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

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 of the grimmer aspects of our present, but also how we might delight in the world’s “endless buffet of pleasure” in spite of them. This episode contains strong language. Note: We’re recording an "Ask Me Anything" episode soon. If you have a question, please email [email protected] using the subject like "AMA." We'd love to hear from you. Mentioned: “The End Point Of Viral Content” by Ryan Broderick “How Jokes Won the Election” by Emily Nussbaum “A Visit to Seoul Brings Our Writer Face-to-Face With the Future of Robots” by Gary Shteyngart The Intimate City by Michael Kimmelman “Don’t Just Take the Slow Road; Design It,” Commencement address at Wesleyan’s 194th Commencement Ceremony, Chris Murphy Book Recommendations: Men Like Ours by Bindu Bansinath A Tender Age by Chang-rae Lee Motherland by Julia Ioffe Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary-Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ezra Klein?

  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 ezra klein show at nytimes.com with the headline AMA.

• 0:42Ezra 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 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.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  We are living in a time of profound corruption.

• 1:31Ezra Klein?

  Inflation is hitting its highest point in three years. A world where everybody is upset. And they're grabbing at the wrong things to try to fix it.

• 1:44Ezra Klein?

  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 Steingard, 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

• 2:24Ezra Klein?

  a moment like this one. But I wanted to talk to him about all of it. As always, my email as our client show at nytimes.com.

• 2:42Ezra Klein?

  Gary Steingard, welcome to the show.

• 2:44Gary Shteyngart?

  Great to be here, longtime listener.

• 2:46Ezra 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?

• 2:58Gary 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, 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

• 3:42Gary Shteyngart?

  to spend more. It just constantly wants to keep people in equilibrium. Women are very sexualized, even more so than in our world. America is run by a kind of, well, fascist leader who has started a war in Venezuela, et cetera. So a lot of familiar stuff is happening. There's two main characters. Lenny is kind of like me, a sort of neo-nebish, who's a Gen X, which is this interesting generation that's kind of a bridge between the analog and the digital worlds. And Eunice is 10, 15 years younger than him, but she's already a full digital native. So probably, you know, if you think millennial or something like that. And so this is a very unlikely love affair between two people. And I think the biggest thing that holds them back is the

• 4:27Gary Shteyngart?

  fact that they live, they live in two different worlds.

• 4:30Ezra 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 looks maxer, and the way that streaming culture and looks and ratings and everything, hyper visual culture, all seem to be now holding our attention in a way I don't remember happening before. So as a guy who wrote a book about all this as the future at one point, how is this look to you?

• 4:58Gary Shteyngart?

  You know, the book was written about mid aughts, 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.

• 5:21Ezra Klein?

  Oh, yeah, there is invasion of Venezuela in the book.

• 5:23Gary Shteyngart?

  There is an invasion of Venezuela. Israel is controlled by a Smotrich-like party.

• 5:27Ezra Klein?

  It's called Security State Israel.

• 5:28Gary 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, you know, social media was the way we were into being ranked.

• 5:46Gary Shteyngart?

  Uh, this was something very new to me. I mean, I guess it's always been a thing, you know, people apply to college and then they're ranked to get in or, you know, athletes are ranked, blah, blah, blah. We're in a very competitive society. Uh, 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, or every single aspect of their being. Uh, and at one point, the internet of the future goes out and, um, 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.

• 6:21Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I thought that was a very, I actually had that quote here. I found it very moving. You talk about these young people who committed suicide, um, 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."

• 6:40Gary 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 they're, 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, I don't have, um, you know, that other, I, I fell into that trap so quickly. I have friends, relatives who, uh, work in Silicon Valley that they

• 7:23Gary Shteyngart?

  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, and look, none of this is a hundred percent new. Civilization began, there was, you know, the, the head caveman and the lower caveman and. Blah, blah, blah. So we, we, we know that there's always been a hierarchy, but they need to know to the infinitesimal decimal point. It was funny. Uh, my preparation for some of this was going to a super competitive high school in New York, uh, 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, eighty

• 8:04Gary Shteyngart?

  six point eight nine four was my average, uh, 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, uh, and millimeter, this isn't a good way to live.

• 8:30Ezra Klein?

  So this to me, it's, it's the other interesting thing about the book, and it also comes up in your, your book of essays, but it is this simultaneous obsession with living forever without enjoying life.

• 8:39Gary Shteyngart?

  Right.

• 8:40Ezra Klein?

  And what I always find so fascinating about when I watch Brian Johnson, and I don't mean to be, uh, insulting anybody's life decisions here, but I don't know if I was, I, I don't wanna live like that.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:16Ezra Klein?

  I think the reason he is so fascinating people in part is that to constantly have a level of self-examination, the level of self diagnostics. I mean, you, you have a partner now. And so the first thing you do is you go online and talk about her vaginal biome.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  Good relationships are really rare and Kate is important to me because she really does feel like my other half.

• 9:41Speaker 04

  Biohacker Brian Johnson recently boasted about his girlfriend's top 1% vagina, sparking interest in at-home vaginal microbiome tests.

• 9:48Gary Shteyngart?

  Yes. Gotta get that vaginal biome.

• 9:51Ezra Klein?

