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

26:23But 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 Superset. I thought, this technology is going to destroy everything. Why did you think that? Yeah. Because I knew, look, when you're a writer or an artist, you are a part of a narcissist, right? 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.

26:55It was called 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. 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, a year more on those platforms.

27:33And 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. 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.

28:12I'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, 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 porn evolved on the internet. But now it's like people pulling apart cheese sandwiches. You've got to feel angry or curious or hungry or something immediately. And I mean, you're, again, writing this some time ago.

28:50There's a section in the book where Lenny is reading from The Unbearable Lightness of Being to Eunice. A book by Milan Kundera. And you write, or he says, he writes in the book, I felt that Kundera had put too many words around the fetish for her to gain what our generation required from any form of content. A ready surge of excitement, a temporary lease on satisfaction. I mean, now you hear everybody talking about how 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, somebody has thought about this a lot. How do you think about what it is doing to us as a country, as a collective, as a world, when we get sort of trained to expect that the things we see will immediately create a reaction, a sensation.

29:40Oh, 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 Steingart, 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 like me.

30:16Oh, Salvatore Nershti 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, 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 % 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 do people in California call it, or in Silicon Valley call it the end-user experience? It's like, for me, because I hope I write funny, I think the humor is the thing that gives you that little hit.

30:54It 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, will 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 the release is a plume of smoke or something. It's like, oh, yeah, right, right. I got to get back to it. There's an interesting tension around that in the book because one of the other main characters is Eunice, who is a much younger partner of Lenny. And Lenny is a writer and a reader, and he has actual physical books, which is a bit of a gauche thing to have in that world, and they smell bad, and they smell musty.

31:31And not to spoil 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 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.

32:08And you can, I mean, those get released a lot. 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 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.

32:46They 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 a kind of, he thinks of himself as being very literary. He's actually not a writer per se, you know, but he thinks of himself as journaling a lot. And so he, you know, a lot of what he writes is very much meant for a certain kind of, it's meant for a certain kind of Brooklyn reader or 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 teens way, everything, she's buying this, she's buying that, she's buying clothes.

33:27She 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.

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34:48It 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.com slash gift.

35:12One of the things, going back to the subject of clavicular, is I find him to be a very tragic figure. doesn't seem happy to me like i just saw pictures of him uh after getting a rhinoplasty a nose job his nose 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 are out and people are making fun of them on the internet 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 i 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?

36:22Like an important and that they are 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.

36:55We really were a small village onto ourselves. It was just wonderful that we get 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 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 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 carnivalesque atmosphere.

37:40Look, 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'd, 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, I'm going to find someone else who beats his, you know, his nose with a hammer or whatever. That's interesting and a very grim way to put it, like that 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 uh to destroy the sense of people hanging out in your in your bar talking to each other rubbing elbows hitting on each other if you wait till AI enters the chat 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 bed rotting, etc.

38:45So 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 a 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. Nobody'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.

39:22Tell me what you see when you're there from that perspective, because the low fertility rate is happening in the background there of Super Sad. Yes. And it's 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. What's it like? It's amazing because, well, first of all, if you're into technology, even if you like a dystopian version of that, it's all technology all the time. There's a wastebasket that says it's honored to accept your waste. I mean, it just never ends.

39:56Everything's the internet of things. I remember I did a piece for Smithsonian. I went to visit Korea. One of the ways they advance 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 a 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.

40:35And they're like, yes, we're trying to corner the Toreador market in Spain because people don't want real bulls to die anymore. You know, so we're developing these Toreador bulls and this bull looked 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 into a stupor and then talk about how, oh, at work, I'm on the B team.

41:09I 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. 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.

41:49And then in the middle 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 everybody's 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.

42:25We've made having kids very, very expensive. We've also made it to 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.

42:59And so the competition is breathtaking for just a little smidgen of the pie, you know. God bless Clavicular. As an economic agent, he's figured out his own path forward. He's making 1.2 million or something a year by, you know, 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 off that. People are trying to, and you were talking about this earlier, trying to sort of commodify their own sense of grief.

43:33There's like grief maxing now where people talk on, you know, about all the grief that they've suffered, which I guess is called a novel, but right. But now it's also a TikTok. So, but again, these kids that I'm looking at, like, yeah, what happens to them? I know parents who are decamillionaires, centimillionaires, 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 claviculars down the line. I find this very frightening. I have a first grader and another one who'll be in kindergarten next year.

44:11And 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 look at my son 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 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 a real love, especially a love of something creative.

