Gary Shteyngart

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.

And books are the best way to get inside into interiority because what is a book?

It's a communication between one consciousness and another.

I love film and theater and TV and all this other stuff, but

This is the fastest.

This is like a mind-melding Vulcan technology.

You're in somebody else's head and somebody who's completely different from you, hopefully.

So when I started using that, I thought that this would be a problem for personalities, especially personalities like mine, and for the rest of society.

I'm very influenced by this thing Ryan Broderick has said, who's an internet writer.

He talks about it as a porn theory of the internet, that all content now, or at least a lot of content on places like TikTok and Instagram, what it's doing is creating an instant surge of sensation.

Right.

I see this even when we're creating like clips from the show.

We needed to make you feel something immediately.

It's like the way like porn evolved on the Internet.

But 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.

Yeah.

And I mean, you're, again, like writing this some time ago.