  Clavicular, who it's like you've divorced getting hot from the point of getting hot, right? He talks about how he can't have a girlfriend given the life he leads. He is not fertile. Well, why are you infertile right now?

• 10:01Speaker 05

  Uh, so there's just like a negative feedback loop when you're, uh, you know, not needing to produce testosterone anymore because your body realizes, okay, we're getting it from an

• 10:09Ezra Klein?

  So you're not producing any testosterone naturally?

• 10:11Speaker 05

  No.

• 10:12Ezra Klein?

  None?

• 10:13Speaker 05

  No.

• 10:14Ezra Klein?

  Oh, I'm gonna take a 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.

• 10:29Gary Shteyngart?

  It's incredible. Um, taking testosterone to look good, to attract a mate. But at the same time, you know, 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. Clubicula is one of my favorites when it comes to this because he's just really funny and intentionally so.

• 10:54Speaker 06

  How important is it to you to also make the girl have an orgasm?

• 11:00Speaker 05

  Not important.

• 11:04Speaker 06

  How come?

• 11:05Speaker 05

  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.

• 11:18Speaker 05

  So.

• 11:21Speaker 05

  I don't.

• 11:23Speaker 05

  Well, it's true. I mean, really.

• 11:24Speaker 06

  That means return on investment.

• 11:27Gary Shteyngart?

  Uh, you know, he'll talk about how, um, 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.

• 11:36Ezra Klein?

  The ranking, about mugging.

• 11:38Gary Shteyngart?

  The mugging, the ranking. But, you know, and, and so it's like, but wasn't sex supposed to be enjoyable? Especially when you're 21. I, I, 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, this is kind of it. You know, I'll give you another example, which is a little strange, but, uh, so I've been teaching creative writing at Columbia for about 20 years now. Um, 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. You know, um, 20 years ago in the aughts, there was this kind of.

• 12:20Gary Shteyngart?

  John Cheever bisexual energy going on where Explain what a John Cheever bisexual energy is. You can't, you can't move that fast. 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. So, uh, but it, 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,

• 13:03Gary Shteyngart?

  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. What's your view of where that came from? I mean, I think it's, when I look at my students, we're talking about our place in the world earlier. They're unsure of the world's place in the world. They don't know what's going to happen next. Everything is a source of anxiety. Half of what my students write, if not more, is speculative fiction of one sort or another. Right. Uh, and the speculation isn't that, you know, we're going to be living in a utopia in 20 years.

• 13:47Gary Shteyngart?

  It's, it's 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, uh, didn't write in a solipsistic way about whatever, you know, their own identity as a wealthy white people in Scarsdale or whatever. You know, obviously there was a lot of that kind of stuff as well, but there was a sense that life wasn't entirely hopeless.

• 14:24Ezra Klein?

  When I read a lot of modern literary fiction, the driving force to me is neurosis.

• 14:29Gary Shteyngart?

  Yeah.

• 14:30Ezra 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.

• 14:45Gary Shteyngart?

  Yeah.

• 14:45Ezra Klein?

  And, like, 2020s writing is very nervous.

• 14:49Gary Shteyngart?

  Yeah, yeah. My students call 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 not always, but what I kind of look for in the neurosis novel is a sense of, is a sense of humor that almost leads you into a path of joy. You know, I teach a class called So You Want to Write Funny at Columbia, and for example, you know, we teach, talk about neurosis. Like, we teach, I teach Portnoy's Complaint, you know? And that is, obviously, is all, it's all set in a psychiatrist's office. It's this neurotic horny Jew, like, they don't make them anymore, right?

• 15:30Gary Shteyngart?

  And he's just, you know, 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 title, but I hope that Lenny, you know, 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. Let me go away by the next day, or when the hangover sets in, but that is there at least for a while.

• 16:05Ezra Klein?

  There's a character in Super Sad, your love story, who I think is interesting for this conversation, which is Joshy, Lenny's boss. Tell me a bit about Joshy.

• 16:12Gary Shteyngart?

  So Joshy is, let's see, how old is Joshy? 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 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.

• 16:56Gary Shteyngart?

  And that life is always the opposite of the rearview mirror. I don't know, always in the windshield. You're always looking forward to it. It never quite comes, but in order to reach it one day, one has to extend life almost indefinitely. I remember one of the first things when we emigrated to America, my parents would say about Americans, who always seemed so unhappy despite the fact that they were so much richer than us. We were living on government cheese for a time, you know? And my parents and other Russians would say, "Аня жыр бесятся", 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.

• 17:39Gary Shteyngart?

  And to not die is one of those almost Protestant kind of extension of everything and striving. Why should the striving ever end?

• 17:47Ezra Klein?

  Well, there's the search for greater meaning than those 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. And you have, one of the fun fillips of the book is that talking to other people is called verbaling.

• 18:04Gary Shteyngart?

  Verbaling.

• 18:04Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 18:15Gary Shteyngart?

  Yes.

• 18:16Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 18:37Gary Shteyngart?

  Stickers? Then he could put on the rock, right? Yeah, that'd be great. Oh, my God. Now, that is, that is really, really smart.

• 18:42Ezra Klein?

  But so there is this, I mean, the way you talk about eating a little pasta, it's fundamentally erotic.

• 18:48Gary Shteyngart?

  Right.