44:52my son loves composition musical composition loves it and he's going to school next year you know during the weekend that will you know prep him for if he wants a career as a composer someday I don't know maybe I will do that too but he loves it and this I think you know he's sitting there in a class he may like the class he may not like the class but he's humming to himself

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46:37I think 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 could see this in some of your characters over the years. It feels to me that one of the arguments you've quietly been making and then making more loudly in your nonfiction is that it is a radical act to, in a bodily, physical way, just enjoy this life. So first thing, what is sensualism to you? Well, first of all, it's not even just about the senses. It is in a more Buddhist or meditative way, if you want to take it that way. It is enjoying what's happening in the present moment.

47:13I am. 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 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 mansard roofs. So I'm like, damn, somebody did something right architecturally. New York is such a hodgepodge of good and bad architecture.

47:50Maybe 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 Kimmelman, his book called The Intimate City. And he says, the beauty of New York is the juxtaposition of this with that. Yes, this with that. And that 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.

48:25Is it one of the senses? Yes, this is sight, which is probably the most boring sense. But I am - to rank them if i had to rank them uh well it's the most obvious one uh but you know recently i got a dachshund which is the world's best dog clearly and this giant sausage uh 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 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 talmudic scholar you know And he sniffs here, he sniffs there.

49:00Yes, 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 that younger people have diminishes in some good ways as i sort of see what the rest of my life will look like i'm fine with it maybe good things will happen maybe some terrible things will happen but i'm more or less okay with it as long as that sense of enjoyment doesn't leave me the other thing that i talk about in the sensualist is that i recently two of my most sensual friends have died recently.

49:52And 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. Nobody wants the 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 some metric. I think the interesting thing you're doing in that, across these essays, which are about martinis and suits and all kinds of things, capybaras.

50:37I love capybaras. Capybaras, that's how you say it? Well, I'm trying to be a little more Latin American, given that they mostly live in, capybara in Brazil. Oh, there you go. So there is something about the way elite culture flaunts the repression of enjoyment. I saw there was this clip that had gone viral the other day from the guy who hosted I was CEO. 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. It meant that I got worse sleep that night.

51:15I 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 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 an example of this culture in which there is a status in optimizing everything, the aura ring, right?

51:52You never have a drink. And I do think people have this feeling of like, well, what about enjoyment? 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 really spikes my glucose. And this is what the people, I mean, you listen to some of the top podcasts which will have all kinds of health influences on. And I'm not saying necessarily even that they're wrong about what they're saying.

52:31Sometimes they are. But it just sounds so joyless. I was watching something go around the other day that was 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. It's like, I think, I don't want to say I would rather die than do 12 air squats every 45 minutes. I don't know what an 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 a 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?

53:08Is 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, you know, and people, people listened, you know. Speaking of Trump, Emily Nussbaum, 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 Borscht Belt comics of a certain period, right?

53:54And 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 a sensualist. Trump is in some horrible— He loves a pretty room. He loves a pretty room. Thinks a lot about interior design. Loves a good musical. That's right. Right, right, right. J.D. Vance is not a sensualist. Marco Rubio is not a sensualist. 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, Kamala Harris, she talked about joy so much that you knew that there wasn't that much joy going on.

54:36You 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 evince not just the unhappiness of what everything we're confronting from, you know, climate change to inflation to the mess that's going to be left to us when the president leads. And that's not easy to do because we'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, the things that we love, the parts of community that make life livable.

55:10There'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. It is a positional competition to show that you are optimizing your body within an inch of your life and your mind and how much you're reading. And look, I'm not saying by any means I'm free of this. The other side, which I think is more specific on the left, is that pleasure is problematic for all different kinds of reasons. Right. You know, maybe the things you enjoy are not politically like a center. The jokes are too gauche. Right.

55:52There's like 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 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.

56:31Don'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, 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 on a former podcast of yours where we were talking about, you know, how Mississippi is richer than almost every European state.

57:12Well, 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.

57:54You 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.

58:25And 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 a lot that your wages, your income does not say about how life feels. Some of this can all be resolved down to economic, but some of it can't. When you say people are six, seven, eight, nine times richer in these places than 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 metros consider horrible way to live this is complete poverty how can you live in such a small space not have a backyard often not have a car i'm using spain as an example but it applies to others but spain is one of the most has one of the most wonderful transit systems both within cities and interconnected uh 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.

59:40If they go over their deductible on a horrible medical bill, that they're not completely bankrupt. All this stuff doesn't exist in a place like Spain. That's where the wealth is. The wealth is being taxed at a different rate, obviously a much higher rate than we are, but also knowing that these 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.

1:00:12It's not that crazy. You just have to be a little less xenophobic, and you have to figure out the things that really mean 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 bouteillon, having an open bottle in a square and enjoying their company? So I think this is very important. It's important in the conversation you're having about kids, about rankings, about a lot, which is the role that expectations and positional competition play in degrading the quality of life or making it feel so hard to enjoy life, right?

