Fresh Air - Best Of: Jia Tolentino on plastic surgery & AI / ‘Beef’ creator Lee Sun Jin

Episode Date: August 8, 2026

Seven years ago, New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino coined the term “Instagram Face.” Now we talk about how current beauty standards are changing our relationship to reality. “It seems more explicitly anti-human right now than ever before,” she tells Tonya Mosley. “There seems to be something that’s dove-tailing with the age of AI.” Also, we hear from Lee Sung Jin, creator of the Netflix series Beef. The second season is a story about class and blackmail at an exclusive country club. He talks about how he has pulled ideas from his own life, and his experience working in writers rooms as the only Asian person. Film critic Justin Chang reviews the new erotic comedy I Want Your Sex, starring Olivia Wilde.Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter Follow us on Instagram Subscribe to our YouTube channel Check out the Fresh Air ArchivesSupport public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and curated playlists of archive interviews. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

From W.HY.Y.Y. in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley in Los Angeles. Today, New Yorker staff writer Gia Tolentino. She coined the term Instagram face. Seven years later, we talk about how current beauty standards are changing our relationship to reality. It seems more explicitly anti-human right now than ever before. There seemed to be something that's dovetailing with the age of AI. Also, we talk with writer Lee Sung-Gin. He's the creator of the Netflix series Beef. The second season is a story about class and blackmail at an exclusive country club. Lee writes what he knows. So many of the show's storylines are pulled from his own life. And that's after spending two decades in comedy writers rooms where he was often the only

Asian person in the room. That's what people thought of me when I was starting. I was the diversity hire. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosely. Something strange is happening to the human face. Plastic surgery in the U.S. is increasingly designed to be invisible and it's working. Faces are being lifted, filled, and reshaped to look naturally youthful and at the same time unnatural. My guest today, writer Gia Tolentino says this new era of cosmetic enhancement is quietly changing the way people think about aging and what we believe a real face should look like. In her latest New Yorker piece, Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare, Dolentino reports that cosmetic procedures like Botox and fillers, once associated with middle

age, are now becoming popular for teenagers, with plastic surgeons reporting a significant uptick of patients under 30. Some are even posting photos online asking strangers whether a facelift is their only hope. One influencer got famous by striking his jawline with a hammer as part of the online movement known as looks maxing. Other young men followed suit, an artificial intelligence trained on millions of these new faces is generating new beauty standards. Tolentino argues that what's changing isn't just our appearance, it's our relationship to reality. Her argument is that when every face can be optimized, filtered, or surgically refined, the face itself begins to lose its status as evidence of a life lived. She argues that the thing we've long treated as a window into

another person is becoming less human and more like a product. Gia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the best-selling author of the essay collection Trick Mirror. Seven years ago, she coined the phrase Instagram face, capturing the beauty ideal of the social media era. Her new essay asks what that face has become. And Gia Tolentino, welcome back to fresh air. Thank you so much for having me. Okay, as I mentioned to you, this piece has hit a nerve. And so much of the reaction is basically, yes, we are seeing this, we are feeling this.

What can we actually do about it? And the same thing actually happened seven years ago when you coined this term, Instagram face. And so I thought before we actually get into your. latest piece, remind us what Instagram face is or was. Right. So sometime last decade, if you were on Instagram, you probably noticed that most of the most prominent, most highly visible faces who generally all belonged to white female influencers, they started to kind of converge on a singular face. I remember someone I, a makeup artist described it as a sexy baby tiger. You know, it was the kind of

Kim Kardashian looks like Kendall Jenner, looks like Bella Hadid, looks like Emily Radikowsky, there was this kind of convergence of the face towards a certain mean that seemed to me to be very overtly shaped by the algorithm. The face looked like the beauty filters that Snapchat and Instagram provided to kind of lift your cheeks and plump your lips and, you know, make your eyes bigger and make your chin a little more heart-shaped. And you could press a button or you could use FaceTune to digitally alter your face to fit this kind of algorithmically approved beauty standard. Like this was a face that the algorithm liked. If your face looked like this, you would get more views on your pictures. And then, you know, concurrently, there were these technologies. This was kind of the rise of injectables, Botox filler, these little tweaks that, you know, you could do in real life to match the tweaks that you could do digitally. And I wanted to write about it then