• 18:48Ezra 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.

• 19:09Gary Shteyngart?

  There's a lot in there. So verbally 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 verbally is just, well, it's, it's, it is what it is. Letting sounds come out of your mouth as communication is very hard for people to do, much harder than obviously sending emojis or shortened, you know, shortened text messages, et cetera, stuff like that. And I think it's interesting when you look at someone who is, for example, doing looks maxing, who is using a hammer, talk about the opposite of joy, this anti of enjoyment, you're hammering your cheekbone in to make it a certain metric.

• 19:53Speaker 05

  Describe a bone smashing is. Yeah, so bone smashing is based off of Wolff's law that, you know, when you break down a bone, it grows back stronger.

• 20:04Gary Shteyngart?

  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 verbally 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.

• 20:45Ezra Klein?

  There's been a fascinating 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.

• 21:02Speaker 05

  You said something that I love and I never hear other entrepreneurs think about, talk about, but I think is super important, that you don't have any levels of introspection.

• 21:09Gary Shteyngart?

  Yes, zero, as little as possible.

• 21:10Speaker 05

  Why?

• 21:11Gary Shteyngart?

  Move forward. Go.

• 21:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, I don't know. I just find people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's just, it's a real problem and it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home.

• 21:20Ezra Klein?

  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 a, 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.

• 21:56Gary 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 neurodivergents, but also neurodivergents 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 the case of neurodivergence, give him.

• 22:38Speaker 08

  I think when I was, I don't know, five or six or something, I thought I was insane.

• 22:43Gary Shteyngart?

  Why did you think you were insane?

• 22:45Speaker 08

  Because it was clear that other people did not, their mind wasn't exploding with ideas all the time.

• 22:52Gary Shteyngart?

  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.

• 23:02Speaker 08

  No, it was just strange. It was like...

• 23:08Speaker 08

  Hmm, I'm strange.

• 23:11Speaker 08

  That was my conclusion. I'm strange.

• 23:13Gary Shteyngart?

  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.

• 23:28Ezra Klein?

  Let me go back to the, the Mark and Jasons 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.

• 23:37Gary Shteyngart?

  Sure.

• 23:38Ezra Klein?

  But listen, it created the greatest industrialist of our age, the richest man in the world, the 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?

• 23:54Gary 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, you know, the marvels of Mercury anytime soon. Right? So a lot of this is complete bullshit, as far as I'm concerned, that part of it, right? Now, of course, electric cars, et cetera, all that stuff is very good. And if anything that Musk did that was good 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

• 24:33Gary Shteyngart?

  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, let me bring it down. I know that perhaps if you're living somewhere, if you're living in Kenya, far away from Nairobi, and you have a cellphone, a new technology, right? That's really helping you in a way that not having a cellphone 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

• 25:18Gary Shteyngart?

  to. I am as addicted to, and by the way, please follow me at Steinberg on Twitter, Instagram, Blue Sky, Substack. I mean, it never ends, right? This, this never ends.

• 25:28Ezra Klein?

  Why are you on them then?

• 25:29Gary Shteyngart?

  Well, it's a part of the marketing. Is it? Absolutely. You're a big deal, man. Do you actually need to be there? 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. Yeah, I think that's the more honest answer right there. Both, both, both profit and dopamine. Let me say this. When I started writing Supersat, 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 uh, what was it called? MySpace, I think was the thing, right? And the moment I got on it, I thought, this is, this was the germ of Supersat. I thought, this technology is going to destroy everything. Why did you think that?

• 26:10Gary 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 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 pisatstol, to write into your desk, literally. That is the highest level of writing, right? Because nobody will see it. Uh, 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. Uh, 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?

• 26:54Gary Shteyngart?

  Everyone now is, 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 i- i- into interiori, 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,

• 27:38Gary Shteyngart?

  especially personalities like mine, and, and for the rest of society.

• 27:42Ezra 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 the content on places like TikTok and Instagram, what it's doing is creating an instant surge of sensation, right? I see this even when we're creating like clips from the show, we need it to make you feel something immediately. It's like the way like porn evolved on the internet. But but now it's like, you know, people like, you know, pulling apart cheese sandwiches and right? Like, you got to feel angry or curious or hungry or something immediately. And I mean, you're again, like writing this some time ago, there's a section in the book

• 28:21Ezra Klein?

  where Lenny is reading from a The Unbearable Lightness of Being to Eunice and book by Belong Kandera, and you write, or he says, he writes in the book, "I felt that Kandera had put too many words around the fetish for her to gain what her generation required from any form of content. A ready surge of excitement, a temporary lease on satisfaction." I mean, now you hear everybody talking about how like kids can't follow along book anymore. Everything's too long. I mean, that's all really there in that book. So somebody writes books, somebody has thought about this a lot. How do you think about what it is doing to us as a country, as a collective, as a world, when we get sort of trained to expect that the things

• 29:05Ezra Klein?

  we see will immediately create a reaction, a sensation, as opposed to something we have to follow along and interpret ourselves?

• 29:12Gary Shteyngart?

  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 York, 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, oh, look at that. I thought this person never liked me, but I guess they like me. Oh, someone who's like this. Wow. Life is really good. I mean, do I think that there's a future in long form fiction?

• 29:53Gary Shteyngart?

