I Keep Telling People We’re Living in This Dystopian Novel

Last year, I spent three months embedded with a capital defense team.

Their client had been on death row for more than 30 years, and now, his execution date had been set. I followed along as the lawyers tried to prove something nobody had successfully done in three decades, that one of Texas's most notorious Cyril killers was actually innocent. The last 12 weeks, listen wherever you get your podcasts. Before we begin today's show, we're going to be doing an asked me anything episode,

quite soon. So if you have any questions, email us at [email protected] with a headline AMA. [Music] Over the past six months, I keep telling people, we are living in

“Supersad True Love Story. And sometimes I'll say to me, "What was Supersad True Love Story?" What do you mean?”

Supersad True Love Story, if for some terrible reason you're on out, is at 2010 book by Gary Steinberg. And I think more than any other book, it predicted the strangeness of the world we live in today. And also, a lot of what it feels like to live in it. All of the constant staring at screens, the hyper visual nature of modern life, the obsession with wellness and longevity, and looks maxing, amidst the backdrop of a country that often feels like

it's falling apart. We are living in a time of profound corruption. Inflation is hitting its highest point in three years of world where everybody is upset and they're grabbing at the wrong things to try to fix it. I wanted to understand how the author of this book, Gary Steinberg, had predicted all this, how he had known what it was going to feel like well into the future of when he was writing. Gary Steinberg, of course, has written a number of wonderful novels, including the Russian debut on his handbook,

absurdist Anne and his most recent Vera or Faith. He's also written all these amazing essays on travel and cruise ships and martinis and his love of suits and watches. Many of those essays will be collected in a new book coming out in November called The Centralist. That name, The Centralist.

“I think tells you something about what his project is, what he believes is necessary to live well”

in a moment like this one. But I wanted to talk to him about all of it. As always, my email

as recline show at nytimes.com. Gary Steinberg, welcome to the show. Great to be here, a long time listener. So I've said to many people in my life that when I look around right now, I feel like I'm living in the world of the super-sad chillow story. So for those who haven't read it, you just describe the world you create in that book. So everyone carries a device called the

Aparat which wherever they go, it constantly ranks them. But the sort of the germ of super-sad chillow story is that the main character Lenny Abramov will walk into a bar or restaurant and immediately he is ranked as say the 23rd ugliest man in the room, right? That's his thing. And one point he walks in.

He's the second ugliest man in the room and the ugliest man can't take any leave so that Lenny becomes

the ugliest man in the room. You're constantly being ranked everywhere. You're being ranked even as you walk down the street. There's giant credit polls that showcase your credit for, you know, you can tell Gary has 600 out of 800 points in credit. He needs to save more. So even on that level,

“the society is so intrusive that it tells you you need to save more. Some people need to spend more,”

just constantly wants to keep people in equilibrium. Women are very sexualized even more so than in our world. America is run by a kind of, well, fascist leader who has started at a Warren Benzuela, et cetera. So a lot of familiar stuff is happening. There's two main characters. Lenny is kind of like me, a sort of neo-nebish, who's a gen X, which is this interesting generation that's kind of a bridge between the analog and the digital worlds. And Eunice is 10, 15 years younger than him, but she's

already a full digital native. So probably, you know, if you think millennial or something like that. And so this is a very unlikely love affair between two people. And I think the biggest thing that holds them back is the fact that they live in two different worlds.

omnipresence of Brian Johnson, the longevity influencer, clevicular, the Luxemaxer, and the way that streaming culture and looks and ratings and everything, hypervisual culture, all seem to be now holding our attention in a way that I don't remember happening before.

“So the guy who wrote a book about all this is the future at one point. How is this looked to you?”

You know, the book was written about mid-Outs. I would say it came out in 2010. As I was writing, I was thinking, yeah, this future might be possible in, I don't know, three years. Usually when people are writing specular fiction, they give themselves that 30-year corridor, but it happened to, I don't know, 10 years later, 14, 15 years later. There's an invasion of Venezuela in this book. I think there is a invasion of Venezuela in the

world. Venezuela is controlled by a smart-rich-like party. It's called Security Stadium. Security Stadium is real. It's just kind of Jewish Iran, if you will, which I think is where we're headed. But the main thing I was kind of thinking was, well, one of the main things was the way young people, including myself when I got into, you know, social media was the way we were

into being ranked. This was something very new to me. I mean, I guess it's always been a thing,

you know, people apply to college and then their rank to get in or, you know, athletes are rank, blah, blah, blah, we're in a very competitive society. And in this book, there's a thing called "Retany plus technology," which constantly ranks people over and over, not just by their looks, but also on their finances, all every single aspect of their being. And at one point, the internet of the future goes out and the rate need plus technology disappears. And young people

start killing themselves because they just can't understand how they can live without knowing where they fit into the grander scheme of things. Yeah, I thought that was a very, actually that quote here. I found it very moving. You talk about these young people who committed suicide in the building complex and you write one wrote quite eloquently about how he reached out to life but found there only walls and thoughts and faces, which weren't enough. He needed to be ranked

to know his place in this world. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when I wrote that, I remember feeling a little

“chilled myself because I wondered if that's what the new technology that I was being exposed to,”

the Zuckerberg technology was doing to me a little bit because I would travel a lot and there were times when I would go to, I don't know, some kind of Uzbekistan like country and where they're at that point, you just didn't have constant contact with the internet. And I would find myself going through withdrawal. If I went for two, three weeks and I was like, "But who am I now?" I'm just Gary in the block. On the block, I don't have that other, I fell into that trap so quickly.

I have friends, relatives who work in Silicon Valley that they really create barriers between their kids and this technology. They know exactly what they're making and they want their kids as far away from it as possible. And none of this is 100% new civilization began.

There was the head caveman and the lower caveman and blah, blah, blah. So we know that there's always

been a hierarchy. But they need to know to the infinitesimal decimal point. It was funny. My preparation for some of this was going to a super competitive high school in New York, Stuyves and High School, which was all full of immigrant kids like myself and from Soviet Union, kids were from Soviet Union, East Asia, South Asia, etc. And to this day, 86.894 was my average. It's Stuyves and I remember it. This is the shocking thing to the thousand decimal point. And

“that I think prepared me in some way. Stuyves and prepared me for this world in which every single”

metric is constantly deployed against you, I would say, because none of these people are enjoying life. When you look at all these men who are measuring their cheekbone to the millimeter, this isn't a good way to live. So this to me, it's the other interesting thing about the book and it also comes up in your book of essays. But it is this simultaneous obsession with living forever without enjoying life. And what I was friends so fascinating about when I watched Brian Johnson,

and I don't mean to be insulting anybody's life decisions here. But I don't know if I was, I don't want to live like that. Your life goal is to drive down your heart rate. The reason is because the lower heart rate goes, the better your sleep, the better your sleep, the better will power. More will power, better exercise, better food. When your heart rate is high,

bad sleep, bad will power, no exercise, and bad food. So resting heart rate is the most important

marker of your entire life. I think the reason he is so fascinating people in part is that to constantly have a subtle, self-examination, the subtle of self-diagnostics. I mean, you have a partner now. And so the first thing you do is you go online and talk about her vaginal biome.

feel like my other half. Biohacker Brian Johnson recently boasted about his girlfriend's top

one percent vagina, sparking interest in at home vaginal microbiome tests. Yes, got to get her vaginal biome. Clevicular, who it's like you've divorced getting hot from the point of getting hot already talks about how you can't have a girlfriend given life he leads. He is not fertile. Why are you in fertile, I know? So it's just like a negative feedback loop when you're not needing to produce testosterone, even more because your body realizes, okay,

we're getting it from an exit. So you're not producing any testosterone naturally? No.

