Is the World Getting Uglier?

If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium.

Hi, I'm Sean Evans from Hot Ones and I want to tell you about YouTube Premium.

It has offline downloads, so you can watch without Wi-Fi, background play, so you can lock

your phone and it still plays baby.

Oh, and it is completely ad-free.

Yes, I said it ad-free.

Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium.

File eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime.

Why is everything so drab right now?

Was it also same, same?

You got these coffee shops, they all look the same, architecture looks standardized, buildings

are colorless, cars are interchangeable.

Then on the other side, you have Trump's gilded oval office, his imagined arch, his

garish vision for the reflecting pool.

Say what you will about Donald Trump.

He and the modern right, they have a theory of beauty.

Not my theory of beauty, but a theory.

For a while now, I've been wanting to do an episode on this question that I've seen

all of other people ask and that has bothered me too.

Is the world getting uglier?

And if so, why?

Why do we seem to design so much that looks so boring, run the other side, so loud?

And in this moment when the right has a clear theory of beauty, does the left have any

answer at all?

Debbie moment teaches at the school of visual arts in New York City.

She's a longtime graphic brand designer.

She revamped logos for companies like Burger King, Seven Up and Hagen Daws.

And for over 20 years, she's hosted a podcast called Design Matters, where she talks to

creative people about design.

She joins me now.

Debbie Millman, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Esmerids.

Great to be here.

So over the past couple of years, I feel like I have read or watched, I mean, a dozen

essays on why everything is getting uglier.

And I just read a piece from you with the title is a world getting uglier.

So is it?

Depends on who you ask.

I'm asking you.

My opinion, it's getting more vulgar.

In some ways, ugliness can be very intentional.

Vulgar is accidental because it doesn't have intention.

It really sets out to make something that's truly vulgar.

Certain ugly can be seen through the lens of a trend as being really glamorous or sexy

or interesting or as aversive, but vulgar is always pretty awful.

And I think that is the real word about where we're moving.

Give me some examples of this vulgarity.

Well, the cyber truck, there's really no need for a car to look at that imposing and

that bloviated housing where houses are now being raised that fit sort of sweetly on

their lots with a front yard and a backyard and maybe little alleys on either side.

And now they're being squeezed into the property so that there's maybe six or seven inches

of grass between the house and the sidewalk.

We're seeing it in clothing, particularly in Gen Z fashion, which I know that the New

York Times has been writing about quite a lot.

And if there's anything I'm an expert on, it's Gen Z fashion.

But that, but Gen Z fashion is not forever.

Fashion by nature is a type of expression that has an expiration date in it.

Or certainly a pause date.

It might come back, but for a while, it goes out of style.

Some of it is forstop, cellar, and some of it is just trends in style, whereas houses,

cars, vehicles, airplanes, things like that, can not to transition very often in the way

that they fundamentally look and work.

How do you distinguish, and I know this is like the oldest, hardest question and taste.

But one woman's vulgarity is another woman's interesting ugly is another person's, oh,

that's a cool cyberpunk truck.

I think a lot of it has to do with proportion.

And a lot of proportion has to do with mathematics.

And so there are things that are just more lyrically beautiful because they are in proportion.

And generally speaking, humans can assess when something is out of proportion, not knowing

anything about the math of it, whether it be a building or a car or a coffee mug.

And so if something is out of proportion, it will give us a sense of discompobulation.

And it could be the disproportion of a handbag, a skateboard, it could be the disproportion

of anything.

But things essentially make us feel things.

Everything makes us feel something.

And when something is out of proportion, it changes the DNA around us.

I'm very interested in the way that we notice what the environment around us or the objects

around us are making us feel.

I always had a big reason you had that Marie Kondo craze some years back.

Was it there was a real genius to her giving people a practice of noticing what their

objects made them feel?

Exactly.

People had previously told people to tidy up.

What she offered was a way to say, you can tune in to the way your environment is making

you feel.

But there too, I think you run into this question of much that we now consider beautiful.

When it was built, when it was designed, it was out of proportion, it was brash, it was

aggressive.

And so the early reviews of it were very negative.

So then you get into this interesting question of can you trust what you're feeling in the

moment?

There's so much to talk about just from that sentence.

I want to go back to the first part of what you were saying about how things make us

feel.

We are social mammals and every single way in which we've been socialized to experience

the world around us is based on objects and things around us.

And that goes all the way back.

That goes back 50,000 years ago when we started to create symbols to designate our reality.

So the very first marks was what we were seeing around us.

So we started to draw on the walls of caves.

After that, we started to advance and move into tribes.

What was the first thing we did when we moved into tribes?

We designated where we belonged and what we believed in with a symbol.

I belong to this religion, you belong to that religion.

We signify and telegraph that through the use of this symbol.

And it means as much for the people that are part of the same tribe as those that aren't.

And that safety and numbers, that security, and we all believe the same thing.

So we're not going to go off and kill each other because we all believe in this.

It allowed us to prosper and create bigger, stronger social ties when we're in those

groups.

And that's the whole sort of how do we feel around symbols?

We've been trained, socialized to experience the world through symbols, objects, and now

brands since prehistoric times.

So if you're wearing a certain type of sneaker, you're part of a Nike tribe, a certain

handbag, and that is telegraphing that you're a wealthy woman who bought her handbag on

rodeo drive.

We're even doing that now.

This is really, really interesting to me with plastic surgery.

So we can reconstruct a nose or reconstruct lips or reconstruct our butts to look a certain

way to signify to others that those values, that that thing we think looks good.

Looks good to me and to you and you know that I know that I know that we both did that

and we both look good.

Now it also does the same thing for the people that don't like a big butt or a certain

type of veneer.

So I think that we have to look back at the trajectory of our evolution because looks,

size, fashion, hair, all of those things have so much to do with the politics of our time,

with religion and with socialization.

