47 Hmm

Margaret Atwood 44:47 All of these festivals that you see proliferating like mushrooms all around, or you did see it before COVID, they didn't exist yet

Tim Ferriss 44:55 Mm-hmm

Margaret Atwood 44:56 They sprang up out of this subculture of coffee houses

Tim Ferriss 45:00 And this, this is neither here nor there, but I am fascinated actually by the history of coffee houses, especially in the UK, where you have Lloyd's of London coming out of one coffee shop and all of this incredible, uh, history that I had really no glimpse-

Margaret Atwood 45:15 Oh, you mean back in the 18th century? Yeah

Tim Ferriss 45:19 Yes. Way back

Margaret Atwood 45:20 Yes

Tim Ferriss 45:20 Which I also don't remember, to be clear, but I have read about it

Margaret Atwood 45:22 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 45:23 And that interchange of ideas and this, the, the, the, uh, the sort of interstitial tissue in the, in the societal fabric of the time. But, uh, what I'd like to ask you about next is teaching. And, uh, y- it's clear reading about your life that you have taught a lot. What type of teaching did you most enjoy, if any of it?

Margaret Atwood 45:47 I always enjoyed it. I think the most intense year of teaching that I did was in Montreal. I taught at a place that doesn't exist anymore because it's been amalgamated with another institution, but it was called Sir George Williams, and it was a downtown city establishment. And, um, you taught your subject to 19-year-olds in the day, and then in the evening you taught the same subject to returning adult students. That was very instructive for me. Uh, the 19-year-olds weren't too sure why they were there, except their mom and dad wanted them to, and really, they would rather be drinking beer or going to hockey games or something. And the adults were there because they wanted to be. A couple of reasons they wanted to be there, they wanted to up their credentials, but also they were very engaged, and they would argue with you-

Tim Ferriss 46:49 Hmm

Margaret Atwood 46:49 ... and, um, object to things and, [laughs] you know, really, really give you the old run through, and, and that was pretty stimulating. So I taught, uh, 19th century, uh, novels to those, uh, people, and I also taught, um, American Romanticism. And it was they who gave me a, um, a button that said, "Moby Dick is not a social disease." Uh [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 47:15 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 47:15 So they had a sense of humor. I, [laughs] I liked them a lot. And it was very instructive because the things that the, that the 19-year-old likes, liked, frequently the grown-ups would not like, and the things that the 19-year-olds really didn't like, the grown-ups thought were terrific. So Middlemarch by George Eliot, the 19-year-old said, uh, "Oh, this is, we don't like this book at all because the people in it make wrong decisions in their careers, and they marry the wrong people, and we're not gonna do that." And the adult said, "This is the, a great book. [laughs] They make the wrong decisions in their careers. They marry the wrong people. It's just like life." [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 48:01 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 48:02 So a big difference in experience, and what's the lesson? The lesson is that you bring to any book who you already are-

Tim Ferriss 48:09 Hmm

Margaret Atwood 48:09 ... at the age that you are and the experience that you've had, and it's the same for everyone

Tim Ferriss 48:17 So we're talking about books, of course. I'll, I'll segue to a book that I've not read and I'd love to ask you about because you, you've recommended that young adults should read The Future of Life by Edmund Osborne Wilson, if the internet is to be believed

Margaret Atwood 48:32 Yes. Unfortunately, he's just died

Tim Ferriss 48:35 That's right. I've actually put a quote of E. O. Wilson, I guess, as I, as I better know him, in my newsletter, in fact, I guess two weeks ago. Why do you recommend The Future of Life?

Margaret Atwood 48:48 Yeah, he's a biologist. I was familiar with his work from a, from an early period because of course he was an entomologist. He was, he was an ant guy, and my dad started out as a bee guy. And as you well know from your deep study of entomology-

Tim Ferriss 49:05 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 49:05 [laughs] Those are both Hymenoptera.

Tim Ferriss 49:08 [laughs] Of course.

Margaret Atwood 49:10 So my dad was, was very interested in his work on ants, and I read it pretty early on. And, uh, I followed him along, and I was in fact the reviewer for his only novel. And you can probably find that review in the New York Review of Books. And I was well-equipped to do it because I knew about ants, and, uh, the, the central section of that book, which is the life and death of an ant colony, is the most gripping one [laughs] . You think-

Tim Ferriss 49:43 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 49:44 "Wow, this is so epic. It's like the Sack of Troy." I actually knew him a bit. I'd met him. I thought he was, uh, very interesting. He was a huge advocate for the future of life on Earth. Early, an early advocate, and a lot of the early advocates for the kinds of things that we are now very concerned about now, uh, they came from the world of biology. So my parents, for instance, were early Sierra Club and early environmentalists, and very clear from any study of biology, life is interconnected.

Tim Ferriss 50:24 Mm.

Margaret Atwood 50:25 So you contain multitudes, Tim. Just telling you. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 50:30 Thank you. I'm still, I'm still investigating.

Margaret Atwood 50:33 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 50:33 But yes, I tend to, I tend to agree with you. [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 50:36 [laughs] Maybe not in the way you think. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 50:39 Almost certainly not in the way I think. [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 50:42 Yes, I'm sure you contain many personalities, but I'm, I'm thinking more of your microbes. But never mind.

Tim Ferriss 50:48 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 50:49 You could not exist without them.

Tim Ferriss 50:52 Now, that is actually something that I spend quite a bit of time thinking about, the microbiome and the, the exobiome.

Margaret Atwood 50:58 Do you?

Tim Ferriss 50:58 I do, yes. It's, uh-

Margaret Atwood 51:00 Well, so the knowledge has percolated out from the biologists into the podcasts.

Tim Ferriss 51:06 Somehow, yes. I d-

Margaret Atwood 51:07 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 51:07 I'm not gonna be writing any books about it, but somehow these things do happen. I would love to chat with you about something that I think a lot of my listeners would be very interested in, certainly I'll be interested in exploring a bit, and, and that is what seems like a predilection to resist labels and, or being labeled, being claimed for causes. You wrote an essay titled On Being a Woman Writer, which got a lot of attention. Is it fair to say that you resist labels, being labeled? And if so, why, why is that? How would you explain that?

Margaret Atwood 51:44 I resist closed boxes.

Tim Ferriss 51:47 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 51:48 Okay? The reason I resist closed boxes is that nature does not deal in closed boxes.