“None? No. That's how you're going to take a TRT bro. We want to live because we want to”

enjoy. We want to be hot because we want love and children. And this severing of all of these urges from a thing. See urges are supposed to do this severing of the pursuit of desire from

the thing that desires supposed to. It's incredible. Taking testosterone to look good to attract

a mate. But at the same time, you know, taking all this testosterone causes strong contesticals, which probably will not allow you to propagate. So, you know, these things are completely at odds and at the same time it's almost like a perversion of whatever strange biological instinct we had. Clubicular is one of my favorites when it comes to this because he's just really funny and intentionally so how important is it to you to also make the girl have an orgasm?

Not important. How come? Well, because, you know, the amount of extra effort that's required to do that is just knocking, I really have much ROI. So. So, I don't know. Well, sure, I mean, really. That means return on investment. You know, he'll talk about how knowing that he can have sex

“with a woman or given woman is way more important for him than actually having sex with the woman.”

The ranking about the ranking, the logging, the ranking. But, you know, and so it's like, but wasn't sex supposed to be enjoyable, especially when you're 21. I remember, you know, it took me a while until I started having sex, but when I did, I was like, this is the most

incredible thing that's ever happened to me. I don't care if I died tomorrow. If I keep having this,

you know, for the next 24 hours, this is kind of it. You know, I'll give you another example, which is a little strange, but so I've been teaching creative writing a Columbia for about 20 years now. And I've noticed the way, and my students are wonderful. They write wonderfully. The craftsmanship keeps getting better and better. But the things they'd write about have changed so drastically, you know, 20 years ago in the odds, there was this kind of John Chiever bisexual energy going on.

We're, if I want a John Chiever bisexual energy, you can't move that fast. So, right. Well, you know, the Chiever updike Roth era, and I know that skews very masculine right. There was, you know, people wrote about sex now. Stop. I mentioned Chiever because at least he had a lot of, you know, he was bisexual himself, and there was an appreciation of both hetero and homosexuality. So, but what I'm trying to say in general is that sex was appreciated as a major life force.

When I read the wonderful things that my students submit now, there almost is no sex and love, no love, and almost no pleasure. You know, I have a collection of besties coming out in November, called Essentialist, which is all about my love of pleasure, but in millions of context,

“there's sex in there, there's food, there's, I mean, you know, life is an endless buffet of pleasure.”

And this clavicular generation just says, nah, we don't want that. You know, you might as well be an algorithm. We just want to match up to all these metrics and say, "Done, done, done, check, check, check. We are the best. We won." And that's that. So, what's your view for that came from? I mean, I think it's when I look at my students, we're talking about our place in the world earlier. They're unsure of the world's place in the world. They don't know what's going to happen next.

Everything is a source of anxiety. Half of what my students write, if not more, is speculative fiction of one sort or another, right? And this speculation isn't, you know, we're going to be living in a utopian 20 years. The mood is, the vibes, as they say, are, you know, they're low-key, horrible. It's like we've separated ourselves so much from the possibility of joy, that to make it the subject of a book or a story seems almost privileged. Like, you don't want

to touch that anymore. And I'm not saying that, you know, the cheaper updike crew didn't write in a solid, sophisticated way about whatever, you know, their own identity is wealthy, white people in Scar'sdale or whatever. You know, obviously there was a lot of bad kind of stuff as well, but there was a sense that life wasn't entirely hopeless. When I read a lot of modern literary fiction, the driving force to me is neurosis. Yeah. People being anxious, being unsure,

like mid, late mid 20th century male writing was very horny. Yeah. And like 2020's writing is very

nervous. Yeah. Yeah. My students call this the sad girl novel. And there've been some amazing

sad girl novel. The year of Western relaxation is probably, to me, it reads like a really cool

“smart and funny version of that. I think sometimes what I lack, and not always, but what I kind of”

look for in the neurosis novel is a sense of, is a sense of humor that almost leads you into a path of joy. You know, I teach her a class called, so you want to write funny at Columbia. And for example, you know, we teach, talk about neurosis, like we teach, we teach, I teach, uh, port noise complaints, you know, uh, and that is obviously is all it's all set in a psychiatrist office. It's this neurotic horny Jew, like they don't make them anymore, right? And he's just, you know, jumping at the bit to get

out of his particular identity, and just to have sex with every non-Jewish woman he can find. And that is, I mean, wrong in many ways, but also really, really funny. The pursuit of it is very,

very funny. Look, so per sad is the word sad is the second part of the second word in the title,

but I hope that there, let Lini, you know, when he finds the love of his life units, when he goes out with his friends, that there's still an avenue toward a kind of overwhelming feeling of content. Let me go away by the next day or when the hangover sets in, but that is there, at least for a while. This character in super such a love story who I think is interesting, um, for this conversation, which is Joshy, Lenny's boss. Tell me a bit about Joshy.

So Joshy is, let's see, how old is Joshy? Well, we don't even know how old Joshy is, he could be A and his 80s, but it doesn't matter because he is using every kind of anti-aging technique possible. Joshy does not want to die, he feels, and this is interesting because I think this is true of so many of the people that use this kind of technology, he feels that he hasn't really lived, that he hasn't really had a good life. A lot of people, and I knew, you know, a lot of

people, in for example, finance because I wrote a book, uh, Lake Success that was said in the world of hedge funders, so I had to spend four years hanging out with them. Um, I think not a hundred percent, but so many of the ones I've met have had really unremarkably awful childhoods, and there's a need

“to somehow create the perfect life and live that life, and that life is always the opposite”

of the rearview mirror. I don't know, always in the windshield, you're always looking forward to it,

it never quite comes, but in order to reach it one day, one has to extend life almost indefinitely. I remember one of the first things when we emigrated to America, my parents would say about Americans. We're always seeing so unhappy despite the fact that they were so much richer than us. We were living on garment trees for a time, you know, and my parents and other Russians would say, "Ania drew a business, which translates very vaguely as they're wild with their own fats."

There's so juicy and fat, and yet they don't know what to do with it. Just enjoy the fat, you know? But sometimes this greater meaning combines with this egotistical impulse to have more and more and more into, and to not die is one of those almost Protestant kind of extension of everything and striving, why should the striving ever end? Well, the search for greater meaning than those wear you're searching for it. I mean, one of the fundamental things about super-sad

“and that feels like a fundamental thing about in life is everybody's looking for it in the screen.”

And one of the fun Philips of the book is that talking to other people is called verbal enabling. Right? You've needed to create a different linguistic category for what it is for doing when we have a conversation. And, you know, screens are made by corporations. Corporations have their own incentives and their own things are trying to do. And what the trend is not making happy. They're trying to make you keep coming back.

And nothing keeps you coming back like a ranking. There was a funny tweet I saw today. And it said, "Since if this life would have been much better, if her time he got the rock to the top, he got some points." And if he could then exchange those points for stickers. You know, the hookers that he could put on the rock, right? Yeah, that'd be great. Oh my god, now that is really, really smart. But so there is this, I mean, the way you talk about

eating a little pasta, it's fundamentally erotic. Right? So often, in a bar, I'll see people who are together, they're like on some kind of a date, a married couple or non-mercub, I don't know, I'm both looking at the phones. And there is something about a very unfulfilling, but very compulsive world, like back in England. That I think is an enemy of enjoyment. There's a lot in there. So verbling is very hard for members of younger generations.

I know COVID messed them up as well. Obviously people in generation of health, my son's generation. That didn't help, obviously, but I think verbling is just, well, it is what it is. Letting sounds come out of your mouth as communication is very hard for people to do, much harder than obviously sending emojis or shortened text messages, etc. stuff like that.

mixing, who is using a hammer, talk about the opposite of joy and type of enjoyment, you're hammering

“your cheekbone in to make it a certain metric. Describe a bone smashing is.”

Yes, so bone smashing is based off a wolf's law that when you break down a bone and grows back stronger. And you feel like this is how you make yourself attractive to women. But the real way to make, and this, I learned this as a small furry immigrant without a great deal of good looks, you know, you attract women by verbling with them and saying interesting things, being an interesting human being, listening to them and then getting into conversations

with them, having any kind of charisma that allows you to actually interact with somebody of the opposite or the same sex, whatever your preference says. And this is like, no, we can't do that.

