"Graydon Carter"

Speaker 1 Say hello to the all-new Alexa Plus, your smart, proactive AI assistant. Chat naturally about anything and watch your to-do list disappear.

Speaker 1 Planning date night, one conversation handles everything from dinner reservations to entertainment. It learns your style, anticipates what's next, and puts thousands of services at your fingertips.

Speaker 1 Always ready when you are across Echo, Fire TV, and your favorite devices. Experience AI, that's all yours.
Amazon.com slash new Alexa.

Speaker 1 This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Apple Card members can earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases wherever they shop.

Speaker 1 This means you could be earning daily cash on just about anything like a slice of pizza from your local pizza place or a latte from the corner coffee shop.

Speaker 1 Apply for Apple Card in the wallet app to see your credit limit offer in minutes.

Speaker 1 Subject to credit approval, AppleCard issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, terms and more at applecard.com.

Speaker 1 Nobody wants to spend the holiday season clicking from one site to the next to get their hands on the best brands. But who knew Walmart has the top brands we all love?

Speaker 1 Like the big names that your friends and and family actually want, and all in one place: Nespresso, Nintendo, Apple, you name it. Get the brands everyone loves at prices you'll love at Walmart.

Speaker 1 Who knew? Go to Walmart.com or download the app to get all your gifts this season.

Speaker 1 Knock, knock.

Speaker 1 No, I guess you can't say.

Speaker 1 So I'll do, okay, I'll play both. Knock, knock.

Speaker 1 Who's there? Smartless. Smartless who?

Speaker 1 It's an all-new Smartless. Smart.

Speaker 1 I realize that I think that I curse too much. You do? Yeah.
What are you fucking talking about? There we go.

Speaker 1 Wait, really? Why do you say that? I don't think you do. Because, don't you think I do? I feel like I do.
It just occurred to me that I feel like I curse too much. And maybe

Speaker 1 I think not enough.

Speaker 2 Did you get that feeling because you were hanging out with your dad and you had to, you caught yourself a couple of times?

Speaker 2 No, truly. Like, where did this thought come from? You know, I was just old enough.

Speaker 1 I just, I think I was,

Speaker 1 I think I was talking about hockey with somebody the other day, and I realized that every other, I think when I, especially when I talk about hockey, I'm like, these fucking guys, and look at this fucking TV, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 And I was like, wait, how often do I say, and I saw this review of some gadget that somebody that they've just released, some AI gadget, that documents the

Speaker 1 words that you say throughout the course of a day or a week or a month, et cetera. And this woman was talking about how much she had heard she was cursing.
And I was like, I wonder how much I curse.

Speaker 1 Really? Yeah, a little bit. It used to be my, if I got nervous, I used to swear a lot.
And like the very first time I met Steven Spielberg in his office, oh no, all I did, every other word, was fuck.

Speaker 1 What? I was like, yeah, and his kids were playing video games. I was like, oh, that's fucking cool.
How many, when did you fucking get that? That's fucking amazing.

Speaker 2 I couldn't stop saying that. I remember I once had a,

Speaker 2 the guy who wrote and directed, I think he wrote, but he definitely directed Napoleon Dynamite.

Speaker 1 This guy, Jared has, he's a great director.

Speaker 1 Yeah, amazing.

Speaker 2 He's great. And I got a meeting with him just after Napoleon Dynamite.
I was so excited. And

Speaker 2 just like, I get lazy with cursing as just like sort of like a way to bond, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, right.

Speaker 2 And so I'm just like, every word is this and that, fucking, and that, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm driving home.
And I call my agent. I say, oh, the meeting went really, really well.

Speaker 2 And he goes, he goes, you know, I was going to say something.

Speaker 2 I was wondering if it did, did, because I know your family lived in Salt Lake City for a few years, and I was wondering if your family had any Mormonism in their background.

Speaker 2 Did you guys talk about Mormon?

Speaker 2 Because, you know, he's a big, big Mormon.