For you, what is good design and what is bad design?

Good design makes me feel better about whatever I'm doing and whatever I'm doing it with.

It's entirely subjective for me.

What my specific definition of good design is for me, it makes me feel better.

For the world, I think good design makes the world better.

The experiences that people have, the way in which they're able to move through the

world, it's easy, it's respectful when I was coming to New York.

I was in LAX and I was in a sneaky line where I had to stand behind a bunch of people in

three lines that were all waiting to put their things in a container to then push onto

a line.

There's no rhyme or reason about where the three are.

So even if you're in that position, you're not first.

It's whoever got there first and somebody's managing it.

And then you have to sort of really fast push your things through so that it gets through.

And I said to the guy, because I knew I was coming here today, I said, who designed this?

This was, this is a billion dollar system that's in airports all over the world and it

is the worst design system I have ever witnessed.

Where people are fighting to get their containers into the queue, they're fighting to go next.

The whole thing was just a design disaster.

I think design that's disrespectful.

I think design that is greedy.

I think that design that is immoral is bad design.

Something I've been thinking about as I've been reading and thinking about these essays

over some period of time, my team and I want to do a show on this for a little bit, is

the world getting uglier as a genre?

It has two different lines of critique happening in it at once.

One is the critique you're offering here, which is it it's getting uglier.

The world makes you feel something and the thing it makes you feel is bad.

It's a negative feeling tone in the Buddhist terminology.

The other is that the world is getting, not what I would call uglier, people often use

that word, drabber.

It is getting more drab.

It is making you feel nothing more often.

One of the, I think, foundation losses here is an N plus 1 essay from 2023 and in that

they talk about the drab sublime.

The drab sublime unites flat pack furniture and home electronics, municipal infrastructure

and commercial graphic design, an ocean of stuff, so homogenous and underthought that the

world it is inundated can feel like a digital rendering.

One reason I should have liked the cyber truck is I don't find it beautiful, what it makes

me feel is not good, but it makes me feel something.

Compared to so much else on the road right now, it reflects somebody's vision.

I believe somebody somewhere found it beautiful.

Yeah, there are people that buy it.

So I think a lot of it comes down to taste and then also how well do things go with other

things.

The thing about the cyber truck is that the cyber truck infringes on the landscape.

Maybe there's a strategy behind it, but I'm not entirely sure what that strategy is.

Is it to command attention?

Is it to intimidate?

What is the intention of this?

And when I think about the world getting uglier in its purest form, is the world getting

uglier because we're making bad design decisions or is the world getting uglier because we

don't care about what anybody else thinks but ourselves?

And is the world getting uglier because we're behaving in ugly ways?

Once you start to see people behaving in ugly ways, it's inevitable that that is going

to trickle down into everybody else's behavior because we see if this could happen here,

if somebody can get away with doing this, well, then why can't I do it?

Well, I want to really position myself here because I think the cyber truck is interesting

and I can argue for, but around, but I want to really agree that it's ugly.

It's not like this.

But you see, that's important for you to do this.

But there is a trend here, right?

So I feel like you could imagine two axes here.

So there is whether something makes you feel anything at all, how much it makes you feel.

And then there's whether or not that feeling is good or bad.

But there's so much it surrounds us now, so many apartment buildings.

I don't find them ugly.

What I find is inoffensive.

I feel nothing when I look at them.

They are mute to me.

So many cars that they're mute to me.

When something doesn't have any real intention to it, when it's built without any sense of

purpose or strategy or respect for its surroundings, and that I think is worse than ugly.

And maybe even worse than vulgar.

I think we have been in a period where a tremendous amount of the world around us from the fashion

to the way apartments are designed, the way cars are designed, to the way places we stay

are designed.

People describe this in many different ways, but it has been a flattening.

But now what I'm seeing is a reaction to that, right?

You're talking about this, I think, a little bit in your essay.

You talk about this move towards vulgarity, towards a bloviating style.

You can think about Donald Trump fistuning the oval office and gold.

You can think about this very attention grabbing fashion style on Gen Z. You can think about

the cyber truck.

There was recently, I mean, it's been covered in other places, I moved towards more maximalist

design.

We've gone from...

It looks Maxing.

Yeah, looks Maxing is another one, actually.

But I'm actually man in decor.

And so you write that we're living in an attention economy and attention rewards extremity,

that the more design is rewarded for being instantly visible, recognizable and shareable,

the easier it becomes to lose sight of proportion, purpose and the people to live alongside it.

But I think maybe the other side of it is that we do live in an attention economy and the

more everything is served to us by algorithm, the more also things like feel the same everywhere.

You go to coffee shops, I mean, it is a point the writer, Cal Chicas made.

You go to coffee shops in New York, NLA and Mexico City and Buenos Aires and Tokyo.

And they're all kind of the same coffee shop and all of a sudden people...

I mean, you can't even differentiate airports anymore.

Yeah.

You go into an airport and it could be any airport in any city of the world.

So how do you think about the relationship and the tension between those two things,

a feeling of sameness, maybe the people rejecting, but then it creates this...

It's creating, I think, a move towards what you're describing as a kind of a vulgar or

blowviating answer to that.

Well, I mean, if you look back to the original visual language of the iPod, you know,

six weeks after 9-11, Apple introduced the first iPod and that came with the white earbuds.

I did not know that was six weeks after 9-11.

Yeah.

Those are two events that I'd now put together in my head.

Yeah, yeah.

And there was a really interesting period of time where as people began to acquire the

iPod, they were able to showcase their allegiance with these white earbuds.

It was actually really brilliant because the iPod wasn't sitting around, you know, outside

of your clothing, it was in a pocket, but the earbuds gave you away and there was this

sense of like, I know that you know that we're the early adopters here and people were very

proud of that.

Super minimalist, super minimalist, to really be able to cut through all the cacophony of

that time.