Tim Ferriss 51:55 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 51:57 Yeah, it doesn't. If, if it did, there wouldn't have been any evolution.

Tim Ferriss 52:01 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 52:02 If it did, you and I would not exist. So everything in nature is on a bell curve, and, uh, there are a lot of liminal beings, or let's say forms that cannot be put into closed boxes-

Tim Ferriss 52:17 Mm-hmm

Margaret Atwood 52:17 ... such as, for instance, the platypus. So I, I just don't like closed boxes, and la- labels are a way of, of filing people.

Tim Ferriss 52:28 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 52:28 You know, oh, you're a this, we're gonna file you there in under this, you know, letter. Your, your box is gonna go there, and that's who you are, and that's all you are. And, and I don't think that's true of anyone. I, I do think we all contain multitudes. So that's probably why I'm, and you, you can say, sure, I'm a woman writer. I'm a woman, I'm a writer, but that's not the end of the story. There have been a lot of women writers, and not all of them are exactly like me, so we, we don't-- We-- You can, you can put a general heading over something, just as you can put a general heading over science fiction, speculative fiction, stories about werewolves, you know, Dracula, Frankenstein, ghost stories. They're all wonder tales. You can call them all wonder tales, so you can call all women writers women writers, but that's not the end of the story.

Tim Ferriss 53:29 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 53:30 There's a lot of other things that can be added to that. So Dracula is not the same as War of the Worlds. They're both wonder tales, but they're very different like that.

Tim Ferriss 53:45 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 53:46 So sure, let's say woman writer, 82, generational, okay. Country, city, height, hair, curly. That's important, Tim.

Tim Ferriss 54:03 Yeah. [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 54:04 [laughs] So, so like that. So you, you can, you can build out the picture. You c- you can start with a few labels, but it- it's not the whole story for anybody. And if you're a novelist, of course you deal in individuals.

Tim Ferriss 54:17 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 54:18 So you're not just doing types.

Tim Ferriss 54:21 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 54:22 Does that make any sense to you?

Tim Ferriss 54:24 It makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense, and it's, you know, I think that labels are also dangerous because if you assume them for yourself, you're more inclined, if you get attached to them, to want to defend those labels as a facet or as the sole entirety of your identity, and that's, I think, how we end up in a lot of the places where we find ourselves collectively now.

Margaret Atwood 54:50 Yeah. Well, people attach labels to other people, and then they attack the label. And that has been going on for at least 5,000 years as far as we know.

Tim Ferriss 55:00 Yeah, a few years. [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 55:01 Yeah, quite a few years. So that's, that's a thing that if we wish to live in a, in a multiple democracy, we should attempt to go beyond labels. And of course, what people then go is, "Well, you're a feminist." And then I always have to say, "What kind of feminist are you talking about?"

Tim Ferriss 55:23 Right.

Margaret Atwood 55:24 Because there's at least 75 different kinds.

Tim Ferriss 55:27 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 55:28 So am I the kind that thinks all men should be rounded up and shoved off a cliff, except for 10% kept for breeding? No, I am not that kind.

Tim Ferriss 55:36 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 55:37 You will be happy to know, Tim. [laughs] At least I think you're happy to know. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 55:42 Yeah, thank you.

Margaret Atwood 55:42 You want to be kept for breeding, do you? No, you don't.

Tim Ferriss 55:45 I want to be kept for breeding, yes.

Margaret Atwood 55:46 No, you don't.

Tim Ferriss 55:47 Please keep me for breeding. [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 55:49 No, not... [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 55:50 Maybe not. Maybe not. Depends on the-

Margaret Atwood 55:51 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 55:52 It really depends on how that's all organized. Uh. [laughs] Yeah, you know, I should probably think more before I answer these types of things.

Margaret Atwood 56:00 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 56:01 But [laughs] you know, you, you strike me as a very joyful person. Before we started recording, uh, I said I didn't want to bore you, and you said, "I'm never bored." One might say, and again, this is applying a label, but that you're, you've long been interested in what people might consider dystopian literature.

Margaret Atwood 56:22 You bet.

Tim Ferriss 56:23 You seem to be a connoisseur of possibly dystopian speculative fiction.

Margaret Atwood 56:28 Utopian too, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 56:30 Utopian. Do you consider yourself, and, and I am asking you to use a label, so pardon me, but generally speaking, an optimistic or hopeful person?

Margaret Atwood 56:42 I think hope is built in on a very fundamental level to, to human beings because we get up in the morning, and if we thought it was gonna be a horrible day every day, we probably wouldn't bother doing that. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 56:59 [laughs] Yeah.

Margaret Atwood 56:59 And some people are afflicted. You know, they are, they're-- they've got depression, and it's just a horrible thing to live with. So there is a difference between sad and being depressed. So of course I'm sad about various things, but, but I'm also-- I'm, I'm hopeful about our species in that although we have lots of downsides, uh, which we know about through history and looking around you and reading dystopian fiction, we know we're capable of really awful things. Uh, we're also capable of really pretty wonderful things, and we're, we're, we're smart and inventive. So yes, we're facing a climate crisis. It's real. We're also inventing a lot of things having to do with that. We are looking at the problem, and we are coming up with solutions. And that's very interesting to me, and it's why I'm doing this program called Practical Utopias.

Tim Ferriss 57:58 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 57:58 So the 19th century was a big century of utopias. They, they, they wrote a lot of them because they had made so many improvements already in the 19th century that they thought, "Well, this is just gonna go on, and it's gonna get better and better and better." But then along comes the First World War, bloodshed, slaughter, mustard gas, and all kinds of awful things, and then along come various totalitarianisms and the Second World War. So people aren't writing utopias much in the 20th century. They're writing a lot of dystopias, uh, things could get much worse instead of things could be a lot better. So I'm doing Practical Utopias to bring together a lot of this thinking that's been going on about not how to make a utopia in which everything is perfect. We, we don't get to have that. Human beings are, are different, fallible, and they don't always agree on what is better. But we're going to have to think of different ways to live if we are going to overcome the crisis that is facing us.

Tim Ferriss 59:11 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 59:11 And short form is the oceans die, we're gone. Sorry. We're gonna have to deal with that, Tim. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 59:20 Let's expand on Practical Utopias. So Practical Utopias-

Margaret Atwood 59:22 Yes

Tim Ferriss 59:23 ... and then the subheading or description, An Exploration of the Possible. This is an eight-week, if I understand correctly, live online learning experience.