Speaker 1 Oh, I didn't know that. And I'm like, oh, no, I know.

Speaker 2 Because then I started, like, then I was flashing back to the meeting because I'm driving home.

Speaker 1 Like, yeah, he didn't say anything that was off color.

Speaker 2 And, of course, I never heard from this guy again.

Speaker 1 To this day, to this day, have you spoken to him? To this day. No, I've probably

Speaker 1 just deeply offensive to him. That's so funny.
We've got to get him on here and ask him about that.

Speaker 1 I'm sure he didn't even notice.

Speaker 1 I don't know. It's funny.

Speaker 1 I tell you what.

Speaker 2 This is the segue, Sean. This is incredible.

Speaker 1 So smooth. This is a segue.

Speaker 1 And my guest, my guest is, you know, we all like cool things and

Speaker 1 we like feeling like that we're part of, you know, that we're up on culture, that we're up on what's going on in the world.

Speaker 1 This is a guy who's been not only at the forefront, but I think I would dare to say been shaping it for many years.

Speaker 2 He happens to be Jan Winner.

Speaker 1 Oh, he happens to be from my home country. It's not Canada.
Jan Winner is not Canadian.

Speaker 1 Are you sure?

Speaker 1 I'm very sure that Jan Winner is not Canadian.

Speaker 1 You didn't know him when he was in Canada, but he'd started a magazine in 1973 called the Canadian Review that was very popular. He then moved to the States and he worked for Time magazine.

Speaker 1 He worked for a bunch of other things, Life Magazine. And then in 1986, he co-founded a very,

Speaker 1 very popular and influential magazine known as Spy Magazine. This is not Graydon Carter.

Speaker 1 Left that in great shape. He went on to become over 25 years the editor of Vanity Fair.
He's got a new book coming out called When the Going Was Good Guys. This is Graydon Carter.

Speaker 2 Nice.

Speaker 1 Good morning, morning, sir.

Speaker 2 I read the airmail

Speaker 2 email this morning.

Speaker 1 Bless you. Yes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you didn't mention Airmail, Willie.

Speaker 1 I know. Well, I was about to get to Airmail because you kept saying Graydon Carter, so I was like trying to get through it.

Speaker 2 You're an awesome guest. I know.
Yeah. Nice going, Will.

Speaker 1 Welcome, Graydon. And I mentioned all the various things that you did that you started.
You started as

Speaker 1 a young writer, and you founded him. How old were you when you founded the Canadian Review? What was that in 1930? Like 23.
I was 23.

Speaker 1 That takes a lot of,

Speaker 1 I was going to say guts, but it takes a lot of chutzpah to start a magazine when you're 23 years old. Wow.
How do you even go? How do you even

Speaker 1 know where to start? I actually didn't start it. I bumped into a bunch of guys who were starting it in college, and they needed an art director.
And I said, well, I can draw.

Speaker 1 And they said, well, one should be

Speaker 1 the art director. And then little magazines are just festering pits of bitterness and jealousy and envy.
And so one by one, they all left. And then I became the editor.

Speaker 1 And it wasn't as good as Will was pointing out. And he was being very kind about it.
Nobody knew what they were doing.

Speaker 1 And that was completely evident to readers and advertisers that we were completely incompetent. But it did lead to a job at Time Magazine when...

Speaker 1 Time magazine was like probably one of the most important magazines on the planet. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And what did you do there at Time?

Speaker 1 I was a writer, but you know, it was in 1978. The city was still teetering after bankruptcy and was like dangerous and

Speaker 1 there were burnt out cars everywhere, but rents were really cheap. And I live in Greenwich Village.

Speaker 1 My first apartment was about a block and a half away from here. And it was $200 a month and it had high ceilings and a garden.
But then when I got to time,

Speaker 1 they were restocking it with a bunch of young writers. And there was people like Walter Isaacson, who became the great biographer.

Speaker 1 There was Michigo Kakutani, who became the chief book critic of the New York Times for 35 years.

