The Ezra Klein Show - I Keep Telling People We’re Living in This Dystopian Novel

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

A hypervisual, looks-obsessed, wellness-crazed, postliterate society where we’re constantly staring at screens and evaluating one another based on metrics, as the country around us feels like it’s falling apart: That sounds like the world we live in. It’s also the world Gary Shteyngart created in his 2010 novel, “Super Sad True Love Story.” I’ve been thinking about the book a lot recently, especially with the rise of the “looksmaxxing” influencer Clavicular and the longevity guru Bryan Johnson, and this feeling that people are upset and agitated but grabbing at the wrong things to fix it. It feels uncannily like the experience of living inside Shteyngart’s novel. But Shteyngart isn’t just a dystopian prophet, he’s also an expert at living well amid the world’s darkness. His forthcoming book, “The Sensualist: Adventures in Pure Pleasure,” is an essay collection about his efforts to do exactly that. So I wanted to have Shteyngart on the show to understand how he predicted so many of the grimmer aspects of our present, but also how we might delight in the world’s “endless buffet of pleasure” in spite of them. This episode contains strong language. Note: We’re recording an "Ask Me Anything" episode soon. If you have a question, please email [e-mail] using the subject like "AMA." We'd love to hear from you. Mentioned: “The End Point Of Viral Content” by Ryan Broderick “How Jokes Won the Election” by Emily Nussbaum “A Visit to Seoul Brings Our Writer Face-to-Face With the Future of Robots” by Gary Shteyngart The Intimate City by Michael Kimmelman “Don’t Just Take the Slow Road; Design It,” Commencement address at Wesleyan’s 194th Commencement Ceremony, Chris Murphy Book Recommendations: Men Like Ours by Bindu Bansinath A Tender Age by Chang-rae Lee Motherland by Julia Ioffe Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary-Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Before we begin today's show, we're going to be doing an Ask Me Anything episode quite soon. So if you have any questions, email us at Ezra Klein Show at NYTimes.com with the headline AMA. Over the past six months, I keep telling people, we are living in Super Sad True Love Story. And sometimes I'll say to me, what was Super Sad True Love Story? What do you mean? Super Sad True Love Story, if for some terrible reason you don't know, is a 2010 book by Gary Steingart. 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. A 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 Steingart, 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 Steingard, of course, has written a number of wonderful novels, including the Russian debutante's handbook, absurdistan, 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 our client show at NYTimes.com. Gary Steinger, welcome to the show. Great to be here, 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 Super Sad, Tree Love Story.

So for those who haven't read it, can you just describe the world you create in that book? So everyone carries a device called the apparatus, which wherever they go, it constantly ranks them. But, you know, the sort of the germ of super sad true love 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. At one point he walks in and he's the second ugliest man in the room, and the ugliest man can't take it and he leaves 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 poles that showcase your credit for, you know, and you can tell him. 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. It 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 a war in Venezuela, 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. So the thing that made me start thinking a lot about Super Sad True Love Story. has been the omnipresence of Brian Johnson, the longevity influencer, clavicular, the looks maxer. 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 I don't remember happening before.

So as a guy who wrote a book about all this as The Future at one point, how has this look to you? You know, the book was written about mid-aughts, 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, 30 years. Usually when people are writing speculative 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. Oh, yeah, there is a invasion of Venezuela. Israel is controlled by a Smotrich-like party. It's called Security State Israel. Security State Israel. It's this 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 they're ranked to get in or, you know, athletes are ranked, blah, blah, blah. We're in a very competitive society. And in this book, there's a thing called Rate Me Plus technology, which constantly ranks people over and over, not just. on their looks, but also on their finances, every single aspect of their being. And at one point, the internet of the future goes out and the rate me 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, you know, because I would, I travel a lot, and there were times when I would go to, I don't know, some kind of Uzbekistan-like country, and where at that point you just didn't have constant contact with the Internet.