We can never achieve that level of being interested in another person or even being interested in

nothing our own interiority to access that kind of level of interaction. So we're just going to, it's hammer time. We're going to get that hammer and just chisel ourselves. There's been a fascinating recent trend among Silicon Valley types where they're on a tear against interiority. You have Mark and Jason talking about how he doesn't want to have interiority. It doesn't want to have introspection, which he described as looking backwards, which

that quite what it is, but nevertheless, you said something that I love and I never hear other

“entrepreneurs think about talk about, but I think it's super boring that you don't have any”

levels of introspection. Yes, zero as little as possible. Why? Let's move forward. Go. Yeah, I don't, I just find people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's just, it's a real problem and it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. And I've been trying to think of this, because I mean, there's just more people, right? And I do think it is in some ways a, and I'm being maximally generous. It is in some ways a reaction

I was talking about a minute ago where a lot of modern intellectual culture is very neurotic and very anxious and is endlessly displaying how anxious it is. But then you go all the way to your side to where you're not thinking in a deep way about yourself at all and not trying to self understand at all. And that is the opposite problem and dysfunction. Right. Right. Yeah, that's a very interesting way and I think are a correct way to put it. There's a lot of interesting

things about who these people are and this may seem a little out there. But I would say that you can't look at people like Musk and not think of neurodivergence, but also neurodivergence combined with terrible parenting. Now you have somebody like Elon right who obviously is, it proclaims to be neurodivergence, who is raised by possibly the worst father of this side of Woody Allen. I mean, so you have someone who obviously cannot deal with somebody with special needs and at the same

time somebody who possesses all of the gifts that those special needs in the case of neurodivergence

“give them. I think one of this, I don't know if I was sex or something, I thought I was insane.”

Why do you think you're insane? Because it was clear that other people do not would their mind wasn't exploding with ideas all the time. They weren't expressing it. They weren't talking about it all. And you realize by the time we were five or six like, oh, they're probably not even getting this thing that I'm getting. No, it was just strange. It was like, hmm, I'm strange. That was my conclusion, I'm strange. So you have this strange

combination where it's not, it's somewhere in growing up. These people were not given the opportunity by the school system, by their parents, by relatives to look inwards. Looking inwards was

considered something so wrong that there was never a skill developed for it. We go back to the

the Mark and Jason's of the world. Because I think what they might say on your riff on Elon Musk there is, and Musk hates his father to show that here. But listen, it created the greatest industrialist of our age. The richest man in the world, the guy who is able to put reusable rockets in space isn't that success? Isn't that what humanity needs to go forward even if the New York rightly class literary class doesn't like it? Let me tell you this. I do think that space

conversation really is not something I'm terribly interested in. I don't think going to Mars is going to answer any of our problems. I don't think we'll ever live on the kind of scale we live in. You know, we have a really nice planet here, which we're destroying. We really don't need to discover the marbles of Mercury anytime soon. A lot of this is complete bullshit as far as I'm concerned. That part of it. Now, of course, for cars, et cetera, all that stuff is very good.

If anything, Musk did that was good. Tesla, which now will be probably brought to scale by Chinese automakers that will make it cheaper and possibly better at some point. But when I look at what the great industrialists of the world have given us lately. And is it that? Is it the last

talk, let me bring it down. I know that perhaps if you're living somewhere, if you're living in Kenya, far away from Nairobi and you have a cell phone and a new technology, right? That's really helping you in a way that not having a cell phone would have hurt you 30 years ago. But at the same time, this is not a happy life that's been brought by these wonderful industrialists who create screens and algorithms that make us, you know, that have destroyed my life to a very large extent. I

write it a much slower clip. I don't write it as introspectively as I used to. I am as addicted to and by the way, please follow me at Styngard on Twitter, Instagram, Blue Sky,

Substack, I mean, it never ends, right? This never ends. So why are you on them then? Well,

it's part of the marketing. You know, you know, you know, you're a big deal, man. Do you actually think that big a deal? No, no, no, I still need it. Everyone needs it. But the point and I do get

“that dopamine kick from it. Yeah, I think that's some more honest answer, right? Both, both,”

both profit and dopamine. Let me say this, when I started writing superset, the odds, mid-auts. I didn't know much about this technology, but I had this great intern and he got me into he was very young into Facebook and a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, my space. I think it was the thing, right? And the moment I got on it, I thought, this is, this was the germ of superset. I thought, this technology is going to destroy everything. Why do you think that? Because I knew, look,

when you're right or an artist, you are a part of an artistist, right? You are partly at least an narcissist, because what do you do this for? You don't just do this. There was a great way to putting in the Soviet Union when people were writing things that the system would hate so much that

you knew you could never publish it. It was called Pesapstolt to write into your desk literally.

That is the highest level of writing, right, because you know what you will see it. But I did not want to write into my desk. I wanted the world to, I was just like I said, small furry immigrants, strange sense of self. I wanted people to read my books and say, oh, look at this. These people exist too, you know. But when I saw my space and Facebook, I thought, Apple things are right or now. There are no barriers. Now, on the one hand, that sounds great. Woo, more democracy than

ever. Everyone now is whatever is Aristotle or everyone will express themselves. But then I lived for about half a year or more on those platforms. And I thought, this is just garbage. We're on this all the time. Half of what I read are complete lies. Lies seem to get more clicks. I'm now addicted to this at the point where it's hard for me to start reading and finishing a book. What's the,

“and books are the best way to get inside into interiorry, because what is a book? It's a communication”

between one consciousness and another. I love film and theater and TV and all this other stuff. But this is the fastest. This is like a mind-melding book in technology or in somebody else's head. And somebody who's completely different from you, hopefully. So, when I started using that, I thought that this would be a problem for personalities, especially personalities like mine. And for the rest of society, I'm very influenced by this thing Ryan Broderick has said,

who's an internet writer. He talks about a support theory of the internet that all content now, early slot of content on places like TikTok and Instagram. What it's doing is creating an instant surge of sensation. I see this even when we're creating clips from the show, we needed to make you feel something immediately. It's like the way, like, porn evolved on the internet. But now it's like, you know, people like pulling apart cheese sandwiches and, like, you got to feel angry or curious

“or hungry or something immediately. And I mean, you again, like right in this some time ago,”

there's a section in the book where Lenny is reading from the Unbearable Lightness and Being to Eunice. And book by Belong Condara. And he writes, or he says, he writes in the book, "I felt the Condara had put too many words around the fetish for her to gain what our generation required from any form of content, a ready surge of excitement, a temporary lease on satisfaction." I mean, now you're everybody talking about how kids can't fall along book any more

or everything is too long. I mean, that's all really there in that book. Somebody writes books, somebody who's going to thought about this a lot. How do you think about what it is doing to us as a country, as a collective, as a world, when we get sort of trained to expect that the things we see will immediately create a reaction, a sensation. Absolutely. As for something, we have to follow along and interpret ourselves. I have now started putting, I realized that if I post something

on Instagram at Dunger, if I post something on Instagram, I, and then I start reading something, it's impossible. Because I will, every two pages, even if I'm reading the most in Korea, I was reading this incredible New York, New York or article about Ukraine. You're Korean, obviously, it's a subject that I'm very involved with and I couldn't every three, five minutes. Well,

who liked that? Oh, look at that. I thought this person never liked me, but I guess they liked me.

future in long form fiction? I think it's going to be very much just speaking of fetish, like a very

small, tiny group of people that do this, and most people simply will not have. Even today,

“I think some like 47% of Americans have read a full-length book in the last year. So, this is”