because it just seemed interesting that faces were becoming the same, that these highly visible faces were becoming the same. And the incentives didn't necessarily seem to be coming from within. They seemed to be coming from without it. And I wondered what is going to happen in the future. And now we're kind of living in the future. Right. So for those who aren't online enough to really pick up the changes over the last seven years, paint a picture for us what is coming out of this new era on our screens, not just on our screens too, but also in real life. What are we actually seeing? What does this new aesthetic actually look like? So this began as kind of niche behavior among the professionally beautiful, the wealthy and famous. But the desire trickles down because

those faces are necessarily visually overrepresented. And what those women do trickles down into the desire for the general population. And in the nearly, let's say, decade that has elapsed, when I was starting to research this piece, I started just Googling cities in the United States. I started Googling mid-sized cities everywhere outside the coasts to check, you know, how widespread is this behavior actually? There are some proxies, like the Reddit for R-slash-plastic surgery, it has almost as many weekly visitors as the Reddit forum for R slash running, you know, so there are some proxies where you can tell this is becoming a quite generalized interest. If you are on social media, you see the way that people's faces

have become uncanny. The foreheads are freezing. The lips are plump. Instagram face has kind of trickled down to the general population. You can get it at your local strip mall, basically anywhere you are in the U.S., and people certainly do. And now the faces of the rich and famous and professionally beautiful, now it's changing. Now there's facelifts. Now there's these invisible facelifts. They're the flickers of desire in the general population, people being like, well, should I get a facelift at age 30? This seems to be the next wave of what's happening that the facelifts are becoming the kind of soon-to-be normalized desire. Yeah, and the facelifts themselves are providing a look that maybe is taking us in another direction of trying to look.

more natural. You mentioned some of those more popular Reddit pages. There are also so many plastic surgeons now who have these accounts that are very popular showing before and afters of these deep plain facelifts, which aren't for the faint of heart. You know, it's interesting, right? The Instagram face, the procedures themselves were kind of fundamentally nonviolent, a little needle there back to the office, right? But people kind of looked obviously, altered. The Kardashians are the easiest proxy for this. You could see their faces changing in real time. Kim Kardashian published a selfie book called Selfish, where you could see how her face had changed. The work was on display, even though the procedures themselves were fairly minor.

The facelift is interesting because the procedure itself is kind of extraordinarily violent. You're severing all these layers of muscle and fat and fascia. Bridget Reed did a piece for New York Magazine where she describes a plastic surgeon lifting the face off of its bones, like a Halloween mask and rearranging it. But the results are almost supernatural. You know, there's almost something mystical and gnostic about it where there's this, they kind of imply this complex secret knowledge. And as you mentioned, there's kind of a cottage industry that has been growing over the last decade because these things are interesting to look at on screens. We love looking at faces. And we love looking at faces because, as I was writing, you know, the face is

traditionally how we come to know each other, how we, the first glimpse we have of a person's temperament and soul and life history and disposition. Right. I mean, it tells us, it answers so many questions. Also, you can tell if a person is tired. You can tell if they're sick. You can tell their emotions. Do they laugh a lot by their laugh lines? It's a marker of allowing us to see if we can even trust a person. I mean, you're basically arguing that we're entering a world where these faces don't communicate because Botox and some of these other treatments freeze the face. We're losing the ability to read one another. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it seems like, like you were saying, there are plastic surgeons on Instagram and TikTok. They're all of these

influencers that are just for kind of forensically analyzing what people may and may not. have done. We love to look at faces. We're still looking at faces, but increasingly online, especially if you are a girl or your woman, your feet is likely tailored towards these sort of things. The face is being presented to us as a consumer guide and a disciplinary manual, rather than a human repository of disposition in life. And, you know, I don't think this in and of itself, I don't think individually there's anything immoral or wrong. about plasticity, about changing your looks. You know, individually, these cases are not very interesting to me and not worth, you know, judging on an individual level whatsoever. But it just does seem

collectively like that shift has happened, that the face is not something that, especially if you are socialized as a woman, that you're looking at for human information, that you want human information and experience to show on your face, it's really being reconfigured as kind of an object that should stand up under digital surveillance. If you're just joining us, my guest is New Yorker staff writer Gia Tolentino. Her new piece, Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare, is about the rise of undetectable cosmetic surgery and what it's doing to our grip on reality. We'll continue our conversation after a short break.