There was still a real sense of minimalism to it and it's now what, 26 years later and

that is still primarily the language.

So much so that every other tech company has taken on that same vernacular.

So they all look a certain way because people have an expectation of what excellence should

look like.

All of the tech companies, until recently, I think Samsung is beginning to move a little

bit further away from that visual language because they brought in for the first time ever

a president of design, Moro Portini.

So he's making some of those changes, but up until then we're talking about 25 years

of tech looking a very specific way because everybody wanted to seem like the very best.

And so it'll be interesting to see how that now changes with new people at the helm, both

at Apple and at Samsung.

If you're not a subscriber of The New York Times, we have some news for you.

You can now explore the times for free without any paywalls at all during your first month

in The New York Times.

You should try it.

You can watch it without WiFi.

Background play.

So you can lock your phone and it still plays baby.

Oh, and it is completely ad free.

Yes, I said it, ad free.

Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium.

How eligibility varies?

Terms apply.

Cancel anytime.

This podcast is supported by USAFacts.

People disagree about a lot in this country.

Taxes, healthcare, education, but wherever you land politically, I think most of us agree

on this.

Better information leads to better decisions.

That's the mission of USAFacts to make government data clear and accessible because public

data should be easy to access trust and understand so we can use it to make informed decisions.

Read and sign our open letter to support public data at USAFacts.org.

You see that design is a quote deliberate expression of intention.

Tell me about that.

So in order to do that, I have to go back to, well, what is a brand?

A brand is manufactured meaning.

We agree that a crucifix stands for something.

You and I both agree.

We might not agree.

Hot take on Christianity, a brand.

Well, it's just because I want to bring it down to like the most the foundation, the

very one of the first brands, although, although Hindu and Jane were well before that,

but in any case, let's just go with something that a lot of people know.

It is manufactured meaning that cross could stand for anything.

We agree that this crucifix, this symbol that people wear and pray to and worship signifies

something.

Design is what communicates that differentiation.

That is what design is for me.

That is the ultimate design definition.

It is the communication of differentiation that is made through meaning manufacturer.

So as interested to see you go on that question of intention directly to branding, because

I do take your point that the way the brand or the reputation of meaning of something across

great scale is constructed is indeed constructed.

But one of the things that I think is operating here and I'm curious to explore this a bit

is that brands want to differentiate from each other.

I have to.

And I think a frustration people have is often that they are under differentiated now.

So I think it is widely felt.

We can argue whether it's true, but it's widely felt that cars were more beautiful and

interesting in the way they were designed 30 or 40 years ago than they are today.

At a friend recently to 40th birthday and as a present for him, his partner rented him

like a classic car.

He got to ride around in an old Mustang.

I mean, people like the old Mustangs more than they like the new Mustangs.

I think that's common.

But one reason so many cars look similar is that we've learned a lot about how to make

the merit dynamic.

We know things about how objects move through space at speed that we did not know to the

same level of certainty then.

And we've put pressure on those things through fuel regulation standards and electric vehicle

incentives and other things to push car companies in a certain direction.

And so now the cars look more streamlined because that is very, very important for their

fuel efficiency and their safety and there are other different things that are operating

here.

And it pushes everything in a certain direction.

And so one thing that I thought when I read your definition of design is a deliberate

expression of intention is that the intentions we have now include many other things in just

beauty or just aesthetics.

We know more about how to make buildings energy efficient.

We know more about how to make sure they don't fall down during earthquakes.

And all these things impose strictures that in some of the periods in the past that we

often lionize for their superior aesthetics, they didn't have to optimize for as much.

And so one reason the world is feeling a little bit more same to people in the construction

of material objects is actually this like what we're optimizing on things that actually

do forces sameness.

We know things about the world that have led us to design things in ways that are more

consistent across different brands.

Yeah.

And I think that's just a matter of time because once we begin to master these new ergonomic

ways of building, the next natural step will be to maximize the value via beauty because

you will want to differentiate.

First we're looking at function and then we'll look at aspiration.

And that's while you were talking I had the funniest example come to mind which may or

may not make sense, but I think back to the days when my grandmother used to wear girdles

really ugly, really efficient, really, really ugly.

Now we have spanks and skims essentially doing the same or better work to help shape

a woman, but far sexier and far more beautiful.

So I think it's just a matter of time because that is the system we live in.

We're always looking to improve and create something better than it was before.

One of the interesting questions that came up when my producers and I were preparing for

this episode was my producer lives in a much older home and it's really beautiful.

It's like you take a picture from it from the outside.

It's got this beautiful tree in front of it.

I felt something.

I've never seen our home because we live somewhere else.

It has sold to it.

And also she was saying that part of her really envies people who live in these somewhat more

solace-like mansions that are better designed for kids, that have a lot more space in them

in the way the space is used, that have central air, that have been optimized for other

purposes.

And I just think a lot of things in life are like that.

I think that when you make life frictionless, it begins to lose something even if everything

else is equal, even if sometimes like the quality of the product is higher.

And so I grant completely that you can have and I have experienced this, places, homes,

cars, everything, right?

You can have places where somebody's idea of beauty and their idea of function have come

into a beautiful union.

But I actually think some of the drabness that we're talking about comes from people living

in a world that has been smoothed for them, such that it, on the one hand, works really

well.

And on the other hand, it doesn't feel alive to them.

It just sort of has been like flattened into a kind of solar service.

Like what?

I'd love to know what you consider that to be.

I'm not myself a vinyl collector, but I know many people who are and it is in part,

the physicality, the annoyance you have to get up and turn it over, you have to put

the needle correctly.

And those record collections mean more to people than the Spotify libraries and people

will say, oh, the sound is warmer.

Sure, it's a little warmer.

I don't think that's what's really doing the work.

The work is that you end up in a physical tactile relationship where.

What's reading books for a candle?

Exactly.

I have a big Kindle library and I have a big physical book library.

