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

This is Maurice Schama, 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 30 years, and now his execution date had been set. I followed along as the lawyers tried to prove something nobody had successfully done in three decades, that one of Texas's most notorious serial killers was actually innocent. The last 12 weeks. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Before we begin today's show, we're gonna be doing an ask me anything episode quite soon. So if you have any questions, email us at ezraklineshow@nytimes.com with the headline AMA. Over the past six months, I keep telling people, we are living in super sad true love story. And sometimes I'll say to me, what was super sad true love story? What do you mean? Super sad true love story, if for some terrible reason you don't know, is a 2010 book by Gary Steingart. And I think more than any other book, it predicted the strangeness of the world we live in today, and also a lot of what it feels like to live in it. All of the constant staring at screens, the hyper visual nature of modern life, the obsession with wellness and longevity and looks maxing amidst the backdrop of a country that often feels like it's falling apart. We are living in a time of profound corruption. Inflation is hitting its highest point in three years. A world where everybody is upset and they're grabbing at the wrong things to try to fix it. I wanted to understand how the author of this book, Gary Steingart, had predicted all this, how he had known what it was going to feel like well into the future of when he was writing. Gary Steingart, of course, has written a number of wonderful novels, including The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan, and his most recent, Vera or Faith. He's also written all these amazing essays on travel and cruise ships and martinis and his love of suits and watches. Many of those essays will be collected in a new book coming out in November called The Sensualist. That name, The Sensualist, 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, ezraklineshow@nytimes.com. Gary Steingart, 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 Apparat, which wherever they go, it constantly ranks them. But, you know, the sort of the germ of Super Sad True Love Story is that the main character, Lenny Abramov, will walk into a bar or restaurant and immediately he is ranked as, say, the 23rd ugliest man in the room, right? That's his thing. At one point he walks in and he's the second ugliest man in the room, and the ugliest man can't take it and he leaves, so that Lenny becomes the ugliest man in the room. You're constantly being ranked everywhere. You're being ranked even as you walk down the street. There's giant credit pulls that showcase your credit for, you know, you can tell Gary has 600 out of 800 points in credit, he needs to save more. So even on that level, the society is so intrusive that it tells you you need to save more, some people need to spend more. It just constantly wants to keep people in equilibrium. Women are very sexualized, even more so than in our world. America is run by a kind of, well, fascist leader who has started a war in Venezuela, et cetera. So a lot of familiar stuff is happening. There's two main characters. Lenny is kind of like me, a sort of neo-Nebbish, who's a Gen X, which is this interesting generation that's kind of a bridge between the analog and the digital worlds. And Eunice is 10, 15 years younger than him, but she's already a full digital native. So probably, you know, if you think millennial or something like that, and so this is a very unlikely love affair between two people, and I think the biggest thing that holds them back is the fact that they live in two different worlds. So the thing that made me start thinking a lot about Super Sad True Love Story has been the omnipresence of Brian Johnson, the longevity influencer, clavicular, the looks maxer, and the way that streaming culture and looks and ratings and everything, hyper-visual culture, all seem to be now holding our attention in a way I don't remember happening before. So as a guy who wrote a book about all this as the future at one point, how does this look to you? You know, the book was written about mid-aughts, I would say. It came out in 2010. As I was writing it, I was thinking, yeah, this future might be possible in, I don't know, 30 years. Usually when people are writing speculative fiction, they give themselves that 30-year corridor, but it happened, I don't know, 10 years later, 14, 15 years later. There's an invasion of Venezuela in this book. Oh, yeah, there is an invasion of Venezuela in the book. Israel is controlled by a Smotrich-like party. It's called Security State Israel. It's this kind of Jewish Iran, if you will, which I think is where we're headed. But the main thing I was kind of thinking was, well, one of the main things was the way young people, including myself when I got into social media, was the way we were into being ranked. This was something very new to me. I mean, I guess it's always been a thing. You know, people apply to college and then they're ranked to get in, or, you know, athletes are ranked, blah, blah, blah. We're in a very competitive society. And in this book, there's a thing called Rate Me Plus technology, which constantly ranks people over and over, not just on their looks, but also on their finances, every single aspect of their being. And at one point, the internet of the future goes out, and the Rate Me Plus technology disappears, and young people start killing themselves because they just can't understand how they can live without knowing where they fit into the grander scheme of things. Yeah, I thought that was a very, I actually have that quote here. I found it very moving. You talk about these young people who committed suicide in the building complex, and you write, one wrote, quite eloquently, about how he reached out to life, but found there only walls and thoughts and faces, which weren't enough. He needed to be ranked to know his place in this world. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when I wrote that, I remember feeling a little chilled myself because I wondered if that's what the new technology that I was being exposed to, the Zuckerberg technology, was doing to me a little bit, you know, because I would 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 am I now? You know, I'm just Gary in the block, on the block. I don't have that other ... I fell into that trap so quickly. I have friends, relatives who work in Silicon Valley that they really create barriers between their kids and this technology. They know exactly what they're making and they want their kids as far away from it as possible. And look, none of this is 100% new. Civilization began, there was, you know, the head caveman and the lower caveman, and blah, blah, blah. So, we know that there's always been a hierarchy. But 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, Stuyvesant High School, which was all full of immigrant kids like myself. I'm from the Soviet Union. Kids were from Soviet Union, East Asia, South Asia, et cetera. And I, to this day, 86.894 was my average at Stuyvesant. And I remember it. You know, this is the shocking thing to the thousandth decimal point. And that, I think, prepared me in some way. Stuyvesant prepared me for this world in which every single metric is constantly deployed against you, I would say, because none of these people are enjoying life. You know, when you look at all these men who are, you know, measuring their cheekbone to the nth millimeter. This isn't a good way to live. So this, to me, it's the other interesting thing about the book, and it also comes up in your book of essays, but it is this simultaneous obsession with living forever without enjoying life. Right. And what I always find so fascinating about when I watch Brian Johnson, and I don't mean to be insulting anybody's life decisions here, but I don't know if I was, I don't wanna live like that. Your life goal is to drive down your heart rate, okay? 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 Yeah, when he finds the love of his life, Eunice, when he goes out with his friends, that there's still an avenue toward a kind of overwhelming feeling of contentment. That may go away by the next day or when the hangover sets in, but that is there at least for a while. There's a character in Superset you love, Lori, who I think is interesting for this conversation, which is Joshi, Lenny's boss. Tell me a bit about Joshi. So Joshi is, let's see how old is Joshi. Well, we don't even know how old Joshi is. He could be in his 80s, but it doesn't matter because he is using every kind of anti-aging technique possible. Joshi does not want to die. He feels, and this is interesting because I think this is true of so many of the people that use this kind of technology. He feels that he hasn't really lived, that he hasn't really had a good life. A lot of people, and I 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 100%, but so many of the ones I've met have had really unremarkably awful childhoods. And there's a need to somehow create the perfect life and live that life. And that life is always the opposite of the rearview mirror. I don't know, always in the windshield, you're always looking forward to it. It never quite comes. But in order to reach it one day, one has to extend life almost indefinitely. I remember one of the first things when we emigrated to America, my parents would say about Americans, who always seem so unhappy despite the fact that they were so much richer than us. We were living on government cheese for a time, you know. And my parents and other Russians would say, which translates very vaguely as, they're wild with their own fat. They're so juicy and fat and yet they don't know what to do with it. Just enjoy the fat, you know. But sometimes this greater meaning combines with this egotistical impulse to have more and more and more and to 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 and then there's where you're searching for it. I mean, one of the fundamental things about Superset, and that feels like a fundamental thing of modern life, is everybody's looking for it in a screen. And you have one of the fun Phillips of the book is that talking to other people is called verbaling. Right. You've needed to create a different linguistic category for what it is we're doing when we have a conversation. And, you know, screens are made by corporations. 