I'm Tanya Musley, and this is Fresh Air. weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Let's get back to my conversation with Gia Tolentino of the New Yorker. Her latest piece is about the new era of invisible plastic surgery and why she says it's eroding our connection to reality. Aside from the $100,000 facelifts, what are those who are not in the top brackets doing? It's a lot of injectables. You know, I think there's kind of the non-surgical facelift that a lot of people, that's certainly quite popular in the suburbs of Houston where I grew up where it's like just well-placed Botox and filler to shape, you know, you can put it in your jaw line to thin your cheeks. You know, you can kind of lift your brow with Botox. You can kind of plump and reshape your face. People are getting eye lifts. You know, they're getting blephoroplasties on their upper lip. and lower lids. There's kind of threads you can get in your forehead to lift. There's neck lifts. There's mini-lipo. There's all sorts of stuff. There's the realm of just constant facial resurfacing with

laser. And all of these things, you know, again, it's like individually whatever, right? You know, individually let people live. However, collectively, it just, what is this reframing the face as? It's not just our faces either. Our producer, Molly, points out that BBL's Brazilian butt lifts are being reversed and people are taking off their nails and lashes are going out of style. It's kind of turning into the clean girl aesthetic. Is that sort of under the same phenomenon? One thing that is just kind of blanket true will always be true about beauty standards for women is that they're never static. There's never a final point, well, at least from the point of view of the industries dictating it, which now include the surveillance technologies of the phone and social media.

There is never a fixed point at which contentment is prescribed or incentivized or, you know, or okayed. It's what is prescribed is just a perpetual work, a perpetual outlay of money and time and most importantly concern, a sense of the self as something that must always be optimized, perfected, improved. And, you know, this is beauty standards have been punitive, disciplinary. They have served the interests of those in power for basically all of human history in every human culture. But there's something interesting about it right now in that it seems more explicitly anti-human right now than ever before. There seem to be something that's dovetailing with the age of AI. And AI is where the consequences of Instagram face, they are already quite clear. Right. The fact that so many of the most visible women on the internet kind of resemble each other have this look that if you're on Instagram, you can probably close your eyes and summon. You know, the fact that that is kind of what a woman on the internet looks like to the data scraping engines that are powering AI. You know, the Washington Post did this great investigation a couple of years ago. They asked, you know, AI image generators, multiple of them, to produce an image of a normal woman. Almost every face that was generated.

was white, young, and beautiful. Right. You know, there's already been such a distinct effect, and one wonders, AI is something that I personally, you know, take issue with for the way that it kind of programmatically positions what is specifically human as inferior for being specifically human, for being bounded, for being imperfect.

When, in fact, our boundedness, our imperfection, our kind of imminence, that's the best thing about us. that's what makes us actually human. And so the way that all of this is manifesting through the face is really what I wanted to write about. One of the paradoxes at the center of this essay is also that plastic surgery is becoming both detectable and more extreme at the same time. And the Mar-a-Lago face in particular is a good example of this. Can you describe it for us? I feel kind of a fondness for what's called Mar-a-Lago-Face because it's almost like, it's almost quaint, you know.

So Mar-A-Lago-Face is if you have observed the faces of the women of the second Trump administration, this is Mar-A-Lago face. It's kind of like Instagram face. It's as if kind of the Kardashian-esque beauty standard of 2016 has ported itself 10 years later to the seat of American power and added quite a lot of makeup to it. It's what plastic surgery used to be, where it flounce itself, where it kind of flaunts its lack of relationship to human reality, which I find kind of funny and I find almost quaint. And it also, you know, there's a way in which it mirrors the actual political policy as of the Trump administration where power is displayed in proudly disconnecting from reality altogether. And in that way, Marlau... So you're saying that these Botox and Philips and

faces and the approach to governing are basically the same gesture. It's saying that what is given, what is human, doesn't matter. I'm going to slash it to bits and, you know, put some gold and lipstick on it and we're going to, you know, it's the equivalent of the Trump ballroom, basically, in human face form. And, you know, there's also something, it's quite, it's so aggressively female, you know, it's, there's something, this is certainly not a new observation, but it's very interesting to watch, you know, people that are very much against trans health care, gender affirming, you know, medical care display a beauty look that is nothing, if not gender affirming. It's fundamentally gender affirming surgery like much plastic surgery is.