And I would find myself going through withdrawal. You know, if I went for two, three weeks and I was like, but who am I now? You know, I'm just Gary in the block, on the block. I don't have, you know, 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 look, none of this is 100% new civilization began.

There was, you know, 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, Stuyvesant High School, which was all full of immigrant kids like myself. I'm from the Soviet Union. kids were from Soviet Union, East Asia, South Asia, etc. And I, to this day, 86.894 was my average at Stuyveson. And I remember it. You know, this is the shocking thing to the thousandth

decimal point. And that, I think, prepared me in some way. Stuyveson 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. You know, when you look at all these men who are, you know, measuring their cheekbone to the nth 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 found so fascinating about when I watch 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 your heart rate goes, the better your sleep, the better your sleep, the better willpower. More willpower, better exercise, better food. When your heart rate is high, bad sleep, bad willpower, 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 level of self-examination, the level 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. Good relationships are really rare.

And Kate is important to me because she really does feel like my other half. Biohacker Brian Johnson recently boasted about his girlfriend's top 1% vagina, sparking interest in at-home vaginal microbiome tests. Yes. Got to get that vaginal biome. Clavicular, who it's like you've divorced getting hot from the point of getting hot. He talks about how you can't have a girlfriend given life he leads. He is not fertile.

Why are you infertile right now? So it's just like a negative feedback loop when you're not needing to produce testosterone anymore because your body realizes, okay, we're getting it from an exactance. So you're not producing any testosterone naturally? No. None? No. I'm not taking 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 the things the urges are supposed to do, this severing of the pursuit of desire from the thing the desire is 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 shrunken testicles, 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 instincts we had. Clavicular is one of my favorites when it

comes to this, because he's just really funny unintentionally 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 not going to really have much ROI. So, I don't... Well, it's true.

I mean, really. That means return on investment. You know, he'll talk about how, knowing that he can have sex with a woman, again, woman is way more important for him than actually having sex with the woman. Oh, it's the ranking, the mocking. The mocking, 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 die 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 to. teaching, created writing at 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 aughts, there was this kind of John Cheever bisexual energy going on. Where... Explain what a John Cheever bisexual energy is. You can't move that fast. Sorry, well, you know, the Cheever-updike Roth era, and I know that.

skews very masculine, right? There was, you know, people wrote about sex nonstop. I mentioned Sheaver 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 essays coming out in November. called The Centralist, which is all about my love of pleasure, but in millions of contexts. There's sex in there.

There's food. 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, check, check, check. We are the best. We won. And that's that.

What's your view of where 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 the speculation isn't that, you know, we're going to be living in a utopia in 20 years. It's, it's, 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 of a story seems all.

almost privileged. Like, you don't want to touch that anymore. And I'm not saying that, you know, the Cheever Updike crew didn't write in a solipsistic way about whatever, you know, their own identity as wealthy white people in Scarsdale or whatever, you know. Obviously, there was a lot of that 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, being self-loathing. I find it very, very, very depressing. Like, when you describe that, right, it does, like, late mid-20th century male writing was very horny. Yeah. And, like, 2020's writing is very nervous.

Yeah. Yeah, my students called us the sad girl novel. And there have been some amazing sad girl novel. The year of rest and 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 a class called, so you want to write funny at Columbia. And for example, you know, we teach, talk about neurosis.

Like we teach, I teach a port noise complaint, you know. And that is, obviously, it's all, it's all set in a psychiatrist's office. It's this neurotic, horny Jew, like they don't make him anymore, right? and he's just, you know, chomping 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, super sad is the word sad is the second part of the second word in the title,