Margaret Atwood 59:31 It is.

Tim Ferriss 59:32 How did you choose this project of all of the things that you could spend time on? Why is this important to you?

Margaret Atwood 59:38 I think it's important to, to us. I think it's important in the general scheme of things and at the point at which we are now finding ourselves, and we know what the problems are because we, we carp about them endlessly. It's, it's im- important to turn people's minds to, to what can be done apart from blanket statements like we all have to not use gasoline anymore. [laughs] So there is gonna have to be a transitional period about that, Tim.

Tim Ferriss 1:00:11 Right.

Margaret Atwood 1:00:13 So getting people together, gathering people who know something about these fields and, uh, putting, putting them together with people who are knowledgeable in other fields and constructing... You know Lego, making a Lego village. You know Minecraft.

Tim Ferriss 1:00:32 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:00:33 So world building in a practical way. What are we gonna eat? What sort of clothes are we gonna wear? What are we g- what are they gonna be made out of? What sort of houses will we live in? What about vertical farms? I'm really interested in vertical farms right now. How about mushrooms? Did you know you can make- bricks out of mushrooms. Would you like to have a mushroom coffin?

Tim Ferriss 1:00:59 Bricks?

Margaret Atwood 1:01:00 Bricks, yes. Bricks.

Tim Ferriss 1:01:02 I did not.

Margaret Atwood 1:01:02 Yeah, yeah. You better join up. Do you know you can 3D print houses out of compressed earth in two days?

Tim Ferriss 1:01:09 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:01:10 Do you know that there are now prefab houses that you can erect that create more energy than they consume? So all of these ideas brought together, and for The Practical Utopia, it's gonna have to be, the solutions will have to be green, they'll have to be cheap enough, and they'll have to be scalable. So these are, this is a problem-solving enterprise, and we can look at some of the things that went pear-shaped about previous attempts to make utopias, and we're gonna have to build in the social component to try to keep that from happening. Like, how do you, how do you take something with, with great idealism attached, like the early stages of the, uh, Russian Revolution, and keep it from turning into Stalin show trials like that?

Tim Ferriss 1:02:05 You know a lot about the Russian Revolution. What might be some of your observations with respect to the example you just gave, uh, and the Russian Revolution?

Margaret Atwood 1:02:13 Well, it's not just the Russian, it's the French.

Tim Ferriss 1:02:16 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:02:17 The American one is a bit of an anomaly because it was not conducted in a confined space, as it were.

Tim Ferriss 1:02:25 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:02:25 And it was a particular kind of revolution that was not so much overthrowing a ruling class from within as ejecting a ruling class that was coming in from without. Uh, so that's-

Tim Ferriss 1:02:41 Mm-hmm

Margaret Atwood 1:02:41 ... a different kind of thing. So-

Tim Ferriss 1:02:44 Mm-hmm

Margaret Atwood 1:02:44 ... with the, with the French and the, the Russian, they were toppling a ruling c- class from within, and, uh, the way that both of those things went is, is very interesting to me.

Tim Ferriss 1:03:01 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:03:02 And, and then you find a, you reach a point where it all falls apart. I mean, the other example, of course, is, is, um, are Hitler and Mussolini on, on the right. The French and the Russian, I guess you would say, were from the left. So how do you keep those things from sort of falling apart and turning into the terror and the show trials and, uh, the cultural revolution and things like that? Uh, in fact, one of these books... No, it's not under there anymore. It's around here somewhere. It's over here. Great book on the, um, Chinese Cultural Revolution by a guy who was there.

Tim Ferriss 1:03:43 What's the title?

Margaret Atwood 1:03:44 The World Turned Upside Down. It's by Yang Jisheng.

Tim Ferriss 1:03:48 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:03:49 The most interesting part for me is, is how they went about toppling the Gang of Four. They actually did meet in houses and write things on little pieces of paper, which they then burned, because they [laughs] were convinced their houses were bugged, which they were.

Tim Ferriss 1:04:05 Hmm. [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:04:07 So high drama.

Tim Ferriss 1:04:08 Yeah.

Margaret Atwood 1:04:08 High drama. Sort of George Smiley territory.

Tim Ferriss 1:04:12 You know what? You were gonna... Y- there have been multiple times when you have said, "Do you remember that?" And then you said, "Of course you don't because I was not alive." Who is George Smiley? I'm gonna admit ignorance on this one.

Margaret Atwood 1:04:22 George Smiley is John Le Carré's, uh, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Tim Ferriss 1:04:27 Ah, got it.

Margaret Atwood 1:04:29 MI6 guy who sets out to catch a mole, a mole from within the intelligence service.

Tim Ferriss 1:04:36 What was the film?

Margaret Atwood 1:04:38 It's a TV series starring, uh, Alec Guinness, which he, he's very good at it too, from about the '70s, early '70s. You can find it with a cursory search of web streamers.

Tim Ferriss 1:04:55 Yeah, there's a, a fantastic film.

Margaret Atwood 1:04:58 Depths of the Cold War, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:05:00 Yeah, that's the Cold War. There's another film that might sort of tie into that example, one of my favorite films actually, certainly for a long period of time, called The Lives of Others.

Margaret Atwood 1:05:09 Fantastic film. Exactly.

Tim Ferriss 1:05:11 Which was about the monitoring of East Berlin residents by the Stasi.

Margaret Atwood 1:05:15 You bet.

Tim Ferriss 1:05:16 Incredible film.

Margaret Atwood 1:05:17 I lived in, uh, West Berlin in 1984 and went across to East Berlin, and also Czechoslovakia, and also Poland. Very instructive. You had to be quite careful how you talked to people, if they would talk to you, and those three countries were very different. So the one that was sewed up the tightest was East Germany. The one that was quite loosey-goosey was Poland.

Tim Ferriss 1:05:47 So you're gonna be bringing your life experience, your study of history to bear on Practical Utopias. How many other people are involved? What does the structure look like?

Margaret Atwood 1:06:01 So we're doing it with a platform called Disco, which is an interactive live learning platform, and, um, it's structured so that they give you the tools. So you know what Substack is?

Tim Ferriss 1:06:18 I do.

Margaret Atwood 1:06:18 So Substack gives you the tools to basically publish your own newspaper, and, and Disco gives you the tools to do your own live learning experience.

Tim Ferriss 1:06:28 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:06:28 So there, there are other kinds of learning experience, which are like TED Talks and things, and MasterClass, which I did one of, and they're more like films.