Same.

So there are places where the fact that the world asks things of you that are perhaps like

a little bit less convenient, the fact that my Kindle is always with me and I can look

up on my highlights on my phone, it is more convenient.

And when I really love a book, often just go buy it physically.

I mean, now I've actually moved more to physical books in general because having it is meaningful

to me, even if its function is actually objectively somewhat worse.

Yeah, I 100% agree.

So how do you think about the spaces though where there's that conflict?

Well, I think we're living at a time where the big tension is between convenience and

individuality and we are giving up so much of our individuality and our privacy for convenience.

That's something that we have to opt into.

I don't know that there's anything wrong with having a bit of both, but I do think that

perhaps if you're extreme on one way or the other, you're really missing out on a great

deal.

I mean, I love being able to read anything anywhere, have all my highlights in one place

and have 45 books in my pocket.

But I also love curling up with a book and filling the pages and being able to look

throughout.

I also really miss liner notes, those little booklets that used to come with ban photos.

I mean, I also have a final collection.

So that will go with me somewhere.

I need a really big tomb where I'm going to put all that stuff with me that nobody else

wants, but I can't get rid of even on my deathbed.

So I think it's a matter of where do you live on that continuum?

So there was this YouTube video by Cheyenne Quirk about why things are getting uglier.

He's walking through London looking at lampposts and sewer systems built in an earlier era

and comparing it to what's being built now.

And it's not that the new ones are bad.

They work as lampposts, but they are drab.

The old ones have these weird fish on them and the new ones are just very functional.

And I was watching it and this part on air conditioning units.

Oh my God.

Yes.

I'm going to show you this because I think it maybe gets to some of the things we're talking

about.

Look at this air conditioning unit.

I think this says more about the modern world than anything else, more than phones or social

media.

It's a miraculous technology, one that has changed the world and improved billions of lives.

Hence we stick them literally everywhere.

But it's ugly.

Ugly because it doesn't seem to express any belief in the idea that ordinary things can

also be beautiful.

But worse than ugly, it's boring.

Now, it's going to be a bit more expensive to make it prettier.

Take a little time and care and attention.

But these days, it seems that we would rather make more money to make things look pretty.

And maybe that's okay.

First of all, this is an open call to James Dyson.

Uh-huh.

I interviewed James Dyson last year.

And one of the things that I learned in my research was James Dyson, all of his innovations

have been with air, vacuums, hair dryers, etc.

Who better to innovate an air conditioner than James Dyson?

He's made the most beautiful vacuum cleaners, the most beautiful hair dryers.

James, we need you.

But I don't think that these are boring.

I disagree.

I think that they're obtrusive.

Boring, you sort of fall away from seeing obtrusive, it's in your face and it's assaulting.

It's they assault you.

One thing I thought about with that, though, is where he ends on cost.

I agree with you.

One thing people dislike about window AC units is they're obtrusive.

But window AC units tend to be put onto older buildings, or they tend to be for people

with who don't have the money to put in central air.

You can get ones that are nicer and less nice looking.

I haven't seen any that are truly beautiful, but cost actually matters here.

And so this is a place where I think there often really is attention, where you can put

money into the design of things.

But if you need to produce things in a very mass way, they often look boring, or they

can look very obtrusive.

And there is a tension on many products, at least, between their form and their function.

And so one critique you'll often hear of this conversation, the kind of conversation

we're having is it's a bit elitist that, yeah, beauty is a nice to have.

But there was a reason, you know, what kind of survives from old housing stock is usually

not the tenement buildings of the poor lived in, like those of large who have been knocked

down, and you get these nice row houses in Georgetown, because people put a lot more money

into it.

So how much is what we're talking about here, the mass production of what was once luxury,

and when you make things mass produced, it tends to lose character.

I think again, it really depends on intention.

Years ago, Target had a wonderful line that they launched called Design for All, and they

worked with Isaac Misrahi and really wonderful designers to create sort of bridge lines

that you could buy at Target that would be less expensive, but would still be made with

care.

I think that Mouji is also another, or another company where you can go into a Mouji,

and things are made with care, and they're not overly expensive.

There are alternatives years and years and years ago, probably at least ten years ago.

I became obsessed with the fact that all shower caps were heinous.

I mean, truly grotesque.

And I went online to look for alternatives, and I found a company called Showercap as HHHOW

ERCAP.

And they made these turban style shower caps.

And yes, they are a little bit more expensive than your sort of standard three-packed plastic

ufant type shower cap, but they last forever.

And they're gorgeous.

And suddenly, you go from having this piece of sort of fungus on your head that's been

sitting in your stall for however long to having this beautifully crafted, beautifully

designed object that is not that expensive, but signifies that somebody thought that you

deserve more respect than that experience, and somebody that wanted more respect than

that experience found them.

So you are able to find these things.

They're not everywhere, but you do have to look.

There's something interesting about that, because you actually sometimes get this completely

opposite explanation for why many things feel and look worse today, which is that they

have become cheap.

And so we don't attend to them as much.

We were talking in my team as we were getting ready for this about how it used to be hand

me down furniture was a really important thing.

People got their grandparents' bedroom sets all the time.

Yeah, my grandmother's dining room table.

And now I think many families have had the issue.

It's like the elders pass on or downsizing their home, and they want to give what they

have, what they cared about so much, what was so important to them, down to their children,

their children don't want it.

And one reason they don't want it is that we have made furniture much cheaper.

And so it's not as incredible an investment for a family to get a bedroom set or to get

a dining room table as you get one from IKEA, and you don't have to think about it that much

necessarily, because you maybe know that this is your starter home and in a couple of

years, you'll probably change it.

And so in a weird way when there was more scarcity, people had to attend to what they were

getting to sort of give that attention.

