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The Ezra Klein Show
I Keep Telling People We’re Living in This Dystopian Novel
01:18:20
A hypervisual, looks-obsessed, wellness-crazed, postliterate society where we’re constantly staring at screens and evaluating one another based on metrics, as the country around us feels like it’s falling apart: That sounds like the world we live in. It’s also the world Gary Shteyngart created in his 2010 novel, “Super Sad True Love Story.” I’ve been thinking about the book a lot recently, especially with the rise of the “looksmaxxing” influencer Clavicular and the longevity guru Bryan Johnson, and this feeling that people are upset and agitated but grabbing at the wrong things to fix it. It feels uncannily like the experience of living inside Shteyngart’s novel. But Shteyngart isn’t just a dystopian prophet, he’s also an expert at living well amid the world’s darkness. His forthcoming book, “The Sensualist: Adventures in Pure Pleasure,” is an essay collection about his efforts to do exactly that. So I wanted to have Shteyngart on the show to understand how he predicted so many o...
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- [00:00]
Ezra Klein
This podcast is supported by BetterHelp. Summer can feel like a sprint. Kids home, trips to plan, routines flipped upside down. It's easy to slip into survival mode just trying to get through it. Then suddenly it's over and you're wishing you enjoyed the days just a little bit.
- [00:16]
Gary Shteyngart
More.
- [00:17]
Ezra Klein
Therapy can help you slow down and actually be present for the moments that matter. With BetterHelp, you can connect with a licensed therapist from anywhere on your schedule. Don't just survive this summer, thrive. Visit betterhelp.com newyorktimes before we begin today's show, we're going to be doing an Ask Me Anything episode quite soon, so if you have any questions, email us@ezra kleinshowytimes.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?
- [01:23]
Gary Shteyngart
What do you mean super sad true
- [01:25]
Ezra Klein
love Story, if you, 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.
- [01:58]
Gary Shteyngart
Is that what you signed up for?
- [02:00]
Ezra Klein
We are living in a time of profound corruption.
- [02:04]
Gary Shteyngart
Inflation is hitting its highest point in
- [02:06]
Ezra Klein
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. This, 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 Ezra kleinshowytimes.com. Gary Steinger, welcome to the show.
- [03:17]
Gary Shteyngart
Great to be here. Longtime listener.
- [03:19]
Ezra Klein
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?
- [03:31]
Gary Shteyngart
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, Leni Abramov, will walk into a bar or restaurant and immediately he is ranked as, say, the 23rd ugliest man in the room. Right? That's his thing. At one point, he walks in and he's the second ugliest man in the room. And the ugliest man can't take it and he leaves. So that Lenny becomes the ugliest man in the room. You're constantly being ranked. Everywhere you're being ranked even as you walk down the street. There's giant credit poles that showcase your credit for, you know, 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 equilib. 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 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. So probably, 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.
- [05:03]
Ezra Klein
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 looksmaxer, 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?
- [05:31]
Gary Shteyngart
You know, the book was written about mid aughts, I would say, came out in 2010. As I was writing, I was thinking, yeah, this future might be possible in, I don't know, 30 years. Usually when people are writing speculative fiction, they give themselves that 30 year corridor. But it happened, I don't know, 10 years later, 14, 15 years. There's an invasion of Venezuela in this book.
- [05:53]
Ezra Klein
Oh yeah, there is an invasion of Venezuela on the book.
- [05:56]
Gary Shteyngart
Venezuela, Israel is controlled by a Smotrich like party.
- [05:59]
Ezra Klein
It's called Security State Israel.
- [06:01]
Gary Shteyngart
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. People apply to college and then they're ranked to get in, or 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 by 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.
- [06:54]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, I thought that was a very. Actually, that quote here, I found it very moving. You talk about these young people who committed suicide in the building complex and you write. One wrote quite eloquently about how he reached out to life, but found there only walls and thoughts and faces which weren't enough. He needed to be ranked to know his place in this world.
- [07:13]
Gary Shteyngart
Yeah, yeah. I mean, when I wrote that, I remember feeling a little chilled myself because I wondered if that's, if that's what the new technology that I was being exposed to, the Zuckerberg technology, was doing to me a little bit, you know, because I would, I travel a lot and there were times when I would go to, I don't know, some kind of Uzbekistan like country. And where there at that point you just didn't have constant contact with the Internet. And I would find myself going through withdrawal, you know, if I went for two, three weeks. And I was like, but who, who am I now? You know, I'm just Gary in the block, on the block. I don't have, you know, that other. I fell into that trap so quickly. I have friends, relatives who work in Silicon Valley that they really create barriers between their kids and this technology. They know exactly what they're making and they want their kids as far away from it as possible. And look, none of this is 100% new civilization began. There was, you know, the, the head caveman and the lower caveman and bl. 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 ways. 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.
- [09:03]
Ezra Klein
So this, to me, it's the other interesting thing about the book, and it also comes up in your book of essays, but it is this simultaneous obsession with living forever without enjoying life. And what I 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 want to live like that. Your life goal is to drive down your heart rate, okay? The reason is because the lower your
- [09:31]
Gary Shteyngart
heart rate goes, the better your sleep.
- [09:33]
Ezra Klein
The better your sleep, the better willpower,
- [09:35]
Gary Shteyngart
more willpower, better exercise, better food when your heart rate is high.
- [09:41]
Ezra Klein
Bad sleep, bad willpower, no exercise and bad food.
- [09:45]
Gary Shteyngart
So resting heart rate is the most important marker of your entire life.
- [09:49]
Ezra Klein
I think the reason he is so fascinating people in part is that to constantly have this level of self examination, this level of self diagnostics, I mean, you have a partner now, and so the first thing you do is you go online and talk about her vaginal biome. Good relationships are really rare. And Kate is important to me because she really does feel like my other half.
- [10:14]
Gary Shteyngart
Biohacker Brian Johnson recently boasted about his
- [10:16]
Ezra Klein
girlfriend's top 1% vagina sparking interest in at home vaginal microbiome tests.
