[Ezra Klein]: Over the past six months, I keep telling people, "We are living in Super Sad True Love Story." And sometimes they'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 Shteyngart. 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 hypervisual 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.

[Ezra Klein]: I wanted to understand how the author of this book, Gary Shteyngart, 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 Shteyngart, 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 is Kleinshowny@Times.com. Before we begin today's show, we're going to be doing an ask me anything episode quite soon. So, if you have any questions, email us at EzraKleinshow@myTimes.com with the headline AMA. Gary Shteyngart, welcome to the show.

[Gary Shteyngart]: 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?

[Gary Shteyngart]: So everyone carries a device called the Aparat which wherever they go it constantly ranks them. But you know the sort of the germ of Super 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 polls 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, etc. So a lot of familiar stuff is happening. There's two main characters. Lenny is kind of like me, a sort of 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 Ununice 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.

[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, clvicular, the looks maxer, and the way that streaming culture and looks and ratings and everything, hypervisual culture all seem to be now holding our attention in a way I don't remember happening before. So as a guy who wrote a book about all this as the future at one point, how has this looked to you?

[Gary Shteyngart]: The book was written about mids I would say it came out in 2010. As I was writing I was thinking yeah this future might be possible in I don't know 30 years. Usually when people are writing speculative fiction they give themselves that 30-year corridor but it happened I don't know 10 years later 14, 15 years later. There's an invasion of Venezuela in this 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 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 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.

[Ezra Klein]: 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.

[Gary Shteyngart]: 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 Beckistan-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? I'm just Gary in the block. I don't have that other I. 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. Since civilization began, there was the head caveman and the lower caveman. So we know that there's always been a hierarchy, but the need to know to the infinite decimal point. It was funny. My preparation for some of this was going to a super competitive high school in New York, Stuyvesant High School, which was all full of immigrant kids like myself. I'm from the Soviet Union. Kids were from Soviet Union, East Asia, South Asia, etc. And I to this day, 86.894 was my average at 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 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.

[Ezra Klein]: 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 want to 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, better food. When your heart rate is high, bad sleep, bad willpower, no exercise, and bad food. So, resting heart rate is the most important marker of your entire life. I think the reason he is so fascinating people in part is that to constantly have 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.

[Gary Shteyngart]: Yes, you got to get the vaginal biome. Clvicular 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. Why are you infertile right now? It's just like a negative feedback loop when you're not needing to produce testosterone anymore because your body realizes okay we're getting it from an exhaust. You're not producing any tesas naturally? No. None. No. I'm not taking TRT, bro. We want to live because we want to enjoy. We want to be hot because we want love and children. And this severing of all of these urges from the things the urges are supposed to do. This severing of the pursuit of desire from the thing the desire is supposed to. It's incredible. Taking testosterone to look good to attract a mate but at the same time taking all this testosterone causes shrunken testicles which probably will not allow you to propagate. So these things are completely at odds and at the same time it's almost like a perversion of whatever strange biological instinct we had. Clvicular is one of my favorites when it comes to this because he's just really funny unintentionally.

[Ezra Klein]: How important is it to you to also make the girl have an orgasm? Not important. How come? Well, because you know the amount of extra effort that's required to do that is just not going to really have much ROI. So, I don't. Well, it's true. I mean, really, that means return on investment. 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. The ranking about mogging the ranking the mogging the ranking but you know and so it's like but wasn't sex supposed to be enjoyable especially when you're 21. I remember 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 for the next 24 hours, this is kind of it. I'll give you another example, which is a little strange, but 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 the things they write about have changed so drastically. 20 years ago there was this kind of John Cheever bisexual energy going on.

[Ezra Klein]: Explain what a John Cheever bisexual energy is. You can't move that fast.

[Gary Shteyngart]: Sorry. Well, you know, the Cheever Updike Roth era and I know that skew is very masculine, right? There was, people wrote about sex non-stop. I mentioned Cheever because at least he had a lot of, he was bisexual himself and there was an appreciation of both hetero and homosexuality. So 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. 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, life is an endless buffet of pleasure. And this clvicular generation just says nah we don't want that you might as well be an algorithm we just want to match up to all these metrics and say done done check check we are the best we won and that's that. So what's your view of where that came from?