You were just giving to that shower cap more often, but when people know that they're

only going to have the thing for a few years, when they know that its obsolescence is planned

for them, then maybe they don't treat it that way, because in the back of your mind, well,

it's a temporary investment.

It's a temporary visitor in my home, so it doesn't need to express as much about me.

I feel bad for people that feel that way, because why not have everything around you express

something about you in some way that doesn't necessarily need to be how much something

costs, but I also feel in the case of Handmedown family furniture, there's a soul that's

embedded in that at one point 60 years ago, my grandmother sat at that table.

Now I didn't need that table anymore, because I, for a lot of different reasons, my wife

wanted a different table, but I don't want to get rid of it.

And so I had it in my basement, and my niece needs a dining room table.

So I am shipping her the table, and now she is going to have her great-grandmother's dining

room table.

To me, that is magic.

To me, that is a reason for living, that kind of continuity, where you can pass something

down that has been in a family that's dining room table where people gathered, where they

ate, where they cried, where they fought, where they did any kinds of things, that that

has so much meaning embedded in it.

And that's what I treasure most about objects.

I tend to be a bit of a pack rat.

My wife would say, I'm absolutely a pack rat.

But things have sentiment, they're embedded with sentimentality, with emotion, with memory.

It's evidence of living that to me is more important than almost anything.

In the back of my mind, while we've been talking, I've been thinking about how different

structures in our life operate by different logics.

And there's a logic of markets.

And markets like a logic that is frictionless, markets hate friction, markets like

things to be tradable, they like things to be legible across great distances.

I was very moved a second ago when you said that giving this table to your niece, I think

it was, is a reason for living, that participating in that ancestral continuity has a meaning

far beyond the worth of the table, if you put it up for sale in eBay or something.

And I think critique I kind of buy is that one thing just going on in life, is it market

logic is eating more and more and more and more.

And markets don't, as I was saying, markets don't really want specificities.

So I was thinking about homes.

One thing that has been measured is that people are painting their homes gray more often.

There's a study about this from Washington DC, a sharp rise on the number of gray homes.

This has been described as the color recession.

It's not unknown why it is.

So nearly a third of American home sales in 2021, when do people who had no intention

of living in them, the homes where an investment vehicle or the homes are going to be flipped

in 2021, 2021.

Wow.

And so if you're seeing your home, not as a place you will live for 50 years, but either

as a place you're trying to sell to someone else and then maybe sell to somebody after

that and sell to somebody after that.

Or just as a place you're only going to live for a few years because you yourself are

more mobile and you only expect to be in this job in Washington DC for four or five years.

Then you're going to move back to Asheville, North Carolina or something.

Moving that home towards particularity, right?

Painting it yellow and green because you're an idiosyncratic person who loves yellow and

green is not good for the long term resell value of the home.

Absolutely.

And even more than that, I mean, I grew up in a place with very strong homeowners associations

where you were not allowed to paint your home a lot of different colors because it might

change the resell value of the homes around you.

It wasn't even about you.

Right.

It was about everybody wanting to make sure their home was an effectively tradable asset.

Yep.

And so there's this market logic that can infect more and more and that that is, you know,

again, part of the trend towards sameness.

I'm curious how that resonates with us and for you.

Well in many ways, it sort of brings us back to the whole notion of somebody raising

their house and creating a house that's so big that it infiltrates in that sort of air

and space of others because that's exactly what is being controlled here.

And that's why it's ugly.

Now I'm sad that there's so much that is being diluted now to eliminate some of

what some of what is strange, but also really beautiful or also really specific to a person.

And look at all the auctions that go on when celebrities die that somebody wants their

desk or their hat or you know, Diane Keaton had an auction, her family had an auction and

all her clothes went on auction and people were clamoring for her bolo hats.

So I think that there's this really interesting, really interesting thing that I want to do

some research now on in that we still want these really expressive ways of differentiating

ourselves, but within a certain parameter.

So if we are being urged to to gray down our color palettes, what does that mean about

how much color we can actually express?

And when we hold back from that, what is that due to our creativity?

And what does it do to or what is it reflect about the way you want to move through the world?

So one of going back to our earlier axis of both there's something that do you feel

anything at all versus what do you feel?

I have a friend who the way she dresses is meant to make other people feel things.

Thank you.

She joy whimsy, but it's loud.

Like you walk around with her and people are noticing and she is trying to get them to notice.

And the way I dress and when we move this podcast or video calls me a lot of stress,

it's sort of bent to not have people notice.

I don't want you to be thinking about how I do like I want you to think it looks nice

and then not give it any further thought.

And there is this dimension where are you willing to have people have views about you?

What your house looks like, what you're dressed like, how things are decorated or you

recognizing that some people might love it and other people might hate it, right?

That fashion can be polarizing and design can be polarizing versus do you have a society

that in some cultural way has become less comfortable with that, right?

People in it do not want to expose themselves to judgment.

They want to be looked at, judges acceptable and have the gaze fall off of them.

I don't know if that's possible Ezra and even when someone takes a stance against being

obvious or loud, that choice is still a choice.

It's still a deliberate decision years ago.

My father decided that he was no longer going to wear Ralph Lauren polo shirts because

he didn't want to be a walking billboard for the brand.

Okay.

What did he do?

I can't even say this with a straight face.

He put a flag pin over the logo.

I'm like, dad, you just exchanged one logo for another.

Now you are representing the United States on your shirt, on your polo shirt.

He didn't want to buy new ones.

So he replaced the logo, he covered up the logo, the polo logo with a flag.

As soon as you see that flag, it signifies something.

I have always, in the last 20 years, been kind of afraid of wearing color.

I only always wear black.

Always, always.

It's anything else feels too fluorescent.

I feel like I'm being looked at.

I sort of, this everything goes with everything.

It blends my nephew first, first realizing it many, many years ago.

He said, why do you always wear black?

I'm like, oh, it's just easier.

I don't have to decide about too much.

Everything goes with everything.