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, Sisyphus's life would have been much better if every time he got the rock to the top, he got some points. And if he could then exchange those points for stickers, you know. Stickers that he could put on the rock, right? Yeah, that'd be great. Oh my God. Now that is, that is really, really smart. But, but so there is this, I mean, the way you talk about it, even go past it, it's fundamentally erotic, right? It's often in a bar. I'll see like people who are together. They're like on some kind of a date, a married couple or a non-married couple. I don't know. And they're both looking at their phones. And there is something about a very unfulfilling but very compulsive world, like beckoning, that I think is a, an enemy of enjoyment. There's a lot in there. So verbaling is very hard for members of younger generations. I know COVID messed them up as well. Obviously people in generation Alpha, my son's generation, that didn't help, obviously, but I think verbaling is just, well, it's, it's, it is what it is. Letting sounds come out of your mouth as communication is very hard for people to do, much harder than obviously sending emojis or shortened, you know, shortened text messages, et cetera, stuff like that. And I think it's interesting when you look at someone who is, for example, doing looks maxing, who is using a hammer. Talk about the opposite of joy, this anti-enjoyment. You're hammering your cheekbone in to make it a certain metric. Describe what bone smashing is. Yeah, so bone smashing is based off of Wolf's law that, you know, when you break down a bone, it grows back stronger. And you feel like this is how you make yourself attractive to women. But the real way to make, and this, I learned this as a small furry immigrant without a great deal of good looks, you know. You attract women by verbaling with them and saying interesting things, being an interesting human being, listening to them and then getting into conversations with them, having any kind of charisma that allows you to actually interact with somebody of the opposite or the same sex, whatever your preferences. And this is like, no, we can't do that. We can never achieve that level of being interested in another person or even being interested enough in our own interiority to access that kind of level of interaction. So we're just gonna, it's hammer time. We're gonna get that hammer and just chisel ourselves. There's been a fascinating recent trend amongst Silicon Valley types where they're on a tear against interiority. You had Marc Andreessen talking about how he doesn't want to have interiority. He doesn't wanna have introspection, which he described as looking backwards, which is 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? Forward, go. Yeah, I don't know. I just, I found people who dwell on the past get stuck in the past. It's just, it's a real problem and it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. And I've been trying to think on this because I, I mean, these are smart people, right? And I do think it is in some ways a, if I'm being maximally generous, it is in some ways a reaction to what 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, but 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 the opposite problem and dysfunction. Right, right. Yeah, that's a very interesting way and I think a correct way to put it. There's a lot of interesting things about who these people are. And this may seem a little out there, but I would say that you can't look at people like Musk and not think of neurodivergence, but also neurodivergence combined with terrible parenting. Now you have somebody like Elon, right, who obviously is, proclaims to be neurodivergent, who was raised by possibly the worst father this side of Woody Allen. I mean, so you have someone who obviously cannot deal with somebody with special needs. And at the same time, somebody who possesses all of the gifts that those special needs, in the case of neurodivergence, give him. I think when I was, I don't know, five or six or something, I thought I was insane. Why'd you think you were insane? Because it was clear that other people did not, their mind wasn't exploding with ideas all the time. They weren't expressing it. They weren't talking about it all the time. And you realized by the time you were five or six, like, oh, they're probably not even getting this thing that I'm getting. No, it was just strange. It was like, hmm, I'm strange. That was my conclusion. I am strange. So you have this strange combination where it's not, it's somewhere in growing up, these people were not given the opportunity by the school system, by their parents, by relatives to look inwards. Looking inwards was considered something so wrong that there was never a skill developed for it. Let me go back to the Mark Andreessens of the world, because I think what they might say on your riff on Elon Musk there is, and Musk hates his father, to note that here. But listen, it created the greatest industrialist of our age, the richest man in the world, a guy who is able to put reusable rockets in space. Isn't that success? Isn't that what humanity needs to go forward, even if the New York writerly class, literary class doesn't like it? Let me tell you this. I do think that space colonization really is not something I'm terribly interested in. I don't think going to Mars is gonna answer any of our problems. I don't think we'll ever live on the kind of scale we live in. You know, we have a really nice planet here, which we're destroying. We really don't need to discover, you know, the marvels of Mercury anytime soon, right? So a lot of this is complete bullshit as far as I'm concerned. That part of it, right? Now, of course, electric cars, et cetera, all that stuff is very good. And if anything that Musk did that was good, it was Tesla, which now will be probably brought to scale by Chinese automakers, right? That will 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 Ishmael, 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 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. She's, she's 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'm