- [10:21]
Gary Shteyngart
Yes, Gotta get that vaginal biome clavicular
- [10:25]
Ezra Klein
who it's like you've divorced getting hot from the point of getting hot. Right? He talks about how you can't have a girlfriend given the life he leads. He is not fertile.
- [10:33]
Gary Shteyngart
Wait, why are you infertile right now? So it's just like a negative feedback loop when you're, you know, not needing to produce testosterone anymore because your body realizes, okay, we're getting it from an exhaust. So you're not producing any to sauce more naturally. No, none. No, I'm not taking trt, bro.
- [10:48]
Ezra Klein
We want to live because we want to enjoy. We want to be hot because we want love and children. And this severing of all of these urges from the things the urges are supposed to do, this severing of the pursuit of desire from the thing that desire is supposed to.
- [11:01]
Gary Shteyngart
It's incredible. Taking testosterone to look good, to attract a mate, but at the same time, taking all this testosterone causes shrunken testicles which probably will not allow you to propagate. So, you know, these things are completely at odds. And at the same time, it's almost like a perversion of whatever strange biological instinct we had. Clavicular is one of my favorites when it comes to this because he's just really funny, unintentionally.
- [11:27]
Ezra Klein
So how important is it to you
- [11:29]
Gary Shteyngart
to also make the girl have an orgasm? Not important. How come? Well, because, you know, the amount of extra effort that's required to do that is just not gonna really have much roi. So. So.
- [11:55]
Ezra Klein
Well, it's true.
- [11:56]
Gary Shteyngart
I mean, really, that means return on investment. You know, he'll talk about how knowing that he can have sex with a woman, a given woman, is way more important for him than actually having sex with the woman.
- [12:09]
Ezra Klein
That's the ranking.
- [12:10]
Gary Shteyngart
The mogging, the mogging, the ranking.
- [12:12]
Ezra Klein
But.
- [12:13]
Gary Shteyngart
And so it's like. But wasn't sex supposed to be enjoyable? Especially when you're 21? I remember, you know, it took me a while until I started having sex, but when I did, I was like, this is the most incredible thing that's ever happened to me. I don't care if I die tomorrow. If I keep having this, you know, for the next 24 hours, this is kind of it. You know, I'll give you another example, which is a little strange. But. So I've been teaching creative writing at Columbia for about 20 years now, and I've noticed the way. And my students are wonderful. They write wonderfully. The craftsmanship keeps getting better and better, but things they write about have changed so drastically. You know, 20 years ago, in the aughts There was this kind of John Cheever bisexual energy going on where.
- [12:57]
Ezra Klein
Explain what a John Cheever bisexual energy is. You can't move that fast.
- [13:00]
Gary Shteyngart
Sorry. Well, you know, the Cheever, Updike, Roth era, and I know that Skew is very masculine, right? There was, you know, people wrote about sex nonstop. I mentioned Cheever because at least he had a lot of, you know, he was bisexual himself. And there was an appreciation of both hetero and homosexuality, sexuality. So. But what I'm trying to say in general is that sex was appreciated as a major life force. When I read the wonderful things that my students submit now, there almost is no sex and love. No love and almost no pleasure. You know, I have a collection of essays coming out in November called the Sensualist, which is all about my love of pleasure, but in millions of contexts. There's sex in there, there's food, there's. I mean, you know, life is an endless buffet of pleasure. And this clavicular generation just says, nah, we don't want that. You know, you might as well be an algorithm. We just want to match up to all these metrics and say, done, done, done. Check, check, check. We are the best. We won, and that's that.
- [13:57]
Ezra Klein
So what's your view of where that came from?
- [14:00]
Gary Shteyngart
I mean, I think it's. When I look at my students, we're talking about our place in the world earlier. They're unsure of the world's place in the world. They don't know what's gonna happen next. Everything is a source of anxiety. Half of what my students write, if not more, is speculative fiction of one sort or another. Right. And the speculation isn't that, you know, we're gonna be living in a utop. It's. It's the. The mood is. The vibes, as they say, are, you know, they're low key, horrible. It's like we've separated ourselves so much from the possibility of joy that to make it the subject of a book or of a story seems almost privileged. Like, you don't want to touch that anymore. And I'm not saying that, you know, the Cheever Updike crew didn't write in a solipsistic way about whatever, you know, their own identity as wealthy white people in Scarsdale or whatever. You know, obviously there was a lot of that kind of stuff, but there was a sense that life wasn't entirely hopeless.
- [14:57]
Ezra Klein
When I read a lot of modern literary fiction, the driving force to me is neurosis.
- [15:02]
Gary Shteyngart
Yeah.
- [15:03]
Ezra Klein
People being anxious, being unsure, being self loathing. I find it very Very, very depressing. Like when you describe that. Right. It does like mid, late mid 20th century male writing was very horny.
- [15:17]
Gary Shteyngart
Yeah.
- [15:18]
Ezra Klein
And like 20 20's writing is very nervous.
- [15:21]
Gary Shteyngart
Yeah. Yeah. My students call this the sad girl novel. And there've been some amazing sad girl novel. The year of rest and relaxation is probably. To me, it reads like a really cool, smart and funny version of that. I think sometimes what I lack and not always, but what I kind of look for in the neurosis novel is a sense of. Is a sense of humor that almost leads you into a path of joy. You know, I teach a class called so youo Want to Write Funny at Columbia. And for examp example, we teach talk about neurosis like I teach Portnoy's complaints. And that is obviously it's all said in a psychiatrist's office. It's this neurotic horny Jew. Like they don't make him anymore. Right. And he's just chomping at the bit to get out of his particular identity and just to have sex with every non Jewish woman he can find. And that is, I mean, wrong in many ways, but also really, really funny. The pursuit of it is very, very funny. Look, super sad is the word. Sad is the second part of the second word in the. I hope that Lyney, 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 it's there at least for a while.
- [16:38]
Ezra Klein
There's a character in Super Sachi Love Story who I think is interesting for this conversation, which is Joshi, Lenny's boss. Tell me a bit about Joshi.