He goes, that's weird.

Yeah, it is a little bit weird, but it's easy for me.

And I also feel like you, in the podcast world, to have to then suddenly go into video is

terrifying.

But I do think that every decision we make is deliberate.

We're revealing ourselves in ways that allow us to be perceived in a certain way, including

and objects and cars and houses and sneakers and handbags.

All express that.

In a way, I'm not sure people mean that much by the Ralph Lauren brand.

It may not be a great example, but when people put a flag pin on now, particularly in

the post-911 world and in that period, it was a very, very, very specific kind of statement

about yourself that maybe it wouldn't have been at other times when it was just people

at American flags.

They had an FDR picture hanging in their house or separately what it meant to have a

mau picture or a stolen picture in those societies meant something different than in societies

where it's much more of a choice whether or not you hung those.

You're talking about the sort of emotional resonance being different between Ralph Lauren

and a flag pin.

No, what I'm talking about here, what I think I'm talking about here, is that the logic

of branding, we have become so used to thinking of it as branding, as the thing corporations

are trying to do with it, that even when the symbol is coming out of a non-commercialized

sphere, a sphere that would understood to be representing very different things about

somebody, we almost now sort of see them all on the same plane.

You know, when I was a kid, I wore a gold chai, which is a Jewish symbol.

And I wore that at a time when I was quite religious as a kid.

I would appear around wannabe at rabbi.

What that meant to me wasn't what it meant to me some years later when I got my first

Nike shoes or when I was trying to dress to fit in with other kids.

I was expressing something that was more private.

It was existing publicly too, but it wasn't.

I think these are different.

It's funny because it's not where I thought our conversation would go, but I think it's

a very interesting place for it to go, which is places where maybe logics or ways of accessing

the world that should remain separate actually begin to converge.

I want to get into the public and private spheres here.

And maybe a way to do it is this.

We sent you an email asking you for an example, something ugly that you thought was good

design.

And you talked about these ads.

These to be on the subway from Dr. Zimor.

Is it?

Dr. Zimor.

Can you describe them for listeners and audio here?

Yes.

Dr. Zimor was a dermatologist.

I don't know if he's still alive, but he's definitely not in practice anymore.

And for many, many, many years, he essentially took over the billboards in the New York City

subway system and had really garish, short truths, orange, lots of rainbows.

Dr. Z will fix your face, you know, all about what your high hopes could be to eradicate

acne.

They were really hideous, really, really hideous.

But over time, they were enormously consistent.

They used the same visual language over and over.

It's like rainbows and really badly current type and terrible vertical and horizontal scaling

and bad silhouettes.

But they became sort of like the crazy Eddie ads of the 70s.

Crazy Eddie, his prices are insane.

Part of the tapestry of the New York City subway system and so they became really familiar

and ultimately really beloved.

Now, this is something that's really important to branding.

Even when something is ugly, if you see it enough times, it becomes something that you

recognize and you begin to associate with something.

That thing could have good feelings, it could have bad feelings again, back to the feelings.

And in the case of Zizmour, because he seemed like a nice guy and there were no scandals

and he seemed to do good work and he was somewhat inexpensive and he talked to the populace,

people love these ads.

They love them.

What people get so upset about now when you change logos, it's not so much that the

logo that is being changed is any good.

It's that it's taking us away from the thing that we're most familiar with and in the

day and age where everything feels so tenuous, taking that familiarity away, even if it's

a juice carton, makes people feel really insecure.

So I want to take this on a different direction.

So I was looking at those ads and I think they're wonderful and one reason they're wonderful

though, ugly and weird and crowded and is that they feel like a person was behind them,

not a committee.

They don't feel like they came out of a sophisticated branding agency that had a kickoff

meeting and a scoping meeting and you can feel the sort of bureaucratic energy behind

a very sophisticated campaigns.

But to go back to this point of maybe the market eating a lot of other spaces and imposing

its logic on them, a column I have wanted to write and not written in part because I've

been afraid of the reaction to it is that as a newcomer to New York City, I moved here

three years ago, I find the presence of the advertising on the New York City subway and

on the buses really sad and not that it doesn't exist in other places it does that we're

not the MTA is not the only transit authority that raises somebody through advertising.

But that is a public space.

It is actually one of the most remarkable public spaces I think in American life.

The New York City subway for whatever its flaws is incredible.

It is egalitarian.

It is all straddles of society mixing with each other.

It is people going in all kinds of places.

And yet it is all happening beneath the glare of these ambulance chasing attorneys and

Tinder ads and plastic surgery ads.

For a long time, the subway system I would walk into with my kids.

It had an ad for the reboot of the exorcist above where we would walk in and it was black

and white and these two girls faces and they're like spitting blood, it was his horrifying

grotesque ad.

And I looked into this, the MTA gets about 1% of operating revenue from advertisements.

And on the one hand, I know that the mom administration is trying to make buses free and

isn't it a little bit elitist to say you should spend that money on making the subway's

non-commercial rather than making the buses free.

And on the other hand, as I've thought about writing this piece, it seems to me that maybe

public spaces should not be commercialized in that way.

This should be a space of oasis from constant advertising, from your attention and your

visual field being captured by the market.

These ads make the New York City subway much uglier than it could be.

Yes.

So what I love on the New York City subway is sometimes they'll use the spaces they use

for ads and put poetry there.

That's really beautiful.

They occasionally have art on them.

I think that's really cool.

It has a very old style progressive movement, like the enriching of the citizenry.

You can imagine a world where that was the only thing that existed that was non-utellitarian

visuals there.

And I think it'd be really beautiful if the ads were gone.

It's like the market has eaten something that is for the public and the market is the

dominant visual language and something that they are not the dominant player paying for

it.

They don't pay for most of it.

You're a visual prisoner.

Yes.

And we used to, I mean, if you go back to the 50s and 60s, people worry a lot about how

the visual field is being taken over by advertising.