1:00:46Because, 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 gotten, you know, we want bigger homes in much of the country. We want cars, right? New York is like a little bit unusual in that. But the way in which like the treadmill of what it just, what the trappings of a good life are. and then you look around and you're unhappy and you're atomized and you're you know far from family and you live in a place you didn't quite intend to live in and and and it is i think this feeling and i think it's quite poisonous that you did everything right and this wasn't how you were told it would be or feel and like there's never a resting space i mean look at all the young people who voted for mamdani you know who uh 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.

1:01:45You 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 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.

1:02:17And 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's... What is your advice on how to be happy? It's not even advice. The advice is, you know, I mean, again, I'm not trying to, you know, suck up with this Buddhism, but the advice really is present moment living.

1:02:52It'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 a negroni 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 negroni 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 uh 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.

1:03:37And 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 can just say it in life. I think it requires a certain navigation to seek out beauty, a certain intention to seek out beauty.

1:04:13Look, to counter 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. 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.

1:04:53The 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, 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.

1:05:24most 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 X34 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. This isn't even about money. Some people will bring their Casio G-Shock, 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.

1:05:54I'm just going to stop you because I'm going to actually ask a question and be dumb about this. I don't get the watch thing. Help me get it. 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 up. Help me with the watch thing. Well, look, the watch I'm wearing now was made in Germany, in Glarsutze, Germany. It's called a Langezone. 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.

1:06:31She 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're telling 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, But in the back, there's this secret, there's almost a city going on here, a vibrating city.

1:07:17When 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 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?

1:07:50You 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 somebody, I guess my grandma, bought me a Casio melody alarm watch, and it played all songs from around the world. This is when Japan was very ascendant and created technology nobody else could. And one of the songs was Kalinka Malinka, the Russian song. Kalinka Malinka Malinka Maya. 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.

1:08:28Not that I missed the politics of the 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, boy chick, steal a 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 when you live life fully and amongst people instead of just staying working at home, socializing on the Internet, you actually get stories.

1:09:03Stories 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 in your love of that watch, which I feel pulled towards, I found reading The Centralist, again, the rest of you can't buy it yet, but you will be able to soon. November. I found it very inspiring. Oh, thank you. And what it pulled me towards was craft. You have an adoration in that book across the watch essay, the suits essay, the martinis essay of craft. You are drawn to human beings doing beautiful things that have taken them a lot of work to do at that level.

1:09:47And 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. 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 that do this, but you don't have to be a writer or even an artist.

1:10:20You know, you can be somebody who crafts, who designs a beautiful part of a watch movement. You could be an incredible mixologist. Part of the great fun of buying that martini art 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.

1:10:57For 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 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, and at least many parts in Tokyo is one of them, they have a public policy structure that just makes it quite affordable to have shops, restaurants that not that many people are going to shop or eat at.

1:11:48Right. They have decided to not maximize the efficiency of retail space. They've decided to allow people to do a lot of very specific and unusual things. Tokyo also builds a tremendous amount. It is it's an important part of it. And Chris Murphy, the senator, just gives an interesting speech at a commencement about 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. Everyday 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.

1:12:30These 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, it has an excellent...

1:13:05I'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 on a smaller scale has always been viewed as even higher than the merchant. In many other societies, the merchant class is above the craftspeople, and 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.

1:13:38What efficiency does, I think, is it takes smaller things that are done well, and it says, well, we're going to do 8 million examples of that. And then, of course, 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 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?

1:14:13Scarcity 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 as a positional good in some ways where 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.

1:14:47But 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 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.

1:15:30So you could see how 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?

1:16:07And 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 you're somebody who reads it or is listening to this and thinking, yeah, I don't actually seek out that much beauty in my life.

1:16:43You 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 what do 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 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.

1:17:20It'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 wrists 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 those cities designed for the car and 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.

1:17:59Bukhara and Samarkand and Kiva. These are works of magnificence. Magnificence. To pass through them, wow. Wow. What an honor it is to be alive in the world and see things like that. I think that's a good place to end. Always a final question. What are the books you're going to send 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 of years ago. The book is called Men Like Ours. Her name is Bindu Bansinath. I hope I pronounced that correctly. Set in New Jersey. I love anything set in New Jersey. Talk about dystopia, right?

1:18:38That 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, Chang-Rae 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 Yoffe's Motherland, which was a National Book Awards finalist, an old friend of mine, also Soviet-born, Moscow to my Leningrad.

1:19:24And it's a book about what the 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 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.

1:19:57Thank you.

1:20:27Justin Lin, Emma Kelbeck, and Jan Kobel. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Pending Audio is Annie Rose-Strosser.