- [16:45]
Gary Shteyngart
So Joshi is. Let's see, how old is Josh? Well, we don't even know how old Josh is. He could be in his 80s, but it doesn't matter because he is using every kind anti aging technique possible. Josh Yee does not want to die. He feels, and this is interesting because I think this is true of so many of the people that use this kind of technology. He feels that he hasn't really lived, that he hasn't really had a good life. A lot of people, and I knew, 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 rear view 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 were always seemed so unhappy despite the fact that they were so much richer than us. We were living on government cheese for a time and my parents and other Russians would. 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 into and to not die is one of those almost protestant kind of extension of everything. And striving. Why should the striving ever end?
- [18:20]
Ezra Klein
Well there's the search for greater meaning, then there's where you're searching for it. I mean one of the fundamental things about super sad and that feels like a fundamental thing of modern life is everybody's looking for it in a screen. And you have. One of the fun fill ups of the book is that talking to other people is called verbaling.
- [18:37]
Gary Shteyngart
Verbaling, right.
- [18:37]
Ezra Klein
You've needed to create a different linguistic category for what it is we're doing when we have a conversation. And you, 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 like exchange those points for stickers.
- [19:10]
Gary Shteyngart
Stickers that he could put on the rock. Right? Yeah, that'd be great. Oh my God. Now that is really, really smart.
- [19:15]
Ezra Klein
But so there is this, I mean the way you about eating a little pasta, it's fundamentally erotic.
- [19:20]
Gary Shteyngart
Right? Right.
- [19:21]
Ezra Klein
So 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.
- [19:42]
Gary Shteyngart
There's a lot in there. So verbling is very hard for members of younger generations. I know Covid messed them up as well, obviously, in Generation Alpha, my son's generation. That didn't help, obviously. But I think verbaling is just. Well, it is what it is. Letting sounds come out of your mouth as communication is very hard for people to do. Much harder than obviously, sending emojis or shortened, you know, shortened text messages, et cetera, or stuff like that. And I think it's interesting when you look at someone who is, for example, doing looks maximum, 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 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 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 preference is. And this is like, no, we can't do that. We can never achieve that level of being interested in another person or even being interested enough in our own interiority to access that kind of level of interaction. So we're just gonna. It's hammer time. We're gonna get that hammer and just chisel ourselves.
- [21:18]
Ezra Klein
There's been a FASC recent trend among 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 want to have introspection, which he described as looking backwards, which not quite what it is, but nevertheless, you
- [21:35]
Gary Shteyngart
said something that I love and I
- [21:37]
Ezra Klein
never hear other entrepreneurs talk about.
- [21:39]
Gary Shteyngart
But I think it's super important that you don't have any levels of introspection. Yes.
- [21:42]
Ezra Klein
Zero.
- [21:42]
Gary Shteyngart
As little as possible.
- [21:43]
Ezra Klein
Why?
- [21:44]
Gary Shteyngart
Move forward, go. Yeah, I don't know. I've found people who dwell in the
- [21:48]
Ezra Klein
past get stuck in the past. It's a real problem, and it's a problem at work, and it's a problem at home. And I've been trying to think on this because 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.
- [22:29]
Gary Shteyngart
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 neurodivers. 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, something, I thought I was insane.
- [23:16]
Ezra Klein
Why'd you think you were insane?
- [23:18]
Gary Shteyngart
Because it was clear that other people did not would. Their mind wasn't exploding with ideas all the time.
- [23:24]
Ezra Klein
They weren't expressing it, they weren't talking about it all. And you realize by the time you were five or six, like, oh, they're probably not even getting this thing that I'm getting.
- [23:34]
Gary Shteyngart
No, it was just strange.
- [23:38]
Ezra Klein
It was like,
- [23:40]
Gary Shteyngart
hmm, I'm strange. That was my conclusion. I'm strange. So you have this strange combination where it's not. It's somewhere in growing up, these people were not given the opportunity by the school system, by their parents, by relatives to look inwards. Looking inwards was considered something so wrong that there was never a skill developed for it.
- [24:01]
Ezra Klein
Let me go back to the mark and gins of the world because I think what they might say on your riff on Elon Musk, there's 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.
- [24:26]
Gary Shteyngart
Let me tell you this. I do think that space colonization really is not something I'm terribly interested in. I don't think going to Mars is going to answer any of our problems. I don't think we'll ever live on the kind of scale we have a really nice planet here, which we're destroying. We really don't need to discover the marvels of Mercury anytime soon, right? So a lot of this is complete bullshit as far as I'm concerned. That part of it right now, of course, electric cars, et cetera, all that stuff is very good. And if anything that musk did that was good was Tesla, which now will be probably brought to scale by Chinese automakers, right? That will make it cheaper and possibly better at some point. But when I look at what the great industrialists of the world have given
- [25:08]
Ezra Klein
us
- [25:10]
Gary Shteyngart
lately, and is it that have the last 26, 25 years, 30 years, have they been really that great in terms of just life? Let me, let me bring it down. And I know that perhaps if you're living somewhere, if you're living in Kenya, far away from Nairobi, and you have a cell phone, a new technology, right, that's really helping you in a way that not having a cell phone would have hurt you 30 years ago. But at the same time, this is not a happy life that's been wrought by these wonderful industrialists who create screens and algorithms that make us, you know, that have destroyed my life to a very large extent. I write at a much slower clip. I don't write as introspectively as I used to. I am as addicted to. And by the way, please follow me heingard on Twitter, Instagram, Blue sky substack. I mean, it never ends, right? This never ends.
- [26:01]
Ezra Klein
So why are you on them then?
- [26:02]
Gary Shteyngart
Well, it's part of the marketing.
- [26:04]
Ezra Klein
Is it?
- [26:04]
Gary Shteyngart
Absolutely. It helps.
- [26:05]
Ezra Klein
You're a big deal, man. Do you actually need that?
- [26:07]
Gary Shteyngart
I don't think I'm that big a deal. No, no, I still need it. Everyone needs it. But the point, and I do get that dopamine kick from it.
- [26:13]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, I think that's the more honest answer right there.
- [26:15]
Gary Shteyngart
Both, Both. Both profit and dopamine. Let me say this. When I started writing super sat the aughts, mid aughts, I didn't know much about this technology, but I had this great intern and he got me into, he was very young, into Facebook and what was it called? MySpace, I think was the thing right and the moment I got on it, I thought this was the germ of supersat. I thought, this technology is going to destroy everything.