So for like a Mara Lago woman, she's performing maximal femininity. And for the men, this looks maxing. they're kind of surgically building maximal maleness. Totally. It's almost like drag. I mean, it's in a way. Literally, it's drag, which is why it's always been so funny to me to see Republicans be so against drag and children's exposure to drag and against, again, like trans affirming, gender affirming medical care because essentially all plastic surgery, you know, the hair transplants that men are getting in Turkey, you know, the hair transplants that men are getting in Turkey, you know, the, you know, the breast implants and nose jobs of a more innocent time of the 80s and 90s when those were the only things that, you know, that people may be got. It's gender affirming surgery. So there is a version

of this playing out with the trad wife trend. These influencers who have lots of followers, sometimes millions of followers, they're kind of performing a femininity in another way to standing in their kitchens and these prairie dresses, they're being domestic, they're performing submission. It's femininity content in a way. And how does this kind of fit into what you're describing this world of face altering? Well, the tradwife thing, you know, there's some very kind of obvious built-in contradictions and paradoxes in it, right, where the women that are most famous as trad wives, they are not trad wives, they are million-dollar business people, right? They are entrepreneurs, they make more money than their husbands, you know, they're heads of enormous businesses.

And, you know, there's a similar kind of contradiction with the kind of Mar-a-Lago-Face territory where, let's say, you know, the Trump administration, its point of view on public health is, you know, it's funny to have the beauty look of the second Trump administration be so overtly artificial, one that is only possible with injecting, you know, synthetic substance. into your face, and at the same time they're saying raw milk only, you know, be skeptical of your vaccine schedule. Yeah, like there's a similar built-in contradiction between the, you know, the aggressively prescribed naturalness, quote unquote, and then what the faces look like and what actually has to go into the faces for them to look like that.

Both you and I are parents navigating this world for our children, and you also wrote in your piece, how Kylie Jenner, who was famous for, among other things, altering her face, says she'd be heartbroken if her daughter got surgery as a teenager. And I'm just wondering, when you look at your kids, what do you see coming for them? And what is your plan to navigate it? Let me illustrate this with an anecdote. So a few months ago, my five-year-old daughter had seen a friend that, you know, had been handed a phone at pickup or something. She was like, mom, when can I get a phone? And my husband was walking through the hallway, and he just started laughing. And my daughter was like, why did he laugh? And he was like, because I know that how much that broke her heart? And she was like, well, mom, why did that break your heart? And I was like, how do I explain this to a five-year-old? And what I said to her is like, you, your imagination, your sense of freedom, your sense of what's possible is the most beautiful thing about you. And as soon as you get a phone, all of that will start to shrink, all of that will become endangered. The most wonderful things about you will be captured and

rendered inadequate by the phone. And I think that's true, you know, with, I think that will be true with her, inevitably, her relationship to her physical self. She'll find herself perfect and amazing until she sees the things on the screen that start to tell her, you can find fault and you can improve. And I, you know, I guess I think about my own behavior is the only thing I can really control, you know, I guess I want her to see me valorizing the human and valorizing, you know, the actually human and not trying to improve and protect and beautify myself and my life in a way that, where it seems like that's a priority. How do you do that? Because, I mean, you write that the beauty ideal is basically a mark of obedience. And then you admit on many days you still want it.

You want to be seen as conventionally attractive. And I'm not going to lie, even at my big old age, I want it too. So how do you even resist something that you still want? Yeah. I think that's the question, right? I think that's the question that I hope that this piece raises, right? And it's a larger question. It doesn't just have to do with beauty. How do we look at a world where the incentives are so anti-human? and how do we deal with it? How do we live within it? And how do we, where do we hold our ground? And I think the answer is specific to every person, but I think specifically with me, I wrote about optimization in my book in 2017, and after I wrote about it, it became clear that I could feel a difference within myself. I could feel a difference from wanting to perpetually improve and perfect

versus trying to take care. And I think just on a personal level, that's the division I'm trying to draw for myself, right, that I can enjoy going to yoga, trying to get stronger. You know, I mean, I dye my hair blonde. You know, I wear makeup every day. Like, I have no cred as, you know, a second wave radical that's resisting this altogether. And, you know, I don't think it's wrong to want to be beautiful. And from a young age, we probably also understood there's kind of a pleasure in seeing, like, what could I be? Like, great. Girls are lovely. Girls want it self-improve. It's a right of passage.