I was going to be a very minority position. But when I write myself, I, what are people in California call it? Or, and it's like, I'm not going to call it the end user experience. Like, I, for me, because I hope I write funny, I think the humor is the thing that gives you that little hit. It keeps the reader, hopefully someone attached to the page. So, this is the interesting thing, right? Like, there's writing have to, I don't know, well, we have books that explode while you read them in order

to your attention in the future. That could be a great technology, or the releases of plume of a smoke or something, like, oh, yeah, right, right. I got to get back to it. There's an interesting tension around that in the book, because one of the other main characters is Eunice, who is a much younger partner of, of, of, Lenny. And Lenny is a writer and a reader, and he has actual physical books,

“which is a bit of a ghost thing to have in that world, and they smell bad, they smell nasty. And,”

you know, not to smell too much of any, any of the book. But, but at the end, when some of their communication with each other has been discovered by others, it's Eunice, who is considered like the great writer, and she is internet-addled, everybody is texting on a service called Global Teens, which is very funny. But I actually thought that too when you're reading it, like her writing is much more in a way vivid because it is less self-conscious, right? You can,

you can read Lenny writing to be read. I mean, there's nothing worse than reading the journal entries of somebody who wrote a journal, hoping somebody would want to read their journal entries. And you can, I mean, those get released a lot. That's half of literature. That's half of literature. And there's a lot of life in the writing that comes without that self-consciousness.

“Yeah, absolutely. And that's, you know, this is, sorry, I keep talking about the craft of writing,”

but I hopefully listeners won't mind, but it's this idea, you know, when we start teaching a

workshop, what I'm looking for in the first paragraph, the first page, the first chapter,

is a sense that there's a really active voice that's unlike any other voice I've read before. And that has something to declare that's so desperate to declare. They need to do this or they won't survive in some ways. That's maybe overstating the case, but some sense of that kind of, you know, call me Eshmael, you can't, you can't look away from that. And yeah, Lenny's voice, Lenny is almost in some ways a kind of, he thinks of himself as being very literary. He's actually not a writer,

per se, you know, but he thinks of himself as journaling a lot. And so he, you know, a lot of what he writes is very much meant for a certain kind of, it's meant for a certain kind of Brooklyn reader or Brooklyn mass reader, let's say. Whereas, you know, what I loved about writing you know, was that you know, was she wrote in this completely global teen's way, everything she's buying this, she's buying bad, she's buying clothes, she's, she looks maxing in her own way. And at the same time,

she has an ability, especially as a novel continues to look more inwards and to see the dichotomy between what the society wants from her and what she wants to be. I'm opening up Crossplay, I've been playing against Dan, my colleague at the New York Times, I'm going to play Stoop, STUPE across the tripward multiplier square. That's played another move. Oh, and she did have an S, she played Stoop for 36 points.

I've got a Z, which is 10 points. If I can put my X over there, I can make box. I have two A's in St. T's. I'm guessing Tanga is not a word, let's see. Tanga is a word. Oh, don't know what Tanga means, so I'm going to press down on the word and, oh, definition popped up for a monetary unit of Tajikistan. Something every time I play this game. Even though I'm about 50 points ahead, one thing I've learned in Crossplay is that the game is

never over. I just got a notification in Dan played his last turn. Let's see who won. It's so close.

But I did win. New York Times game subscribers get full access to Crossplay. Our first two player word game. Subscribe now for a special offer on all of our games. One of the things going back to the subject of a particular

after getting a rhinoplasty. It knows job, business, and fine to me before. He just is miserable

and we all share and is small legs, and people are making fun of them on the internet. You just think this guy is achieved a level of social notoriety that is remarkable. I mean,

“most successful streamer of the age. How much happier could probably be if he had never touched it?”

And like, look, I'm not in there. But this is not good for people to be putting that much of their lives forward. To have so little backstage in their own mind. And you're writing there about a world in which this has become very, very common. And one of the things that I see in our world is that this has become very, very common. You know, the, you know, people with a brand, everybody, you know, on TikTok. And I wonder what you think it does to people when they keep

offering up things that are so cherished to them, right? Like an important and that they're

insecure about, right? How do I look am I loved? Am I successful? Who am I? And they keep giving it out to the public and saying, what do you think? What do you think? What do you think? What do you think? And then they're dependent on what the people around them think? Yeah, you know, since I'm mid-gen X, we grew up sitting around bars talking to each other, counseling each other, helping each other, everybody had different things they could do. You know, one friend could really write a great

CV, another friend could do something else, really well for you. We really were a small village onto ourselves. It was just wonderful. They began to fight, yes, and breakups, et cetera, all this stuff, but we were still a wonderful unit. I don't think these people have that on that level. What our society has done, what these platforms have done, have done, is that they have made being mentally ill

“a very profitable thing, being openly mentally ill, a profitable thing, and I think that reaches”

up to a commander-in-chief. You know, there is this sense that if you flaunt the fact that you are you don't know what you're doing, you're completely out of it, but you do it in this way that combines humor and trolling and all this kind of stuff. You know, it's almost like a carnival-esque atmosphere, look, I'm completely crazy. I'm beating myself up with a hammer, you know, and people will pay for that. They will pay for that. But what happens to that person is nobody cares, right? If tomorrow he

OD, you know, I don't think you've even as followers would care, they'd be like, okay, that was interesting, you know, I'm gonna find someone else who beats his nose with a hammer. That's interesting, and a very grim way to put it, like these relationships that they feel real, but they're not real. They're not real. They're not real, and people will say, well, you know, or these, the harwitzes, these industrialists will say, "But Gary, you're living in the past, you know, society moves on."

And in fact, if you think social media did anything to destroy the sense of people hanging out in your bar, talking to each other, rubbing elbows, hitting on each other if you wait till AI enters the chats, and then you won't even need friends. You'll just have six or seven AIs hanging out with you, possibly helping you as you, you know, pleasure yourself, so you don't even have to, hey, save time, you know, just, you can get it all without even leaving the comfort of your own bed,

“the concept of bedriding, etc. So I think they would say, we're only getting started here.”

Now, this creates interesting challenges on a political level, because, nobody's having children in the development, I don't even know what you call it anymore. The opposite of the global south, the global north, nobody's having children in the world. The wealthier world, you know, East Asia, wonderfully leads the pack. I go to South Korea a lot, because my wife's Korean American, nobody's having kids there.

If they do it's one kid, I see this is also with someone we want kid, but, you know, nobody's replicating themselves in those societies. Tell me what you see when you're there from that perspective. He's low fertility rate is happening in the background there of supersad. Yes. And it's could have been something you thought about for a while. So if you go to South Korea, which is a society that is now,

if trans-continue, it will shrink geometrically. Yes, shrink very, very, very fast.

What's it like? It's amazing because, oh, first of all, if you're a, if you're into

technology, even if you're like a dystopian version of that, there's, it's all technology, all the time, you know, there's a waste basket that says it's honored to accept your waste. I mean, it just never ends everything's the internet of things. I remember I did a piece for Smithsonian where I went to visit, you know, Korea, one of the ways the advances that the government decides, oh, now we're going to do this. So, oh, now we're going to do flat screen televisions,

this is decades ago. So they became, you know, LG Samsung took over the market in that. The last time was there was like, oh, we're going to take over robotics, obviously robotics,

bull robots, bull robots. This bull, you know, there was a red hanky and this bull would charge you. And they're like, yes, we're trying to corner the Toria door market in Spain because people don't want real bulls to die anymore, you know, so we're developing these Toria door bulls. This bull look pretty fierce, you know, and I'm like, she's just Christ. It's like there's no end to it. Every single part of our lives is going to be replicated. But when you hang out with people

in South Korea, they are exhausted, they're exhausted. You know, and they will drink as a Russian, I can drink, but nobody drinks more than people I've met in Korea. They will drink themselves and it was super. And then talk about how, oh, it work. I'm on the B team. I want to be on the A team. I'm glad I'm not on the C team, but being on the B team isn't great either, you know, the metrics are even more finely attuned than they are in America. And then, you know,

but when you're also working 80 hours a week. And if you have kids, you have to put them through these schools to get into a university that will take up half your paycheck already. So having one kid is already a gigantic undertaking, having two is basically an impossibility for most