Paul Tenorio. I cover soccer for The Athletic. And I'm Amy Lawrence. I cover football for The Athletic. Whatever you call it, the biggest competition in the sport is happening right now. And The Athletic's World Cup coverage has everything you need to follow the tournament. There's 48 countries taking part from the tiny island of Curacao to the five-time champions Brazil. Even if you don't know you're offside from your onside, if you're eager to know more about the teams, the matches, all the stories on and off the pitch, we've got you sorted. Maybe you're the kind of person who's already up early every weekend waking the neighbors when your favorite club scores. We'll make sure you get equipped with more information, more insight than anyone you know. We've got more than 70 obsessive reporters on the ground covering the ins and outs from every game. I almost forgot to mention the best part, Amy. Free access to The Athletic's World Cup coverage in our app. Download The Athletic app and see you there. One of the things, going back to the subject of clavicular, is I found to be a very tragic figure. Doesn't seem happy to me. I just saw pictures of him after getting a rhinoplasty, a nose job. His nose seemed fine to me before. And he just, like, is miserable in their wheelchair and is, 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, the 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, like, this is not good for people to be putting that much of their lives forward, to have so little backstage in their own mind. And you're writing there about a world in which this has become very, very common. And one of the things that I see in our world is that this has become very, very common. You know, the number of people with a brand, everybody, you know, on TikTok. And I wonder what you think it does to people when they keep offering up things that are so cherished to them. Right? Like, and 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. You know, since I'm mid-Gen X, we grew up sitting around bars talking to each other, counseling each other, helping each other. Everybody had different things they could do. You know, one friend could really write a great CV. Another friend could do something else really well for you. We really were a small village unto ourselves. It was just wonderful. Did we get into fights? Yes, and breakups, etc., 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 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 carnivalesque atmosphere. Look, I'm completely crazy. I'm beating myself up with a hammer, you know. And people will pay for that. They will pay for that. But what happens to that person is nobody cares, right? If tomorrow he OD'd, you know, I don't think even his followers would care. They'd be like, OK, that was interesting, you know. I'm going to find someone else who beats his, you know, his nose with a hammer or whatever. That's interesting 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, these industrialists will say, but Gary, you're living in the past, you know. Society moves on. And in fact, if you think social media did anything to destroy the sense of people hanging out in your bar talking to each other, rubbing elbows, hitting on each other, 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. 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 developed, I don't even know what you call it anymore, the opposite of the global south, the global north. Nobody's having children. The wealthier world. The wealthier world. You know, East Asia wonderfully leads the pack. I go to South Korea a lot because my wife's Korean-American. Nobody's having kids there. If they do, it's one kid. I see this 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 because the low fertility rate is happening in the background there of super sad. Yes. And it could have been something you've thought about for a while. Yes. When you go to South Korea, which is a society that is now, if trends continue, it will shrink geometrically. Yes. Will shrink very, very, very fast. Yes. 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, there's, it's all technology all the time. You know, there's a wastebasket that says it's honored to accept your waste. I mean, it just, it never ends. Everything's the internet of things. I remember I did a piece for Smithsonian where I went to visit, you know, Korea. One of the ways 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 in the, I went to this place where they were creating bull robots, bull robots? This bull, you know, you sit there with a red hanky and this bull would charge you. And they're like, yes, we're trying to corner the toriador market in Spain because people don't want real bulls to die anymore, you know? So we're developing these toriador bulls. And this bull looked pretty fierce, you know? And I'm like, Jesus Christ. I was 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. I want to be on the A team. I'm glad I'm not on the C team, but being on the B team isn't great either, you know? The metrics are even more finely attuned than they are in America. And then, you know, but when you're also working 80 hours a week, and if you have kids, you have to put them through these schools to get into a university that will take up half your paycheck already. So having one kid is already a gigantic undertaking. Having two is basically an impossibility for most Koreans. And I think that's where we're going too. I think there's a really interesting way this actually connects to rankings. One of the fascinating thing about fertility rates around the world is that people tend to have a lot of kids when sometimes when they're very, very rich, but also when they're quite That's right. Let's remember that. You know, he loves, and his tail is wagging away. He's just enjoying the hell out of life. He enjoys this more than, I mean, 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. It's, 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 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. 