And the way that that gets captured by these systems is almost what I want to, you know, what I feel, the desire to protect in my daughter. How do we separate the desire to kind of make something of yourself from the desire that will lead you straight to capture in all of these systems? And I think, I think for me, you know, I just never want her to see me becoming deranged by this, becoming actually captured by it. I think she will see me her whole life, you know, responding to it, living within the system, you know. But I never want her to think, I never want her to see within me that the purpose of being a woman is to be as beautiful as possible all the time, you know, and to never look old, to never change, to always look like I did when I was 26. I never want her to see those incentives that exist on the internet be written on my actual. actual activities in life. And I hope I can hold myself to that for her sake, you know.

Gia Tolentino, thank you so much for this conversation. Thank you so much for having me. Gia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her new piece is called Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare. In the new comedy, I Want Your Sex, Olivia Wilde plays an L.A.-based artist, who initiates a dominant submissive relationship with her younger employee played by Cooper Hoffman. The movie, which drew much acclaim at this year's Sundance Film Festival,

was directed by the queer cinema pioneer Greg Araki. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review. When Greg Araki brought his new movie, I Want Your Sex, to this year's Sundance Film Festival, it felt like a long overdue homecoming. In the early 90s, Sundance helped launch Iraqi into the front ranks of queer independent filmmakers, with daringly sexy, funny, and violent tales of gay identity, like The Living End, Nowhere, and one movie whose title I Can't Say Here. His output has been more erratic in the decades since. But in all his work, including the 2019 TV series, Now Apocalypse, he's never lost sight of sex as a defining force in the lives of his characters, as well as his audiences. Or, as one character in I Want Your Sex

puts it, sex is everything. Those are the words of Erica Tracy, a multimedia artist who's known for her provocative work. She's played by a terrific Olivia Wilde. When we first meet Erica, she's floating face down in her own Los Angeles swimming pool, while a young man in a pink bra and panties, that's Elliot, played by Cooper Hoffman, clumsily tries to save her. I was reminded of the beginning of Sunset Boulevard. And indeed, I Want Your Sex is an erotic comedy by way of a noirish mystery.

The story flashes back several weeks to around the time Erica hires Elliot as her assistant. Elliot is smart and friendly, but also hopelessly naive. And he has no idea what he's in for when one day Erica calls him into her office.

There is something I need to speak with you about. I wouldn't want you to take this the wrong way. but the way you've been looking at me has been making me feel uncomfortable. What? Don't pretend you haven't been flirting with me, Elliot. And it is entirely inappropriate in the workplace.

Oh my God. I am so sorry. I don't even know what I've been doing exactly, but I promise whatever it is, I will stop immediately. As long as we're really on the same page about that. I would love to be on the same page, yes. That's right. Erica's accusation is, of course, a come-on.

Before long, the two have crossed over into entirely inappropriate terrain, with Erica initiating Elliot into a dominant submissive relationship. Most of their encounters take place at Erica's home, and are played for easy laughs. But when they're not having sex, Erica and Elliot have some pretty pointed conversations about why so many Gen Ziers like Elliot are, well, not having sex. Elliot blames COVID and overproductive parents,

noting that he and his peers were raised to fear any kind of in-person socialization, let alone intimacy. Erica calls them all out as a generation of cowards, arguing that the whole point of sex and of life itself is to take risks and push past boundaries. Iraqi more or less agrees with her. You could think of I Want Your Sex as his state of the physical union address. At 66, he no longer represents the younger generation, but he's still clearly concerned for their well-being.

That might have seemed condescending coming from another filmmaker, but a rocky style of comedy is warm, genuinely inclusive, and thoroughly disarming. For moment to moment, the movie is pure pleasure, full of bright colors, delectable sight gags, and sharp, pop culture-savvy one-liners, like when Elliot, wearing all black for a hot date, is told that he looks like an assassin in a Netflix yakuza movie. There are also sharp performances from Mason Gooding, as Elliot's snarky gay co-worker, Zap,

and Chase Swee wonders as Elliot's best friend, Apple, who envies his forays into kink. As it turns out, though, there's not much to envy. Erica invites Elliot to take their already wild relationship to another level. But what happens next simply doesn't ring true. It's the movie's most daring scene, and ultimately its most disappointing one. Like some other recent BDSM-themed films, like Baby Girl and Pillion, I Want Your Sex brings its leads to an emotional crisis point

that lays bare the long-term limitations of the character's arrangement. Iraqi is hardly a moralist, but he's mellowed a bit since his more radical early days, and the movie, for all its twists and trists, follows a fairly conventional arc. And the narrative machinery really starts to splutter in the closing stretch, as the pieces of the swimming pool mystery plot snap laboriously into place. Even so, I left I Want Your Sex with real respect for Iraqi's determination to start a cross-generational conversation, and his fondness for his characters and his actors.