[Ezra Klein]: I mean I think it's when I look at my students we're talking about our place in the world earlier they're unsure of the world's place in the world. They don't know what's going to happen next. Everything is a source of anxiety. Half of what my students write, if not more, is speculative fiction of one sort or another, right? And the speculation isn't that we're going to be living in a utopia in 20 years. It's the mood is the vibes, as they say, are 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 the Cheever Updike crew didn't write in a solipsistic way about their own identity as wealthy white people in Scarsdale or whatever. Obviously there was a lot of that kind of stuff as well, but there was a sense that life wasn't entirely hopeless. When I read a lot of modern literary fiction, the driving force to me is neurosis. People being anxious, being unsure, being self-loathing. I find it very very depressing.

[Gary Shteyngart]: Like when you describe that, right, mid late 20th century male writing was very horny. And like 2020's writing is very nervous. Yeah. My students called this the sad girl novel. And there have been some amazing sad girl novel. The Year of Rest and Relaxation is probably to me it reads like a really cool, smart and funny version of that. I think sometimes what I lack and it not always but what I kind of look for in the neurosis novel is a sense of humor that almost leads you into a path of joy. I teach a class called So You Want to Write Funny at Columbia. We teach talk about neurosis like we teach I teach Portnoy's Complaint, it's all set in a psychiatrist's office. It's this neurotic horny Jew like they don't make him anymore, right? And he's just 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 wrong in many ways but also really really funny. The pursuit of it is very very funny. Look, Super Sad is the word sad is the second part of the second word in the title. But I hope that Lenny when he finds the love of his life, Ununice, 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.

[Ezra Klein]: There's a character in Super Sad Love Story who I think is interesting for this conversation, which is Joshy, Lenny's boss. Tell me a bit about Joshy. So Joshy is, let's see, how old is Josh? Well, we don't even know how old Joshy is. He could be in his 80s, but it doesn't matter because he is using every kind of anti-aging technique possible. Joshy does not want to die. He feels, and this is interesting because I think this is true of so many of the people that use this kind of technology. He feels that he hasn't really lived, that he hasn't really had a good life. A lot of people, and I knew 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. Always in the windshield. You're always looking forward to it. It never quite comes. But in order to reach it one day, one has to extend life almost indefinitely. I remember one of the first things when we immigrated to America, my parents would say about Americans who were always seemed so unhappy despite the fact that they were so much richer than us. We were living on government trees for a time, 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. 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?

[Ezra Klein]: Well, there's the search for greater meaning and where you're searching for it. I mean, one of the fundamental things about Super Sad and that feels like a fundamental thing of modern life is everybody's looking for it in the screen, right? And you have one of the fun things of the book is that talking to other people is called verbaling, right? You've needed to create a different linguistic category for what it is we're doing when we have a conversation. And you know, screens are made by corporations. Yes, corporations have their own incentives and their own things they're trying to do. And what they're trying to do is not make you happy, right? 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, Sisyphus's life would have been much better if every time he got the rock to the top, he got some points and if he could then like exchange those points for stickers. Stickers that you can put on the rock, right? Yeah. That'd be great. Oh my god. Now that is really really smart.

[Gary Shteyngart]: But so there is this real I mean the way you talk about eating a little pasta, it's fundamentally erotic, right? So often at a bar I'll see 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 an enemy of enjoyment. There's a lot in there. So verbaling is very hard for members of younger generations. I know COVID messed them up as well. Obviously people in generation alpha, my son's generation, that didn't help obviously, but I think verbaling is just well it is what it is. Letting sounds come out of your mouth as communication is very hard for people to do much harder than obviously sending emojis or shortened text messages etc. 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. The anti-enjoyment you're hammering your cheekbone in to make it a certain metric.

[Ezra Klein]: Describe what bone smashing is.

[Gary Shteyngart]: Um yeah. So bone smashing is based off of Wolff'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 know you attract women by verballing 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 going to it's hammer time. We're going to get that hammer and just chisel ourselves. There's been a fascinating recent trend among Silicon Valley types where they're on a tear against interiority, right? You had Mark Andre talking about how he doesn't want to have interiority. It doesn't want to have introspection, which he described as looking backwards, which not quite what it is, but nevertheless.

[Ezra Klein]: You said something that I love and I never hear other entrepreneurs think about, but I think it's super important that you don't have any levels of introspection. Yes. Zero. As little as possible. Why? Move forward. Go. Yeah. I don't I've just I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's a real problem and it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. And I've been trying to think on this right because I mean these are smart people, right? And I do think it is in some ways if I'm being maximally generous, it is in some ways a reaction I was talking about a minute ago where a lot of modern intellectual culture is very neurotic and very anxious and is endlessly displaying how anxious it is. 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.