And we've come to accept it in a way that is a little surprising and a little sad and

represents a diminishment of our ambitions for public space or the built environment.

Well, part of it is that the ads are really ugly.

If they were interesting, if they were provocative, if they were something that made you think

or inspired you, then it might be a little bit different.

But if you're writing this article, two things that you might be interested in, San Paolo

for a while took all their billboards down.

I don't know if they still, yeah, I don't know if that's still the case, but they did that

as a test and it really changed the visual environment.

And then Ed Rouché, the artist, has a whole series of pieces.

He did a whole series of pieces of blank billboards.

And it's beautiful.

No messages, just the white playing billboard in urban environment.

And it's really quite provocative.

That's so interesting about San Paolo.

And I mean, you go to, I mean, I've been to other countries and there's subway systems

and you don't always have advertising everywhere.

So to me, it gets to something we're talking about, which is we have begun to accept the

logic of the market and a lot of spaces you might have not expected the market to be.

We've begun to see things that are not market-based, like religions and market terms.

And you know, the market, I think, has certain desires.

It's not that the market hates beauty.

It would love to sell you something beautiful.

But the intentionality of the market is to sell product.

We see ads now in over-euronals and public bathrooms.

I mean, really?

That's when you want to get somebody's attention.

I mean, there's virtually no space that is left free from a corporate mark.

You have logos on eggs.

On the actual egg.

Try it.

If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium.

Try it now for two months free at youtube.com slash premium.

If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium.

Hi, I'm Sean Evans from Hot Ones and I want to tell you about YouTube Premium.

It has offline downloads, so you can watch without Wi-Fi.

Background play.

So you can lock your phone and it still plays, baby.

Oh, and it is completely ad-free.

Yes, I said it.

Ad-free.

Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium.

Trial eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime.

Some see borders.

You see possibilities.

At HSBC, so do we.

If today is the day you put your plan into action, we are here.

Whether you're navigating markets from Seattle to Singapore,

London to New York, HSBC brings strategic insights and a global perspective

to give you an edge wherever you go.

HSBC, we are here.

As we're getting into politics here, I want to ask you about,

there's been a real movement on the right in recent years,

to in a very certain way, resuscitate an argument about beauty.

And you've seen it in, I mean, Donald Trump uses Lord Beautiful.

Yes.

More than any president, I think, probably ever.

And certainly his idea of beauty is not my idea of beauty,

but he cares about it.

Yeah, and there's now even a term for it.

Let's not forget, Mar-a-Lago faces that are in our culture right now.

And they are building things and going back to neoclassical,

architecture in different ways.

And it's not just him.

It's sort of all the people around him.

I thought this from Tucker Carlson, this clip I'm going to show you,

was genuinely interesting.

This is another third rail in American politics.

You're not allowed to note that our buildings are grotesque and dehumanizing.

Why are they bad?

Because they're ugly and ugly dehumanizes us.

And by, let me be more precise about what I mean when I say dehumanizing.

Dehumanizing is the act of convincing people that they don't matter,

that they are less significant than the larger whole,

that they are not distinct souls, that they are not unique,

that they are not created by God, that they are merely

putty in the hands of some larger force.

Him starting by saying you're not allowed to talk about this is strange,

because you're definitely allowed to talk about this.

But you do see a move on the right to say that we have allowed

like beauty to become subordinate as a public goal.

I'm curious what you thought of it.

Well, it's the first time I think I've ever agreed with Tucker Carlson,

ever, but I don't think it's true.

I don't think that's true about the right at all.

If that were the case, then there would be much more of an uproar

about what the president is doing to the White House,

to the East Wing, to the arches that he's putting up to the reflecting pool.

I mean, there's so much damage that is making Washington uglier.

I don't see how that is being protested by the right.

Well, don't they think they're going to make it more beautiful?

It doesn't Donald Trump think his reflecting pool is luminous?

I don't know anybody that's like, you know, that, that, the,

the Oval Office, that looks really good now.

Trump, the person who thinks that is Trump.

But I mean that very serious.

But no, I do too. There's no pity on the right saying, you know what?

Let's invest in gold filigree.

No one's talking about that.

That's not a trend that's catching on in any way, thankfully.

Well, let me make not the argument for what they're doing,

but I think that challenge they are posing.

That is interesting for liberals and people on the left to try to take seriously.

The rights rediscovery of classical architecture, of Roman columns.

The right because it is a more, pretty the modern right in America is a much more reactionary movement.

It is able to locate a very clear moment of beauty, which is old things.

And, you know, in ways where if you read the white nationals, right, they're very explicit about this.

You know, what they understand is like the, the European inheritance.

And I think that the left and the term the left is tricky because obviously,

you know, you've moderates and liberals and leftists.

But has more trouble knowing what it wants to answer this with.

Not because it doesn't think beauty is important,

but because it doesn't want to dictate what the beautiful should be.

Who I to say.

And it's not binary.

And it's not binary.

And so you have an interesting thing where I do think that the right is doing something interesting

and trying to move ideas of beauty back to something more sent more centrally contested in politics.

And I'm not sure.

I've really seen an answer.

Or even like a willingness to to argue about it with them.

Among people on the the left and part because

if you understand the past to be full of problems

and you want to move to a future that is not yet built.

Well, what visual grammar, what visual language can everybody agree on for that?

Well, nobody will ever agree.

Not one, there will never be one way of assessing beauty.

But I do want to make a distinction between taste and style and power.

And so I don't think that anybody on the right is looking back to Roman and Greek architecture

or the architecture of Versailles and thinking,

now there was some really magnificent architecture.

I think what they're actually saying is this is the type of power that's represented.

This architecture is representing a certain power.

And that power is the way we want to lead.

I don't know.

I don't think that's.

I don't agree with that.

I think they really do think it's beautiful.