- [26:41]
Ezra Klein
Why did you think that?
- [26:43]
Gary Shteyngart
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 it in the Soviet Union when people were writing things that the system would hate so much that you knew you could never publish it. It was called Pisa to write into your des. 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. Woo. 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 and I thought, this is just garbage. We're on this all the time. Half of what I read are complete lies. Lies seem to get more clicks. I'm now addicted to this to the point where it's hard for me to start reading and finishing a book.
- [27:47]
Ezra Klein
What's the.
- [27:48]
Gary Shteyngart
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.
- [28:15]
Ezra Klein
I'm very influenced by this thing Ryan Broderick has said, who's an Internet writer. He talks about it as a porn theory of the Internet that all content now, or at least a lot of content on places like TikTok and Instagram. What it's doing is creating an instant surge of sensation. Right. I see this even when we're creating clips from the show. We need it to make you feel something immediately. It's like the way like porn evolved on the Internet, but. But now it's like, you know, people like, you know, pulling apart cheese sandwiches and. Right. Like you gotta feel angry or curious or hungry or something immediately. And I'm. I mean, you're again, like writing this some time ago. There's a section in the book where Lenny is reading from a the Unbearable Lightness of Being to. To Eunice and 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 is too long. I mean, that's all really there in that book. So somebody writes books, somebody who's clearly thought about this a lot. How do you think about. 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?
- [29:42]
Gary Shteyngart
Oh, absolutely.
- [29:43]
Ezra Klein
As opposed to something we have to follow along and interpret ourselves.
- [29:45]
Gary Shteyngart
I have now started putting. I realized that if I post something on Instagram at Steingart. If I post something on Instagram, Instagram 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. Oh, someone. Rushdie liked this. Wow, life is really good. Good. I mean, do I think that there's a future in long form fiction? I think it's going to be very much a speaking of fetish, like a very small, tiny group of people that do this and most people simply will not have even today. I think something like 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. Like I, I, for me, because I hope I write funny. I think the humor is the thing that gives you that little hit. It keeps the reader hopefully somewhat attached to the page. So this is this interesting thing, right? Like does writing have to. I don't know, 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 releases of Plume of Smoke or something to like. Oh, yeah, right, right. I gotta get back to it.
- [31:15]
Ezra Klein
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 Len. 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 and, you know, 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, her writing is much more, in a way, vivid because it is less self conscious. Right. You can read Lenny writing to be read. I mean, there's nothing worse than reading the journal entries of somebody who wrote a journal, hoping somebody would one day read their journal entries. Right, right, right.
- [32:10]
Gary Shteyngart
And you can.
- [32:11]
Ezra Klein
I mean, those get released a lot.
- [32:13]
Gary Shteyngart
Oh, yeah.
- [32:13]
Ezra Klein
Oh, my God.
- [32:14]
Gary Shteyngart
That's half of literature.
- [32:14]
Ezra Klein
That's half of literature. And there's a lot of likes in the writing that comes without that self consciousness.
- [32:23]
Gary Shteyngart
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 they need to do this or they won't survive. In some ways, that's maybe overstating the case, but some sense of that kind of, you know, call me Ishmael, you know, you can't look away from that. And yeah, Lenny's voice. Lenny is almost in some ways 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. 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 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 to see the dichotomy between what this society wants from her and what she wants to be. Foreign.
- [34:15]
Ezra Klein
This podcast is supported by Better Help. Summer can feel like a sprint. Kids home, trips to plan, routines flipped upside down. It's easy to slip into survival mode just trying to get through it. Then suddenly it's over and you're wishing you enjoyed the days just a little bit more. Therapy can help you slow down and actually be present for the moments that might matter. With Better Help, you can connect with a licensed therapist from anywhere on your schedule. Don't just survive this summer thrive. Visit betterhelp.com New York Times I'm Paul Tanorio. I cover soccer for the Athletic.
- [34:50]
Gary Shteyngart
And I'm Amy Lawrence.
- [34:51]
Ezra Klein
I cover football for the Athletic.
- [34:53]
Gary Shteyngart
Whatever you call it.
- [34:54]
Ezra Klein
The biggest competition in the sport is happening right now and the Athletics 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 your 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
- [35:18]
Gary Shteyngart
already up early every weekend waking the
- [35:20]
Ezra Klein
neighbors when your favorite club scores. We'll make sure you get equipped with more information, more insight than anyone you know.
- [35:26]
Gary Shteyngart
We've got more than 70 obsessive of reporters on the ground covering the ins
- [35:30]
Ezra Klein
and outs from every game. I almost forgot to mention the best part, Amy. Free access to the Athletics 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 find him to be a very tragic figure. Doesn't seem happy to me. Like I just saw pictures of him after getting getting a rhinoplasty a nose job. His nose seemed fine to me before and he just like is miserable and they're in a wheelchair and is like, you know, kind of like small legs route and people are making fun of them on the Internet.
- [36:07]
Gary Shteyngart
Oh my God.
- [36:07]
Ezra Klein
And you just think like this guy's 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 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.
- [37:11]
Gary Shteyngart
Yeah, yeah. You know, since I am mid Gen X, we grew up sitting around bars, talking to each other, counseling each other, helping each other. Everybody had different things they could do. You know, one friend could really write a great cv. Another friend could do something else really well for you. We really were a small village onto ourselves. It was just wonderful. Did 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 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. 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. It's almost like a carnival esque atmosphere. Look, I'm completely crazy. I'm beating myself up with a hammer. And people will pay. Pay for that. They will pay for that. But what happens to that person is nobody cares.
- [38:22]
Ezra Klein
Right.
- [38:22]
Gary Shteyngart
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 gonna. I'm gonna find someone else who beats his, you know, his nose with a hammer or whatever.
- [38:31]
Ezra Klein
That's interesting and a very grim way to put it like that. These relationships that they feel real, but they're not real.