“Koreans. And I think that's what we're going to. I think it's a really interesting way this actually”

connects to rankings. One just fascinating thing about fertility rates around the world is that people tend to have a lot of kids, but sometimes when they're very, very rich, but also when they're quite poor. And then in the middle of here, it's two expensive deaf kids. And it's not that that's wrong, but it has to do with the positional competition of having kids when you are in richer countries in particular. And I mean, obviously there's other things going on here, birth control and women's

separation and a million different things. But there is a reality that, you know, you go to

much poorer places and they have a lot more children. And then you go to Brooklyn and I was like into expensive deaf kids. And it's not that that's fake, it's true. But it has to do with, you know, we have made having kids very, very expensive. We've made it, having kids very, very expensive. We've also made it to competitive. It's just in Palo Alto and the absolute back to downtown Manhattan Rylev. And in both of these precincts, there's this feeling that you're not just having a child,

you're having a kind of, I don't know, you're having a corporation and many corporation that has to do really, really well. The competition among these kids, because it almost feels like these parents and the kids recognize that the pie is so small that it's so easy to get kicked out of the, but everyone called the upper middle class, the coastal elites, whatever you want to call it. And so the competition is breathtaking for just a little smidgen of the pie, you know,

God bless Glvicular. As an economic agent, he's figured out his own past forward. He's making

him at 1.2 million or something a year by, you know, doing this complete horseshit. That's

“incredibly cool for him. And that I think that is the model that so many Americans are looking at.”

I used to be, you know, oh, I'm going to be a basketball player, you know, I'm going to be a cool rock and roll band. Now is what I'm going to be mentally ill on TikTok and I'm going to make a lot of money up that. People are trying to, and you were talking about this earlier, trying to sort of commodify their own sense of grief. There's like grief maxing now where people talk on, you know, about all the grief that they've suffered, which I guess is called a novel,

but right, but now it's also a TikTok. So, but again, these kids that I'm looking at, like, yeah, what happens to them? I know parents who are decommilioners, sent a millionaires, and they're still incredibly worried for what their kids will do. And so this isn't fun for the parents. It's not fun for the kids. It takes away, it creates, it recreates that sense of metrics that

creates for curricular, claviculars down the line. I find this very frightening. I have a first

creator and another one who'll be in kindergarten next year. Yeah. And I know it's coming for them. I know it's coming for them and for me. So, there's a saddest to this for me. I, you know, look at myself and like studying his Pokemon card finder every morning, which it's not for anything. It's not for anything. He just likes the cards because he likes the cards. And I know homework is coming in a real way and I know the competitions are coming and I know it'll be important

for him to at least do. Like, well, enough, and then, and obviously, for my younger one, when it's his turn, and I just feel this dread of so much of the joy being dreamed out of their life. One thing I can suggest is mind when your kid develops a real love, especially a love of something creative. My son loves composition, musical composition. Loves it, and he's going to school next year during the weekend that will prep him for if he wants a career as a composer someday. I don't

“know, maybe I will do that too. But he loves it. And this, I think, you know, he's sitting there”

in a class. He may like the class, he may not like the last but he's humming to himself.

I'm Paul Tenorio. I cover soccer for the athletic.

And I'm Amy Lawrence. I cover football for the athletic. Whatever you call it, the biggest competition in the sport is happening right now. And the

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This 48 country-staking part, from the tiny island of Curacao to the five-time champions Brazil. Even if you don't know your off-site from your on-site, if you eager to know more about the teams and matches, all the stories on and off the pitch, we've got you sorted. Maybe you're the kind of person who's already up early every weekend, waking the neighbors when your favorite club scores. We'll make sure you get equipped with more information,

more insight than anyone you know. We've got more than 70 obsessive reporters on the ground.

Covering the ins and outs from every game. I almost forgot to mention the best part, Amy. Free access to the athletics World Cup coverage in our app. Download the athletic app and see you there. I think there's a, this is like an interesting bridge to this book of essays you have coming up called The Central List. And, you know, you could really see this in Lennie.

You could see this in some of your characters over the years. It feels to me that one of the arguments you've quietly been making and then making more loudly in your nonfiction is that it is a radical act to, in a bodily physical way, just enjoy the life.

So, first of what is centralism to you? Well, first of all, it's not even just about the

“senses. It is in a more Buddhist or meditative way, if you want to take it that way, it isn't”

enjoying what's happening. Thank you for sending. I am, I bet, right, very nice pander, but also I know that there's some probably Buddhist listeners out there and I love all of you. I do a little little headspace in there, when life requires it. But, um, I do, I was walking here today. And, uh, mostly I'm in the summer of state, but I came down for the center of view and I'm walking down Broadway and I looked up and I'm just noticing these beautiful

mancer roofs of some of these buildings. Now, I spent half my year in New York. I forgot all about these mancer roofs. I'm like, damn, somebody did something right, architecturally in New York is such a hot podge of good and bad architecture. Maybe that's one of the things that makes it such a cool city is that it's not beautiful, beautiful. It's just this, like, Michael Kemoman, uh, when I moved here, which is only a couple years ago. I read Michael Kemoman, uh, is book

all the intimate city and he says the beauty of New York is a juxtaposition of this with that. Yes, this was that. This was that like allowed me to see the beauty of New York. It was like a single sentence that reshaped how it looked at a whole place. This was that, this was that. So, I agree with that. A wonderful man, wonderful lunch date. Um, this and that, um, I'm going down to street and this and that is creating a pure great pleasure in me. Is it one of the senses? Yes,

this is site, which is probably the most boring sense. Uh, but I am, you know, if you had to rank them, if I had to rank them, uh, what's most obvious one. Uh, but, you know, recently, I got a doc sentence, which is the world's best dog, clearly, and this giant sausage, uh, completely out of control. Bernie is his name. I dedicate the sensueless to Bernie, my furry sensueless, because he has a very sensual dog. And his great sense of smell, obviously. So, he will walk down the street

and there's a corner where every dog pees on and he approaches it like a ton with a scholar. You know, and he, uh, he sniffs here. He sniffs there. Yes, Rocco was here at 1230. That's right. That's right.

“Let's remember that. You know, he loves and his tail is wagging away. He's just enjoying the hell out”

of life. He enjoys this more than, I mean, loves food, obviously. But food is, so we all have this part in us that is able to enjoy things on this crazy level. It's most of it is free. So, my hobbies are slightly expensive, but most of this stuff is wonderfully free. It's all around us, you know. So, the more and the more I live, also I find in some ways that the sense of ambition that, you know, that younger people have diminishes in some good ways. As I sort of see what the rest of my life

will look like, I'm fine with it. Maybe good things will happen. Maybe some terrible things will happen. But I'm more or less okay with it as long as that sense of enjoyment doesn't leave me. The other thing that I talk about in the sensueless is that I recently, two of my most sensual friends of died recently, and it was remarkably sad, obviously, to watch them die of cancer in the early '50s and my generation, incredibly sad. But to the last moment, you know, they found things to

enjoy. Almost to the very last moment, there were things that they enjoyed, and I think the thing they enjoyed the most was talking verbally, and if you will, with their friends, even at the, you know, nobody wants to verbal and slow and catering. That's the worst place you want to do it. But if it's there, it still beats not, it still beats not having cancer. I think and hitting

thing you're doing in that, across these us videos about Martini's and suits, and, you know,

all kinds of things, capaberas. I love capaberas. Yeah, capaberas, I'd say saying, well, I'm trying to be a little more Latin American than you're giving that thing, mostly living. All right, capabara in Brazil. Oh, there you go. There is something about the way a leap culture flaunts the repression of enjoyment. Yes. I saw there was this clip that had gone viral the other day from the guy host Irbeseo. I had a year of not drinking, decided how to drink again.