[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 neurodivergence, but also neurodivergence combined with terrible parenting. Now, you have somebody like Elon, right, who obviously is or proclaims to be neurodivergent, who was raised by possibly the worst father this side of Woody Allen. I mean, so you have someone who obviously cannot deal with somebody with special needs, and at the same time somebody who possesses all of the gifts that those special needs, in a case of neurodivergence give him.

[Ezra Klein]: I think when I was, I don't know, five or six or something, I thought I was insane. Why did you think you were insane? Because it was clear that other people did not their mind wasn't exploding with ideas all the time. They weren't expressing it. They weren't talking about it all. And you realized by the time you were five or six like, "Oh, they're probably not even getting this thing that I'm getting." No, it was just strange. It was like, hm, 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.

[Ezra Klein]: Let me go back to the Mark Andreessen 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 was able to put reusable rockets in space. Isn't that success? Isn't that what humanity needs to go forward? even if the New York writerly class, literary class doesn't like it.

[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 live in. You know, 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, etc., All that stuff is very good and if anything that Musk did that was good was Tesla which now will be probably brought to scale by Chinese automakers, right? That will make it cheaper and possibly better at some point. But when I look at what the great industrialists of the world have given us lately and is it that have the last 26, 25 years, 30 years have they been really that great in terms of just life? Let me 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 have destroyed my life to a very large extent. I write at a much slower clip. I don't write as introspectively as I used to. I am as addicted to. And by the way, please follow me at Steingard on Twitter, Instagram, Blue Sky, Thump Stack. I mean, it never ends, right? This never ends.

[Ezra Klein]: So why are you on them then?

[Gary Shteyngart]: Well, it's part of the marketing, you know. Absolutely. It helps. You're a big deal, man. Do you actually 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.

[Ezra Klein]: Yeah. I think that's the more honest answer right there. Well, both profit and dopamine. Let me say this. When I started writing Super Sad, the mids, 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 Super Sad. I thought this technology is going to destroy everything.

[Gary Shteyngart]: Why did you think that? because I knew look when you're a writer or an artist you are a part of a narcissist right you are partly at least a narcissist because what do you do this for you don't just do this there was a great way of putting in the Soviet Union when people were writing things that the system would hate so much that you knew you could never publish it was called pisat v stol to write into your desk literally that is the highest level of writing right because nobody will see it but I did not want to write into my desk I wanted the world I was this like I said small furry immigrant strange sense of myself. 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's 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. What's the And books are the best way to get inside into interiority because what is a book? It's a communication between one consciousness and another. I love film and theater and TV and all this other stuff, but this is the fastest this is like a mind-meld technology or in somebody else's head and somebody who's completely different from you hopefully. So when I started using that, I thought that this would be a problem for personalities, especially personalities like mine and for the rest of society. I'm very influenced by this thing Ryan Brick has said, who's a internet writer. He talks about as a porn theory of the internet that all content now or at least a lot of content on places like Tik Tok and Instagram. What it's doing is creating an instant surge of sensation, right? I see this even when we're creating like clips from the show. We needed to make you feel something immediately. It's like the way like porn evolved on the internet, but now it's like, people pulling apart cheese sandwiches and right like you got to feel angry or curious or hungry or something immediately.

[Ezra Klein]: 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 The Unbearable Lightness of Being to Ununice 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 like kids can't follow a long book anymore or 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 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.

[Gary Shteyngart]: Oh, absolutely. As opposed to something we have to follow along and interpret ourselves. I have now started putting I realized that if I post something on Instagram at Steingard if I post something on Instagram I and then I start reading something it's impossible because I will every two pages even if I'm reading the most incredible I was reading this incredible New Yorker article about Ukraine Ukraine obviously is a subject that I'm very involved with and I couldn't every three five minutes well who liked that oh look at Yeah, I thought this person never liked me, but I guess they like me. Oh, Sabani liked this. Wow, life is really good. I mean, do I think that there's a future in long form fiction? I think it's going to be very much 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 some 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 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 it releases a plume of smoke or something like oh yeah right right I got to get back to it. There's an interesting tension around that in the book because one of the other main characters is Ununice who is a much younger partner of Lenny and Lenny is a writer and a reader and he has actual physical books which is a bit of a ghost thing to have in that world and they smell bad and they smell musty and you know not to 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 Ununice who is considered like the great writer and she is internet adult. Everybody is texting on a service called Global Teens, which is very funny.