- [38:37]
Gary Shteyngart
They're not real. They're not real. And again, people will say, well, Gary, you know, or these, the Horowitzes, these Industrialists will say, but yeah, Gary, you're living in the past. You know, society moves on. And in fact, if you think social media did anything to destroy the sense of people hanging out in your bar, talking to each other, rubbing elbows, hitting on each other, if you wait till AI enters the chats, and then you won't even need friends. You'll just have six or seven AIs hanging out with you, possibly helping you as you pleasure yourself so you don't even have to, hey, save time. Just, you can get it all without even leaving the comfort of your own bed. The concept of bedrotting, et cetera. Think they would say we're only getting started here. Now, this creates interesting challenges on a political level because nobody's having children in the development. I don't even know what you call it anymore. The opposite of the global south, the global North. Nobody's having children.
- [39:37]
Ezra Klein
Wealthier world.
- [39:38]
Gary Shteyngart
The wealthier world. 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 is also with someone with one kid. But, you know, nobody's replicating themselves in those societies.
- [39:54]
Ezra Klein
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.
- [39:58]
Gary Shteyngart
Yes.
- [39:59]
Ezra Klein
And it's could have been something you've thought about for a while. So when you go to South Korea, which is a society that is now, if trends continue, it will shrink geometrically. Yes. Shrink very, very, very fast.
- [40:09]
Gary Shteyngart
Yes.
- [40:10]
Ezra Klein
What's it like?
- [40:11]
Gary Shteyngart
It's amazing because. Well, first of all, if, if you're, if you're into technology, even if you like a dystopian version of that, there's it' all the time. You know, there's a waste basket that says it's honored to accept your waste. I mean, it just, it never ends. Everything's the Internet of things. I remember I did a piece for Smithsonian. I went to visit, you know, Korea. One of the ways they advance is that the government decides, oh, now we're going to do this. So, 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, 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. And 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 look pretty fierce, you know, And I'm like, jesus Christ. It's like, there's no end to it. Every single part of our lives is going to be replicated. But when you 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 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.
- [42:07]
Ezra Klein
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 sometimes when they're very, very rich, but also when they're quite poor. And then in the middle here, it's too expensive to have kids.
- [42:23]
Gary Shteyngart
Right.
- [42:24]
Ezra Klein
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 poor places and they have a lot more children. Yeah. 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.
- [42:56]
Gary Shteyngart
We've made having kids very, very expensive. We've also made it too competitive. I was just in Palo Alto, and I flew back to downtown Manhattan, where I live. And in both of these precincts, there's this feeling that you're not just having a child. You're having a kind of. I don't know, you're having a corporation, a mini corporation that has to do really, really well, the competition among these kids, because it almost feels like these parents and the kids recognize that the p. So small that it's so easy to get kicked out of the. Whatever you want to call it, the upper middle class, the coastal elites, whatever you want to call it. And so the competition is breathtaking for just a little smidgen of the pie, 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 horseshit 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. There's like grief maxing now where people talk on, you know, about all the grief that they've suffered, which I guess is called a novel, but. Right. But now it's also a TikTok. So. But again, these kids that I'm looking at, like, yeah, what happens to them? I know parents who are deca millionaires, Senta millionaires, and they're still incredibly worried for what their kids will do. And so this isn't fun for parents. It's not fun for the kids. It takes away, it creates, it recreates that sense of metrics that creates for clavicular. Claviculars down the line.
- [44:37]
Ezra Klein
I find this very frightening. I have a first grader and another one who'll be in kindergarten next year. And I know it's coming for them. I know it's coming for them and for me. So there's a sadness to this for me. I look at my son studying his Pokemon card binder every morning, which it's not for anything.
- [44:56]
Gary Shteyngart
It's not for anything.
- [44:58]
Ezra Klein
He just likes the cards. Cause he likes the cards. And I know homework is coming in a real way, and I know the competitions are coming, and I know it'll be important for him to at least do, like, well enough in them. And obviously for my younger one, when it's his turn And I just feel this dread of so much of the joy being drained out of their life.
- [45:15]
Gary Shteyngart
One thing I can suggest is mind when your kid develops a real love, especially a love of something creative. My son loves composition, musical composition, 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 AI 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.
- [46:11]
Ezra Klein
I gave my brother a New York Times subscription. He sent me a year long subscription so I have access to all the games. We'll do wordle mini spelling bee. It has given us a personal connection.
- [46:23]
Gary Shteyngart
We exchange articles and so having read the same article, we can discuss it.
- [46:28]
Ezra Klein
The coverage, the options.
- [46:30]
Gary Shteyngart
It's not just news. Such a diversified disc. I was really excited to give him a New York Times cooking subscription so
- [46:37]
Ezra Klein
that we could share recipes and we
- [46:38]
Gary Shteyngart
even just shared a recipe the other day. The New York Times contributes to our quality time together. You have all of that information at your fingertips.
- [46:47]
Ezra Klein
It enriches our relationship. Relationship. Broadening our horizons.
- [46:50]
Gary Shteyngart
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@nytimes.com gift.
- [47:11]
Ezra Klein
I think there's a. This is like an interesting bridge to this book of essays you have coming up called the Sensualist. And you could really see this in Lenny. You could see this in some of your characters over the years that it feels to me that one of the arguments you've quietly been making and then making more loudly in your nonfiction is that it is a radical act to in a bodily, physical way, just enjoy this life. So first, like, what is sensualism to you?
- [47:39]
Gary Shteyngart
Well, first of all, it's not even just about the senses. It is in a. A more Buddhist or meditative way. If you want to take it that way, it is enjoying what's happening.
- [47:47]
Ezra Klein
Thank you for pandering.
- [47:48]
Gary Shteyngart
I 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 spend half my year in New York. I forgot all about these mansard roofs. I'm like, damn, somebody did something right. Architecturally, New York is such a hodgepodge of good and bad architecture. Maybe that's one of the things that makes it such a cool city, is that it's not beautiful beautiful.
- [48:29]
Ezra Klein
It's just this Michael Kimmelman. When I moved here, which was only a couple 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.
- [48:40]
Gary Shteyngart
Yes. This with that. That this with that, and that, like,
- [48:42]
Ezra Klein
allowed me to see the beauty of New York. It was like a single sentence that reshaped how I looked at a whole
- [48:47]
Gary Shteyngart
this with that, this with that. So, look, I agree with that. Wonderful man, Wonderful lunch date. This and that. I'm going down the street and this and that is creating a fear of great pleasure in me. Is it one of the senses? Yes. This is sight, which is probably the most boring sense. But I am.
- [49:05]
Ezra Klein
If you had to rank them.
- [49:06]
Gary Shteyngart
If I had to rank them. Well, it's the most obvious one. But recently I got a dachshund, which is the world's best dog, clearly. And this giant sausage, completely out of control. Bernie is his name. I dedicate the Sensualists to Bernie. 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. Yes. Rocco was here at 12:30. That's right. That's right. Let's remember that. You know, he loves. And his tail is wagging away. He's just enjoying the hell out of life. He enjoys this more than. 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. And the more I live, also, I find in some ways that this sense of ambition 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. And it was remarkably sad, obviously, to watch them die of cancer in their early 50s. In my generation, incredibly sad. But to the last moment, you know, they found things to enjoy almost to the very last moment, there were things that they enjoyed. And I think the thing they enjoyed the most was talking, verbaling, if you will, with their friends either even at the. You know, nobody wants the verbal. And Sloan Kettering. That's the worst place you want to do it. But if it's there, it still beats not ver. It still beats not having cancer, I think, and hitting yourself with a hammer to create the sense that you're meeting some metric.
- [51:03]
Ezra Klein
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.
- [51:11]
Gary Shteyngart
I love capybaras.
- [51:13]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, capybaras. That's how you say it.
- [51:14]
Gary Shteyngart
Well, I'm trying to be a little more Latin American, given that they mostly live in Cape in Brazil.
- [51:20]
Ezra Klein
Oh, there you go. So there is something about the way elite culture flaunts the repression of enjoyment. Yes. Yes. I saw. There was this clip that had gone viral the other day from the guy who started CEO. I had a year of not drinking, decided to have a drink again. It ruined three days of my life.
- [51:41]
Gary Shteyngart
I had a couple of glasses of wine, didn't get drunk.
- [51:44]
Ezra Klein
It ruined three days of my life because of the domino effect it caused. So it meant that I got worse sleep that night.
- [51:50]
Gary Shteyngart
I ate more poorly the next day
- [51:51]
Ezra Klein
because my dopamine system, or whatever, the cortisol system, was all messed up. That's resilience. 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.
- [52:06]
Gary Shteyngart
Those three glasses of wine had this
- [52:08]
Ezra Klein
hidden domino effect that I must have been living with. And I thought this was a little bit unfair to him how viral it went. But it hit a nerve because it was hitting this culture. Right. It was like an example of this culture. Culture in which there is a status in optimizing everything. The oura ring. Right. You never have a drink. And I do think people have this feeling of like, well, what about enjoyment? What's the point of all this AI can already do a bunch of the things we can do, like if we're not going to be here and enjoy music, enjoy a drink, enjoy great food. Right. If you're going to endlessly be having a glucose monitor and you're not a diabetic, and then you're like, well, pasta. It really spikes my glucose. And 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 influences on. And I'm not saying necessarily even that they're wrong about what they're saying. Sometimes they are. But it just sounds so joyless. I was watching something go around the other day that was like, from the study, and it was like, turns out that doing 12 air squats every 45 minutes is, like, better for you than, like, running to whatever it was was like, I think. I don't want to say I would rather die than do 12 air squats every 45 minutes.
- [53:23]
Gary Shteyngart
Air squat is. So I'm probably ahead, but it didn't
- [53:25]
Ezra Klein
seem like a way to live.
- [53:27]
Gary Shteyngart
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 because so much of this is a part of what you hear and see in certain elite democr 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 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.
- [54:28]
Ezra Klein
Right.
- [54:28]
Gary Shteyngart
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.
- [54:36]
Ezra Klein
Trump is a sensualist.
- [54:37]
Gary Shteyngart
Trump is in some horrible.
- [54:39]
Ezra Klein
He loves a pretty room.
- [54:41]
Gary Shteyngart
He loves a pretty room.
- [54:42]
Ezra Klein
Thinks a lot about interior design. Love loves a good musical.
- [54:46]
Gary Shteyngart
That's right. Right, right, right. J.D.
- [54:49]
Ezra Klein
vance is not a centralist Marco Rubio is not a centralist. Trump is.
- [54:53]
Gary Shteyngart
I think you're absolutely right. And maybe that 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. You know, it was this. Look at the joy. It's what we call in fiction telling, not showing joy. Joy, joy. But we need leaders or candidates who can evince not just the unhappiness of everything we're confronting, from climate change to inflation to the mess that's gonna be left to us when the president leads. And that's not easy to do because we so programmed to this idea that we have to democracy, Max. And we have to be constantly 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.
- [55:45]
Ezra Klein
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.
- [55:54]
Gary Shteyngart
Yeah.
- [55:54]
Ezra Klein
It is a positional competition to show that you are, like, optimizing your body within an inch of your life and your mind, and you're never, you know, you're. How much you're reading and you're, you know, and look, I've. I'm not saying by any means, I'm free of that. The other side, which I think is more specific on the left, is that pleasure is problematic for all different kinds of reasons. Right. You know, maybe the things you enjoy are not politically like a centered. The jokes are too gauche. Right. There's like a million reasons, but I do not find that people are comfortable admitting to a lot of enjoyment. It's. The discourse is critical, not appreciative. Yeah.
- [56:37]
Gary Shteyngart
And I think. Look, I think.
- [56:39]
Ezra Klein
Think
- [56:41]
Gary Shteyngart
this is a Protestant country. There is this kind of Protestant background. And many of the immigrants that come here, including my own family. Right. They are Protestant in a sense, too, that they, you know, they work to. They live to work instead of working to live. That's part of the sort of the coda. So it's very hard for people to appreciate things that are. 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 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 Andalucia. 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. 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 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, or people, you know, having sex with each other, you know, and then talking about it and loving it. You know, they love their culture. Even though statistically they're making half of what Mississippi makes. It doesn't matter. They're 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 times as rich as we are in almost every other context.