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 centralist is that I recently, two of my most sensual friends have died recently, and it was remarkably sad, obviously, to watch them die of cancer in their early 50s in my generation. Incredibly sad. But to the last moment, you know, they found things to enjoy. Almost to the very last moment, there were things that they enjoyed. And I think the thing they enjoyed the most was talking, verbaling, if you will, with their friends. 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 verbaling. 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, you know, all kinds of things, capybaras. I love capybaras. Capybaras, let's say it that way. Well, I'm trying to be a little more Latin American, given that they mostly live in... Capybara in Brazil. So it should be capybara. 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 hosts Diary of a 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. So it meant that I got worse sleep that night. I ate more poorly the next day because my dopamine system or whatever, the cortisol system was all messed up. And then I podcasted worse. I didn't go to the gym the day after, that day or the day after because of that, because I felt really bad. I then slept worse. And I was like, oh my God, those three glasses of wine had this hidden domino effect that I must have been living with. And I thought that was a little bit unfair to him how viral it went, but it hit a nerve because it was hitting this culture, right? It was like an example of this culture in which there is a status in optimizing everything, the aura ring, right? You never have a drink. And I do think people have this feeling of like, well, what about enjoyment? Like, what's the point of all this? AI can already do a bunch of the things we can do. Like if we're not going to be here and enjoy music, enjoy a drink, enjoy great food, right, if you're going to endlessly be having like a glucose monitor and you're not a diabetic, and then you're like, well, pasta really spikes my glucose. And like, this is what, like the people, I mean, you listen to some of the, you know, top podcasts which will have like all kinds of health influencers on. And I'm not saying necessarily even that they're wrong about what they're saying. Sometimes they are. But it just sounds so joyless. I was watching something go around the other day. There was like from the study and it was like, turns out that doing 12 air squats every 45 minutes is like better for you than like running through 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 even 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, me, 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. Does 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 would listen, you know. Speaking of Trump, Emily Nussbaum, I think, wrote the best piece ever on that when she wrote in 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, and then using it for his own evil purposes. So I think a lot of the other Trump wannabes try to do this. Many of them fail, but there is that kind of motion. Trump is essentialist. Trump is in some horrible... He loves a pretty room. He loves a pretty room. Thinks a lot about interior design. Loves a good musical. That's right. Right, right, right. J.D. Vance is not essentialist. Marco Rubio is not essentialist. Trump is. I think you're absolutely right. And maybe there is, in a horrible way, something that we can take away from this, that the people that we nominate to be our leaders can't be, I mean, hilarious. 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 evince not just the unhappiness of 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've 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. There's a lot I want to say in response to that. One is, you know, and this I think is fairly bipartisan, transpartisan, this sort of elite display of discipline. It is a positional competition to show that you are like optimizing your body within an inch of your life and your mind and you're never, you know, how much you're reading and you're, you know, and look, I'm not saying by any means I'm free of this. The other side, which I think is more specific on the left, is that pleasure is problematic for all different kinds of reasons, right? You know, maybe the things you enjoy are not politically like a center. The jokes are too gauche, right? There'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 the sense too that they, you know, they work to, they live to work instead of working to live. That's part of the sort of the coda. So it's very hard for people to appreciate things that bring you joy because joy itself is kind of suspect. Well, do that on your own time. Don't talk about that. Just leave the joy out of there, 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 I get to, I get to sort of live in that world for a while. You know, I was just in Spain with my kid and my wife and I was showing him 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 in a former podcast of yours where we were talking about, you know, how Mississippi is