It ruined three days of my life. I had a couple of glasses of wine, didn't get drunk. It ruined three days of my life because of the domino effect it caught. It meant that I got worse, sleep that night. I ate more poorly the next day because my dopamine system or whatever the cortisol system was all messed up. And then I pod casted worse. I didn't go to the gym the day after, that day all the day after because of that because I felt really bad. I then slept worse.

And I was like, oh my god, that three glasses of wine had this hidden domino effect that I must have been living with. And I thought there's a little bit unfair to him how viral it went. But it it had a nerve because it was hitting this culture, right? It was a good example of this culture in which

there is a status in optimizing everything, the aura ring, right? You never have a drink.

And I do think people have this feeling of like, well, what about enjoyment? What's the point of all is AI can already do a bunch of the things we can do? Like if we're not going to be here and enjoy music, enjoy a drink, enjoy great food, right? If you're going to endlessly be having like a glucose monitor and you're not a diabetic and they're like, well, post it really spikes my glucose and see that. And like this is what like the people. I mean, you listen to some of the

you know, top podcast was like all kinds of health influences on. And I'm not saying necessarily even that they're wrong about what they're saying. Sometimes they are. But it just sounds so joyless. I was watching something go around the other day. There was like from a study and I was like, turns out that doing 12 air squats every 25 minutes is like better for you than like running to whatever it was. I was like, I don't want to say I would rather die than do 12 air squats every

four minutes or whatever it is. So I'm probably ahead. But it didn't seem like a way to live.

“No, no. I think yeah, the other way I could title a book about current state is no way to live.”

None of this is a way to live. You know, me, I posit it. And I don't know, there could be some blowback or pushback on this. But that this is a problem for us as Democrats. Is that, you know, because there's so much of this is a part of what you hear and see in certain elite democratic principles, precincts. This isn't, you know, just, I mean, Silicon Valley obviously has a a lovely fascist wing now. But there's still quite a few people who are democratic and somewhere

or another. But the one thing about Trump humor is always even when it has this very nasty edge.

It just seen as a kind of joyous thing. And he would belt things out. And then he would do everything. You know, and people who have people listen, you know, speaking of Trump, I only know it's bad. I think for the best piece ever on that when you're in the New Yorker about Trump, really stealing, appropriating as they say, the humor of sort of Jewish Bush belt comics of a certain period, right? And then using it for his own evil purposes.

“So I think a lot of the other Trump want to be tried. I do this many of them failed.”

But there is that kind of motion. That's a sensualist. Trump is in some horrible. He loves a pretty room. He loves a pretty room. Thanks a lot about interior design. Love loves a good musical. That's right. Right. Right. Right. J.D. Vance is not a sensualist. Largo Ruby is not a sensualist. Right. Trump is. I think you're absolutely right. And maybe

maybe there is in a horrible way, something that we can take away from this, that the people that we nominate to be our leaders can't be. I mean, Clarice, she talked about joy so much that you knew that there wasn't that much joy going on. You know, it was this, look at the joy. It's what we call in fiction, telling not showing. Joy, joy, joy, you know, but we need leaders or candidates who can events not just the unhappiness of what, or everything we're confronting

from, you know, climate change to inflation, to the mess that's going to be left to us when the president leads. And that's not easy to do because we, so programmed to this idea that we have to democracy max. And we have to be constantly, you know, talking about all the terrible things. Instead of talking about the things that give us pleasure, that things that we love, the parts of community that make life livable. There's a lot of want to say in response to that.

“One is, you know, and this I think is fairly five part of the entry-ance part is in the sort of”

elite display of discipline. Yeah. It is a positional competition to show

you know, the how much you're reading and you're, you know, and look, I'm not saying by any means

“I'm free of this. The other side, which I think is more specific on the left is that pleasure is”

problematic for all different kinds of reasons, right? You know, maybe the things you enjoy are not politically, like a center, the jokes are too ghost, right? There's a million reasons, but I do not find that people are comfortable admitting to a lot of enjoyment. It's the,

the discourse is critical, not appreciative. Yeah. And I think, look, I think

this is a Protestant country. There is this kind of Protestant background. And many of the immigrants that come here, including my own family, right? They are Protestant in a sense, too, and that they they work to, they live to work instead of working to live. That's part of the sort of the code. So it's very hard for people to appreciate things that are that bring you joy because joy itself, this kind of suspect. Well, do that on your own time. Don't talk about that. Just leave the joy out of

there. I think people miss the idea of being able to talk in my case right about the things that I love. There's so much pleasure in the writing is almost the second pleasure I get when I try to think about what all these things mean to me, and I get to sort of live in that world for a while.

You know, I was just in Spain with my kid and my wife and I was showing him Manda Luthia,

you know, which is considered the poorest region or one of the poorest regions of Spain. There's this wonder why I think I was listening to this in a former podcast of yours where we were talking about, you know, how Mississippi is richer than almost every European state. Well, I have spent time in Mississippi. You know, Mississippi, if anything reminds me of Russia, whether there's a couple of super rich people with gigantic housing pools, and then there are people

living in conditions that, you know, almost anywhere in the world, Luthia, is very poor. And the medium of that becomes whatever that number is. I'm sort of the average of that, not the

“median, becomes whatever that number is. You go to the poorest region in Spain. Life is beautiful.”

I'm not saying that it's completely free of poverty, but the communal connections are so strong.

The things that bring people joy are so celebrated, whether it's wine or a large midday meal or or people, you know, having sex with each other, you know, and then talking about it and loving it. You know, they love their culture even though statistically they're making half of what Mississippi makes. It doesn't matter. There are three, four, five, six, eight times as rich as we are in almost every other context. Say, say more on this. So, because, I mean, these numbers are true,

where I have looked into this debate and it's not just averages, it's medians, and you can cut this a lot of ways. Like, we've gotten a lot richer than Europe in this country. But, you know, this is the thing we've actually been exploring on the show recently. We've just gotten a lot richer than we used to be. You know, maybe not as much as we could have, and people hate the way the economy feels. They, I mean, everything is incredibly expensive. The prices are going up. They

feel like on dime. They can't afford a home. So, there is, there's a lot that your wages, your income does not say about how life feels. Some of this can all be like resolved down economic, but some of it can't. When you say that people are 6, 7, 8, 9 times richer in these places and we are despite the wealth differential. Why? Well, look, for example, if you're living in southern Europe, you could be very content with 600 square foot apartments where you live.

You know, could be two, three people are living. Stuff that we in America would, especially outside the larger metro, consider horrible way to live. This is complete poverty. How can you live in such a small space, not have a backyard? Often not have a car. I'm using Spanish example, but the Pliced others, but Spain is one of the most, has one of the most wonderful transit systems, both within cities and interconnected transit systems. Everything you need costs a lot less.

So, you don't need to feel like you have, in some ways, America and China have more in common, because there's such a lack of a safety net that people need to save constantly in order to be able to make sure that if things do turn against them, that they're not one paycheck away from complete bankruptcy. If they don't have, if they get a, if they, you know, go over their deductible on a horrible medical bill that they're not completely bankrupt. All this stuff doesn't

exist in a place like Spain. That's where the wealth is. The wealth is being taxed at a different rate. Obviously, a much higher rate than we are, but also knowing that these are real problems that you're going to face. And Spain also figured out the fact that the Spanish are also not having any children. That actually, if they let in a certain amount of immigrants, life isn't even better. Now, there's people working for less, doing more. And the society keeps expanding,

despite the fact that they should be shrinking. It's not that crazy. You just have to be a little

“less than a phobic, and you have to figure out the things that really means something to you.”