- [58:39]
Ezra Klein
Say more on this. This. So, because, I mean, these numbers are true, right? I've looked into this debate and it's not just averages, it's medians. And you can cut this a lot of ways. Like, we've gotten a lot richer than Europe in this country. But, you know, this is a thing we've actually been exploring on the show recently. We've just gotten a lot richer than we used to be. You know, maybe not as much as we could have. And people hate the way the economy feels. They. I mean, everything's incredibly expensive. The prices are going up. They feel nickel and dime. They can't afford a home. So there is this. There's a of lot, lot that your wages, your income does not say about how life feels. Some of this can all be, like, resolved down to economics, 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?
- [59:27]
Gary Shteyngart
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 that are horrible way to live. This is complete poverty. How can you live in such a small space, not have a backyard, often not have a car? I'm using Spain as an example, but it applies to others. But Spain has one of the most wonderful transit systems, both within cities and interconnected transit systems. Everything you need costs a lot less. So you don't need to feel like you have. In some ways, America and China have more in common because there's such a lack of a safety net that people need to save constantly in order to be able to make sure that if things do turn against them that they're not one paycheck away from complete bankruptcy. Bankruptcy. If they don't have, if they get a. If they, you know, 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 shouldn't be shrinking. It'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 Botteglon, having an open bottle in a square and enjoying their company.
- [61:03]
Ezra Klein
So I think this is very important. It's important in the conversation we'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? Because we do buy more. We have more air conditioning here. I mean, a lot of people die in Europe every year because of heat, right? That doesn't happen here nearly to the same degree. We have gotten. 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 the feeling there's never a resting space.
- [62:07]
Gary Shteyngart
I mean look at all the young people who voted for Mamdani, who used it I think in part also as a protest vote against the fact that here we are professionals in New York and we can't afford to live on what we're being paid. This is a nightmare. I think it's the look, since the Thatcher Reagan years there's been a project to destroy as much of the middle class as possible 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. And I think that's all I really want out of life. I think that's all I really wanted. Growing up. I had very few friends. I didn't speak English. Once I started making friends and once I started enjoying my life with them and learning to create distances between me and the 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 mansion.
- [63:14]
Ezra Klein
What is your advice on how to be happy?
- [63:17]
Gary Shteyngart
It's not even. The advice is. I mean again, I'm not trying to suck up with this Buddhism, but the advice really is present moment living, it's that simple. But also not saying no to something. Things that are against the Protestant thrust of this country. So if it's 4:30pm And Negroni beckons, 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. You do all these. I can't believe I'm even g giving this as advice.
- [64:04]
Ezra Klein
This is the thing you do is be in the present moment. Having read a number of your essays now and a number of your books, I think you search out beauty. And I mean, I take much of what you're writing in the Centralist. I mean, you have this beautiful piece about 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 this in politics where I think we have sacrificed beauty as a political virtue and as a social virtue. And I think it has been a mistake, but I could just say it. In life, I think it requires a certain navigation to seek out beauty, a certain intention to seek out beauty. Look, 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. But I don't know, I feel like you're making a real argument about this. So I want to hear more about the search for beauty.
- [65:17]
Gary Shteyngart
Oh, well, look, 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 when one is attention
- [65:28]
Ezra Klein
to the orientation towards, you know, this
- [65:31]
Gary Shteyngart
is stuff that look a lot of this stuff. Also, I would say that even some of these hobbies they. I started collecting watches, for example, only in 2016 because I knew Trump was going to win the election and I knew that I needed something to take my mind off things. Now, many people find, for example, that sports allows them. Watching sports, if not participating in them allows them to do that. I'm not a sports person, so it doesn't do that for me. But finding even a relatively hilarious hobby like watch collecting, first of all, watch collecting of a lot allowed me to meet. I had very few male friends. Most of my friends have always been women. But when you go into this very male space of watch collecting, there's all these men who come up and they're like, you know, they're talking about the 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. 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.
- [66:25]
Ezra Klein
Right.
- [66:26]
Gary Shteyngart
So curation may be a part of it, but it's not even all of it.
- [66:29]
Ezra Klein
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.
- [66:36]
Gary Shteyngart
So what?
- [66:37]
Ezra Klein
And not that one. I'm sure your watch is very nice. The Casio G fit. Like, why that one?
- [66:41]
Gary Shteyngart
I made up a. You made up a watch I made up.
- [66:45]
Ezra Klein
Help me with the watch thing.
- [66:46]
Gary Shteyngart
Well, look, the watch I'm wearing now was made in Germany in Glassutte, Germany. It's called a Langel. It is made by hand. The back, the movement and the. 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.
- [67:18]
Ezra Klein
Yeah. While you tell me about this flower,
- [67:20]
Gary Shteyngart
a number of workers there who make this. And there's a number of workers who create the striping called glassuta. Striping that creates. So that when you. When you bend the watch backwards and forwards, you see a different kind of shimmer across the. Across the dial.
- [67:36]
Ezra Klein
The back is much more interesting than the front.
- [67:37]
Gary Shteyngart
Well, exactly.
- [67:38]
Ezra Klein
Exactly.
- [67:39]
Gary Shteyngart
Well, that's part of the. 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 background, 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 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.
- [68:21]
Ezra Klein
Done. How did you get into them?
- [68:25]
Gary Shteyngart
You know, it's funny because I went to a very horrible yeshiva when I was a kid and I was bullied all the time because I was the stinky Russian bear. I wore a giant shopka, there's a giant fur hat and stuff. And nobody was friends with me but my 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 malia. 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, boy chick 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. 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.
- [69:40]
Ezra Klein
I want to go back to the story 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.
- [69:54]
Gary Shteyngart
November.
- [69:55]
Ezra Klein
I found it very inspiring.
- [69:57]
Gary Shteyngart
Thank you.
- [69:58]
Ezra Klein
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, say of craft.
- [70:12]
Gary Shteyngart
Yeah.
- [70:12]
Ezra Klein
You're. You are drawn to human beings.
- [70:16]
Gary Shteyngart
Yeah.
- [70:17]
Ezra Klein
Doing beautiful things that have taken them. A lot of work to do at
- [70:21]
Gary Shteyngart
that level and a lot of training.
