YouSaid · the spoken record

Margaret Atwood

lines on the record: 115
first: 2022-02-23
most recent: 2022-02-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm sitting in my study. Which you can see in the background. In Toronto, but 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 made it down, passing 12 stuck buses on the way.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not telling you, no, not you. No, no, no, no. 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.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You would be dictating away, and she would say, you know, no, no, she's dictating romance novels. Oh, yeah, I like the confessional. The voice would come from behind the screen and she'd, and Letitia, with her flashing green eyes and the stenographer, say, a couple pages ago, her eyes were blue. Well, change them.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Yeah, we knew a person a long time ago who wrote romance novels and also drank, and she is to sit behind a screen and dictate her romance novels to a stenographer.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So people used to dictate to stenographers, but I don't think those people exist anymore. And also it would be a bit inhibiting because there would be another person in the room. Don't you think”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Especially if you can't touch type, especially if you can't touch type, which I can't, I have to look. So you know that they said of Henry James, there were three Henry James I, James II, and the old pretender, but late Henry James dictated. Did you know that”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of it in the war spies totalitarianism section of my library. And some of it, of course, in Shakespeare, you always go to Shakespeare. So Richard III.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And spies and really interesting things like programs of deception in wars. I mean, I find those fascinating. The British hired a lot of theatrical set designers 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. So theatrical illusions. Yeah, so I had a lot of it already in the junk shop of my brain.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh darn, you weren't allowed up there. Well, that's very bad. Everybody should be allowed up into their granny's attic once because it's basically like a collection of stuff that just it's there. 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. So there's just a lot of stuff. In there. And there's lots of books in this house. And one of the sections is devoted to wars and totalitarianism.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one of my go-to's for Aunt Lydia was people who had been believers within a system and then changed their minds. And there are a number of those in history, they're pretty interesting.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She evolved for sure. She's a secondary character in the handmaid's tale and she becomes a primary character in the Testaments. The thing about characters who speak for themselves, you're always a lot closer to them, and they're always more complex than somebody that you're just seeing. You know, that's sort of across the room. And as you know from what I've already said, everybody is more complex than just the sort of cardboard cutout. So once we get inside out 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 approximate, 16 years after the handmaid's tale. Things have happened to Aunt Lydia since that time. Based things on stuff that's happened.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The physical long pen, of course, we have an entirely digital service now, but the physical long pen still exists and people still want to have them. Because you write on your end and the pen holder on the other end duplicates that exactly with real ink. So, yes, it's bizarre, but it came out of the requirements of the book signing industry because book collectors would not accept anything that wasn't perfectly your signature. And we did these events from Australia to North America from back and forth from England. We were able to do it. People didn't know how to scale it. But as it is now, that has all been solved. So you can do the digital version, but if you need the physical one within, that can be produced. But it's not like an auto pen. An auto pen is like a sewing machine design. This is every Remember cursive? I do.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With a different name. It's called S-Y-N-G-R-A-F-I. It is biometric digital signing within a video signing room. But because we started it so early, we've got all these patents, Tim, because nobody else was doing it and people thought we were nuts. You've heard this story before. Sort of the Velcro story. Like, what is this good for?”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I'm keen on disco because it allows people who aren't in a physical space to participate in an experience that usually people only had in physical spaces. And that goes way back to the beginning of the 21st century when I was trying to think of a way to make book signings and author appearances available to places that normally wouldn't have them. We did succeed in doing that. The enterprise was called Longpen, but the publishing industry couldn't get their heads around it, so now it segued into a business tool.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With a wonderful graphic artist called Johnny Christmas. And that was so much fun. And we exchanged ideas through drawing them and sending them over the internet. So he would send me one and I would say make the years bigger. Then I sent him a cat skeleton. This is a cat skeleton. You have to look at the skull. It's very narrow at the bottom. So he did a wonderful job, and I'm looking forward to seeing 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.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They live in a wild and wonderful world. You probably know that I did what is essentially a bird conservation project called Angel Catbird.