richer than almost every European state. Well, I have spent time in Mississippi. You know, Mississippi, if anything, reminds me of Russia where there's a couple of super rich people with gigantic houses and pools, and then there are people living in conditions that, you know, almost anywhere in the world would be seen as very poor. And the medium of that becomes whatever that number is. I'm sorry, the average of that, not the median, becomes whatever that number is. You go to, you go to the poorest region in Spain, life is beautiful. I'm not Well, friends, most of my friends have always been women, but when you go into this very male space of watch collecting, there’s all these men who come up and they’re like, you know, they’re talking about the 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.” It’s not even — 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, you know? I’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 for it. I made up — I made up — I made up — Help me — help me with the watch thing. Well, look, the watch I’m wearing now was made in Germany, in Glashütte, Germany. It’s called A. Lange & Söhne. It is made by hand. The back — the movement and the markers of it were made by hand. So there is a woman who I met in Germany. Her entire job is to create a floral motif around this. It is a work of art. She spends hours, days even, sitting there and freestyling this beautiful flower, right? And there’s a number of workers there. Can I see it? Yeah. While you tell me about this flower. A number of workers there who make this. And there’s a number of workers who create the striping, called Glashütte striping, that creates, so that when you bend the watch backwards and forwards, you see a different kind of shimmer across the dial. The back is much more interesting than the front. Well, exactly. Exactly. Well, that’s part of the—you want to be very — You don’t want to show off in front. This is not a watch that anyone’s going to rip off your wrist, you know. But in the back, there’s this secret; there’s almost a city going on here, a vibrating city. When you watch them put the escape wheel, which is this thing that is spinning, the balance onto it, and you see it spin, it’s almost like it’s been given a soul because all of a sudden, this static, static movement has come alive and is 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 fascist. And now I don’t have to do that. Oh, it’s 1:20. Done! How did you get into them? You know, it’s funny, because I went to a very horrible yeshiva when I was a kid, and I was bullied all the time because I was the stinky Russian bear. I wore a giant shapka, this 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 was 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. Not 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, “Boychik steal watch!” And the principal made the bully give it back. So also, this is one of the other things that happens— This is a bit of an aside, but that happens when you live life fully and amongst people instead of just staying, working at home, socializing on the Internet. You actually get stories. Stories happen. Interesting things happen. I want to go back to the search for beauty here, the orientation 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. Yeah. You are drawn to human beings doing beautiful things that have taken them a lot of work to do at that level. And a lot of training. And a lot of training. Tell me about that. Well, look, am I the greatest writer that ever lived? No. But I have worked my butt off to craft sentences, and then to make sure that the sentences are crafted into paragraphs. This is, you know, there’s the original fun of writing a sentence or a paragraph. Oh, look at me! I got this great idea! And then you return to it 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. 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 writing that martini article is, 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. 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, uh, a very dry martini or a very wet martini. There’s a great martini at the Eel Bar in New York. Um, 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 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, at least many parts, and Tokyo is one of them. They have a public policy structure that just makes it quite affordable to have shops, restaurants, that not that many people are going to shop or eat at, right? They have decided to not maximize the efficiency of retail space. They’ve decided to allow people to do a lot of very specific and unusual things. Tokyo also builds a tremendous amount. It is an important part of it. And Chris Murphy, the senator, just gave an interesting speech at a commencement about, you know, the problem with the American pursuit of efficiency. You are about to step into a world that prizes efficiency and the annihilation of drift and friction above all else. Every day technology companies are rolling out new products that cut the time it takes to do everything in your life, from eating to shopping to dating, from getting one place to another. These aren’t products designed to make you 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, 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 train system. I'm trying to fix that, man. I'm working on it. Okay, please, please do, because I love high-speed rail. But my friends in Japan have told me of 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, you know, above the craftspeople. Craft people 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,