Tim Ferriss 1:06:39 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:06:40 In fact, the background of the MasterClass people was in film production, and they do a beautiful job of film producing your class. The Disco one is, is interactive in that people join you, and there's a, a to and fro. So- The, the idea is that people will bring their ideas to add to the building of their version of a better way to live that will be green, scalable, and, and affordable, and they're gonna have to make practical decisions. They're gonna say, they're gonna have to say, "Okay, which is better?" Is it better to get your corpse disposed of by cremation? Very carbon producing. Is it better to put it in a mushroom coffin? Is it better to do this new thing that has started up in Seattle called Recompose, in which you, you get turned quite quickly into compost?

Tim Ferriss 1:07:41 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:07:41 And they're gonna have to do the cost and money and the cost in carbon and figure out which choice they're going to make because there's, there's ups and downs to all of these choices. So what you're gonna eat. Are you going to eat the 100 Mile Diet? Are you going to grow things in vertical gardens quite close to you? Is it gonna be nothing but brown rice [laughs] the way it wasn't about 1973? That was very bad for people.

Tim Ferriss 1:08:12 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:08:13 And so you're gonna have to do the nutrition plus where are you getting these things. And we are so used to going into the supermarket and everything is just there, you know?

Tim Ferriss 1:08:24 Yeah.

Margaret Atwood 1:08:25 How long can that continue? And all of these things, what are you gonna do with the old people? Are you gonna sort of shove them out the window at some point or what?

Tim Ferriss 1:08:32 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:08:33 Don't laugh, Tim. [laughs] It's been done.

Tim Ferriss 1:08:36 I'll make you a deal. If I am kept as one of the 10 or 20% of males for breeding, I will prevent them from throwing you out the window.

Margaret Atwood 1:08:43 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:08:44 So we can strike a bargain. Yeah. [laughs] Now, you have a lot going on. You also have Burning Questions.

Margaret Atwood 1:08:51 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 1:08:52 Collection of essays from 2004 to 2021, which will be, uh, published in March of 2022. Could you tell us more about Burning Questions?

Margaret Atwood 1:09:01 So it's the, the third in a series of, uh, there's two-- been two other collections of, of essays. Uh, the first one was called Second Words 'cause it was mostly book reviews. [laughs] Did a lot of book reviews at that time. The second one was called Moving Targets, and that took us from, that took us up to 2004, and then we have Burning Questions. And to, to do these collections, we have to weed through an awful lot of stuff because it turns out that I write about, uh, on an average of 35 short pieces a year.

Tim Ferriss 1:09:43 My God.

Margaret Atwood 1:09:43 So you can see that adds up. I know, it's awful.

Tim Ferriss 1:09:46 Now, when you say short pieces, what do you consider short? [laughs] What is the range on short?

Margaret Atwood 1:09:51 Well, anywhere from, you know, 4 pages to, to 25 pages.

Tim Ferriss 1:09:57 Wow, okay. [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:09:58 Well, some of them are speeches. You know, they, they can, they can dribble on for a while. But some of them are [laughs] you have to condense them. You have to take out the repetitions.

Tim Ferriss 1:10:10 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:10:11 Increasingly, of course, there are obituaries of people that I have known.

Tim Ferriss 1:10:17 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:10:17 I didn't write any of those in the first part of my life 'cause nobody died-

Tim Ferriss 1:10:22 Hmm

Margaret Atwood 1:10:22 ... that I knew.

Tim Ferriss 1:10:23 Yeah.

Margaret Atwood 1:10:24 So there are some of those. I, I did-- well, we won't go into all the people that have died, but, but I have written some of their obits. I wrote actually two for Ursula K. Le Guin. I wrote one for The Guardian. I wrote one for The Washington Post, and they, they both had to be different. But these-

Tim Ferriss 1:10:43 Hmm

Margaret Atwood 1:10:43 ... things are very sudden. You know, somebody's suddenly dead, and they want you to write it right now, so I, I wrote one of those on a plane.

Tim Ferriss 1:10:49 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:10:50 So that's what it is. And quite a lot about conservation issues, which have come increasingly to the fore. As usual, gender issues, and, um, and other things that you might not expect.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:11 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:11:12 Nor did I. I didn't expect them either, but suddenly there I was writing about them.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:16 Is Burning Questions taken from one of the pieces that was included in the collection? Otherwise, where did the title come from?

Margaret Atwood 1:11:24 Oh, I think it just came out of the air like, like a lot of titles.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:28 Like that big thumb in the sky.

Margaret Atwood 1:11:30 Like that, yes. [laughs] Exactly like that.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:33 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:11:33 It's, it's suddenly just there. I think the issues that we are facing, although we have been in these very tight spots before. I can remember sitting in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis thinking that we were all gonna get atom bombs dropped on us at any minute.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:54 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:11:55 That didn't happen, but I think it came pretty close. So like that, things that, that almost happened but, but didn't, and I'm hoping that the climate crisis, although it's already, uh, underway, I'm, I'm hoping that it can be at least, uh, stalled enough for people to get a, a grip on it.

Tim Ferriss 1:12:17 Yeah, that's certainly a subject area and a research area that I'm spending a lot of my time on as well right now.

Margaret Atwood 1:12:24 I bet you are. Well, you should join Practical Utopias. Come and join us. You probably by this time have gathered a lot of things. Every, every day there's something new that comes into view. For instance, I hadn't been thinking at all about, about vertical farms, and now I am. I'm suddenly doing a lot of thinking about, about how-- and there's a number of companies putting this together for you. There's a bunch of kits out there.

Tim Ferriss 1:12:47 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:12:48 Things like that. Did you know you can make fabric out of algae?

Tim Ferriss 1:12:53 I did not know about the fabric.

Margaret Atwood 1:12:55 No, neither did I, but now I do. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:12:57 But it's so funny that you mention algae I was just going to say as, as one of my examples in the last six months is aquaculture, so vertical sea farming, and, uh, specifically algae. I didn't know about the application of clothing, so no, I did not know that. It's the hemp of the sea, I guess.

Margaret Atwood 1:13:18 Yes. Well, the clothing and, you know, growing cotton, growing stuff that you make fabrics out of is, is pretty consumptive of, um, energy and materials and, and water.

Tim Ferriss 1:13:29 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:13:30 So how do we deal with, with these things?