Hoffman, who came to fame a few years ago in Paul Thomas Anderson's Lickrish Pizza, has a wily goofball charisma. He never becomes the butt of the movie's joke. And Wild is outstanding as Erica, mocking her own art world pretensions one minute, delivering a sex-positive monologue the next, and always seeming to keep the truth of what she really wants under wraps. She's a classic Greg Iraqi creation,

A hilarious yet wholly serious reminder of the slippery, unpredictable nature of human desire. Justin Chang is a film critic at The New Yorker. He reviewed I Want Your Sex, starring Olivia Wild. Coming up, Lee Sung-Jin, the creator of the Netflix series Beef. This is Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. My guest is creator, writer, and director Lee Sung-Jen.

The second season of his Netflix series, Beef, just earned 16 Emmy nominations, including for writing, directing, and executive producing. It's his second time being nominated in all three categories, making him the first Asian television creator in Emmy history to do that for the same series. Lee says he writes what he knows, and what he keeps returning to are the pressures people carry but rarely talk about, money, class, and the anger we sometimes swallow to get the time. through the day. The idea for season two began when Lee was walking through his neighborhood and heard a couple arguing with each other inside of their home. Later when he told the story, his younger friends were horrified. Did you call 911? They asked. Friends, his own age, had almost the opposite reaction. They shrugged. Lee couldn't stop thinking about that split, what it revealed about what different generations expect from relationships, and what

happens when the private lives of one generation collide with the values of another. That became the new season of beef. Oscar Isaac and Carrie Mulligan play a married couple, whose ugliest private fight is secretly recorded by two young employees, Ashley and Austin, played by Kaylee Spaney and Charles Melton. The next morning, Austin comes over and offers Mulligan's character a safe place if she needs it, and she tells him that he's misunderstood the situation. How old are you? 29. And how long of you and... What's the name? Ashley.

How long have you and Ashley been going out? Year and a half. Wow. So early? Well, you've got a good fight coming. And when it does come, you two are going to be stronger for it. If I may say this, ma'am, I don't think that's how we relationships work. All right. All I'll say is that all the couples I know that last, they've really had at it, you know. There's actually the ones that don't where someone's usually hiding something.

I mean, not to say that that's your situation with Ashley. Ashley, but the bad does have to come out somewhere. Do you understand? The first season of Beef, starring Ali Wong and Stephen Young, also grew out of a moment Lee couldn't let go of, a road rage encounter that ended with him following another driver for nearly half an hour. At season 1, eight Emmys, including Outstanding Limited Series. Before creating Beef, Lee spent years writing for comedies, including It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Silicon Valley. Lee Sung-jin, welcome to fresh air and congratulations. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

And I'm just so curious, what was it about your friend's reaction to those people fighting in your neighborhood that really sparked this for you? Well, you know, to be honest, the actual neighbors are older. They're probably boomers, I think. I don't know their exact age. But when I was talking to friends and writers, it was interesting that the 40-suff. young-year-olds, we're all defending the boomers. Yeah. And I was trying to examine why that is. And I'm like, oh, no, it's because we're old now. We know what it is like to be in a relationship.

Yeah. Yeah. And I thought that, oh, wow, like elder millennials haven't really seen characters wrestle with the fact that, oh, we're starting to feel and do things that the previous generation did for the first time. and, you know, as someone who's 44, that felt very potent and relevant. And so, yeah, like, it just kind of sparked something in me. I also wondered, is there something very specific about midlife at this time period for millennials in particular?

Because in this series, Oscar Isaac and Carrie Mulligan, they play Josh and Lindsay, and they're a married couple who Josh actually works for. this really swanky country club. And then the two younger people, they also work there. Josh has a little bit more power because he's a manager, but all of them kind of don't have power. But they begin throughout the course of the series to battle against each other instead of the folks who are the ones with the money and power

who are part of the country club, you know? Exactly. Yeah, it's just interesting. That was very much intended. You know, I was, I had the privilege of, you know, getting to use a country club for a month because I was house sitting for one of my best friends who, you know, we were, we've been friends since our mid-20s, were broke and poor together, tempted in random places in L.A. And he recently came into a lot of money in tech over the last few years. And so he became a member of Monasito Country Club. And I was house sitting for him for like a month.

And he allowed me to use his membership while I was there. And, you know, like, I kind of turned my nose up at it being like, that's crazy the amount of money you're paying for this place. Because how much? It's a 300K initiation fee. That's just to apply. Not even your yearly dues. No, no. So then it's dues, all this stuff.

And, you know, you're encouraged to donate. And then once you enter the club, it's not like it's like a free buffet. You pay for everything, and everything's extraordinarily costly. And, you know, I found myself, like, you know, three days into using it where I'm like, well, can I see an application, please? You know? And so, yeah, while I was there, I was observing that, you know, probably most of the members are like boomer silent gen, from my estimation. And then almost all the workers were millennial and Gen Z.

And I thought, well, that's a, you know, analogy for 2026, if I've ever seen one, where no matter how hard the millennials and Gen Z workers work, they're never going to get to be members. They're not going to be able to pay that 300K initiation fee. And that felt like an appropriate metaphor for, I think, how a lot of people are feeling today, you know. All right, I got to talk just for a minute about season one because we got to talk about this roevalued. road rage situation that came from a real thing that happened to you. You were in a parking lot and you got into it with somebody. You started following them for quite a distance. Sure.

And my question about this, because you tell this story often, especially during the first run of the first season, what would you have done if that person had stopped? I probably would have just fed away. I mean, to clarify, the only reason it was such a long sort of stalking, let's call it, is because I was getting on the 10, one of the main highways in L.A. Yeah. And it was bumper-to-bumper traffic. And so what started very heated, then eventually you're just sort of, it's not like the movies or the show where you're chasing, you're just sort of like stuck.

and then like 30 minutes go by and then you're like, okay, I'm not that angry anymore. And then, you know, but then it was sort of fortuitous on that day. We were both going to the same exit, which was on the opposite side of town. So you, okay.

So in my car, I'm just, I've lost interest. I'm listening to music, you know. I'm just like, kind of like in a better mood. And I could tell that in his car, he was like, this psychopath is following me across bumper-to-bumper traffic through all of L.A. And that is what fascinated me is that we're in our literal mechanical bubbles and trapped in our own subjectivity, completely unaware of what the other person is thinking or feeling.

There is something that you say, almost in all of your interviews, you talk about this research that you read, and I had to go digging for it, and I actually found it. And you were pretty accurate with it. But you have mentioned this scientific belief that our inner voices are formed by how our caregivers talk to us when we were small. Yes. And ever since I heard you say that, I've been rethinking everything. And I wanted to know how your parents talk to you. I'm working through a lot of that in therapy actually right now.

I love my parents. and I can't imagine their young adulthood moving to a foreign country. Immigrants, not really knowing the language. You know, my dad went to grad school at University of Illinois, Urbana, Champaign, and I moved here when I was nine months old with my mom and dad and slept in the dorm. You know, it was the dorm room that we all lived in. And I think that a lot of immigrant parents, it's not just mine,

their parenting in that era, the 80s, was like to provide, to help your child assimilate and to really make sure that this move was worth it, that you're trying to give your child a better life than the one that you had. And so I think, you know, there, I think it's a different love language than maybe what, like, modern Western culture is used to, where, you know, now it's like gentle parenting and you got to, like, you know, accept the child as they are and kind of continually make them feel safe and supported through, like, words of affirmation. What did your parents do? My dad was a professor of electrical and computer engineering, and he then worked for Samson. which is why we moved back to Korea,

and he actually designed Samsung's first supercomputer, which is extraordinary. And my mom, she was going to be a classical pianist, but then gave it all up to raise my sister and me. So, you know, she ended up later in life once my sister went to college. She got her master's in music. And so, you know, I was able to sort of fulfill her dreams. in that way.

Highly accomplished people. Yes, they are for sure. So you were a straight-A student, almost perfect SAT, or maybe you did, and played the violin. I mean, highly, highly, you know,

just academically superior. That was my parents, for sure. It was a lot of... Your whole childhood was, like, you know, preparing to try and get into an Ivy League school. And so it was hours of violin practice every day. You know,

I played tennis. I, you know, was, you know, self-studying for the PSATs. I remember in, like, I want to say, like, sixth grade. And, yeah, and it worked. I got into an Ivy League school. University of Pennsylvania. Yeah. So, you know, I think the way they spoke to me makes sense with my inner monologue.

I am very, like, you know, results driven. And I just saw the Novak Djokovic trailer that came out this week and hearing him talk about, like, tennis and stuff. I think the trailer is supposed to highlight, like, oh, like, look how, like, how harsh he is on himself. And to me, I'm just like, oh, that's me. What did you see in him and yourself? Just this drive for... to prove everyone wrong, this drive for excellence, this unrelenting work ethic, to push yourself past your breaking point.

And I think that's something that I'm actually, I'm glad that was instilled in me at a young age because I don't think I can like get through a season of beef without that, without that work ethic, you know. Your family moved a lot. You all moved, as you mentioned, you lived up and down the Midwest in Texas and then up Minnesota. You go to UPenn, you graduate in economics, is that right? And then you decide, I don't want to do this anymore. And you moved to New York, and the first night you get there, your car is like people steal everything except for an Aladdin DVD. Yes. What were you planning to do there? I thought maybe music. You know, I applied to so many music internships because that was so musical that didn't really pan out. I remember there was this one forum, back when Internet forums were more of a thing, where Jack Ponte, who is the guitarist for Bon Jovi, had just started a record label.

and he posted that he was looking to hire interns. And I remember replying on that forum, sent my resume, and he was based in New Jersey, and I would drive out, and I would just box CDs and think promotional materials. And I was able to leverage asking, like, hey, I don't mind being an intern, but is it okay if I create business cards of my own where I can have my title be, like, director of research. Oh, uh-huh.

And he was cool with it. So then I remember printing those out. And in New York, I didn't know anybody. So I was so alone. Like, I'm not exaggerating when I say I did not have a friend. And so I would Google where, like, the free events were that night. You know, there would be some, like, you know, Condi Nost would be having some, like, release party at the Hermes store. And I would go get dressed up in my one suit with my little

self-made business card. I would stand in line and I would sneak into the party and then I would eat the free food and that would be the dinner for my day because I was so poor. And then I would just like try to rub the elbows and hand out like my business card to everybody. But like how brave you were. I think I was just desperate. Okay, so you become an NBC page, which is a program that you get to give tours to tourists and things through 30 Rock. And this really amazing thing happens while you're a page. The head of comedy sees something that you wrote and says, like, you're super talented, gets you hooked up with an agent. you get an agent, you move to L.A.

Things get so tough for you while you're in L.A., but you're still like, I'm going to do this. But at one point, it got so rough that you were sleeping on a hospital cot. Yeah. In a friend's apartment. Yeah, you know, my then writing partner and I went with sort of the fanciest agent who was like, you have to move out by upfronts. And so we gave our jobs two weeks notice,

and moved out here, and I didn't bring my bed because I was like, oh, I'm going to be like a working writer and I'll buy a bed eventually. And just nothing happened. Like, couldn't get the agent to return our calls, you know, didn't really go out for any meetings. And suddenly it dawned on me like, oh, I've made a huge mistake. And had to start tempting, you know. And I, in the meantime, I needed a place to sleep. So my then-roomate's girlfriend worked at a hospital. And she brought home a cot for me to sleep on.

I slept on it for probably a year and a half. A year and a half. Yeah, I don't recommend. You'll have, like, long time back issues. And, you know, was doing that for probably almost two years. The Rider Strike also happened in 2008. Yep. And then right after the Rider Strike, just so fortunate that Rob Charlie and Glenn at it,

Soe Sunny, I think they read a sample. and asked for a meeting, and the meeting only lasted like 10 minutes. And I thought I for sure didn't get it. But then that changed my life. Lee Sung-jin, thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks so much. Lee Sung-jin is the creator of the Netflix series Beef. The latest season is up for 16 Emmy nominations.

Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer this week is Adam Stanishefsky. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.