  I think it's going to be very much just, speaking of fetish, like a very small, tiny group of people that do this. And most people simply will not have, even today, I think something like 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, the end user experience? Like, I, I, for me, because I hope I write funny. I, 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, 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?

• 30:36Gary Shteyngart?

  That could be a great technology, or it releases a plume of, of smoke or something. It's like, oh, yeah, right, right. I gotta get back to it.

• 30:42Ezra 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, of Lenny. And Lenny is a, 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, but at the end, when some of their communication with each other has been discovered by others, it's Eunice who is considered like the great writer. And she is internet addled, everybody is texting on a service called Global Teens, which is very funny. But I actually thought that too, when you're reading it, like her writing is much more, in a way,

• 31:26Ezra Klein?

  vivid because it is less self-conscious, right? You can, you can read Lenny writing to be read. I mean, there's nothing worse than reading the journal entries of somebody who wrote a journal, hoping somebody would want to read their journal entries. And you can, I mean, those get released a lot.

• 31:40Gary Shteyngart?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, my God, that's half of literature.

• 31:42Ezra Klein?

  That's half of literature. And there's a lot of life. And the writing that comes without that self consciousness.

• 31:51Gary 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 a first paragraph, the first page, the first chapter, is a sense that there's a really active voice that's unlike any other voice I've read before. And that is, has something to declare that's so desperate to declare. They need to do this or they won't survive in some ways. That's maybe overstating the case, but some sense of that kind of, you know, call me Ishmael, you know, you can't, you can't look away from that. And yeah, Lenny's voice, Lenny is almost in some ways a kind of, he thinks of himself as being very literary. He's actually not a writer per se, you know, but he thinks of himself as journaling a lot.

• 32:36Gary Shteyngart?

  And so he, you know, a lot of what he writes is very much meant for a certain kind of, it's meant for a certain kind of Brooklyn reader or Brookline mass reader, let's say. Whereas Eunice is, what I loved about writing Eunice was that Eunice was, she wrote in this completely global teens way, everything she's buying this, she's buying that, she's buying clothes, she's, she's looks maxing in her own way. And at the same time, she has an ability, especially as the novel continues to look more inwards and to see the dichotomy between what this society wants from her and what she wants to be.

• 33:44Ezra Klein?

  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 a rhinoplasty at nose. Job business seemed fine to me before. And he just like is miserable in their wheelchair and is like, you know, kind of like small legs around and people are making fun of them on the internet.

• 34:06Gary Shteyngart?

  Oh, my God.

• 34:07Ezra Klein?

  And you just think like, this guy has achieved a level of social notoriety that is remarkable. I mean, most successful streamer of the age. And how much happier he would probably be if he had never touched it. And like, look, I'm not in there, but, but I like, this is not good for people to be putting that much of their lives forward, to have so little backstage in their own mind. And you're writing there about a world in which this has become very, very common. And one of the things that I see in our world is that this has become very, very common. You know, the number of people with a brand, everybody, you know, on TikTok. And I wonder what you think it does to people when they keep offering up things that are

• 34:51Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 35:11Gary 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. You, 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, have done is that they have made being mentally ill a very profitable thing, being openly mentally ill.

• 35:53Gary Shteyngart?

  A profitable thing, and I think that reaches up to our commander in chief. You know, there is this sense that if you flaunt the fact that you are, you don't know what you're doing, you're completely out of it, but you do it in this way that combines humor and trolling and all this kind of stuff. You know, it's almost like a carnivalesque atmosphere. Look, I'm completely crazy. I'm beating myself up with a hammer, you know, and people will pay for that. They will pay for that. But what happens to that person is nobody cares, right? If tomorrow he OD'd, you know, I don't think even his followers would care. They'd be like, 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.

• 36:31Ezra 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.

• 36:36Gary 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 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, in your bar, talking to each other, rubbing elbows, hitting on each other. If you wait till AI enters the chat and then you won't even need friends. You'll just have six or seven AIs hanging out with you, possibly helping you as you, you know, pleasure yourself. So you don't even have to, hey, save time, you know, just you can get it all without even leaving the comfort of your own bed. The concept of bed rotting, et cetera. So I think they would say, we're only getting started here.

• 37:21Gary Shteyngart?

  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.

• 37:34Gary Shteyngart?

  The opposite of the global south, the global north, nobody's having children.

• 37:36Ezra Klein?

  Wealthier world.

• 37:37Gary Shteyngart?

  The wealthier world. You know, East Asia wonderfully leads the pack. I go to South Korea a lot because my wife's Korean American. Nobody's having kids there. If they do, it's one kid. I say this is also with someone with one kid, but you know, nobody's replicating themselves in those societies.

• 37:53Ezra Klein?

  Tell me what you see when you're there from that perspective. His low fertility rate is happening in the background there of super sad.

• 37:58Gary Shteyngart?

  Yes.

• 37:58Ezra 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.

• 38:07Gary Shteyngart?

  Yes.

• 38:07Ezra Klein?

  Shrink very, very, very fast.

• 38:09Gary Shteyngart?

  Yes.

• 38:10Ezra Klein?

  What's it like?

• 38:11Gary Shteyngart?

  It's amazing because, oh, first of all, if you're a if you're into technology, even if you like a dystopian version of that, there's it's all technology all the time. You know, there's a 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 and 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

• 38:57Gary Shteyngart?

  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 Toriyador market in Spain because people don't want real bulls to die anymore, you know? So we're developing these Toriyador bulls. And this bull looked pretty fierce, you know? And I'm like, Jesus Christ. It's like, there's no end to it. Every single part of our lives is going to be replicated. But when you hang out with people in South Korea, they are exhausted. They're exhausted, you know, and they will drink. As a Russian, I can drink, but nobody drinks more than people I've met in Korea. They will drink themselves into a stupor and then talk about how, oh, at work, I'm on the B team. I want to be on the A team.

• 39:41Gary Shteyngart?

  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.

• 40:06Ezra 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, but 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. And it's not that that's wrong, but it has to do with the positional competition of having kids when you are in richer countries in particular. And I mean, obviously, there's other things going on here, birth control and women's liberation and a million different things. But there is a reality that, you know, you go to much poorer places and they have a lot more children. And then you go to Brooklyn and everybody's like, it's too expensive

• 40:47Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 40:56Gary Shteyngart?

  We've made it, having kids very, very expensive. We've also made it too competitive. 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 Glavicular. As an economic agent, he's figured

• 41:38Gary Shteyngart?

  out his own path forward. He's making about 1.2 million or something a year by, you know, doing this complete horse shit. That's incredibly cool for him. And that, I think, that is the model that so many Americans are looking at. It used to be, you know, oh, I'm going to be a basketball player, you know, I'm going to be in a cool rock and roll band. Now I'm going to be mentally ill on TikTok and I'm going to make a lot of money off that. People are trying to, and you were talking about this earlier, trying to sort of commodify their own sense of grief. 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 decamillionaires,

• 42:21Gary Shteyngart?

  centamillionaires, 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 Glavicular, Glaviculars down the line.

• 42:36Ezra Klein?

  I find this very frightening. I have a first grader and another one who'll be in kindergarten next year.

• 42:42Gary Shteyngart?

  Yeah.

• 42:43Ezra Klein?

  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, I, you know, look at my son like studying his Pokemon card binder every morning, which it's not for anything.

• 42:56Gary Shteyngart?

  It's not for anything.

• 42:57Ezra Klein?

  He just likes the cards because he likes the cards. And I know homework is coming in a real way. And I know the competitions are coming. And I know it'll be important for him to at least do 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.

• 43:15Gary 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 a 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.

• 44:12Ezra 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 could see this in some of your characters over, 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 nonfiction, is that it is a radical act.

• 44:31Ezra Klein?

  To in a bodily, physical way, just enjoy this life.

• 44:38Ezra Klein?

  So first thing, what is sensualism to you?

• 44:40Gary 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.

• 44:48Ezra Klein?

  Thank you for pandering.

• 44:49Gary Shteyngart?

  I am, I bet, 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, little headspace here and there when, when, when life requires it. But I do, I was walking here today and mostly I'm in the summer upstate, but I came down for this interview and I'm walking down Broadway and I looked up and I'm just noticing these beautiful mansard roofs of some of these buildings. Now I spent half my year in New York. I forgot all about these mansard roofs. 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, beautiful. It's just this.

• 45:31Ezra Klein?

  Michael Kimmelman, when I moved here, which was only a couple of years ago, I read Michael Kimmelman, his book called The Intimate City, and he says, "The beauty of New York is the juxtaposition of this with that."

• 45:41Gary Shteyngart?

  Yes, this with that, that's this with that.

• 45:43Ezra Klein?

  And that like allowed me to see the beauty of New York. It was like a, a single sentence that reshaped how I looked at a whole place.

• 45:47Gary Shteyngart?

  This with that, this with that. So I agree with that. Wonderful man, wonderful lunch date. This and that, I'm, I'm, 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.

• 46:06Ezra Klein?

  If you had to rank them.

• 46:07Gary Shteyngart?

  If I had to rank them, well, it's the most obvious one. But you know, 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 is 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, 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? 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.

• 46:53Gary Shteyngart?

  It's, most of it is free. Some of my hobbies are slightly expensive, but most of this stuff is wonderfully free. It's all around us, you know? So the more and the more I live, also, I find in some ways that this sense of ambition that, you know, that younger people have diminishes in some good ways. As I sort of see what the rest of my life will look like, I'm fine with it. Maybe good things will happen. Maybe some terrible things will happen, but I'm more or less okay with it as long as that sense of enjoyment doesn't leave me. The other thing that I talk about in the 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, my generation, incredibly sad.

• 47:38Gary Shteyngart?

  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 to verbal and slow and 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.

• 48:03Ezra Klein?

  I think the, the interesting thing you're doing in that, in across these essays, which are about martinis and suits and, you know, all, all kinds of things, capibaras.

• 48:12Gary Shteyngart?

  I love capibaras.

• 48:13Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, capibaras, that's how you say it?

• 48:15Gary Shteyngart?

  Well, I'm trying to be a little more Latin American, given that they mostly live in, all right, capivara in, in Brazil.

• 48:21Ezra Klein?

  Oh, there you go. So there is something about the way elite culture flaunts the repression of enjoyment.

• 48:30Gary Shteyngart?

  Yes, yes.