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But what we are doing, we're hiring graphic illustrators to draw the utopias. So each of our interactive groups is going to make choices about how their utopia is going to be in these illustrators are going to illustrate them. And I'm going to do some illustrating of them too because one of my background things is graphic design and comic book writing pretty elementary kind. So we're going to get some wonderful illustrators and they're going to make five illustrations for each of our utopias and we're going to 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 going to come together. So I think that part is pretty exciting, and I have worked with graphic artists before.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You do. Well, we're doing them at first. They said, let's do one of those. We can't do that because they'd consume too much energy. Like a lot. So they went out and they found one that doesn't. It contains the same amount of energy as a tweet, and it is called a TEZOS.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had to move along to launching in September because we got too much input. So we just needed a bit more time. And we also decided to add a low cost.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, he strays into a valley in which everybody is blind. In fact, they don't even have any eyes. They just have sort of blank spaces there and not even any sticky out things. And he decides that he can be king of this because he can see. And he falls in love with a woman who says, yes, yes, we can get married. But first we have to get rid of those ugly bumps on your face. Wait a minute.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that goes back to, I think, in H.D. Wells story called In the Valley of the Blind, the One Eyed Man is King. Which is a sci fi story in which this guy thinks he's pretty, you want to hear the plot?”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what it is. Wait until dark. She's blind. God comes in the house is going to murder her and she shuts off all the lighting.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So many pages is usually how I do it so not so much time. That's motivating because if you write the number of pages that you think you should be writing that day, you'll You can then goof off. and watch really silly murder mysteries, Tim.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're probably going to be writing in the daytime. Then there's another thing that happens when you pass a certain moment, which you seem to need less sleep. So right now I'm a procrastinating nighttime writer. In other words, I'm back to doing what I used to do in about 1964.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course. No, no, of course they change. So when you have a job You're right at night. So when you have a job, when you're a student, those kinds of things, you're going to 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. You are going to write when the child is asleep When the child goes to school, you're going to write when the child is at school. When the child sniffles, sniffles, sniffle goes off on its own, grows up and goes off on its own, then you're probably, and you're getting quite, dare I say, middle-aged. Yes, I'm going to say middle-aged, Tim. I'm there. They're already there.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it mounts out. You see, it just accumulates. So, you know, Joan Keats was probably more prolific, but he died young. So there's two things. There's the accumulation, which makes you look prolific. But then there's the speed, the rate. Which can actually be quite slow, but if you're this old, it all sort of adds up.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the clothing and growing cotton, growing stuff that you make fabrics out of is pretty consumptive of energy and materials and water. So how do we deal with these things?”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you are. Well, you should join Practical Utopias. Come and join us. You probably by this time have gathered a lot of things. Every day there's something new that comes into view. For instance, I hadn't been thinking at all about vertical farms, and now I am. I'm suddenly doing a lot of thinking about how, and there's a number of companies putting this together for you. There's a bunch of kits out there. Things like that. Did you know you can make fabric out of algae?”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 going to get atom bombs dropped on us at any minute. That didn't happen, but I think it came pretty close. So like that, things that almost happened but didn't. And I'm hoping that the climate crisis, although it's already underway, I'm hoping that it can be at least stalled enough for people to get a grip on it.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of them are speeches, you know, they can dribble on for a while, but some of them are, and you have to condense them, you have to take out the repetitions. Increasingly, of course, there are obituaries of people that I have known. I didn't write any of those in the first part of my life because nobody died that I knew. So there are some of those. I did, well, we won't go into all the people that have died, 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 both had to be different. But these things are very sudden. You know, somebody is suddenly dead, and they want you to write it right now. So I wrote one of those on a plane. 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 other things that you might not expect.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's the third in the series. There's been two other collections of essays. The first one was called Second Words because it was mostly book reviews. I did a lot of book reviews at that time. The second one was called Moving Targets, and that took us And then we have burning questions. And to do these collections, we have to weed through an awful lot of stuff because it turns out that I write about on an average of 35 short pieces a year. So you can see that adds up.