but I hope that Lenny, you know, when he finds the love of his life, Eunice, when he goes out with his friends, that there's still an avenue toward a kind of overwhelming feeling of contentment. That may go away by the next day or when the hangover sets in, but that is there at least for a while. There's a character in SuperSatry Love Story, who I think is interesting for this conversation, which is Joshie, Lenny's boss. Tell me a bit about Joshy. So Joshy is, let's see how old is Josh. Well, we don't even know how old Joshy is. He could be in 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 a lot of people in, for example, finance, because I wrote a book, Lake Success that was set in the world of hedge funders, so I had to spend four years hanging out with them. I think not 100%, 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, who always seemed so unhappy despite the fact that they were so much richer than us. We were living on garment cheese for a time, you know. And my parents and other Russians would say, which translates very vaguely as they're wild with their own fats. They're 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 and to, and to not die, is one of those almost Protestant kind of extension of everything and striving. Why should the striving ever end? Well, there's the search for greater meaning than there's where you're searching for it. I mean, one of the fundamental things about Super Sad and that feels like a fundamental thing of modern life is everybody's looking for it in the screen. and you have one of the fun phillips of the book is that talking to other people is called verbaling right you've needed to create a different linguistic category for what it is we're doing when we have a conversation and you know screens are made by corporations yes corporations have their own incentives and their own things are trying to do and what they're trying to do is not make you 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 And it said, you know, Sisyphus's life would have been much better if every time he got the rock to the top, he got some points.

And if he could then, like, exchange those points for stickers. Stickers that you 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 and go old pasta, it's fundamentally erotic. Right. So often a bar will see, like, people who are together, they're like on some kind of a date, a married couple or a non-mirate couple.

I don't know. And they're both looking at their phones. And there is something about a very unfulfilling, but very compulsive world, like beckoning, that I think is an enemy of enjoyment. There's a lot in there. So verbaling is very hard for members of younger generations. I know COVID messed them up as well. Obviously, people in Generation Alpha, my son's generation. That didn't help, obviously, but I think verbaling 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, et cetera, stuff like that. And I think it's interesting when you look at someone who is, for example, doing looks maxing, who is using a hammer, talk about the opposite of joy, this anti-enjoyment, you're hammering your cheekbone in to make it a certain metric.

Describe a bone smashing it. Yeah, so bone smashing is based off of Wolf's Law that, you know, when you break down a bone, it 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 verbaling 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 preferences. 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 enough in 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 had Mark Andresen talking about how he doesn't want to have interiority. It doesn't want to have introspection, which he described as looking backwards, which not quite what it is, but nevertheless. You said something that I love and I never hear other entrepreneurs talk about, but I think is super important, that you don't have any levels of introspection. Yes, zero, as little as possible. Why? Move forward.

Go. Yeah, I don't know. I've found people who dwell on the past, get stuck in the past. It's just a real problem. And it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. And I've been trying to think on this, right? because I mean, these are smart people, right? And I do think it is in some ways a,

if 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 other 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 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, proclaims to be neurodivergent, who was raised by possibly the worst father 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 a case of neurodivergence, give him. I think when I was, I don't know, if I was six or something, I thought I was insane. Why did you think you were insane? Because it was clear that other people did not, their mind wasn't exploding with ideas all the time. They weren't expressing it.

They weren't talking about it all. And you realized by the time you 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. Let me go back to the mark and Jesus in the world, because I think what they might say on your riff on Elon Musk there is, and Musk hates his father to note that here. But listen, it created the greatest industrialist of our age, the richest man in the world, a 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 writerly class, literary class doesn't like it. Let me tell you this. I do think that space colonization 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, you know, the marvels of Mercury anytime soon, right? So a lot of this is complete bullshit, as far as I'm concerned, that part of it, right? Now, of course, electric cars, et cetera, all that stuff is very good. And if anything that Musk did, that was good, was Tesla, which now will be probably brought to scale by Chinese automakers, right, 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, have the last 26, 25 years, 30 years, have they been really that great in terms of just life? Let me.

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, 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 wrought 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 at a much slower clip. I don't write as introspectively as I used to. I am as addicted to, and by the way, please follow me at Steingard 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. Is it? Absolutely. It helps. You're a big deal, man. Do you actually need to be there? 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 the more honest answer right there. Both, both profit and dopamine. mean, let me say this. When I started writing SuperSat, the aughts, mid-aughts, 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 what was it called, MySpace, I think was the thing, right? And the moment I got on it, I thought, this was the germ of SuperSat. I thought, this technology is going to destroy everything. Why did you think that?

Because I knew, look, when you're writer or an artist, you are a part of a narcissist. You are partly, at least, a narcissist, because what do you do this for? You don't just do this. There was a great way of 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 Bessiv Stoll to write into your desk, literally. That is the highest level of writing, right, because nobody will see it. But I did not want to write into my desk. I wanted the world.

I was this, like I said, small furry immigrant, 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 MySpace and Facebook, I thought everyone's a writer now. There are no barriers. Now, on the one hand, that sounds great. Ooh, more democracy than ever, right? Everyone now is whatever, is Aristotle or everyone will express themselves.

But then I lived for about half a year, year 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 to the point where it's, 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 interiority, 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 bulk 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 it as a porn theory of the internet. That all content now, or at least a lot 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 porn evolved on the internet. But now it's like, you know, people like, you know, pulling apart cheese sandwiches.

Right. Like, you got to feel angry or curious or hungry or something immediately. And I mean, you're, again, like, writing this some time ago. There's a section in the book where Lenny is reading from the Unbearable lightness of being to Eunice. And book by Belong Kondera, and he says, he writes in the book, I felt that Kondera had put too many words around the fetish for her to gain what are generation required from any form of content. A ready surge of excitement, a temporary lease on satisfaction. I mean, now you hear everybody talking about how kids can't follow a long book anymore, everything is too long.

I mean, that's all really there in that book. So somebody writes books, somebody who's going to think 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? Oh, absolutely. as opposed to something, we have to follow along and interpret ourselves. I have now started putting, I realized that if I post something on Instagram at Steingard, 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 incredible, I was reading this incredible New Yorker article about Ukraine. Ukraine, obviously, is 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. Oh, someone who actually liked this?

Wow. Life is really good. I mean, do I think that there's a 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 so like 47 percent of Americans have read a full-length book in the last year. So this is obviously going to be a very minority position. But when I write myself, I, what are people in California call it, or in Silicon Valley call it the end user experience?

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 somewhat attached to the page. So this is this interesting thing, right? Like, does writing have to, I don't know, well, we have books that explode while you read them in order to get your attention in the future? That could be a great technology or releases a plume of smoke or something so they're like, oh yeah, right, right,

I've 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 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 and they smell musty.

And, you know, not to spell too much of any of the book, 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 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 one day read their journal entries. And you can, I mean, those get released a lot. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God, 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 Ishmael, you know, you can't look away from that. And, yeah, Lenny's voice, Lenny is almost in some ways kind of, he thinks of himself as being very literary. He's actually not a writer per se, but he thinks of themselves 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 Brookline Mass reader, let's say.

Whereas Eunice is, what I loved about writing Eunice was that Eunice was, she wrote in this completely global teen's way, everything, she's buying this, she's buying that, she's buying clothes, she's, she looks maxing in her own way. And at the same time, she has an ability, especially as the novel, continues, to look more inwards and to see the dichotomy between what this society wants from her and what she wants to be. One of the things going back to the subject of clavicular is I find it to be a very tragic figure. It doesn't seem happy to me. Like, I just saw pictures of him after getting a rhinoplastia. know his job business knows seemed fine to me before and he just like is miserable in their wheelchair

and it's like you know kind of like small legs route and people are making fun of them on the internet oh my god and you just think like this guy has achieved a level of social notoriety that is remarkable i mean most successful streamer of the age and how much happier he would probably be if he had never touched it and like look i'm not in there but but like 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 number of 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 into fights, 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 our 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 even his followers would care, they'd be like, okay, that was interesting, you know, I'm going to find someone else who beats his, you know, his nose with a hammer or whatever. That's interesting in 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 again, people will say, well, Gary, you know, or these, the Horowitz's, 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.

The wealthier 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. and nobody's having kids there. If they do is one kid, I say this is also someone with one kid,

but nobody's replicating themselves in those societies. Tell me what you see when you're there from that perspective because low fertility rate is happening in the background there of Super Sad.

Yes. And it's could have been something you've thought about for a while. So when you go to South Korea, which is a society that is now, if trends continue,

it will shrink geometrically. Yes. Shrink very, very, very fast. Yes. What's it like? It's amazing because, well, if you're into tech

Even if you 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 is 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 I was there, it was like, oh, we're going to take over robotics, obviously, robotics is the thing. So I went to this way outside of Seoul. I went to this place where they were creating bull robots. Bull robots? This bull, you know, you stood there with a red hanky and this bull would charge you and they're like, yes, we're trying to corner the Toriador market in Spain because people don't want real bulls to die anymore, you know, so we're developing these Toriador bulls. And this bulls, this bull, pretty fierce, you know. And I'm like, Jesus 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 since it was stupor and then talk about how, oh, at 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. 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 where we're going to. I think there'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 too expensive to have 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 liberation 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, it's too expensive to have 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 too competitive. I was just in Palo Alto and I flew back to downtown Manhattan where I live. 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, a mini 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, whatever you want to call it, 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. God bless clavicular, as an economic agent, he's figured out his own pass forward. He's making $1.2 million or something a year by doing this complete horse shit. that's incredibly cool for him.

And that, I think, that is the model that so many Americans are looking at. It used to be, you know, oh, I'm going to be a basketball player, you know, I'm going to be in a cool rock and roll band. Now I'm going to be mentally ill on TikTok and I'm going to make a lot of money about 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, I'm looking at. Like, yeah, what happens to them? I know parents who are deca millionaires, centa 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 cubicular, claviculars down the line. I find this very frightening. I have a first grader and another one who will 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 sadness to this for me. I, you know, look at myself and like studying his Pokemon card binder 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 in them. And obviously, for my younger one,

when it's his turn. And I just feel this dread of so much of the joy being drained out of their life. One thing I can suggest is mind when your kid develops 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, you know, prep him for, if you want, so 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 less, but he's humming to himself. I think there's a, this is like an interesting bridge to this book of essays you have coming up called The Sensualist. And, you know, you could really see this in Lenny. You can see this in some of your characters over the years that 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 this life. Right. So first thing, what is sensualism to you? Well, first of all, it's not even just, just, just, just, you know, just just about the senses. It is in a more Buddhist or meditative way, if you want to take it that way. It is enjoying what's happening in the present moment. 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 here and there when life requires it. But I do, I was walking here

today, and mostly I'm in the summer upstate, but I came down for this interview, and I'm walking down Broadway, and I looked up and I'm just noticing these beautiful mansard roofs of some of these buildings. Now, I spent half my year in New York. I forgot all about these mansored roofs. I'm like, damn, somebody did something right architecturally. New York is such a hodgepodge 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. Michael Kimmelman, when I moved here, which is only a couple years ago, I read Michael Kimmelman. His book called The Indimate City, and he's a little bit of a little bit of a city. And he's a lot of, says the beauty of New York is the juxtaposition of this with that. Yes, this with that. And that, like, allowed me to see the beauty of New York. It was like a single sentence that reshaped how I looked at a whole place. This with that, this with that. So, look,

I agree with that. Wonderful man. Wonderful lunch date. This and that, I'm going down the street and this and that is creating a fear of great pleasure in me. Is it one of those senses? Yes. This is sight, which is probably the most boring sense. But I am, you know,

if you had to rank them. If I had to rank them. Well, it's the most obvious one. But, you know, recently I got a doxon, which is the world's best dog, clearly, and this giant sausage completely out of control. Bernie is his name. I dedicate the sensualist to Bernie, my furry sensualist, because he is a very sensual dog. And his great sense is 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 Talmudic scholar, you know, and he sniffs here, he sniffs there. Yes, Rocco was here at 1230. That's right, that's right, let's remember that. He loves, and his tail is wagging away. He's just enjoying the hell out of life. He enjoys this more than, I mean, he loves food, obviously, but food is. So we all have this part in us that is able to enjoy things on this crazy level. Most of it is free.

Some of 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, 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 Sensualists is that I recently, two of my most sensual friends have died recently. And it was remarkably sad, obviously, to watch them die of cancer in their early 50s in 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, verbaling, if you will, with their friends, either, even at the, you know, nobody wants to verbal in Sloan Kettering. That's the worst place you want to do it. But if it's there,

it still beats not having cancer, I think, and hitting yourself with a hammer to create the sense that you're meeting symmetric. I think the interesting thing you're doing in that across these essays which are about martinis and suits and, you know, all kinds of things.

Capabaras. I love capabaras. Capabaras, that's they say it? Well, I'm trying to be a little more Latin American, given that they mostly live in. Capivada in Brazil. Oh, there you go. So there is something about the way elite culture flaunts the repression of enjoyment. Yes, yes.

I saw there was this clip that had gone viral the other day from the guy who hosts down. I had a year of not drinking, decided to have a 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 caused. So 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 podcasted worse. I didn't go to the gym the day after, that day or the day after because of that because I felt really bad. I then slept worse. And I was. And I was Oh my God, those three glasses of wine had this hidden domino effect that I must have been living with.

And I thought there was a little bit unfair to him how viral it went, but it hit a nerve because it was hitting this culture, right? It was like an 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? Like, what's the point of all this? 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 a glucose monitor and you're not a diabetic, and then you're like, well, pasta, 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, which will have, 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 that was like from the study and it was like, turns out that doing 12 air squats every 45 minutes is like better for you than like running to whatever it was. I think, I don't want to say I would rather die than do 12 air squats every 45 minutes.

I'm going to run air squat 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. You know, may I posit, 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 so much of this is a part of what you hear and see in certain elite democratic precincts. This isn't, you know, just, I mean, Silicon Valley, obviously has a lovely fascist wing now, but there's still quite a few people who are democratic in some way or another.

but the one thing about Trump, humor is always, even when it has this very nasty edge, it's seen as a kind of joyous thing and he would belt things out and then he would do it, you know, and people listen, you know. Speaking of Trump, Emily Nostbaum, I think, wrote the best piece ever on that when she wrote the New Yorker about Trump really stealing, appropriating, as they say, the humor of sort of Jewish Borchbel comics of a certain period, right? and then using it for his own evil purposes. So I think a lot of the other Trump wannabes try to do this.

Many of them fail, but there is that kind of motion. Trump is essentialist. Trump is in some horrible... He loves a pretty room. He loves a pretty room. He loves a lot about interior design. Loves a good musical. That's right.

Right, right, right. J.D. Vance is not essentialist. Love. Margo Rubio is not essentialist. Trump is. I think you're absolutely right. And 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, Clareis, 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 everything we're confronting from, you know, climate change to inflation to the men. that's going to be left to us when the president leads. And that's not easy to do because we're 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 I want to say in response to that. One is, you know, and this I think is fairly bipartisan, transpartisan, this sort of elite display of discipline. Yeah. It is a positional competition. to show that you are like optimizing your body within an inch of your life and your mind and you're never you know you're how much you're reading and you know and look i'm not saying by any means i'm free of this uh 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 the jokes are too gauche right there's a a million reasons, but I do not find that people are comfortable admitting to a lot of enjoyment. It's 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, that they, you know, they work to, they live to work instead of working to live.

That's part of the sort of the coda. So it's very hard for people to appreciate things that bring you joy because joy itself is 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, write 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, my wife, and I was showing him Andalusia, you know, which is considered the poorest region, or one of the poorest regions of Spain. There's this wonderful, 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 where there's a couple of super rich people with gigantic houses and pools, and then there are people living in conditions that, you know, almost anywhere in the world would be seen as very poor. And the medium of that becomes whatever that number is.

I'm sorry, 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 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. They're three, four, five, six, eight times as rich as we are in almost every other context. Say more on this. So, because, I mean, these numbers are true, right? I've 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 a 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 nickel and dime.

They can't afford a home. So there is this, 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 to economic, but some of it can. can't. When you say people are six, seven, eight, nine 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 a 600-square-foot apartment where you live. You know, could be two, three people are living. Stuff that we in America would, especially outside the larger metro is consider a 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 Spain as an example, but it applies to others. But Spain 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 go over, they're 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 aren't 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 is 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. just have to be a little less xenophobic and you have to figure out the things that really means something to you. Is it having a 4,000 square foot McMansion, half of which you don't even

see? Or is it, you know, sitting around with friends having a botayon, having an open bottle in a square and enjoying their company? So I think this is very important. It's important to the conversation you're having about kids, about rankings about a lot, which is the role that expectations and position play in degrading the quality of life or making it feel so hard to enjoy life, right? 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 nearly to the same degree. We have got in, you know, we want bigger homes. Is 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 far from family and you live in a place you didn't quite intend to live in. 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. Look at all the young people who voted for Mamdani, 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, we can't afford to live on what we're being paid. You know, this is a nightmare.

I think it's the, look, since, you know, since the Thatcher Reagan years, there's been a very, there's been a project to destroy as much of the middle class as possible and to create a small, I mean, obviously that's not how it was stated, but that was the effect of it, I think, was creating an upper middle class and 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 man.

What is your advice on how to be happy? It's not even advice. It's, 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 that simple. But also, not saying no to things that are against the Protestant thrust of this country. So if you're, if it's 4.30 p.m. and the Nogroni 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 groney 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 see the thing you do is be in the present moment. Having read a number of your essays now

and a number of your books, I think you search out beauty. And, I mean, I take much of what you're writing in The Centralist. 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 martini runs. Some of us may not have the same constitutions. But I think this is important. I mean, 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 in the spring and in the summer. Of course.

And, but I don't know, I feel like you're making a real argument about this. I want to hear more about the search for beauty. Oh, well, first of all, I don't know if the search needs to be as systematic as that because one can also create a kind of martini maxing when one is, or suit maxing. The attention to, the orientation towards. You know, this is stuff that, look, a lot of this 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 in 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 have always been women.

But when you go into this very male space of watch collecting, there's all these men who come up and they're like, you know, they're talking about the X-34 movement on the 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 Cassio G-shock of a $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 a question, uh, and be dumb about this. I don't get the watch thing. Help me get it. So, well, and not that one. I'm sure your watch is very nice. The Casio G fit, like, why that one? I made up a name. Oh, you made up a watch. I made it. Help me with the watch thing. Well, look, the watch I'm wearing now

was made in Germany, in Glarsuta, Germany. It's called Alangal zone. It is made by hand. 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 freestyling this beautiful flower, right? And there's a number of workers there.

Can you see it? Yeah. While you tell me about this flower? A number of workers there who make this. And there's a number of workers who create the striping, called Glasuta striping, that creates so that when you bend the watch backwards and forwards, you see a different kind of shimmer across the dial. The back is much more interesting than the front.

Well, exactly. Exactly. Well, 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, you know. 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, oh, what time is it? I take out my phone. And then I'd spend seven hours on Twitter arguing with some fascists. And now I don't have to do that. Oh, it's 120. Done. How did you get into them? You know, it's funny, because I went to a very horrible yeshiva when I was a kid and I was bullied all the time because I was the stinky Russian bear. I wore a giant Shopka, the giant fur hat and

stuff and nobody was friends with me, but my somebody, I guess my grandma, bought me Cassio 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 Kalimka Malimka, the Russian song. Kalimka Malimka Malimka.