Is it having at 4000 square foot McMansion happen, which you don't even see? Or is it, you know, sitting around with friends, having a butcher, you're having an open bottle in a square and enjoying

about kids, about rankings, about a lot, which is the role that expectations and

“positional competition play in degrading quality of life, or making it feel so hard to enjoy”

life. Because, you know, we do buy more. We have more air conditioning here. I mean, a lot of people die in Europe every year, because of heat, right? That doesn't happen here in your living same degree. We have got in, you know, we want bigger homes in much of the country, we want cars, right? New York is like a little bit unusual in that. But the way in which, like, the treadmill of what it just, what the trappings of a good life are. And then you look around and you're unhappy

and you're atomized and you're, you know, far from family. And you live in place you didn't quite intend to lift in. And, and, and, and, and it is, I think this feeling, and I think it's quite poisonous that you did everything right. And this wasn't how you were told it would be or feel.

And like, there's never a resting space. I mean, look at all the young people who voted for

Maldani, you know, who used it. I think in part also as a protest vote against the fact that here we are, professionals in New York and we can't afford to live on what we're being paid, you know, this was a nightmare. I think it's the, it looks since, you know, since the batch of Reagan years, there's been a very, there's been a project to destroy as much of the middle classes possible and to create a small, I mean, obviously that's not how it was stated, but that was

the effective that I think was creating an upper middle class in above that still has access to stuff

“and then obviously people who are living in some degree of precarity. That's, that's what's been”

happening and I think that creates the need to find even better rankings. But there is still a sense that life can be slow and pleasurable and I think that's all I really want out of life. I think that's all I really wanted growing up. I had very few friends. I didn't speak English. Once I started making friends and once I started enjoying my life with them and learning to create distances between me and my parents, I am more and more ready to spend my life

not just thinking about happiness, but actually being happy because I know how to do it. I know how to do it, walking down Broadway, looking up at a manager and advice on how to be happy. It's not even advice. The advice is, you know, I mean, again, I'm not trying to, you know, suck up with this Buddhism, but the advice really is present moment, living. It's, it's that simple. But also not saying no to things that are against the, the Protestant thrust of this country.

So, if you're, if it's for 30 pm and an agrony beckons, you're all, you're all by yourself. Oh, one shouldn't drink alone, obviously, but the day is beautiful. There's sunshine. There's people walking by and you sit down by yourself at the bar and you order that in the

groany and you sip it. Somebody comes up and talks to you. You talk back. You verbal at them first,

maybe in a non-aggressive way. You do all these, I can't believe I'm even giving this as advice. This is the thing you do is be in the present moment, having read a number of your essays now and in the number of books. I think you search out beauty. And I mean, I, I take much of what you're writing in the central, I mean, you have this beautiful piece about like the perfect suit and the perfect martini I've told you this before we started,

but I feel like I got a hangover just reading your piece about your, your martini runs.

“Some of us may not have the same constitutions, but I think this is important. I mean,”

go, I could say some politics where I think we have sacrificed beauty as a political virtue and as a social virtue and I think it has been a mistake. But I could just say it in life. I think that I think it requires a certain navigation to seek out beauty, a certain intention to seek out beauty. Look, to counter my own, some of my own episodes here. I do think some present moments are better than others. And I think decisions you make are meaningful. Trying to find ways to

be in beauty, which doesn't, it can be expensive, but I find prospect park to be like a place of extraordinary beauty and the spring and in the summer. And, but I don't know, I feel like you're making a real argument about this. So I want to hear more about the search for beauty.

Oh, well, first of all, I don't know if this search needs to be as systematic as that because

one can also create a kind of martini maxing when one is, yeah, or suit maxing. Is that into the orientation towards, you know, this is stuff that, look, a lot of the stuff also, I would say that even some of these hobbies, they, I started collecting watches, for example, only in 2016 because I knew Trump was going to win the election and I knew that I needed something to take my mind off things. Now, many people find, for example, that sports allows

them watching sports, if not participating them, allows them to do that. I'm not a sports person, so it doesn't do that for me. But finding even a relatively hilarious hobby like watch collecting, first of all, watch collecting allowed me to meet, I had very few male friends, most of my friends who have been women, but when you go into this very male space of watch collecting, there's all

Rolex SFG3 reference. And what they're really saying is I'm lonely and I'm just so happy that I can

“hang out with seven or eight other men who share this affliction. It's not, this isn't even about”

money. Some people will bring their Casio G-Shock of $58 watch, but it's a very specific $58 watch. And it makes them so happy and you're so happy that they're happy about that watch, right? So curation may be a part of it, but it's not even all of it. You know, I'm just going to stop you, because I'm going to actually ask you a question and be dumb about this. I don't get to watch thing. Help me get it. So what, and not that one, I'm sure you're watching this very nice,

the Casio G-Fit, like, why that one? I made up a, I made up a, I made up a, I made up a, I made up a, I made up a, I made up a, I made up a, I made a, I'll be with the watch thing. Well, look, the watch I'm wearing now was made in Germany. In

Massachusetts Germany is called a Lungel zone. It is made by hand, the back, the movement and the markers of it were made by hand. So there is a woman who I met in Germany.

Her entire job is to create a floral motif around this. It is a work of art. She spends hours days, even sitting there and free styling this beautiful flower, right? And there's a number of workers there. Yeah. Well, you tell me about the flower. A number of workers there who make this. And there's a number of workers who create the striping called Glacuta Striping that creates. So that when you, when you bend the watch backwards and forwards, you see a different kind of shimmer across the across the dial. The back is much more interesting than the front.

Well, exactly. Well, that's part of the, that's part of the, you want to be very, you don't want to show off in front.

“This is not a watch that anyone's going to rip off your wrist. But in the back, there's this secret. There's almost a city going on here, a vibrating city.”

When you watch them put the escape wheel, which is this thing that is spinning the balance onto it. And you see it spin. It's almost like it's been given a soul because all of a sudden, the static static movement has come alive and it's spinning different gears are turning. It's all mechanical. One of the other reasons I love watches is it keeps me from using my phone. Because one of the biggest things I would take out my over time is it. I take out my phone and then it's been seven hours on Twitter

arguing with some fascists. And now I don't have to do that. Oh, it's 120. Done. Had to get into them. You know, it's funny because I went to a very horrible Yoshiva when I was a kid. And I was bullied all the time because I was the stinky Russian bear. I were a giant shop girl. There's a giant for hat and stuff and nobody was friends with me. But my somebody gets my grandma bought me a Casio melody alarm watch and it played all songs from around the world.

“This is when Japan was very ascendant and created technology. Nobody else could. And one of the songs was Kalin Kamalingka.”

The Russian song Kalin Kamalingka. Kalin Kamalingka. So I would hide in the bathroom away from all the bullying. Jewish Queens kids and listen to that song and it would take me back to a world with which I understood. Not that I missed the politics of Soviet Union, but I missed having a language and a culture that I understood. So this one watch had this in me and then, you know, and then, of course, a bully stole the watch. And my grandmother who spoke three words of English had to go to the principal's office and say,

"Boychik, steal watch!" And the principal made the bully give it back. So also, this is one of the other things that happens. This is a bit of an aside, but that happens when you live life fully and amongst people. Instead of just staying working at home, socializing on the internet, you actually get stories. Stories happen. Interesting things happen. I want to go back to the search for beauty here. The orientation turns beauty here. Because one of the things that you're describing in your love of that watch,

which I feel pulled towards. I found reading the centralist again. The rest of you can't buy it, but you will be able to soon. November. I found it very inspiring. And what it pulled me towards was craft. You have an adoration in that book across the watch essay, the suits essay, the martinis essay of craft. Yeah, you're drawn to human beings doing beautiful things that have taken them a lot of work to do at that level. And a lot of training. And a lot of training. Tell me about that.

Well, look, am I the greatest writer there ever lived? No, but I've worked my butt off to craft senses. And then to make sure that the senses are crafted into paragraphs. This is, you know, there's the original fun of writing a sentence or a paragraph. Oh, look at me. I got this idea and then you return to it and like what the hell this is the ugliest sentence ever written. So you crafted over and over. You chisel away here. You expand there. It's endless. I love people that do this.

