Derek Thompson

The other idea that your book is arguing against is pseudo excellence.

So you lift, you deadlift.

I love it.

What would pseudo excellence for deadlifting look like?

And why is that the wrong path?

My next question for you here is, who is the audience for this approach, for the pseudo excellence approach?

And I'm going to do the really bad interview thing where I'm actually going to offer an answer to the question as I ask it.

As I'm thinking about the relationship between pseudo excellence and alienation, one audience that this approach is so clearly for is for young men who are profoundly alone.

I won't say lonely, but alone.

What you just described, those morning routine TikTok videos, the guy in those videos is always by himself.

There is never another person that wakes up in a bed with him.

There's never, God forbid, a child

heavens forbid, two children in the house, it's an incredibly time-expensive, performative routine that can only really be done in the absence of other people and certainly in the absence of family.

And that's a way in which the audience for this approach you're arguing against

is both pseudo excellence and alienated.

There's a way in which this performative approach of success in the world also makes it hard to be around people because it takes so damn long to check all of these stupid boxes.

So that's one audience that I imagine is enamored of the pseudo excellence approach.

To what extent is that the audience you had in mind and is there another audience that you think is being suckered by this pseudo excellence approach?

You use the G word there, which is grift.

And I think it's important that the pseudo excellence approach also turns viewers, turns audience into customers.