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 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 Steele 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 towards beauty here. Because one of the things that you're describing and your love of that watch, which I feel pulled towards,

I found reading The Centralist, again, the rest of you can't buy it yet, but you will be able to assume. November. I found it very inspiring. Oh, thank you. And what it pulled me towards was Kraft. You have an adoration in that book.

across the watch essay, the suits essay, the martini's essay of craft. Yeah. You are 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 that ever lived? No, but I've worked my butt off to craft sentences.

and then to make sure that the sentences 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 great idea. And then you return to it, like, what the hell? This is the ugliest sentence ever written. So you craft it 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. As part of my great fun of writing that martini article, because I hung out with people who make some of the best martinis ever.

In the end, maybe the best martinis are made in Shibuya at something called the zinc bar in Tokyo. But why? I have no idea what. It really, this is one of those things where 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.

They're 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 eel bar 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 the reason that I got to that, that in my head was that, as you would expect with me, I went to Japan. I was like, how do all these things exist? And it turns out they have, you know, in at least many parts, and 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 at, right? They have decided to not maximize

the efficiency of retail space. They have 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 a 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 happier.

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 I agree 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 about 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 that has an excellent treatment. I'm trying to fix that, man. I'm working on it.

Okay. Please, please do, because I love high-speed rail. But my friends in Japan have told me several things, first of all, one is that in Japanese culture, craftsmanship and small store craftsmanship in a smaller scale has always been viewed as even higher than the merchant.

In many other societies, the merchant classes, you know, is above the craftspeople, the craft people and artisans are seen as being bought. below that. So you want policies that sustain this kind of thing, right? There's just this 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 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 part because it's not that many people can have them. If the watch you had was mass produced and everywhere, you know, it might be no less beautiful in some way, but it would not be rare, right? Scarcity creates meaning in 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 its relationship is a positional good in some ways we love it because there's not that many of it. And if 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, you know. 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 that is absolute artistry. You can walk around from Elmhurst to Astoria. 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 marvel at it. Last time I walked down Roosevelt Avenue on a weekend it was half the people

because this was when ICE was especially prevalent. So you could see how we're trying, you know, this administration is trying to destroy beauty, the beauty of the fact that so many of us are from different places and create things that are beautiful but are not 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 do they do when 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 is not meant to be a self-help book. I know you're not presenting yourself here as a guru. But let's say if somebody who reads it or is listening to this and thinking, yeah, I don't actually seek out that much

beauty in my life. You don't have a lot of money. You don't have like you're not able to go traveling to the great capitals of the world. But would you tell a student in one of 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'd think that, for example, we're talking about watches, you'd 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. If, you know, 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 designed for the car in the parking lot, Even those have incredible moments of beauty. I was just in Uzbekistan, one of the poorest countries in the world. I've never seen cities that beautiful.

Bukhara and Samarkand and Chiva. These are works of magnificent. Magnificence. To pass through them, wow. What an honor it is to be alive in the world and see things like that. I think it's a good place to end. Always our final question. What are the three books?

You're not going to amend to the audience. So I'm going to start with a book by one of my students. I love my students. Such good work. Columbia graduate a couple years ago. The book is called Men Like Ours. Her name is Bindu Banzinath. I hope I pronounced that correctly.

Set in New Jersey. I love anything said in New Jersey. Talk about dystopia, right? That is the best. Really dark humor, but as dark as it is funny. I can't say enough about it. A second book was coming out, I think, in August, and that's by my mentor, Changre Lee, the wonderful Korean American writer. A Tender Age, I think, is the name of the book.

There was an excerpt in the New Yorker. This, I think, is his most memoiristic novel. I think a lot of his own background goes into this. He meant so much to me, 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. And the third book is Julia Joffi's motherland, which was a National Book Awards finalist, an old friend of mine, also Soviet-born, Moscow to my Leningrad. And it's a book about what the Soviet Union was ostensibly this feminist progressive society.

But guess what? It treated women like shit. This book really helped me understand a lot of my own background and also about how what the Soviet Union did to people on every level 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 Yuzrakan shows produced by Annie Galvin, fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Mary Marge Locker.

Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gild. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassione, Roland Hu, Marina King, Jack McCordick, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kellebec,

and Jan Kobel. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times pending audio is Annie Rose Strasser.