[Ezra Klein]: But I actually thought that too when you're reading it, like her writing is much more in a way vivid because it is less self-conscious, right? You can read Lenny writing to be read, right? I mean, there's nothing worse than reading the journal entries of somebody who wrote a journal hoping somebody would want to read their journal entries, right? And you can I mean, those get released a lot, right? Oh my god, that's half of literature. That's half of literature. And there's a lot of life in the writing that comes without that self-consciousness.

[Gary Shteyngart]: Yeah, absolutely. And that's you know this is sorry I keep talking about the craft of writing but I hopefully listeners won't mind but it's this idea you know when we start teaching a workshop what I'm looking for in the first paragraph the first page the first chapter is a sense that there's a really active voice that's unlike any other voice I've read before and that 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 some sense of that kind of, call me Ishmael, 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, but he thinks of himself as journaling a lot and so he, a lot of what he writes is very much meant for a certain kind of Brooklyn reader or Brooklyn Mass reader, let's say. Whereas Ununice is what I loved about writing Ununice was that Ununice 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 see the dichotomy between what this society wants from her and what she wants to be. One of the things going back to the subject of clvicular is I found him to be a very tragic figure. Doesn't seem happy to me. Like I just saw pictures of him after getting a rhinoplasty and nose job. His nose seemed fine to me before and he just like is miserable and they're in a wheelchair and is like kind of like small legs are out and people are making fun of them on the internet.

[Ezra Klein]: Oh my god. And you just think like this guy has achieved a level of social notoriety that is remarkable. I mean, most successful streamer of the age and how much happier he would probably be if he had never touched it.

[Gary Shteyngart]: 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. Mhm. 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, on Tik Tok. 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.

[Gary Shteyngart]: Yeah. Yeah. You know, since I'm mid Gen X, we grew up sitting around bars talking to each other, counseling each other, helping each other. Everybody had different things they could do. You know, one friend could really write a great CV, another friend could do something else really well for you. We really were a small village onto ourselves. It was just wonderful. 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 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 for that. They will pay for that. But what happens to that person is nobody cares, right? If tomorrow he ODed, I don't think even his followers would care. They'd be like, "Okay, that was interesting." I'm going to find someone else who beats his nose with a hammer or whatever.

[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.

[Gary Shteyngart]: They're not real. They're not real. And again, people will say, "Well, Gary, you know, or these the Horowits, these industrialists will say, 'But Gary, you're living in the past. You know, society moves on.'" And in fact, if you think social media did anything to destroy the sense of people hanging out in your bar, talking to each other, rubbing elbows, hitting on each other, if you wait till AI enters the 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 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 bedrotting, 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 develop developed world, I don't even know what you call it anymore. The opposite of the global south, the global north, nobody's having children.

[Ezra Klein]: 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 this is also with someone with one kid, but you know there 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's clearly been something you've thought about for a while. So when you go to South Korea, which is a society that is now if trends continue, it will shrink geometrically. Yes. Shrink very, very, very fast. Yes. What's it like?

[Gary Shteyngart]: It's amazing because well, first of all, if you're into technology, even if you like a dystopian version of that, it's all technology all the time. There's a waste basket that says it's honored to accept your waste. I mean, it just never ends. Everything's the internet of things. I remember I did a piece for Smithsonian where I went to visit 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, 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 and I went to this place where they were creating bull robots. Bull robots. this bull, you stood there with a red hanky and this bull would charge you and they're like, "Yes, we're trying to corner the Toriodor market in Spain because people don't want real bulls to die anymore, so we're developing these Toryodor bulls and this bull look pretty fierce." And I'm like, Jesus Christ, it's like there's no end to it. Every single part of our lives is going to be replicated. But when you hang out with people in South Korea, they are exhausted. They are exhausted, 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. The metrics are even more finely attuned than they are in America. And then, 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 too. 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 where they're very, very rich. But also when they're quite poor and then in the middle you hear it's too expensive to have kids, right? 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, right? 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 go to much poorer places and they have a lot more children.

[Ezra Klein]: 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, right? But it has to do with, we have made having kids very, very expensive. We've made it having kids very, very expensive. We've also made it too competitive. I was just in Palo Alto and I flew back to downtown Manhattan where I live. And in both of these precincts, there's this feeling that you're not just having a child, you're having a kind of I don't know, you're having a corporation. a mini corporation that has to do really really well. The competition among these kids because it almost feels like these parents and the kids recognize that the pie is so small that it's so easy to get kicked out of the whatever you want to call it, the upper middle class, the coastal elites, whatever you want to call it. And so the competition is breathtaking for just a little smidgen of the pie. You know, God bless Clvicular as an economic agent. He's figured out his own path forward. He's making 1.2 million or something a year by 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, oh, I'm going to be a basketball player. I'm going to be in a cool rock and roll band. Now is 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 about all the grief that they've suffered, which I guess is called a novel, but now it's also a Tik Tok. So, but again, these kids that I'm looking at like, yeah, what happens to them? I know parents who are decillionaires, centillionaires, and they're still incredibly worried for what their kids will do. And so, this isn't fun for the parents. It's not fun for the kids. It takes away, it creates, it recreates that sense of metrics that creates for clviculars down the line.

[Ezra Klein]: I find this very frightening. I have a first grader and another one who'll be in kindergarten next year. Yeah. And I know it's coming for them. I know it's coming for them and for me. So, there's a sadness to this for me. I look at my son like studying his Pokemon card binder every morning, which it's not for anything. It's not for anything. He just likes the cards because he likes the cards and I know homework is coming in a real way and I know the competitions are coming and I know it will be important for him to at least do like well enough in them and 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.

[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, during the weekend that will 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, he's sitting there in a class. He may like the class, he may not like the class, but he's humming to himself.

[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 know, you could really see this in Lenny. You can see this in some of your characters over the years that it feels to me like one of the arguments you've quietly been making and then making more loudly in your non-fiction is that it is a radical act to in a bodily physical way just enjoy this life. Right. So, so first like what is sensualism to you?

[Gary Shteyngart]: Well, first of all, it's not even just about the senses. It is in a more Buddhist or meditative way if you want to take it that way. It is enjoying what's happening. I was walking here today and mostly I'm in the summer upstate but I came down for this interview and I'm walking down Broadway and I looked up and I'm just noticing these beautiful mansard roofs of some of these buildings. Now I spent half my year in New York. I forgot all about these mansard roofs. I'm like, damn, somebody did something right architecturally. And 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. 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 a juxtaposition of this with that." Yes. This with that. That's this with that. And that like allowed me to see the beauty of New York. It was like a single sentence that reshaped how I looked at a whole place. this with that, this with that. So, look, I agree with that. Wonderful man, wonderful lunch date. This and that. I'm going down the street and this and that is creating a fear of great pleasure in me. Is it one of the senses? Yes, this is sight, which is probably the most boring sense. If you had to rank them, 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 Sensualist to Bernie, my furry sensualist, because he is a very sensual dog. And his great sense of smell, obviously. So, he will walk down the street and there's a corner where every dog pees on. And he approaches it like a Talmudic scholar, and he sniffs here, he sniffs there. Yes. Roco was here at 12:30. That's right. Let's remember that. He loves and his tail is wagging away. He's just enjoying the hell out of life. He enjoys us 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. So the more 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, 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, verballing, if you will, with their friends. Even at the, 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 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.

[Ezra Klein]: I think the interesting thing you're doing in that across these recipes which are about martinis and suits and all kinds of things. Capibaras. I love capibaras. Yeah. Capibaras that's how you say it. Well, I'm trying to be a little more Latin American given that they mostly live in capiv in in Brazil. 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 host 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. 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, those three glasses of wine had this hidden domino effect that I must have been living with." And I thought this was a little bit unfair to him how viral it went, but it hit a nerve, right? 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 top podcasters 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 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. just like I think I don't want to say I would rather die than do 12 air squads every is so I'm probably ahead. Yeah, but it didn't seem like a way to live.

[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 push back on this, but that this is a problem for us as Democrats is that, because so much of this is a part of what you hear and see in certain elite democratic precincts. This isn't, 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's has this very nasty edge. did see as a kind of joyous thing and he would belt things out and then he would you know and people listened. speaking of Trump Nusbam I think wrote the best piece ever on that when she wrote the New Yorker about Trump really stealing appropriating as they say the humor of sort of Jewish borscht belt comics of a certain period right 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 a sensualist. Trump is in some horrible He loves a pretty room. He loves a pretty room. Thinks a lot about interior design. Love loves a good musical. That's right. Right. Right. Right. JD Vance is not essentialist. Marco Rubio is not essentialist. Trump is 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 Kamla Harris she talked about joy so much that you knew that there wasn't that much joy going on it was this look at the joy it's a what we call in fiction telling not showing joy joy joy but we need leaders or candidates who can event not just the unhappiness of what everything we're confronting from, climate change to inflation to the mess that's going to be left to us when this president leaves. 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 liveable.

[Gary Shteyngart]: There's a lot I want to say in response to that. One is, 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, how much you're reading and, 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 as centered. The jokes are too go, 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.

[Ezra Klein]: Yeah. And I think look I think this is a Protestant country. There is this kind of Protestant background and many of the immigrants that come here including my own family right they are Protestant in a sense too that they live to work instead of working to live. That's part of the sort of the koda. So it's very hard for people to appreciate things that bring you joy because joy itself is kind of suspect. Well do that on your own time. Don't talk about that. just leave the joy out of there. I think people miss the idea of being able to talk, in my case, write about the things that I love. There's so much pleasure in the writing is almost the second pleasure I get when I try to think about what all these things mean to me and I get to sort of live in that world for a while. I was just in Spain with my kid, my wife and I was showing him Andalusia, which is considered the poorest region or one of the poorest regions of Spain. I was listening to this in a former podcast of yours where we were talking about how Mississippi is richer than almost every European state. Well, I have spent time in Mississippi. Mississippi, if anything, reminds me of Russia where there's a couple of super rich people with gigantic housing pools and then there are people living in conditions that almost anywhere in the world would be seen as very poor. And the medium of that becomes whatever that number is. I'm sorry, the average of that, not the median, becomes whatever that number is. You go to the poorest region in Spain, life is beautiful. I'm not saying that it's completely free of poverty, but the communal connections are so strong. the things that bring people joy are so celebrated whether it's wine or a large midday meal or people having sex with each other and then talking about it and loving it, they love their culture even though statistically they're making half of what Mississippi makes. It doesn't matter. They're three, four, five, six, eight times as rich as we are in almost every other context.

[Ezra Klein]: Say say more on this. So be 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 this is a thing we've actually been exploring on the show recently. We have just gotten a lot richer than we used to be. 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 lot that your wages, your income does not say about how life feels. Some of this can all be like resolved down to economic, but some of it can't. When you say people are six, seven, eight, nine times richer in these places than we are, despite the wealth differential, why?

[Gary Shteyngart]: Well, look, for example, if you're living in southern Europe, you could be very content with a 600 foot apartment where you live. could be two three people are living stuff that we in America would especially outside the larger metros consider horrible way to live this is complete poverty how can you live in such a small space not have a backyard often not have a car I'm using Spain as an example but it applies to others but Spain is one of the most has one of the most wonderful transit systems both within cities and and interconnected transit systems everything you need costs a lot less so you don't need to feel like you have in some ways America and China have more in common because there's such a lack of a safety net that people need to save constantly in order to be able to make sure that if things do turn against them, that they're not one paycheck away from complete bankruptcy, if they go over their deductible on a horrible medical bill, that they're not completely bankrupt. All this stuff doesn't exist in a place like Spain. That's where the wealth is. The wealth is being taxed at a different rate. Obviously, a much higher rate than we are, but also knowing that these aren't real problems that you're going to face. And Spain also figured out the fact that the Spanish are also not having any children. that actually if they let in a certain amount of immigrants, life is even better. Now there's people working for less doing more and the society keeps expanding despite the fact that they should be shrinking. 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 4,000ft McMansion half of which you don't even see or is it sitting around with friends having a bayon and having a open bottle in a square and enjoying their company? So I think this is very important. It's important to 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 you know we do buy more we have more air conditioning here. I mean a lot of people die in Europe every year because of heat, right? that doesn't happen here nearly to the same degree. We have gotten, we want bigger homes in much of the country. We want cars, right? New York is like a little bit unusual in that. the way in which like the treadmill of what it just what the trappings of a good life are and then you look around and you're unhappy and you're atomized and you're far from family and you live in a place you didn't quite intend to live in and it is I think this feeling and I think it's quite poisonous that you did everything right and this wasn't how you were told it would be or feel and like there's never a resting space right

[Ezra Klein]: I mean look at all the young people who voted for Mandani, who viewed 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 my parents, I am more and more ready to spend my life not just thinking about happiness, but actually being happy because I know how to do it. I know how to do it walking down Broadway looking up at a man.

[Ezra Klein]: What is your advice on how to be happy?

[Gary Shteyngart]: It's not even advice. It's the advice is, present moment living. It's that simple. But also not saying no to things that are against the Protestant thrust of this country. So, if it's 4:30 p.m. 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 giving this as advice. This is the thing you do is be in the present moment.

[Ezra Klein]: 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 Sensualist. I mean, you have this beautiful piece about like the perfect suit and the perfect martini. I've told you this before we started, but I feel like I got a hangover just reading your piece about your martini runs. Some of us may not have the same constitutions. But I think this is important. I mean, I could say 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 that it requires a certain navigation to seek out beauty, a certain intention to seek out beauty. Look, to counter my own some of my own episodes here, I do think some present moments are better than others. And I think decisions you make are meaningful. trying to find ways to be in beauty, which doesn't it can be expensive, but I find Prospect Park to be like a place of extraordinary beauty in the spring and in the summer, of course. And but I don't know. I feel like you're making a real argument about this. So, I want to hear more about the search for beauty.

[Gary Shteyngart]: Oh well look first of all I don't know if this search needs to be as systematic as that because one can also create a kind of martini maxing when one is or suit maxing to the orientation towards you know this is stuff that look a lot of this stuff also I would say that even some of these hobbies they I started collecting watches for example only in 2016 because I knew Trump was going to win the election and I knew that I needed something to take my mind off things. Now many people find for example that sports allows them watching sports if not participating in them allows them to do that. I'm not a sports person, so it doesn't do that for me. But finding even a relatively hilarious hobby like watch collecting. First of all, watch collecting allowed me to meet I had very few male friends. Most of my friends have always been women. But when you go into this very male space of watch collecting, there's all these men who come up and they're like, 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, right? So curation may be a part of it, but it's not even all of it.

[Ezra Klein]: 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. So why and not that one? I'm sure your watch is very nice. The Casio G50. Like why that one? I made up a watch. 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. 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. 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 movement has come alive and it's spinning. Different gears are turning. It's all mechanical. One of the other reasons I love watches is it keeps me from using my phone because one of the biggest things I would take out my Oh, what time is it? I take out my phone and then I'd spend seven hours on Twitter arguing with some fascists and now I don't have to do that. Oh, it's 120. Done.

[Ezra Klein]: How did you get into them?

[Gary Shteyngart]: You know, it's funny cuz I went to a very horrible yeshiva when I was a kid and I was bullied all the time cuz I was the stinky Russian bear. I wore a giant Shopka, a giant fur hat and stuff and nobody was friends with me. My somebody I guess my grandma bought me a Casio melody alarm watch and it played all songs from around the world. This is when Japan was very ascendant and created technology nobody else could. And one of the songs was Kalinka the Russian song. So I would hide in the bathroom away from all the bullying Jewish kids and listen to that song and it would take me back to a world which I understood. Not that I missed the politics of Soviet Union, but I missed having a language and a culture that I understood. So this one watch had this in me. And then 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 steal watch. She 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 toward 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 Sensualist again, the rest of you can't buy it yet, but you will be able to soon, November. I found it very inspiring 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. Yeah. Doing beautiful things that have taken them a lot of work to do at that level and a lot of training. Tell me about that.

[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, 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 writing that martini art because I hung out with people who make some of the best martinis ever. In the end, maybe the best martinis are made in Shibuya at something called the Zinc Bar in Tokyo. But why? I have no idea what it really This is one of those things where in the same way that I don't know quite how to fashion this piece of this watch, I also don't know. I make my own martinis. pretty good. But there's skills and proprietary formulas that just make for a better martini in both directions. For example, a very dry martini or a very wet martini. There's a great martini at the Eel Bar in New York. So, it's finding a place where the person has a history to what they're doing and has so often it's been perfected over generations and then figuring out what they do really well and that is beauty.

[Ezra Klein]: I wonder how much you think beauty and efficiency are opposed.

[Gary Shteyngart]: 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 in at least many parts and Tokyo is one of them. They have a public policy structure that just makes it quite affordable to have shops, restaurants that not that many people are going to shop or eat at, right? They have decided to not maximize the efficiency of retail space. They have decided to allow people to do a lot of very specific and unusual things. Tokyo also builds a tremendous amount. It is it's an important part of it. and Chris Murphy the senator just gives a interesting speech at a commencement about 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.