- [70:23]
Ezra Klein
And a lot of training. Tell me about that.
- [70:24]
Gary Shteyngart
Well, look, I. Am I the greatest writer that ever lived? No. But I've worked my butt off to craft sentences and then to make sure that the sentences are crafted into paragraphs this is. You know, there's the original fun of writing a sentence or a paragraph. Oh, look at me. I got this great idea. And then you return to it and 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. The great fun of buying 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. But why? I have no idea what it really. This is one of those things where in the same way that I don't know quite how to fashion this piece of this watch, I also don't know. I make my own martinis. They're pretty good. But there's skills and proprietary formulas that just make for a better martini in both directions. For example, a very dry martini or a very. 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.
- [71:52]
Ezra Klein
I wonder how much you think beauty and efficiency are opposed.
- [71:58]
Gary Shteyngart
Yeah, I would say so. I would say so, because what that is.
- [72:01]
Ezra Klein
And the reason I got to that in opinion, my head, was that, as you would expect with me, I went to Japan. I was like, how do all these things exist? And it turns out they have, you know, in at least many parts, and Tokyo is one of them. They have a public policy structure that just makes it quite affordable to have shops, restaurants that not that many people are going to shop or eat at. Right. They have decided to not maximize the efficiency of retail space. They've decided. Decided to allow people to do a lot of very specific and unusual things. Tokyo also builds a tremendous amount. It's an important part of it. And Chris Murphy, the senator, just gives a interesting speech at a commencement about the problem with the American pursuit of efficiency.
- [72:45]
Gary Shteyngart
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.
- [73:11]
Ezra Klein
And it's not that efficiency is never good. It's often great, but the most beautiful things are not going to be efficient.
- [73:18]
Gary Shteyngart
Yes, but look, this is funny And I agree 100% that this is part of a policy, 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 that has an excellent.
- [73:40]
Ezra Klein
I'm trying to fix that, man. I'm working on it, okay?
- [73:42]
Gary Shteyngart
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, crafts, 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. The craftspeople and artisans are seen as being below that. So you want policies that sustain this kind of thing. Right. There's just this great sense of pride in making very particular things as beautiful as possible. What efficiency does, I think is it takes smaller things than have 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, it's not going to be that, that good.
- [74:24]
Ezra Klein
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. Scarcity creates meaning in things and we do compete with each other. So how do you think about this relationship between what we give this kind of honor to and admiration to the kinds of elite craftsmanship we're talking about? And its relationship is a positional good. In some ways we love it because there's not that many of it. And if there was more, we wouldn't love it as much.
- [75:13]
Gary Shteyngart
A lot of the generations that should be making them are dying out. There's actually some of them may die out just because there won't be enough people to service these watches, to make these suits, you know, but look as much as I love watches and as much as I love my crazy blue suit, I love eating more. And I also think that that is absolute artistry. You can walk around from Elmhurst to Astoria. I've done this, exactly this. And go from Nepalese to Filipino to Egyptian to Greek cuisine in a day. You can wander around and you, you can see people, grandmothers, their granddaughters making art. There's no rarity to it. I mean, as long as there's papayas in the world, these cuisines will exist. But they do something so loving, you just, 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. So you could see how we're trying to, you know, this administration is trying to destroy beauty. The beauty of the fact that so many of us are from different places and create things that are beautiful but are not indigenous to America. But what I found is through my very long research with very, very wealthy people, these are some of the least happy people I know. By far. Every aspect of their life is horrible. So when we talk about, you know, what, you know, yes, having more money. Better, I guess, but to a point, and after a certain while it's worse. It's much, much worse because so many of the people I would meet, right, who are hedge fund managers and they spent their whole day compet one another over different trades, different bets, as they call them, right. And then what do they do when it's over? They go and play poker for $10 million stakes with each other. You know, the competition has to continue forever and there's no appreciation of anything else. You sit in a horrible club, you eat garbage, and you compete with each other some more. That's what America thinks is the highest level of success possible. You're so successful if you can do that, that you should probably run the whole country. Right?
- [77:05]
Ezra Klein
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. You don't have a lot of money. You don't have like, you're not, you know, 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?
- [77:30]
Gary Shteyngart
You know, it's interesting. I think a lot of young people have already figured out, 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'd think that, for example, we talk 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 if we all get robbed, it's the end of the world. But so many of them are super young and they also hate their phones. They don't want to look at those things. They want to look at their wrist and see something beautiful on them. If you know every American metro has incredible inexpensive food that will blow your mind. People complain about Houston. To me, this is the best Vietnamese food outside of Vietnam. Any city, even though cities designed for the car in the parking lot, even those have incredible moments of beauty. I was just in Uzbekistan, one of the poorest countries in the world. I've never seen cities. Is that beautiful. Bukhara and Samarkand and Khiva. These are works of magnificence. Magnificence to pass through them. Wow, what an honor it is to be alive in the world and see things like that.
- [78:49]
Ezra Klein
I think that's a good place to end, always. Our final question. What are the books you recommend to the audience?
- [78:53]
Gary Shteyngart
So I'm gonna start with a book by one of my students. I love my students. Such good work. Columbia graduate a couple years ago. The book is called Men Like Ours. Her name is Bindu Bansinath. I hope I pronounced that correctly. Set in New Jersey. I love anything set in New Jersey. Talk about dystopia, right? That is the best. Really dark humor, but as dark as it is funny, I can't say enough about it. 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 extra 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. And it's a book about what the Soviet. You know, the Soviet Union was ostensibly this feminist, progressive society, but guess what? It treated women like shit. This book really helped me understand a lot of my own background and also about how what the Soviet Union did to people on every level here through the prism of women, but also through Jewish women. It is a remarkable book.
- [80:21]
Ezra Klein
Gary Stenger, thank you very much.
- [80:23]
Gary Shteyngart
Thank you.
- [80:40]
Ezra Klein
This episode of the Israel Clancho is produced by Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior audio engineer is just mixing about Isaac Jones. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassione, Roland Hu, Marina King, Jack McCordick, Kristin Lin, Emma Kelbeck and Jan Cobel. Original music by Pat McGusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.