Tim Ferriss 1:13:33 Now, I, I, I want to push back on a quote that I read from you, uh, at, uh, at some point when prepping for this, and it was, it was related to, I believe, an interviewer or, uh, someone profiling you saying that you were prolific, and you said, I believe, and this could be a, a, a misquote, but-

Margaret Atwood 1:13:53 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:13:54 ... "Joyce Carol Oates is prolific. I'm just old." [laughs] Now-

Margaret Atwood 1:13:57 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:13:58 ... I mean, you have a great sense of humor, so I can see now, especially having spent some time together, how you would say something like that. I would say that you are most certainly prolific.

Margaret Atwood 1:14:07 But it mounts up, you see. It just accumulates. So, you know, John, John Keats was probably more prolific, but he died young.

Tim Ferriss 1:14:15 Yeah.

Margaret Atwood 1:14:16 So there's, there's, there's two things. There's the accumulation, which make, makes you look prolific, but then there's the speed, the, the rate-

Tim Ferriss 1:14:24 Mm-hmm

Margaret Atwood 1:14:24 ... which can actually be quite slow, but if, but if you're this old, it, it all sort of adds up.

Tim Ferriss 1:14:31 Has your writing cadence or your writing habits changed much over the last few decades, or have they remained fairly constant?

Margaret Atwood 1:14:41 No, no, of course they change. So when you have a job, [laughs] you write at night.

Tim Ferriss 1:14:48 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:14:49 Yeah. So when you have a job, when you're a student, uh, those kinds of things, you're gonna be a night writer. When you have a child, when the child is small, if you still have a brain at that point, and it does come back [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:15:07 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:15:09 You are going to write when the child is asleep. When the child goes to school, you're gonna write when the child is at school. When the child sniffle, sniffle, sniffle, goes off on its own, grows up and goes off on its own, then you're probably, and, and you're getting quite, dare I say middle-aged. Yes, I'm gonna say middle-aged, Tim.

Tim Ferriss 1:15:37 I'm there.

Margaret Atwood 1:15:37 Just putting it out there.

Tim Ferriss 1:15:38 I'm there already.

Margaret Atwood 1:15:38 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:15:39 Yep.

Margaret Atwood 1:15:40 You're probably gonna be writing in the daytime.

Tim Ferriss 1:15:43 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:15:44 Then there's another thing that happens, uh, when you pass a certain moment, which you, you seem to need less sleep. So right now-

Tim Ferriss 1:15:54 Mm

Margaret Atwood 1:15:54 ... I'm a procrastinating nighttime writer. In other words, I'm back to doing what I used to do in about 1964.

Tim Ferriss 1:16:03 What does it look like when you write at night? Is it, uh, a set block of time, a set number of pages? I, I, I know that you, as I understand it, don't have any sort of magical talismans. You don't have a particular writing setup that you require. But what, what does it, in the last, just say, handful of years, what does your night writing look like?

Margaret Atwood 1:16:24 So many pages is usually how I do it, so not so much time, and that's, that's motivating because if you write the number of pages that you think you should be writing that day, you can then goof off-

Tim Ferriss 1:16:40 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:16:41 ... and watch really silly murder mysteries, Tim. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:16:47 Uh, sign me up. I was just doing it on Netflix the other day. [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:16:50 [laughs] What were you watching?

Tim Ferriss 1:16:53 I was watching In the Dark, which is a series about a ver- a very attractive blind woman who is attempting to solve a murder mystery. [laughs] And it's very funny.

Margaret Atwood 1:17:05 Oh, that's the Audrey Hepburn plot from, uh, long ago. What is that movie that she was in?

Tim Ferriss 1:17:12 Oh, boy, I don't know.

Margaret Atwood 1:17:14 Wait Until Dark.

Tim Ferriss 1:17:16 There we go.

Margaret Atwood 1:17:17 That's what it is. Wait Until Dark. She's blind. A guy comes in the house, is gonna murder her, and she shuts off all the lighting-

Tim Ferriss 1:17:25 Ah

Margaret Atwood 1:17:25 ... so that she can get around better than he can.

Tim Ferriss 1:17:29 Oh, wow.

Margaret Atwood 1:17:30 And, uh, that goes back to, I think, an H.G. Wells story called In the Valley of the Blind, The One-Eyed Man Is King.

Tim Ferriss 1:17:36 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:17:38 Which is a sci-fi story [laughs] in which he, this guy who thinks he's pretty... You wanna hear the plot?

Tim Ferriss 1:17:47 Yeah, I do. I do wanna hear the plot.

Margaret Atwood 1:17:49 Yes. He, he strays into a valley in which everybody is blind. In fact, they don't even have any eyes. They, they just have sort of blank s- spaces there, and not even any sticky out things. And he, he decides that he can be king of this 'cause he can see. And he falls in love with a, with a woman who says, uh, "Yes, yes, we can get married, but first we have to get rid of those ugly bumps on your face." [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:18:15 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:18:16 Wait a minute. I'm gone. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:18:19 [laughs] It makes me think of that, uh, that Twilight Zone episode. I can't recall the name of the episode, but the, this very sort of antisocial, I guess this is sort of a redundant way to put it, but misanthrope, this man who wears glasses, who survives the end of the world, and now he can be alone and read all of his books, and he steps on his own glasses at the end of the episode.

Margaret Atwood 1:18:41 Oh, no. Oh, no. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:18:43 [laughs] Yes. Sad Christmas.

Margaret Atwood 1:18:45 Oh, no. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:18:45 Yes. [laughs] Well, Margaret, this has been so much fun. People should certainly check out Practical Utopias: An Exploration of the Possible. We'll link to that in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast, so people will be, will be able to find that very easily.

Margaret Atwood 1:19:01 We had to move it along to, to launching in September because we got too much There's too much input, so we, we just needed a bit more time, and we also decided to add a low c- cost NFT.

Tim Ferriss 1:19:16 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:19:17 You know what an NFT is?

Tim Ferriss 1:19:20 I do. I do know what an NFT is.

Margaret Atwood 1:19:22 You do? Well, we're doing them. At first they said, "Let's do one of those ones." We can't do that because they consume too much energy. Like, a lot. So they went out and they found one that doesn't. It's consumed the same amount of energy as a tweet, and it is called a T-E-Z-O-S.

Tim Ferriss 1:19:45 Oh, Tezos.

Margaret Atwood 1:19:46 Tezos, yes.

Tim Ferriss 1:19:48 I know Tezos.