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quickly into compost, and they're going to 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 ups and downs to all of these choices. So what you're going to eat, are you going to eat the 100 mile diet? Are you going to grow things in vertical gardens quite close to you? There's going to be nothing but brown rice. It wasn't about 1973. That was very bad for people. So you're going to have to do the nutrition plus where are you getting these things? And we are so used to going into the supermarket, everything is just there. You know, so how long can that continue? And all of these things, what are you going to do with old people? What are you going to do with the old people? Are you going to sort of shove them out the window at some point or what?”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 interactive in that people join you and there's a to and fro. So 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 affordable and they're going to have to make practical decisions. They're going to 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 get turned quite”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Substack gives you the tools to basically publish your own newspaper, and Disco gives you the tools to To do your own live learning experience. 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.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we're doing it with a platform called Disco, which is an interactive live learning platform. It's structured so that they give you the tools. So you know what substack is”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You bet. So I lived in 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.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a TV series starring Alec Guinness, which is very good at it too. About the 70s, early 70s, you can find it with a cursor research of web streamers.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The most interesting part for me 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 were convinced their houses were bugged, which they were. So high drama, high drama, heard of George Smiley territory.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the way that both of those things went is very interesting to me. And then you find you reach a point where it all falls apart. I mean, the other example, of course, is Hitler and Mussolini 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 the cultural revolution and things like that? 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 Chinese cultural revolution by a guy who was there.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's not just the Russian, it's the French, the American one is a bit of an anomaly because it was not conducted in a confined space, as it were. 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. So that's a different kind of thing. With the French and the Russian, they were toppling a ruling class from within.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bricks, yes, bricks. Yeah, yeah. You better join up. You know you can 3D print houses out of compressed earth in two days. 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 utopias going to have to be, the solutions will have to be green, they'll have to be cheap enough. 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 going to have to build in the social component to try to keep that from happening. How do you take something with great idealism attached like the early stages of the Russian Revolution and keep it from turning into Stalin's show trials?”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, getting people together, gathering people who know something about these fields, putting them together with people who are knowledgeable in other fields, and constructing, you know, Lego, making a LEGO village, you know, Minecraft. So world building in a practical way. What are we going to eat? What sort of clothes are we going to wear? What are they going to 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?”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's important 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 carp about them endlessly. It's important to turn people's minds to what can be done apart from blanket statements like we all have to not use gasoline anymore. There is going to have to be a transitional period about that, Tim.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Human beings 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. And short form is the oceans die. We're gone. Sorry. We're going to have to deal with that, Tim.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the nineteenth century was a big century of utopias. They wrote a lot of them because they had made so many improvements already in the 19th century that they thought, why this is just going to go on and it's going to 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 utopia as much in the 20th century. They're writing a lot of dystopias. Things could get much worse instead of things could be a lot better. So I'm doing practice. We don't get to have that”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So some people are afflicted. 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 I'm also, I'm hopeful about our species in that although we have lots of downsides which we know about through history and looking around you and reading dystopian fiction, we know we're capable of really awful things, we're also capable of really pretty wonderful things and 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 Utilities.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think hope is built in on a very fundamental level to human beings because we get up in the morning and if we thought it was going to be a horrible day every day we probably wouldn't bother doing that.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, quite a few years. So that's. It's a thing that if we wish to live 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? Because there's at least 75 different kinds. So am I the kind that thinks all men should be rounded up and shoved off a cliff, except for ten percent kept for breeding? No, I am not that kind. You will be happy to note him”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, people attach labels to other people and then they attach the label. And that has been going on for at least, you know, 5,000 years as far as we know.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you're a novelist, of course, you deal in individuals. So you're not just doing types Does that make any sense to you?”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT