Finding Beauty in a Modern World

This podcast is supported by Better Help. Summer can feel like a sprint. Kids home, trips to plan, routines flipped upside down. It's easy to slip into survival mode, just trying to get through it Then suddenly it's over and you're wishing you enjoyed the days just a little bit more Therapy can help you slow down and actually be present for the moments that matter For better Hel, you can connect with a licensed therapist from anywhere on your schedule Don't just survive this summer Thrive betteretterhelp d. com slash New York Times Before we begin today's show, we're going to be doing an As me Anthing episode quite soon So if you have any questions, email us at Ezraclin Show at NYTimes. com with the headline AMA past six months, I keep telling people. We are living in super sad trrue love story And sometimes they'll say to me, What was superad Tue loveoestory? What do you mean Super' a true love story if for some terrible reason you don't know. is a twenty ten book by Go Steingart And I think more than any other book Did 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 A mixst 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, Erry Steinard, predicted all this, how he had known what it was going to feel like well into the future of when he was writing Gerry Steer off has written a number of wonderful novels, including the Russian deebutant'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 has reclent show at nYimes. com Gry Steinger, welcome to the show. Great to be here, longtime 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 true 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 Aparat which Wherever they go, it constantly ranks them. But you know, the sort of the germ of super Sat true love story is that the main character Leny Abramov will walk into a bar or a restaurant and immediately, he is ranked as, say the twenty third 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 polls that showcase your credit for, you know, you can tell them. Gary has six hundred out of eight hundred points in credit. He needs to save more So even on that level, the society is so intrusive that it tells you you need to save more, some people need to spend more, just constantly wants to keep people in equilibrium womomen 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, etcera. 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 GenX, which is this interesting generation, that's kind of a bridge between the analog and the digital worlds. and Eunice is ten fifteen 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 they live in two different worlds The thing that made me start thinking a lot about Super Sad Tue loveove story It's been the omnipresence of Brian Johnson, the longevity influencer, Clavicular, the Lxmaxer 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 a guy who wrote a book about all this as the future at one point How does this look to you? You know, the book was written, about mid aughts, I would say, it came out in twenty ten. As I was writing, I was thinking, yeah, this future might be possible in I don't know, thirty years. Usually when people are writing speculative fiction, they give themselves that thirty year corridor. but it happened, I don't know, ten years later, fourteen, fifteen years later There's an invasion of Venezuela in this book. Oh yeah, there is an invasion of Venezuela in the book. Venezuela, Israel is controlled by a Smotrich like party It called Scurity state Scurity 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 a very competitive society. And in this book, there's a thing called Ratee plus teechnology, 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 Innet 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 I actually had 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 the new technology that I was being exposed to the Zuckerberg technology was doing to me a little bit, you know, because I would U 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 there 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 who am I now? You know, I'm just Garia in the block on the block, I don't have, you know, that other fell into that trap so quickly 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 one hundred percent new everince civilization began. There was, you know, the head cavemen and the lower cavemen and blah, blah, blah, So we know that there's always been a hierarchy, but the 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, Styison Highchool, which was all full of immigrant kids like myself. I'm from Soviet Union.ids were Soviet Union, East Asia, South Asia, et cetera. And I to this day, eighty six point eight nine four was my average at Stison. and I remember it. You know, this is the shocking thing to the thousandth decimal point And that I think prepared me in some ways, Stevenon prepared me for this world in which every single metric is constantly deployed against you, I would say, becausecause none of these people are enjoying life. you know, when you look at all these men who are know measuring their cheekbone to the millimeter, this isn't a good way to live. So this to me,' the other interesting thing about the book and it also comes up in your book of essays It is this simultaneous obsession with living forever without enjoying life, right? And what I always find so fascinating about when I watched Brian Johnson, and I don't need to be consonsulting anybody's life decisions here. I don't know if I was I don't want to live like that Your life goal is to drive down your heart rate The reason is because the lower 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 constantly have this level of self examination, this 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 is important to me because She really does feel like my other half. Biohacker Brian Johnson recently boasted about his girlfriend's top one percent vagina spparking interest in at home vaginal microbiome tests. Yes, gototta get vaginal biome. Clavicular who it's like you've divorced getting hot from the point of getting hot.? He talks about how you can have a girlfriend given life he leads. He is not fertile. Whyy are you in fertile right now So it's just like a negative feedback loop when you're you know not needing to produce tesoser anymore because your body realizes okay we're getting it from an ex. You're not producing any toser naturally. No None. no Let' not take it to your te, 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 U taking testosterone to look good, to attract a mate, But at the same time,, taking all this testosterone causes shrunkenesticles, which probably will not allow you to propagate. So you 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 'cause he's just really funny unintentionally so How important is it to you to also make the girl have an orgasm. Not important 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 So It hurt. Well That'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, a given woman is way more important for him than actually having sex with the woman. with the ranking aboveanking moging the ranking. But you know and so it's like Wasn't sex supposed to be enjoyable? especially when you're twenty one? 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 twenty four hours, this is kind of it. You know, I'll give you another example, which is a little strange, but so I've beenaching created wrriting a Columbia for about twenty years now. And I've noticed the way and my students are wonderful, they write wonderfully, the craftsmanship keeps getting better and better Things they'd write about have changed so drastically, you know? twenty years ago in the odds, there was this kind of John Saver bisexual energy going on where Explain what a John Shever bisexual energy is can't you can't move that fast. Sorry, well, you know, the Chver updke Roth era, and I know that skew is very masculine, right? There was you know, people wrote about sex nonstop. I mentioned Shver because at least he had a lot of, you know, he was bisexual himself and there was an appreciation both hetero and homosexuality. 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 haveitt out, 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 Eesssentialist, which is all about my love of pleure but in millions of contxts, 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, done, check, check, check. We are the best we want. And that's that. So what were 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 know we're going to be living in utopia twenty years The mood is the vibes, as they say, you know, they're low key, horrible It's like we've separate ourselves so much from the possibility of joy that to make it the subject of a book or of a story seems almost privileged. you don't want to touch that anymore. And I'm not saying that, you know, the Cheewver Updite crew didn't write in a solobistic 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, driving force to me is neurosis people being anxious, being unsure, being self loathing I find it very, very, very depressing. Like when you describe that, right? It does like mid late mid twentieth century maail writing was very horny. Yeah And like twenty twenty's writing is very nervous. Yeah Yeah, my students called this the Sad Girl novel. And there haveve been some amazing Sad Girl novels. The year of rest and relaxation is probably T 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 I teach Port noise complaints, you know And that is obviously all it's all said in a psychiatrist's office. It's this neurotic horny Jew, like they don't make them anymore, right And he's just you 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, suuper sad is the word sad is the second part of the second word in the title, but I hope that Lenny Yeah when he finds the love of his wife, 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 iss there at least for a while. There's a character in suuperety love story who I think is interesting for this conversation, which is Joshy, Lenny's boss. Tell me a bit about Joshy So Joshy is, let's see, how old is Joshu? Well, we don't even know how old Josh is. He could be in his eighties, but it doesn't matter because he is using every kind of anti aging technique possible Josh does not want to die. 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 know 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 a hundred percent, but so many of the ones I've met have had really Unremarkably awful childhoods. And there's a need to somehow create the perfect life and live that life. And that life is always The opposite the rear view mirror, I don't know, Al 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 immigrated 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 government trees for a time, you know And my parents and other Russians would say, Anad Besits 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 into and to not die is one of those almost Protestant kind of extension of everything and striving. Why should the striving ever end? Well, 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 Sab And that feels like a fundamental thing in modern life is everybody's looking for it in the screen And you have one of the fun phhillips of the book is that talking to other people is called verbaling 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.es. Corporations have their own incentives and their own things they're 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 it said, you know, Syphus' life would have been much better if every time he got the rock to the top. He got some points And if you could then like exchange those points for stickers. you stickers that you could put on the rock, right Yeah. Yeah, that'd be great. Oh my God. Now that is that is really, really smart. But so there is this real I mean, the way you talk about Eo old pasta,'s fundamentally erotic. Soft in a bar I'll see like people who are together. They're like on some kind of date, a married couple or a nonarri couple. I don't know, and they're both looking at the phones and is something about a very unfulfilling but very compulsive world ing. I think is an enemy of enjoyment. There's a lot in there. So verbling is very hard for members of younger generations. I know COVID messed them up as well. Obviously people in generation alpha, my son's generation It didn't help obviously, but I think verbling is just well, it is what it is. Letting sounds come out of your mouth as communication is very hard for people to do, much harder than obviously sending emojis or you know shortened text messages, et cetera, stuff like that. And I think it's interesting when you look at someone Wh 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 is. U ye, 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, you attract women by verbling with them and saying interesting things, being an interesting human being, listening to them and then getting into conversations with them, having any kind of charisma that allows you to actually interact with somebody of the opposite or the same sex, whatever your preference is 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 gonna it's hammer time. We're going to get thatmmer 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 Andreesen talking about how he doesn't want to have interiority. He 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 it's 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. Ive just've found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past., it's a real problem and it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home And I've been trying to think on this right? because I mean these are smart people, right? And do think it is in some ways a 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. And Then you go all the way to 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 Bid. 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 But I would say that you can't look at people like Musk and not think of Neurod divergence Also neurodivergence combined with terrible parenting Now you have somebody like Elonright, who obviously proclaims to be neurodivergent, who was raised by possibly the worst father this side of Woody Alla. I mean, so you have someone who obviously cannot deal with somebody with special needs and at the same time somebody who possesses all of the gifts that those special needs in the case of neurodivergence give them I think when I was, I don't know, five or six or something thought I was insane. Why'd you think you were intane because it's clear that other people do not theirir mind wasn't exploding with ideas all the time They weren't expressing it. They weren't talking about at 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. It's just strange It was like and strange. That was my conclusion. That strange So you have this strange combination where 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 market reasons of the world, because I think what they might say on your Riff on La Musk there is And Musk hates his father to show that here. But listen, It created the greatest industrialist of our age, the richest man in the world, a guy who was 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 anything 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 is I't have the Last twenty six, twenty five years, thirty years, have they been really that great? in terms of just life T let me bring it 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 thirty 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 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, you know abolutely. it helps. H's a big de, man. Do you actuallyer' that big a deal? 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 th. bothoth profit and dopamine. Let me say this, when I started writing Super S The odts, mid ots 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 The moment I got on it, I thought this was the germ of SuperSet. I thought, this technology is going to destroy everything. Why did you think that Because I knew, look, when you writer or an artist, you are a part of a narcissist partartly at least at a narcissist because What did you do this for? You don't just do this. There was a great 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 Pes Stol 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 just, like I said, small furry immigrant strange sense of self I wanted people to read my books and say, o, 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., more democracy than ever, right? Everyone now is whatever, is Aristotle or everyone will express themselves I lived for about half a year a 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 hard for me to start reading and finishing a book. What's 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 vulcan 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 Brorick has said, who's an interternet writer. He talks about it as a porn theory of the internet. that all content now, early slot of content on places like TikTok and Instagram What it's doing is creating an instant surge of sensation, right? I see this even when we're creating like clips from the show. We need it to make you feel something immediately.. It's like the way like porn evolved on the internet, But now it's like you know people like know, pulling apart cheese sandwiches and right Like you gott to feel angry or curious or hungry or something immediately Yeah and I I mean, you're again, like writing this some time ago. There's a section in the book. where Blenny is reading from a the unbearable lightness of being to Eunice and Billon Candera And he write or he says he writes in the book I felt that Candera had put too many words around the fetish for her to gain what her generation required from any form of content A ready surge of excitement very least on satisfaction I mean, now you hear everybody talking about how like kids can't follow a long book anymore, everything's too long. I mean, that's all really there in that book. So somebody writes books, someomebody who could have thought about this a lot How do you think about What it is doing to us as a country, as a collective, as a world, when we get Tined to expect things we see will immediately create a reaction, a sensation.solutely. As opposed something we have to follow along and interpret ourselves. I have now started realized that if I post something on Instagram Stangard 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 Yk New Yorker article about Ukraine. Ukraine obviously is a subject that I'm very involved with You couldn't every three five minutes. Well who liked that? Oh, Oh look at that This person never liked me, but I guess they like me. Oh, someone nirsty like 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 something like forty seven 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 what do people in California call it or in Silicon Valley call it the end user experience? like 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' like, Ohh yeah, right? I' got to get back to this There's an interesting tension around that in the book because one of the main characters is Eunice, who is a much younger partner of Lenny And Money is a writer and a reader and he has actual physical books, which is a bit of a gache thing to have in that world and they smell bad it's all musty. And you know, not to spoill too much of any of the book, but But at the end when some of their communication with each other has been discovered by others It's Eunice who is considered like the great writer and she is Internet adult, everybody is texting on a service called Global Teeenens, 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 want to read their journal entries.ight And you can I mean, those get released a lot. Oh my God that's half of literure. 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 hopefully listeners won't mind, but it's this idea, you know when we start teaching workshops. 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 is 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 Yhmel, you know, you can't you can't look away from that And yeah, Lenny's voice, Lenny is almost in some ways a kind of he thinks of himself as being very literary. He's actually not a writer per se, you know, but he thinks of himselfves as journaling a lot. And so 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 Brooklyine mass reader, let's say U whereereas Eunice is what I loved about writing Eunice was that Eunice was wrote in this completely global teenss way, everything she's buying this, she's buying that, she's buying clothes. 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 I gave my brother a New York Times subscription. She sent me a year long subscription so I have access to all the games. We'll do wordle, mini, spelling be. It has given us a personal connection. We exchange articles. and so having read the same article, we can discuss it, the coverage, the options, it's not just news. such a diversified gift. I was really excited to give him the New York Times cooking subscription so that we could share recipes. And we even just shared a recipe the other day The New York Times contributes to our quality time together. You have all of that information at your fingertips. It enriches our relationship, broadening our horizons. It was such a cool and thoughtful gift. We're reading the same stuff. We're making the same food We're on the same page Connect even more with someone you care about Learn more about giving a New York Times subscription as a gift at nYtimes d. com slash gift One of the things going back to the subject of clavicular, is I find to be a very tragic figure. Itesn't seem happy to me Like I just saw pictures of him after getting a Rhinoplastyia ns Job, business seemed fine to me before And he just like is miserable and they're in a wheelchair and' like, you know, kind of like small legs right out and people 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 and which this has become 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 people with the 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? L and 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 in. 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 people around them think. Yeah. You know, since I' met GenX, 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. reallyally We're a small village onto ourselves. It was just Wonderful we get into fights, yes, and for 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 ly mentally ill 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 carnalesque 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 Ooded, you know, I don't think even his followers would care, they'd be like, okay, that that was interesting. you know, I'm I'm going to find someone else who beats you know his nose with a hammer or whatever. That's interesting in a very grim way to put it. L that these relationships that they feel real, but they're not real. They're not real They're not really. And again, people say, well, Gary, you know, orr these the Harrowz, these industrialists will say, but Gry 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. bedriding, etca. 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 develop development. I don't even know what you call it anymore The opposite of the global south, the global North, nobody'sving ks 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. noobody's having kids there. If they do it's one kid, I say this is also with someone with one kid, but you know, nobody's replicating themselves in those societies. tell me what you see when you're there from that perspective. becauseow 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 society that is now If trends continue, it will shrink geometrically. shrink very, very, very fast. What's it like It's amazing because well, first of all, if you're a If you're into technology, even if you're like a dystopian, u 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 it never ends E's the internet of things. I remember I did a piece for Smithsonian I went to visit, you know, Korea One of the ways they advance is that the government decides, oh, now we're going to do this. So o, 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 I was there it was like, oh, we're going to take over robotics, obviously, robotics a thing. So I went to this way outside of Seoul and I went to this place where they were creating Bll robots. Bll robots Uh this bull, you know, you there with a red Hanky and this bull would charge you and they're like, yes, we're trying to corner the Torreador market in Spain because people don't want real bulls to die anymore, you know, So we're developing Tyad door bulls and this book look 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 and it was stupor and then talk about How o 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.. The metrics are even more finely attuned than they are in America. and then you But when you're also working eighty 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 too I think there's a really interesting way this actually connects to rankings What is fascinating about ility rates around the world is that people tend to have a lot of kids with simes they' very, very rich. but also when they're quite poor then in the middle here it's expensive kits And it's not that that's wrong But it has to do with the posositional competition of having kids when you are in richer countries in particular.ight And I mean, obviously there's 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 everybody's like, it's too expensive to have kids. And it's not that that's fake, it's true 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 justust 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 wantna call it the upper middle class, the coastal elites, whatever you want to call it. So the competition is breathtaking for just a little smidgeon of the pie, God bless Glavicular, as an ecom agent, he's figured out his own path forward. He's making one point two million or something a year by you know, doing this complete horssehit 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 off that. People are trying to and you were talking about this earlier,re trying to sort of commodify their own sense of grief. There's like grief maxing now where people talk on know about all the grief that they've suffered, which I guess is called a novel, But now it's also a TikTok. But again, these kids that I'm looking at like, yeah, what happens to them? I know parents who are decka 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 curiculular Cbiculars down the line I find this very frightening. I have a first grader and another one who'll be in kindergarten next year 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 my son like studying his Pokemon cardbinder every morning. which it's not for anything. 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 will 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 Sred of so much of the joy being drained out of their life One thing I can suggest is Mind when your kid develops a real love, especially a love of something creative My son loves composition, musical composition, looves it and he's going to a school next year, you know during the weekend that will you know prep him for if he wants a career as a composer or somay. 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 lass, but he's humming to himself This podcast is supported by NertTech ODT Remedipant. We know you didn't ask for an interruption, but my brain doesn't wait for the right moment to interrupt either. It just barges in, takes your time and throws everything off. So when migraine takes your time, take NERTEc. It's for the acute treatment of migraine with or without aura in adults. NRTEc can provide pain relief in two hours, which can last up to two days. Ask your healthcare provider if NRTEc is right for you because your time is for you, not migraine Don't takeake if allergic to NerRTech ODT. Allergic reactions can occur even days after use. Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue or throat. High blood pressure and Rino syyndrome can occur. Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, coolness, pain, or color changes in fingers and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call one eight thirty three For NRech, or visit Nertech. comot All right, back to your podcast. This is Maurice Chima, the host of a new podcast from Serial Productions, The Marshall Project, and the New York Times Last year I spent three months embedded with a Capital defense team. Their client had been on death row for more than thirty years, and now his execution date had been set I followed along as the lawyers tried to prove something nobody had successfully done in three decades that one of Texas's most notorious serial killers was actually innocent For the last twelve weeks, listen wherever you get your podcasts I's this is like an interesting bridge to this book of esses you have coming up called the Sensualist and You know, you can 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 it It is a radical act to in a bodily physical way Just enjoy this life So first thing, what is centualism to you? Well, first of all, it's not even just about the census, It is in a more Buddhist or meditative way if you want to take it that way, it is enjoying what's happening. Thank you for pandering. I am 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 mansered roofs of some of these buildings. Now I spend half my year in New York. I forgot all about these mansered roofs. I'm like, damn someomebody does 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 of years ago I read Michael Kimelman his book called The Intimate City and he says The beauty of New York is the juxtaposition of this with that. Yes, this would that. this would That like allowed me to see the beauty of New Yor. 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 the senses? Yes, this is sight, which is probably the most boring sense. But I am you if you had to rank them, if I had to rank them?, it's the most obvious one. But you know recently I got a Dachshund, which is the world's best dog, clearly. and there's giant sausage completely out of control. Bernie is his name. I dedicate the centualist to Bernie, my furry sensualist because he is a very sensual dog And his great sense of smell, obviously. So he will walk down the street and there's a corner where every dog pees on. and he approaches it like a Tmudic scholar, you know, And he he sniffs here, he sniffs there. Yes, Rocko was here at twelve thirty. That's right, That's right. Let's remember that. you know, He loves and his tail is wagging away. He's just enjoying the hell out of life. He enjoys this more than, he loves food obviously ood So we all have this part in us that is able to enjoy things on this crazy level It 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. The more and the more I live also I find in some ways this sense of ambition that You know, that younger people have diminishes in some good ways. As I sort of see what the rest of my life will look like, I'm fine with it. Maybe good things will happen, mayaybe 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 centals is that Ily two of my most sensual friends have died recently, and it was remarkably sad obviously to watch them die of cancer in the early fifties in my generation. incredibly sad 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 verbing, 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 it still beats not having cancer, I think and hitting yourself with a hammer to create the sense that you're meeting some metrics I think the The interesting thing you're doing in that in across E saes, which are about martinis and suits and, you know, all kinds of things. Cappeeveras. I love Caparas. Yeah, Cappearas,'d sayir? Well, I'm trying to be a little more Latin Ameran given that they mostly live in. Capiara in Brazil. there you go. Capara. There is something about the way Elite culture. Faunts the repression of enjoyment. I saw there was this clip that had gone viral the other day from the guy host I was CEO. I had a year of not drinking, decided tod have a drink again It ruined three days of my life I had a couple of glasses of wine D't get drun It ruined three days of my life because of the domino effect it caused. it meant that I got worse sleep that night. ate more poorly the next day because my dopamine system or whatever, the cortisol system was all messed.ill. 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 like, oh my God those three glasses of wine had this hidden domino effect that I must have been living with. And I thought this 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? what's the point of all is AI can already do a bunch of the things we can do? Like if we're not going to be here and Enjoy music, ennjoy drink, enjoy great food, right? If you're going to endlessly be having like a glucose monitor and you're not a diabetic and then they're like, well Pasta really spikes my glucose And see that And like this is what like the people I mean, you listen to some of the Bodcasts 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 I was like It turns out that doing twelve air squats every forty five minutes is like better for you than like running to whatever it was. It like I don't want to say I would rather die than do twelve air squats. I 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. None of this is the 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 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 And he would bt things out and then he would dinner you know, and People people listened, you know Speaking of Trump, Emily Nsbam, I think wrote the best piece ever on that when she were in the New York or about Trump really feeling appropriating, as they say, the humor of sort of Jewish Borsche belelt comics of a certain period, right? And then using it for his own evil purposes. So I think a lot of the other Trump wannabees try to do this. manyany of them fail, but there is that kind of motion. Trump is essentualist. Trump is in some horrible He loves a pretty room He loves it pretty thinkinks a lot about interior design Love Love's a good musical Right, right, right. J. Vance is not essentialist. Largo Rubio iss not essentialist. Right. Trump 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 Laris 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 evinince not just the unhappiness of what everything we're confronting from climate change to inflation to the mess that's going to be left to us when the president leads. And that's not easy to do because we're so programmed 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, the things that we love, the parts of community that make life livable There's a lot ofstand response to that. One is you know, and this, I think is fairly bipartisan, transpartisan, the sort of elite display of discipline. Yeah It is a positional competition to show you are like optimizing your body within an inch of your life and your mind and you're never, you how much you're reading and you', you, and look, I'm not saying by any means, I'm free of this U 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 centered. the jokes are too gauche, right. There's like a million reasons. I do not find that people are comortable admitting to a lot of enjoyment. The discourse is critical, not appreciative 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 in that you know they work they live to work instead of working to live. That's part of the sort of the cota. So it's very hard for people to appreciate things that are I bring you joy because joy itself is kind of suspect. Well, do that on your own time. Don't talk about that. J leave the joy out of there, you know. I think people miss the idea of being able to talk, in my case, write about the things that I love, you know. 