Margaret Atwood 1:19:50 You do? What do you know about it, Tim?

Tim Ferriss 1:19:52 Well, I know that many creatives, artists of different types, decide to use Tezos, and by extension, some of them use a marketplace called Hen. There are different, different tools and platforms related to this, but it is an alternative for those who are seeking a less energy-intensive way of engaging with the NFT, the non-fungible token space.

Margaret Atwood 1:20:21 So what we are doing, we're hiring graphic illustrators to draw the Utopias.

Tim Ferriss 1:20:27 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:20:28 So each of our interactive groups is going to have-- make choices about how their, how their Utopia is gonna be, and these illustrators are going to illustrate them.

Tim Ferriss 1:20:39 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:20:39 And I'm going to do some illustrating of them too, because, uh, one of my background things is, uh, graphic design and comic book writing, Tim [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:20:51 Mm-hmm

Margaret Atwood 1:20:51 ... pretty elementary kind. So we're, we're going to get some wonderful illustrators, and they're going to make five illustrations for each of our Utopias, and we're gonna put them into these NFTs. And this is a whole new world for me, but one of our team members knows quite a lot about it. In fact, he is an NFT artist himself, so he just gave us a crash course last week on how this works, what it could look like, and how it's all gonna come together. So I think that part is pretty exciting, and I have worked with graphic artists before. They live in a wild and wonderful world. Probably know that I did a, I did what is essentially a bird conservation project called Angel Catbird with a wonderful graphic artist called Johnnie Christmas.

Tim Ferriss 1:21:48 Yes, I do.

Margaret Atwood 1:21:50 And that was so much fun, and we exchanged ideas through, through drawing them and sending them over the internet. So he would send me one, and I would say, "Make the ears bigger." [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:22:02 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:22:03 I send him a cat skeleton. [laughs] You know, this is a cat skeleton. You have to look at the skull. It's very narrow at the bottom. So he, he did a wonderful job and, um, and I'm looking forward to seeing, uh, which graphic artists our team member, Rick, manages to talk into doing this, and they will all be in these NIF- NFTs, NFTs at low energy cost. That's the idea.

Tim Ferriss 1:22:32 Yeah. It's a fascinating space. I think it's also wonderful that you're experimenting with some of these alternative platforms and drawing some attention to different options that people have in the space.

Margaret Atwood 1:22:47 Yeah. Well, I'm keen on Disco because it allows people who aren't in a physical space to participate in an experience that, that usually people only had in, in physical spaces.

Tim Ferriss 1:23:02 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:23:02 And that goes way back, uh, to the beginning of the st- 21st century when I was trying to think of a way to, to, uh, make book signings and author appearances available to places that normally wouldn't have them. And, uh, we did succeed in doing that. The, the enterprise was called Long Pen, but the publishing industry couldn't get their heads around it, so now it's segued into a business tool [laughs] with a different name. It's called S-Y-N-G-R-A-F-I-I, and, uh, it is biometric digital signing within a video signing room. But because we started it so early, we've got all these patents, Tim, 'cause nobody else was doing it and people thought we were nuts. You've heard this story before.

Tim Ferriss 1:23:57 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:23:57 Sort of the Velcro story, like what is this good for? [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:24:01 Well, that's how a lot of things start. [laughs] You know, Post-it Notes would be another example.

Margaret Atwood 1:24:06 Was it? What did they think-

Tim Ferriss 1:24:08 They thought it was a flawed, doomed, failed adhesive [laughs] because it didn't work, didn't keep things stuck in one place. And then somebody said, "Well, wait a second here. Maybe we can actually change the positioning and there is an application. It's just not the application that we're used to. It's actually the opposite of what we would normally look for."

Margaret Atwood 1:24:28 Yes. I use them a lot in novel writing, Post-it Notes.

Tim Ferriss 1:24:32 How do you use them in novel writing?

Margaret Atwood 1:24:34 Well, there's my thing that I'm writing, and then I have an idea, so I stick it on the table.

Tim Ferriss 1:24:40 Oh, yes. The idea on the table. Uh, well, I have been taking notes as we, as we've been talking. I have so many things that I'm going to be following up on, ranging from the world turned upside down to, of course, Practical Utopias: Burning Questions, this collection of essays from 2004 to 2021, coming out March 2022. I feel like we could talk for many, many hours. And for those people who didn't catch it, and not only have you produced work and written in every possible format or genre imaginable- Because why not, right? [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:25:18 [laughs] You understand why not.

Tim Ferriss 1:25:21 I do. Because why not? You also are an inventor because I think people may have not, uh, just in case they didn't get the underscoring on that, with patents with this Long Pen, originally Long Pen technology allowing, I guess it would be remote robotic writing?

Margaret Atwood 1:25:38 Well, the physical Long Pen, of course, it has-- We have an entirely digital service now, but the physical Long Pen still exists, and people still want to have them.

Tim Ferriss 1:25:47 Yeah.

Margaret Atwood 1:25:47 Because you write on your end, and the pen holder on the other end duplicates that exactly with real ink. So, yes, it, it's bizarre, but it, it came out of the requirements of the book-signing industry because book collectors would not accept anything that wasn't perfectly your signature.

Tim Ferriss 1:26:06 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:26:07 And we did these events, you know, from Australia to North America, you know, back and forth from England. We, we were able to do it. People didn't know how to scale it. But as it is now, it's all been solved, so you can, you can do the digital version, but if you need the physical one with ink, that can be produced. But it's not like an autopen. An autopen is a, is like a sewing machine design. This is every-- Remember cursive? [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:26:39 I do.

Margaret Atwood 1:26:40 Your signature, every time you sign your name, it's, it's different from the last time you signed it.

Tim Ferriss 1:26:46 So I have just two more questions for you. One, I'm gonna warn people ahead of time, this has a bit of a spoiler, so fast-forward 30 seconds if you don't want a spoiler of sorts. And, uh, this is on behalf of my employee I mentioned who loves your work.

Margaret Atwood 1:27:00 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:00 And here's her question: When you wrote The Handmaid's Tale decades ago, did you plan Aunt Lydia's role as a double agent, which the rest of us didn't find out until The Testaments, or did she evolve as a character in the space between the two books?

Margaret Atwood 1:27:14 She evolved, for sure.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:16 Okay.