Or at least I think it's worth trying to grant them that they think it's beautiful.

But I think they think it's okay.

I agree there.

I think they think it's beautiful because it represents a certain type of leader

and a certain type of power.

And those things you can't always separate.

It's like Mar-Lago face being beautiful for a certain reason.

Those people think it's beautiful.

You and I might not.

But they think it's beautiful.

I'm not questioning somebody's own sense of what is beautiful to them.

But what I think is more important than what they think is beautiful is why.

Why do they think it's beautiful?

What is this represent to them?

I think I agree that the set of the tributaries of why we think a thing is beautiful

and very complicated.

Going back to what you're saying even at the very beginning about proportionality

and the mathematics.

And I mean, you'll get into these things like what is the perfect figure or

the looks, macsars and the men's movement now are sitting there like

measuring the proportional distance of their whatever to their whatever.

Why people have come up with what they think is beautiful is obviously contested.

And then as you also said, changes over time.

But I take the right as or at least this part of the right as

even if power is part of it, believing like now having a kind of politics of beauty

that I don't think George W. Bush had.

That I don't think Romney had.

That I think is a sort of a new entry into politics.

The immediate executive orders on neo-classical or art classical architecture.

And I guess one of my questions is because I do think people,

including on the left, there's a lot of the articles about everything

becoming ugly that we're talking about or coming from.

I do think people have a feeling that the world is becoming less beautiful to them.

And I think they want this represented.

I think that there is a yearning for beauty to be a publicly held value again.

But I think the right always has an easier time with this because they can sort of just reach back.

Right. That's that make America great again.

Well, if you're making America great again, you're going back to things

that were once considered a certain way.

Yeah.

That could be behavior.

That could be social structure.

That could be architecture, art, music, politics, etc.

So I think that's all part of it.

It would be shocking to me if make America great again or the current president was like,

let's innovate a new style of architecture to represent our future.

That's not going to happen.

So alongside this new right, which I think is reaching backwards in its design aesthetic,

you also have the tech right.

We've talked about the cyber truck a bunch in this conversation.

But crypto and NFTs had a very legible visual language.

You have a certain amount of AI from slop to art.

But you do have a kind of emergent language of what the digital design of the future is supposed

to look like. It's certainly a theory of the future.

I'm curious how you think about that as like a contestant.

And what you think it is communicating.

I think it's one faction of design that is apparent now.

Because I could also point to Apple Park and the beauty of the building there and the buildings

there, which are truly extraordinary as a counterpoint to some of that.

Interestingly, a lot of the cyber chic is very linear, very sharp edges,

whereas Apple Park is all rounded edges. You see that in Bilbao, you see that in some of the way

the Whitney was redesigned. So I think that that's there also.

But like everything else, I think that we're in this space of tension between which

visual language is going to win out. There's always more than one.

We've been talking about this very much, but a lot of what we're talking about, I think in a

sometimes sub-bros, some is very explicit ways, masculine and feminine coded.

I mean, cyber truck is a very male design. Say what you will about it.

And you were just talking about like sensuality and curves.

I mean, how much is some of the fight we're having here about the sort of larger political

but gender-ward dynamic that we've been in?

I'm going to go back to what I said before. I don't know that it's a gender war so much as a power

play. How do we believe power should be communicated and visualized?

And that's I think what we're seeing now.

So do you think about in a sort of modern way as a kind of answer to what the Mar-Lago world

has come up with for their beauty? Do you think there is an answer to that?

You know, you can say, yes, the world has become uglier. I mean, I think it's something you're

saying. And what you're sort of saying is what they are doing is ugly because it is

garish, because it is vulgar, because it is out of proportion, because it is about power,

because it is about intimidation. And I'll be very honest, it represents politics that I don't

believe in. Yes. And so do you think there's an answer to that you do believe in? And that does allow

though, you know, people whose politics you do agree with to speak about beauty in a way that is

more legible and inspiring to people? As I'd like to say yes, I'd like to say yes.

In my practice, I am an analyst. I look at the time and back to try to make sense of what's

happening right now. I'm not a futurist. I'm not even sure I would claim to be an optimist.

But I hope so. I want to say I hope so. All right, I think that's a place to end. So then always

our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? So I've been giving this

a lot of thought. Going to name three of my favorite books over the course of my life, and then I'm

going to push in one more that I discovered in the last decade or so that changed my life. So I'm

going to, if that's okay with you, please. Okay. So number one, it's a book of poetry called The

Voice That Is Great Within Us. It's by Hayden Karuth, and it is a remarkable collection of 20th

century poetry. That's where I first became aware of my favorite poem of all time, which is a poem

by Charles Olson called Maximus to himself. PS, I name my dog Maximus. That's number one. Number two

is what I think is one of the greatest love stories of all time. It's a book written by Gabriel

Garcia Marquez called Love in the Time of Calera, which has the greatest last line of all time

in a book. And so you have to read it all the way through before you get to that. And then my

third book is a book that I hope one day to be able to do a visual version of. I fell in love with

this book in college. It's James Joyce's Ulysses. I even went to Ireland for Bloom's Day, which is the

day that the day in the life of Leopold Bloom that James Joyce wrote about in Ulysses and took a

walking tour of Ireland and went to Sandy Mount Strand. And those are my three favorite books.

Books have profoundly changed my life. But more recently, in 2017, I started reading a book called

Hunger by Roxanne Gay. And when I read that book, I fell in love with the author,

sight unseen, just reading her words so much so that I reached out to her. I wanted to get around

my podcast. She said, no, I tried to stay in touch. She was very squirrely about it. And then through

a mutual friend, she got wind that I was actually not a crazy person. And then I asked her out on a date

in 2018. And in 2020, we got married. So my book Hunger by Roxanne Gay. That is a wonderful fourth

recommendation. Debbie Melman, thank you very much. Thank you, Ezra.