[Gary Shteyngart]: 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 superefficient that we should have. For example, highspeed rail. You know, talking about Japan, we're also talking about Spain. all the countries we talked about previously, Italy, which has, technologically is not the most advanced country in the world, has an excellent I'm trying to fix that, man. I'm working on it. Okay, please, please do because I love highspeed rail. But, my friends in Japan have told me several things. First of all, one is that in Japanese culture, craftsmanship and small store craftsmanship on a smaller scale has always been viewed as even higher than the merchant. In many other societies, the merchant class is above the crafts people. The crafts 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, is it takes smaller things that are done well and it says, well, we're going to do 8 million examples of that and then of course it's not going to be that good. There's another side to this which can be a darker side which is how much when we are talking about things we make is beauty a function of scarcity which also makes it a function of cost right things are beautiful we honor them in part because not that many people can have them if the watch you had was mass-produced and everywhere it might be no less beautiful in some way but it would not be rare right scarcity creates meaning in things and we do compete with each other so how do you think about this relationship between what we give this kind of honor to and admiration to the kinds of elite craftsmanship we're talking about and its relationship is a positional good in some ways we love it because there's not that many of it and if there was more of it we wouldn't love it as much

[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 but look as much as I love watches and as much as I love my crazy blue suit, I love eating more and I also think that that is absolute artistry. You can walk around from Elmhurst to Astoria. I've done this exactly this and go from Nepalese to Filipino to Egyptian to Greek cuisine in a day. You can wander around and you can see people grandmothers, their granddaughters making art. There's no rarity to it. I mean, as long as there's papayas in the world, these cuisines will exist. But they do something so loving. You just marvel at it. Last time I walked down Roosevelt Avenue on a weekend there was half the people because this was when ice was especially prevalent. So you could see how we're trying, this administration is trying to destroy beauty, the beauty of the fact that so many of us are from different places and create things that are beautiful but are not indigenous to America. But what I 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 having more money better I guess but to a point and after a certain while it's worse it's much much worse because so many of the people I would meet right who are hedge fund managers and they spend their whole day competing with one another over different trades different bets as they call them right and then what do they do when it's over? They go and play poker for $10 million stakes with each other. You know, the competition has to continue forever and there's no appreciation of anything else. You sit in a horrible club, you eat garbage, and you compete with each other some more. That's what America thinks is the highest level of success possible. You're so successful if you can do that, that you should probably run the whole country, right?

[Ezra Klein]: I know The Sensualist 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're not able to go traveling to the great capitals of the world. But what do you tell a student in one of your classes? It's like, where do I start?

[Gary Shteyngart]: You know, it's interesting. I think a lot of young people have already figured out that the life that the corporations are asking them to live is not a good life and I think that's why you'd think that for example we talk about watches you'd think this would be an 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. Every American metro has incredible, inexpensive food that will blow your mind. People complain about Houston to me. This is the best Vietnamese food outside of Vietnam. Any city, even those cities designed for the car in the parking lot, even those have incredible moments of beauty. I was just in Uzbekistan, one of the poorest countries in the world. I've never seen cities that beautiful. Bukhara and Samarkand and these are works of magnificent magnificence to pass through them. Wow. What an honor it is to be alive in the world and see things like that.

[Ezra Klein]: I think that's a good place to end. Always a final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

[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. A second book was coming out, I think, in August, and that's by my mentor, Chang Lee, the wonderful Korean-American writer. A Tender Age, I think is the name of the book. There was an excerpt in the New Yorker. This, I think, is his most memoiristic novel. I think a lot of his own background goes into this. He meant so much to me both as a teacher and as a friend and as a sensualist. He is as sensual as one gets living in Northern California. He's incredible. And the third book is Julia Yoffy's Motherland which was a national book awards finalist an old friend of mine also Soviet born Moscow to my Leningrad and it's a book about what the Soviet Union was ostensibly this feminist progressive society but guess what it treated women like shit this book really helped me understand a lot of my own background and also about how what the Soviet Union did to people on every level here through the prism of women but also through Jewish women. It is a remarkable book.

[Ezra Klein]: Gary Shteyngart, thank you very much.

[Gary Shteyngart]: Thank you.