Margaret Atwood 1:27:17 No, she's a, she's a secondary character in The Handmaid's Tale, and she becomes a primary character in The Testaments.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:25 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:27:25 And the thing about characters who speak for themselves, you're always a lot, a lot closer to them, and, and they're always more, more complex than somebody that you're just seeing, you know, that's sort of across the room.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:41 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:27:42 And as you know from what I've already said, everybody is more complex than, than just a sort of cardboard cutout. So once we get inside Aunt Lydia's head, she turns out to have quite a few more dimensions. And also, it's further along in the plot, so The Testaments is a-approx 15, 16 years after The Handmaid's Tale.

Tim Ferriss 1:28:08 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:28:09 Things have happened to Aunt Lydia since that time. So you know I always base things on stuff that's happened.

Tim Ferriss 1:28:17 Mm-hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:28:17 And one of my go-tos for Aunt Lydia was, was people who had been believers within a system and then changed their minds.

Tim Ferriss 1:28:28 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:28:28 And there are a number of those in history. They're pretty interesting.

Tim Ferriss 1:28:32 And how do you go about doing research for characters like those in history? Or were those already examples you had in mind and therefore you didn't have to go digging for them? Were they already references in your head, or did you do research?

Margaret Atwood 1:28:47 Okay, so remember what I said about being old-

Tim Ferriss 1:28:50 Mm

Margaret Atwood 1:28:50 ... and stuff accumulating. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:28:52 [laughs] Yes.

Margaret Atwood 1:28:53 So did you have a, a granny who had an attic?

Tim Ferriss 1:28:57 I did.

Margaret Atwood 1:28:59 Okay, what was in it?

Tim Ferriss 1:29:00 [laughs] I wasn't allowed up there, so I don't know.

Margaret Atwood 1:29:03 Oh, darn. [laughs] You weren't allowed up there. Oh, that's very bad. Everybody should be allowed up into their granny's, granny's attic once because it's basically like a, a collection of stuff that just, it's there. Like, you put it up there because you can't think of what else to do with it, but you don't want to throw it out. So the inside of my head is like that, Tim.

Tim Ferriss 1:29:24 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:29:26 So, so there's just a lot of stuff in there, and, um, there's also a lot of books in this house and, and one of the sections is devoted to wars and totalitarianisms and spies-

Tim Ferriss 1:29:44 Wow

Margaret Atwood 1:29:44 ... and really interesting things like programs of deception in wars.

Tim Ferriss 1:29:51 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:29:52 I mean, I find those fascinating. The British hired a lot of theatrical set designers to, to design illusions in the desert, make it look as if there were people where there weren't people, hide their oil drums, disguise trucks as tanks and tanks as trucks, and then they switched them at night. Uh, so theatrical illusions. So I had a lot of it already in the junk shop of my brain-

Tim Ferriss 1:30:21 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:30:22 ... and, uh, some of it in the wars, spies, totalitarianisms section of my library. And some of it, of course, in Shakespeare. You always go to Shakespeare. So Richard III-

Tim Ferriss 1:30:37 Shakespeare

Margaret Atwood 1:30:37 ... a villain, a villain who tells us right off that he's really bad, and now we can watch him being bad.

Tim Ferriss 1:30:43 [laughs] Margaret, I don't even know how to begin to close up this conversation.

Margaret Atwood 1:30:51 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:30:51 You contain multitudes.

Margaret Atwood 1:30:54 Tim, have I confused you?

Tim Ferriss 1:30:56 Oh, you've impressed me. You haven't confused me. I think you've just outranked me. [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:31:01 No, Tim.

Tim Ferriss 1:31:02 I need to do a lot more reading.

Margaret Atwood 1:31:04 So let's have a little bit about you. How did you get into this? What, what put it into your head to do a podcast?

Tim Ferriss 1:31:11 Well, the truth is, I wrote books before the podcast-

Margaret Atwood 1:31:15 Yes

Tim Ferriss 1:31:15 ... nonfiction books. So I, I wrote three of those, and I f- I found the third book to be particularly ... difficult, and it really took a lot out of me. And in the process of launching that third book, I ended up on a number of podcasts, and I really enjoyed the long form conversation, and I decided that I would take a break from writing to do six to 10 episodes of a podcast with my friends to get better at asking questions. Because with the nonfiction books I was writing, it, it all came down to asking questions of experts at the end of the day. So it seemed like something that would transfer. So I decided to have fun, long conversations with friends to hopefully get rid of some lazy verbal tics and some lazy mental habits as a consequence, and I just fell in love with doing it. It was, for me, the fun part of the research process without the writing, and I know that sounds terrible, but, um-

Margaret Atwood 1:32:21 No, it doesn't [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:32:22 [laughs] At the time, I, I was just so battered and bruised from my experience with this third book, uh, and that's how the podcast started. And now we're almost 600 episodes in, and it's, it is, it is something that gives me incredible nourishment and energizes me. I was having such a, if I'm being honest, terrible day before we had this conversation. I was, I was just having a brutal day, and the last week has been very difficult, and I feel great right now.

Margaret Atwood 1:32:54 Well, that's wonderful.

Tim Ferriss 1:32:55 And I think that's why I do the podcast.

Margaret Atwood 1:32:58 Well, I think that's a really good reason. So have you ever-- This is completely off topic.

Tim Ferriss 1:33:05 That's okay. [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:33:07 Do you know anything about dictation apps in which you talk into the microphone and then it turns into text?

Tim Ferriss 1:33:17 I would like to start using such a program because a friend of mine, a new friend named Noah Feldman, who's a professor at Harvard Law School, is a, he's just a prodigious talent and an incredible writer, and he uses, I wanna say Dragon, which might have been previously known as Dragon Naturally Speaking, to draft everything that he writes, articles, books, and, and so on. Why do you ask?

Margaret Atwood 1:33:43 Well, you know, typing is hard. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:33:45 [laughs] Typing is hard.

Margaret Atwood 1:33:47 Especially if you can't touch type, which I can't. I have to look.

Tim Ferriss 1:33:50 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:33:51 So you know that they said of Henry James, there are three [laughs] Henry Jameses. James I, James II, and the Old Pretender. Uh, but late Henry James dictated.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:05 Hmm.

Margaret Atwood 1:34:06 Did you know that?

Tim Ferriss 1:34:07 I did not know that.

Margaret Atwood 1:34:09 So people used to dictate to stenographers, but I, I don't think you c- I don't think those people exist anymore. But, and also it would be a bit inhibiting 'cause there'd be another person in the room.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:20 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:34:23 Don't you think?