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 get 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 Andaluta, you know, this 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 podcast of yours where we were talking about, you how Mississippi is richer than almost every European state Well, I have spent time in Mississippi, 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 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 sexs 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 in Europe in this country 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. I mean Everything's inccredibly expensive. The prices are going up, they feel nicle and dye, 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 economic, but some of it can't When you say people are six and an eight, nine times richer in these places than we are, despite the differential. Why? Well look For example, If you're living in southern Europe, you could be very content with six hundred square foot apartment where you live You know, could be two or three people are living. stuff that we in America would, especially outside the larger metroros, 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 get if they you go over their deductible on a horrible medical bill, that they're not completely bankrupt All this stuff doesn't exist in a place like Spain. That's where the wealth is. The wealth is being taxed at a different rate. obbviously 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. You just have to be a little less enophobic and you have to figure out the things that really mean something to you. Is it having a four thousand square foot McMansion half of which you don't even see? Or is it know sitting around with friends, having a boutuillon, having an open bottle in a square and enjoying their company? So I think this is very important and it's important of the conversation we're having about kids about rankings a lot which is the role that expectations and positional competitions play in U degrading quality of life or making it feel so hard to enjoy life. because We do buy more. We have more air conditioning here I mean, a lot of people die in Europe every year because of heat doesn't happen here nearly to the same degree. U we have got in, you know, we want bigger homes in much of the country we want cars, right New York is a little bit unusual in that. But the way in which like the treadmill of what it just the trappings of a good life are. And then you look around and you're unhappy and you're atomized and you're, you know, far from family and You live in a place you didn't quite intend to live in. And it is, I think this feeling and I think it's quite pooisonous. that you did everything right And this wasn't how you were told it would be or feel. And like there's never a restesting space I mean lookook at all the young people who voted for Mam Dani,, who used it I think in part also as a protest vote against the fact that here we are, professionals in New York and we can't afford to live on what we're being paid. this is a nightmare. I think it's look you since the Thater Reagan years, there 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 obly people who are living in some degree of precarity. 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 amm 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 at a man. What is your advice on how to be happy It's not even advices 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 moments 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 four thirty PM in Negrroni Beckenss 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 necroni and you sip it. someomebody comes up and talks to you. You talk back. You verbal at them first, maybe, in a non aggressive way. You do all these, I can't believe I'm even giving this as advice. This is the thing you do is be in the present moment, having read a number of your essays now and a number of your books I think you search out beauty And I mean, I think 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. 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 this in 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 like I could just say 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 count 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 tryrying 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 And but I don I feel like you'reaking a real argum 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 attion to orientation towards. You know, this is stuff that look, a lot of the stuff also, I would say that even some of these hobbies, I started collecting watches, for example, only in twenty sixteen because I knew Trump was going to win the election that I needed something to take my mind off things. Now, many people find, for example, that Sorts allow 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 they're talking about the X thirty four movement on the Rolex SFG three reference. And what they're really saying is, I'm lonely and I'm just so happy that I can hang out with seven or eight other men who share this affliction. It's not this isn't even about money. Some people will bring their casio G shock up ty dollarars watch, but it's very specific fifty eight dollars watch. It 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 because I'm going to actually ask a question and be dumb about this I don't get to watch thing Help me get it. So and not that one. I'm sure your watch is very nice. The Casio G fit, like why that one? I made up a made up a watch. I made made I made help me with the watch thing? Well, look, the watch I'm wearing now was made in Germany in Glasuta, Germany, it's called Alangl Zon 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 ours Day is even sitting there and freestyling this beautiful flower. And there's a number of workers there yet. Yeah. Why