• 48:32Ezra Klein?

  I saw there was this clip that had gone viral the other day from the guy who hosts Diary of a CEO.

• 48:36Speaker 09

  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.

• 48:56Ezra Klein?

  That's resilience.

• 48:56Speaker 09

  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.

• 49:11Ezra Klein?

  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 a good example of this culture in which there is a status in optimizing everything, the aura ring, right? You never have a drink. And I do think people have this feeling of like, well, what about enjoyment? What's the point of all 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.

• 49:53Speaker 09

  Fancy that.

• 49:53Ezra Klein?

  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. There was like from a study and it was like, turns out that doing 12 air squats every 45 minutes is like better for you than like running to whatever it was. It's like, I think, I don't want to say I would rather die than do 12 air squats every 45 minutes.

• 50:23Speaker 09

  I don't even know what a squat is, so I'm probably ahead.

• 50:25Ezra Klein?

  But it didn't seem like a way to live.

• 50:27Speaker 09

  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. Is that, you know, because of so much of this is a part of what you hear and see in certain elite democratic precincts?

• 50:52Gary Shteyngart?

  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, well, 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, 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 failed, but there is that kind of motion.

• 51:37Ezra Klein?

  Trump is essentialist.

• 51:38Gary Shteyngart?

  Trump is in some horrible.

• 51:40Ezra Klein?

  He loves a pretty room.

• 51:42Gary Shteyngart?

  He loves a pretty room.

• 51:42Ezra Klein?

  Thinks a lot about interior design. Loves a good musical.

• 51:47Gary Shteyngart?

  That's right. Right, right, right.

• 51:50Ezra Klein?

  J D Vance is not essentialist. Marco Rubio is not essentialist. Trump is.

• 51:54Gary 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, you know, but we need leaders or candidates who can evince not just the unhappiness of what, everything we're confronting from, you know, climate change to inflation to the mess that's going to be left to us when the president leads. And that's not easy to do because we're so programmed to this idea that we have to,

• 52:35Gary Shteyngart?

  democracy max, and we have to be constantly, you know, talking about all the terrible things instead of talking about the things that give us pleasure, the things that we love, the parts of community that make life livable.

• 52:46Ezra Klein?

  There's a lot I want to send in response to that. One is, you know, and this, I think, is fairly bipartisan, trans partisan, this sort of elite display of discipline.

• 52:54Gary Shteyngart?

  Yeah.

• 52:55Ezra Klein?

  It is a positional competition to show.

• 53:00Ezra Klein?

  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, and look, I'm not saying by any means I'm free of this. The other side, which I think is more specific on the left, is that pleasure is problematic for all different kinds of reasons, right? You know, maybe the things you enjoy are not politically like a center, the, 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, the discourse is critical, not appreciative.

• 53:38Gary Shteyngart?

  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, you know, they work to, they live to work instead of working to live. That's part of the, 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, 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

• 54:23Gary Shteyngart?

  things mean to me and I get to, I get to sort of live in that world for a while. You know, I was just in Spain with my kid and my wife and I was showing him Andalucia, you know, this, which is considered the poorest region, 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,

• 55:08Gary Shteyngart?

  you go to the poorest region in Spain. Life is beautiful. I'm not saying that it's completely free of poverty, but the communal connections are so strong. The things that bring people joy are so celebrated, whether it's wine or a large midday meal or people, you know, having sex with each other, you know, and then talking about it and loving it. You know, they love their culture, even though statistically they're making half of what Mississippi makes. It doesn't matter. They're three, four, five, six, eight times as rich as we are in almost every other context.

• 55:40Ezra Klein?

  Say more on this. So because, I mean, these numbers are true, right? I've looked into this debate and it's not just averages, it's medians and you can cut this a lot of ways. Like we've gotten a lot richer than Europe in this country. But, you know, this is a thing we've actually been exploring on the show recently. We've just gotten a lot richer than we used to be. You know, maybe not as much as we could have. And people hate the way the economy feels. They, I mean, everything is incredibly expensive. The prices are going up. They feel nickel and dime. They can't afford a home. So there is, there's a lot that your wages, your income does not say about how life feels.

• 56:18Ezra Klein?

  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?

• 56:28Gary 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 horrible way to live. This is complete poverty. How can you live in such a small space, not have a backyard, often not have a car? I'm using Spain as an example, but it applies to others. But Spain is one of the most, has one of the most wonderful transit systems, both within cities and interconnected 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,

• 57:12Gary Shteyngart?

  that they're not one paycheck away from complete 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 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.

• 57:54Gary Shteyngart?

  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 boteillon, having an open bottle in a square and enjoying their company?

• 58:04Ezra Klein?

  So I think this is very important. It's important in the conversation you're having about kids, about rankings, about a lot. Which is the role that expectations and positional competition play in degrading the quality of life or making it feel so hard to enjoy life, right? 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, you know, we want bigger homes in much of the country. We want cars, right? New York is like a little bit unusual in that. But the way in which like the treadmill of what it just, what the trappings of a good life are.

• 58:47Ezra Klein?

  And then you look around and you're unhappy and you're atomized and you're, you know, far from family. And you live in a place you didn't quite intend to live in. And, and, and it is, I think, this feeling, and I think it's quite poisonous, that you did everything right. And this wasn't how you were told it would be or feel. And like, there's never a resting space.

• 59:08Gary Shteyngart?

  I mean, look at all the young people who voted for M'Nani, you know, 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. You know, this is a nightmare. I think it's the, look, since, you know, since the Thatcher-Reagan years, there's been a very, there's been a project to destroy as much of the middle class as possible 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, that's 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.

• 59:52Gary Shteyngart?

  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.

• 1:00:15Ezra Klein?

  What is your advice on how to be happy?

• 1:00:18Gary Shteyngart?

  It's not even advice. It's the advice is, you know, I mean, again, I'm not trying to, you know, suck up with this Buddhism, but the advice really is present moment, uh, living. It's, it's that simple, but also not saying no to things that are against the Protestant thrust of this country. So if you're, if it's 4:30 PM and Negroni beckons, you're all, you're all by yourself. Oh, one shouldn't drink alone, obviously, but the day is beautiful. There's sunshine. There's people walking by and you sit down by yourself at the bar and you order that Negroni and you sip it. Somebody comes up and talks to you, you talk back, you verbal at them first, maybe in a non-aggressive way.

• 1:01:01Gary Shteyngart?

  You do all these, I can't believe I'm even giving this as advice.

• 1:01:04Ezra 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.

• 1:01:13Ezra Klein?

  And I mean, I take much of what you're writing in the centralist. I mean, you have this beautiful, uh, 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, your martini runs. Some of us may not have the same constitutions. But I, I think this is important. I mean, I could say some politics where I think we have sacrificed beauty as a political virtue and as a social virtue, and I think it has been a mistake. But I could just say in, in life, I think that, I think it requires a certain navigation to seek out beauty, a certain intention to seek out beauty. Look, uh, to, to counter, to counter my own, some of my own episodes here.

• 1:01:55Ezra Klein?

  I, I do think some present moments are better than others. And I think decisions you make are meaningful. Trying to find ways to be in beauty, which doesn't, it can be expensive, but I find Prospect Park to be like a place of extraordinary beauty in the spring and in the summer. And, but I don't know, I feel like you're making a real argument about this. I want to hear more about the search for beauty.

• 1:02:18Gary 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.

• 1:02:28Ezra Klein?

  The attention to, the orientation towards.

• 1:02:31Gary Shteyngart?

  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, 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

• 1:03:14Gary Shteyngart?

  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, you know?

• 1:03:30Ezra Klein?

  I'm just gonna stop you, because I'm gonna actually ask a question and be dumb about this. I don't get the watch thing. Help me get it.

• 1:03:36Gary Shteyngart?

  So.

• 1:03:37Ezra Klein?

  And not that one. I'm sure your watch is very nice. The Casio G fit, like, why that one?

• 1:03:42Gary Shteyngart?

  I made up a.

• 1:03:43Ezra Klein?

  Oh, you made up a watch?

• 1:03:44Gary Shteyngart?

  I made, I made, I made up.

• 1:03:46Ezra Klein?

  Help me with the watch thing.

• 1:03:47Gary Shteyngart?

  Well, look, the watch I'm wearing now was made in Germany, in Glaasut, Germany. It's called a Langrozone. 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.

• 1:04:15Gary Shteyngart?

  Right? And there's a number of workers there.

• 1:04:18Ezra Klein?

  Can you see it?

• 1:04:18Gary Shteyngart?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Ezra Klein?

  Why are you telling me about this flower?

• 1:04:20Gary Shteyngart?

  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 when you bend the watch backwards and forwards, you see a different kind of shimmer across the across the dial.

• 1:04:37Ezra Klein?

  The back is much more interesting than the front.

• 1:04:38Gary Shteyngart?

  Well, exactly, exactly. 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 back, there's this secret, there's almost a city going on here, a vibrating city. When you watch them put the escape wheel, which is this thing that is spinning, the balance onto it. And you see it spin. It's almost like it's been given a soul because all of a sudden this static, static movement has come alive and 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 1:20. Done.

• 1:05:24Ezra Klein?

  How did you get into them?

• 1:05:26Gary 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 shapka, the 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 is when Japan was very ascendant and created technology nobody else could. And one of the songs was Kalinka Malinka, the Russian song. Kalinka Malinka Malinka Maya. So I would hide in the bathroom away from all the bullying Jewish Queens kids and listen to that song. And it would take me back to a world which I understood. Not that I missed the politics of it, but I missed having a language and a culture that I understood.

• 1:06:08Gary Shteyngart?

  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.

• 1:06:41Ezra Klein?

  I want to go back to the the search for 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.

• 1:06:55Gary Shteyngart?

  November.

• 1:06:56Ezra Klein?

  I found it very inspiring.

• 1:06:57Gary Shteyngart?

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:06:58Ezra 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 of craft.

• 1:07:13Gary Shteyngart?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13Ezra Klein?

  You are you are drawn to human beings.

• 1:07:17Gary Shteyngart?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:18Ezra Klein?

  Doing beautiful things that have taken them a lot of work to do at that level.

• 1:07:22Gary Shteyngart?

  And a lot of training.

• 1:07:23Ezra Klein?

  And a lot of training. Tell me about that.

• 1:07:25Gary Shteyngart?

  Well, look, I am I the greatest writer that ever lived? No, but I have worked my butt off to craft sentences and then to make sure that the sentences are crafted into paragraphs. This is, you know, there's the original fun of writing a sentence or a paragraph. Oh, look at me, I got this great idea. And then you return to it and 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, because I hung out with people who make some of the best martinis ever.

• 1:08:10Gary Shteyngart?

  In the end, maybe the best martinis are made in Shibuya at something called the Zinc Bar in Tokyo.

• 1:08:14Ezra Klein?

  But. Why?

• 1:08:16Gary Shteyngart?

  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 this piece of this watch, I also don't know, I make my own martinis, they're pretty good, but there's 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.

• 1:08:53Ezra Klein?

  I wonder how much you think beauty and efficiency are opposed.

• 1:08:59Gary Shteyngart?

  Yeah, I would say so. I would say so.

• 1:09:01Ezra Klein?

  Because what that is, and the reason that I got to that in my head was that, as you would expect with me, I went to Japan, I was like, how do all these things exist? And it turns out they have, you know, 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, you know, the problem with the American pursuit of efficiency.

• 1:09:46Speaker 07

  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.

• 1:10:11Ezra 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.

• 1:10:19Gary Shteyngart?

  Yes. But look, this is funny. And I agree 100% that this is part of the, a policy thing. But look, we also suck at things that are super efficient that we should have. For example, the high-speed rail, you know, talking of Japan, but also talking about Spain, all the countries we talked about previously, Italy, which has, you know, technologically is not the most advanced country in the world, it has an excellent.

• 1:10:40Ezra Klein?

  I'm trying to fix that, man. I'm working on it.

• 1:10:42Gary Shteyngart?

  Okay, please, please do, because I love high-speed rail. But my friends in Japan have told me several things. First of all, one is that in Japanese culture, craftsmanship and small store craftsmanship on a smaller scale has always been viewed as even higher than the merchant. In many other societies, the merchant class is, you know, is above the craftspeople, the craftspeople in art. 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 in making very particular things as beautiful as possible. What efficiency does, I think, is it it's takes things, it takes smaller things that are done well. And it says, well, we're going to do eight million examples of that. And then, of course, it's not going to, it's not going to be that that good.

• 1:11:25Ezra 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.

• 1:11:31Gary Shteyngart?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:32Ezra Klein?

  Is beauty a function of scarcity, which also makes it a function of 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 how do you think about this relationship between what we give this kind of honor to and admiration to the the kinds of elite craftsmanship we're talking about? And its relationship is a positional good in some ways where we 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.

• 1:12:14Gary 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 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 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,

• 1:12:54Gary Shteyngart?

  you know, so loving, you just, you marvel at it. Last time I walked down Roosevelt Avenue. In a weekend, there was half the people because this was when ICE was especially prevalent. So you could see how we're trying, 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've 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

• 1:13:38Gary Shteyngart?

  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?

• 1:14:05Ezra 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?

• 1:14:29Gary Shteyngart?

  You know, it's interesting. I think a lot of young people have already figured out that the life that is, the corporations are asking them to live, is not a good life. And I think that's why, you know, you'd think that, for example, we're talking about watches, you'd think this would be an old person, old man's hobby, right? But often when I go to these very secret meetings of watch enthusiasts that happen in New York, they have to be secret because, you know, 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.

• 1:15:07Gary Shteyngart?

  If, you know, every American metro has incredible, inexpensive food that will blow your mind. People complain about Houston to me. This is the best Vietnamese food outside of Vietnam. Any city, even those cities designed for the car 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. I, I, I, Bukhara and Samarkand and Tchiva. 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.

• 1:15:50Ezra Klein?

  I think it's a good place to end. Always a final question. What are the books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:15:54Gary Shteyngart?

  So I'm going to start with a book by one of my students. I love my students. Uh, such good work. Um, Columbia graduate a couple of years ago. Uh, the book is called Men Like Ours. Her name is Bindu Bansina. I hope I pronounced that correctly. Uh, set in New Jersey. I love anything set in New Jersey. Talk about dystopia, right? That is the best. Uh, really dark humor, but as dark as it is funny. I, I can't say enough about it. Uh, a second book was coming out, I think in August, and that's by my mentor, uh, Changri Lee, the wonderful Korean American writer, uh, Attender Age, I think is the name of the book. Uh, 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.

• 1:16:38Gary Shteyngart?

  He meant so much to me, uh, 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. Uh, and the third book is Julia Yoffe's, uh, Motherland, which was a National Book Awards finalist. An old friend of mine, uh, also Soviet born, uh, Moscow to my Leningrad. And it's a book about, uh, 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, uh, what the Soviet Union did to people on every level, uh, here through the prism of women, but also through Jewish women. It is a remarkable book.

• 1:17:22Ezra Klein?

  Gary Steinberg, thank you very much.

• 1:17:24Gary Shteyngart?

  Thank you.

• 1:17:41Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Esso Clan is produced by Annie Galvin, fact checking by Michelle Harris and Mary March Locker. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld, mixing by Isaac Jones. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassillon, Roland Hu, Marina King, Jack McCordick, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, and Jan Kobal. Original music by Patton McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Spinning Audio is Annie Rose Drosser.