Tim Ferriss 1:34:24 It would be inhibiting, yes.

Margaret Atwood 1:34:26 You know, we knew a person a long time ago who, who wrote romance novels and also drank and, and she used to sit behind a screen and dictate her romance novels to a stenographer.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:36 It's like a confessional.

Margaret Atwood 1:34:38 Yeah, like the confessional.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:39 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:34:39 The voice would come from behind the screen and she would say, "And, and Letitia with her flashing green eyes," and the stenographer would say, "Um, a couple pages ago, her eyes were blue." She says, "Well, change them." [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:34:54 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:34:55 So maybe I need a person like that. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:34:58 Yeah. So you're saying I should drink and use some dictation software?

Margaret Atwood 1:35:02 No, not you. No, no, no, no.

Tim Ferriss 1:35:04 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:35:04 You're not writing flashing-eyed romance novels. No, no, you don't need to do that. But I think if you have an iPad, I think you can do this, right?

Tim Ferriss 1:35:12 Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah, I've been meaning to test the software. Have-- Do you use dictation software or anything like that?

Margaret Atwood 1:35:19 Not yet. That's why I'm asking you.

Tim Ferriss 1:35:21 Oh. [laughs] Well, I'll te- I'll test it out for you. I'll test it. Noah, Noah is a true believer, and, uh, he is extremely smart. He says it takes a little while, we were just texting about this the other week, in fact, to work out the kinks and get comfortable. But, uh, he has, I believe it's carpal tunnel or some type of issue with his hands-

Margaret Atwood 1:35:43 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:35:43 ... and his, and his lower arms, whereby he, he, he really can't sit and type for long periods of time.

Margaret Atwood 1:35:49 Oh, that's a problem.

Tim Ferriss 1:35:50 But he's a true believer with the dictation software. So I, I give you my word, I will test it out, and I will let you know how the experiment goes and what my, what my pro and con evaluation is.

Margaret Atwood 1:36:01 I do write a lot in, in longhand, and I can just read the longhand rather than having to transcribe it.

Tim Ferriss 1:36:09 Oh, yeah. I think that's a brilliant idea. So I'll te- I'll test the software and let you know because I, I need someone to hold me accountable, so I will, I will do that. I'll make that commitment.

Margaret Atwood 1:36:19 [laughs] It's gonna be me holding you accountable?

Tim Ferriss 1:36:22 Well, well, I know that I've made a promise, and now even if you forget my, who I am tomorrow, I will still feel badly if I don't do it. So I will, uh, I will, I will download some form of, of transcription software, and I will test it out and let you know how that goes.

Margaret Atwood 1:36:40 That'd be great.

Tim Ferriss 1:36:41 Is there anything else you would like to, to say, share, questions you'd like to ask, requests to my audience, complaints about the podcast you'd like to lodge publicly?

Margaret Atwood 1:36:51 Can you come over and shovel the snow off my roof? [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:36:54 [laughs] You know, I would love to, but I don't think I'm terribly close by. Uh, [laughs] if I were closer by, I would be happy to do that.

Margaret Atwood 1:37:04 Where are you, Tim?

Tim Ferriss 1:37:06 I am actually in the mountains, and, uh, there is quite a bit of snow. It's gonna start snowing again very soon. And I just love it here. I absolutely love it.

Margaret Atwood 1:37:18 Are you there to go skiing?

Tim Ferriss 1:37:20 I'm absolutely skiing. I'm going on a backcountry trip tomorrow for my first time to learn how to skin, which I have never done before, which is putting on basically a ... almost like a sharkskin condom on your skis so you can go uphill, and then you take them off and, and you have alpine skiing. I'll be doing that for a few days. And, uh, I find the geography and the ecology here to be just stunning. It is unlike any place I've ever spent an extended period of time. My girlfriend's family is here. She grew up here. Uh, so that's another reason that I'm here. And, uh, it's spectacular. Just being immersed in the enormity of nature here is calming for me. I'm reading a, a book right now called Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez.

Margaret Atwood 1:38:13 He was a friend.

Tim Ferriss 1:38:15 Oh, he was?

Margaret Atwood 1:38:16 Yeah, so one of my little write-ups in Burning Questions is, is Barry.

Tim Ferriss 1:38:21 Oh, he passed away so recently, and I was so sad to hear that I had been gifted Of Wolves and Men, and it absolutely blew my mind.

Margaret Atwood 1:38:30 Great.

Tim Ferriss 1:38:31 It was such a beautifully written, meticulously researched book. And Arctic Dreams, of course, was, was recommended and recommended and recommended, and I'd never spent time near the poles, but recently had my first trip. I was invited by a friend to go to Antarctica and became fascinated by these polar regions. And so only in the last few weeks have I started Arctic Dreams, and the permanence that he writes about and the vastness of some of those spaces reminds me, in a sense, of the, the Western United States at altitude. And they're very different. Very, very, very different. But you can get a taste of what he's referring to in places like Montana, certainly in Alaska, you can get that feeling. So I'm, I'm happy to be here. I'm very, very happy to be here. And where are you at the moment?

Margaret Atwood 1:39:26 I'm sitting in my study, which you can see in the background-

Tim Ferriss 1:39:33 Mm-hmm

Margaret Atwood 1:39:33 ... in Toronto, but I, I made it down from the woods just in time for this interview. We had a blizzard yesterday, so I was supposed to come down yesterday, but we did not take that chance. And, uh, made it down, passing 12 stuck buses on the way.

Tim Ferriss 1:39:53 [laughs]

Margaret Atwood 1:39:54 And, uh, made the interview. Hooray. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:39:58 You made it. Well, thank you for putting in such an incredible effort. This was wonderful. I encourage people to really do a deep dive on everything that you're up to, including Practical Utopias and Burning Questions. People can find you online at margaretatwood.ca, on Twitter @margaretatwood, Instagram, therealmargaretatwood. And this has just been such a joy to spend time with you this afternoon, so thank you very much, Margaret, for, for carving out the space to have this conversation.

Margaret Atwood 1:40:28 And thank you. It was a real pleasure, and, uh, enjoy your skiing.

Tim Ferriss 1:40:32 [laughs] Thank you. I will. And, uh, to everybody listening, you contain multitudes. Do not be contained by closed boxes that do not conform to the greater beauty of nature, and be just a little bit kinder than you have to be. And until next time, thank you for tuning in