But you don't have to be a writer or even an artist. You know, you can be somebody who crafts

who designs a beautiful part of a watch movement. You could be an incredible mixologist, part of

my great, the great fun of writing that martinis are because I hung out with people who make

something called the zinc bar in Tokyo. But why? I have no idea what. It really, this is one of

“those things. We're in the same way that I don't know quite how to fashion this piece of this watch.”

I also don't know. I make my own martinis are pretty good. But there's skills and proprietary formulas that just make for a better martini. In both directions, for example, a very dry martini or a very wet martini. There's a great martini at the Ealbar in New York. So it's finding a place where the person has a history to what they're doing and has, so often it's been perfected over generations and then figuring out what they do really well. And that is beauty. I wonder how much you think beauty

and efficiency are opposed. Yeah, I would say so. I would say so. Because what that is and for the reason that I got to that in my head was that as you would expect with me, I want to Japan as like how do all these things exist? And it turns out they have, you know, and at least many parts in Tokyo is one of them, they have a public policy structure that just makes it quite affordable to have shops restaurants that not that many people are going to shop or eat that, right? They have

decided to not maximize the efficiency of retail space. They've decided to allow people to do a lot of very specific and unusual things. Tokyo also builds a tremendous amount.

“It is, it's an important part of it. And Chris Murphy, the senator just gives an interesting speech”

at a commencement about, you know, the problem with the American pursuit of efficiency. You are about to step into a world that prizes efficiency and the annihilation of drift and friction above all else. Every day technology companies are rolling out new products that cut the time it takes to do everything in your life, from eating to shopping, to dating, from getting one place to another. These aren't products designed to make you happy.

These are products designed to make you more efficient. And it's not that efficiency is never good.

It's often great. But the most beautiful things are not going to be efficient. Yes, but look, this is funny. And angry 100% that this is part of a policy thing. But look, we also suck at things that are super efficient that we should have. For example, the high speed rail, you know, talking to Japan, but also talking about Spain, all the countries we talked about previously, Italy, which has, you know, technologically is not the most advanced country in the world.

It has an excellent, I'm trying to fix that, man, I'm working on it. Okay, please, please do, because I have high speed rail. But my friends in Japan have told me several, the first of all, one is that in Japanese culture, craftsmanship,

and small store, craftsmanship, and a smaller scale has always been viewed as even higher than

the merchant and may other societies, the merchant classes, you know, as above the craftspeople, the craftspeople and artisans are seen as being below that. So, you want policies that sustain this kind of thing, right? There's just a great sense of pride in making

“very particular things as beautiful as possible. What efficiency does, I think, is it takes things,”

it takes smaller things that have done well. And it says, well, we're going to do an eight million examples of that. And then, of course, it's not going to, it's not going to be that good. There's another side to this, which can be a darker side, which is how much when we are talking about things we make, is beauty, a function of scarcity, which also makes it a function of cost, right? Things are beautiful. We honor them. In private, because not that many people can have them.

If the watch you had was mass produced in everywhere, it might be no less beautiful in some way, but it would not be rare, right? Scarcity creates meaning and things. And we do compete with each other. So, how do you think about this relationship between what we give this kind of honor to and admiration to the kinds of elite craftsmanship we're talking about? And it's relationship is a positional good in some ways where we love it because there's not

that many of it. And there was more of it. We wouldn't love it as much. A lot of the generations that should be making them are dying out. There's actually some of them may die out just because there won't be enough people to service these watches to make these suits. But look, as much as I love watches, and as much as I love my crazy blue suit, I love eating more. And I also think that is absolute artistry. You can walk around from Elmer's to a story. I've done this exactly

this and go from Nepalese to Filipino to Egyptian to Greek cuisine in a day. You can wander around. And you can see people, grandmothers, their granddaughters, making art. There's no rarity to it. I mean, as long as there's papayas in the world, these cuisines will exist. But they do something so loving. You just, you marvel at it. Last time I walked down Roswell to Avenue, and a weekend that was half the people because this was when ice was especially prevalent. So you could see

how we're trying, you know, the administration is trying to destroy beauty. The beauty of the

indigenous to America. But what I found is through my very long research with very, very wealthy people.

“These are some of the least happy people I know. By far, every aspect of their life is horrible.”

So when we talk about, you know, what, you know, yes, having more money, better, I guess, but to a point. And after a certain while, it's worse. It's much, much worse. Because so many of the people I would meet, right, who are hedge fund managers and they spend their whole day competing with one another over different trades, different bets as they call them, right? And then what are they doing

it's over? They go and play poker for $10 million, stakes with each other. You know, the competition

has to continue forever. And there's no appreciation of anything else. You sit in a horrible club. You eat garbage. And you compete with each other some more. That's what America thinks is the highest level of success possible. You're so successful if you can do that that you should probably run the whole country, right? I know the essentials does not meant to be a self-help book. And I know you're not presenting yourself here as a girl. But let's say if somebody who reads it or something, you're

just thinking, yeah, I don't actually seek out that much reading my life. I don't have a lot of money. You don't have like, you know, you're able to go traveling to the great capitals of the world. But what would you tell student when it's your classes? It's like, where do I start? You know, it's interesting. I think a lot of young people have already figured out that the life

“that is the corporations are asking them to live is not a good life. And I think that's why,”

you know, you think that, for example, we're talking about watches, you think this would be an old person, old man's hobby, right? But often when I go to these very secret meetings of watch enthusiasts that happen in New York, they have to be secret because, you know, we all get robbed that's the end of the world. But so many of them are super young. And they also hate their phones. They don't want to look at those things. They want to look at their wrist and see something

beautiful on them. Um, if, you know, on every American Metro has incredible inexpensive food that will blow your mind. People complain about Houston to me. This is the best Vietnamese food outside of Vietnam. Any city, even though cities design for the car and the parking lot, even those have incredible moments of beauty. I was just in his back as to one of the poorest countries in the world.

I've never seen cities that beautiful. I, uh, Wuhan, uh, summer cond and, uh, Cuba. These are

works of magnificent. That's magnificent. To pass through them. Wow. What an honor it is to be a

“live in the world and see things like that. I think it's a good place to end. Always a final question.”

What if he books? You don't come into the audience. So I'm going to start with a book by one of my students. I love my students. Uh, such good work. Um, Columbia graduate a couple of years ago. Uh, the book is called Men like ours. Her name is Bindu Bancinath. I hope I pronounce that correctly. Set in New Jersey. I love anything set in New Jersey. Talk about dystopia, right? That is the best, uh, really dark humor. But as dark as it is funny, I, I can't say enough about it. Uh, second book

was coming out. I think in August. And that's by my mentor, uh, Shangri Lee, the wonderful Korean American writer, uh, a tender age. I think it's the name of the book. Uh, there was an extra in the New Yorker. This I think is his most, um, memoiristic novel. I think a lot of his own background goes into this. He meant so much to me. Uh, both as a teacher and as a friend and as a sensualist.

He is as sensual as one gets living in northern California. He's incredible. Uh, and the third book is

Julia Yofi's mother land, which was a National Book Awards finalist, an old friend of mine, uh, also Soviet born, uh, Moscow to my land and grad. And it's a book about, uh, what the Soviet, you know, the Soviet Union was ostensibly the feminist progressive society. But guess what? A treated women like shit. This book really helped me understand a lot of my own background and also about how, uh, what the Soviet Union did to people on every level, uh, here through the

prism of women, but also through Jewish women, it is a remarkable book. Gary Stanger, thank you very much. Thank you. This episode of this country is produced by Annie Galvin, fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Mary March Locker. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld, mixing by Isaac Jones, our according engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon.

The show's production team also includes Marie Cassion, Roland Hoob, Marina King, Jack McCordic, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kelbeck, and Yon Kobel. Original music by Pat McCusher, audience tragedy by Shannon Busta, the director of New York Times pinning audio