why 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 Glacuta striping that creates so that when you When you bend the watch backwards and forwards, you see a different kind of shimmer across the dial The back is much more interesting than the front. Well exactly. exxactly. Well that's part of 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 There's this seret 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 this 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 It keeps me from using my phone Because one of the biggest things I would take out my all what time is it. I'd 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 one hundred and twenty. doneone. How did you get into them You know funny becausecause 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 shopgun, this giant fur hat and stuff and nobody was friends with me, but somebody grandma boughtght me a casio melody alarm watch and it played all songs from around the world. This is when Japan was very ascended and created technology nobody else could. And one of the songs was Kalim Kamalinka, the Russian song Kalimal. 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 principal's office and say Booychick steal watch. And the principal made the bully give it back. so Also, this is one of the other things that happens, this is 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. interestnteresting 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 in your love of that watch which I feel pulled towards. I found reading the centralist Ag, the rest of you can't buy EP will be able to soon in November. I found it very inspiring. you And what it pulled me towards was craft. You have an adoration in that book ross the watch essay, the suits essay, the Martini's essay of You are you are drawn to human beings. Yeah. doing beautiful things that have taken them a lot of work to do at that level. and a lot of training too And a lot of training.. Tell me about that I am I the greatest writer there ever lived? No. But I've worked my butt off to senses and then to make sure that the senses are crafted into paragraphs. This is You know, there's the original fun of writing a sentence or a paragraph. Oh, look at me. I got this great idea and then you return to it and you're 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 to do this, but you don't have to be a writer or even an artist. you know, you can be somebody who crafts, who designs a beautiful part of a watch movement. You could be an incredible mixologist. Part of my great fun of buying that martini art because I hung out with people who make some of the best martinis ever. I 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 EL 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 in my head was that as you would expect with me, I went to Japan like Prob these things exist and it turns out they have you know, and at least many parts in Tokyo is one of them They have a public policy structure. that just makes it quite affordable to have shops restaurants that not that many people are going to shop or at. right? They have decided Do not maximize the efficiency of retail space, they've decided to allow people to do a 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 us an interesting speech at a commencement about you 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 gettingetting one place to another. These are 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 The most beautiful things are not going be efficient Yes, But look, this is funny. And I agree one hundred percent that this is part a policy thing, but look, we also suck at things that are super efficient that we should have, For example, high speed rail. You know,'ll talk about Japan, we'll also talkking 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. I'm try to fix that, man, I'm working on itlease please do because I love high speed rail My friends in Japan have told me of several things firstirst of all. One is that in Japanese culture, craftsmanship, and small store craftsmanship on a smaller scale has always been viewed as even higher than the merchant. In many other societies, the merchant class is above the craftsople, The craftspeople and artisans are seen as being 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 are done well And it says, well, we're going to do eight million examples of that. And then of course it's not going it's not going to be that 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 probably because not that many people can have them. if The watch you had was mass produced and everywhere. you know 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 up 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 is absolute artistry. You can walk around from Elmhurst to storyia. 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 You're so loving. You just You marvel at it. Last time I walked down Roosevelalt Avenue on a weekend there was half the people because this was when ice was especially prevalent. So you could see how We're trying 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've found is through my very long research with very, very wealthy people. These are some of the least happy people I know B far everyvery 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 ten million dollars stakakes 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 Sentials is not meant to be a self help book I know you're not presenting yourself as a girl But let's say you' somebody who reads it oristening to this and thinking Yeah, I don't actually take out that much beauty in my life You don't have a lot of money. You don't have like you're, you know able to go traveling to the great capitals of the world What do you tell a student in one of your classes wouldould 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 talk about watches Youd 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, if we all get robbed, it'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