Speaker 1 Frank Rich, who became the theater critic of the New York Times, and then the producer of Succession. Wow.
And Maureen Dowd, who was there.

Speaker 1 Rick Stengler became the editor of Time. My best friend Jim Kelly became the editor of Time.

Speaker 1 Anyway, it was just a

Speaker 1 remarkable period. And we were all still keeping touch with each other.
And

Speaker 1 it was, yeah, it was very intimidating for me because I thought, wait a minute, are all Americans this smart? And thankfully, they're not.

Speaker 1 Well, that's true. You're talking to three of them.
There you go. Exactly.
Well, two and a half. Two of those are the smartest.

Speaker 1 That is amazing. And so you work at Time Magazine with all this great talent, and then you and Kurt Anderson

Speaker 1 form Spy Magazine, which,

Speaker 1 boy, I remember Spy Magazine and a lot of people do. It was so

Speaker 1 It was it's been described as like as sort of like vicious and cruel, but also like really dead on and you sort of somebody quoted something like you were you despised all the right people

Speaker 1 Well, you know, there was a there was the time all of a sudden in the mid-1980s New York had sort of come alive financially and you know investment banks had been sort of invented and there that meant there were investment bankers around and they already had a lot of money and they loved showing it off and accidentally i think our timing was was wonderful and we used to call it astringent rather than mean

Speaker 2 but you know that it did occupy a space of sort of

Speaker 2 i don't know what the term might be sort of a healthy cynicism and and and and and a you know like david spade had we've talked about it a few times on this show he had a a segment on saturday night live i think it was called the hollywood minute um uh where you know you'd kind of watch through your fingers, you know, sort of like you didn't want to see it or hear it, but it was always so accurate.

Speaker 2 And funny. I don't know what point I'm making, but I just, I guess I want to say that there, I don't know if it's you.

Speaker 1 Do you feel that it's gone or no?

Speaker 2 No, I don't.

Speaker 2 I feel like there, there is a space somewhere for people having the balls to call out that which is kind of apparent to all of us, but yet only discussed in quiet circles with your closest friends.

Speaker 2 yet everybody says it. You just don't say it in a big group.
You say it in small groups. You're just calling out accuracies on people's foibles.
And

Speaker 2 it is interesting and maybe healthy. I guess this is the question.
What do you guys think? Is it healthy to have mainstream media, to have a place in mainstream media for that type of release?

Speaker 1 I mean, look at

Speaker 1 people like John Oliver and Seth Meyers and

Speaker 1 their news elements, and they do it better almost than

Speaker 1 they do do it better than the evening news in a certain way. You know, not everything is objective.

Speaker 1 You know, if you're talking about the earth being round, you don't need somebody from the Flat Earth Society to come out and give the counter-argument. Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 But Jason, I think maybe, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but maybe are you talking about insults?

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, but

Speaker 2 that cynicism that exists in some corners of mainstream media,

Speaker 2 like, I don't know if this is fair

Speaker 2 because I'm not a student of all this, but I feel like Vulture on New York magazine, they sometimes will like, they even have like a hot radar.

Speaker 2 They've got a term for it. And they just call out basically what everyone's talking about in sort of, I put in quotes, the cool circles.
And

Speaker 2 I mention it only because it does seem to drive

Speaker 2 some pop culture successes and create some pop culture failures when

Speaker 2 it's discussed at sort of that, again, in quotes that high level and then it sort of sort of filters out into

Speaker 2 uh less cynical parts of our country and our media it drives like what films get seen i mean it's it's sort of a the theory of like having critics you know it's like one person says something is good and then that starts to disseminate and then it it actually forms a wave of either success or failure for some things.

Speaker 2 And I wonder if

Speaker 2 that is a healthy thing that

Speaker 2 we should have in in media.

Speaker 2 My guess would be yes, but it's hurtful.

Speaker 1 But at the same time,

Speaker 1 excuse me, on the Internet, everybody's a critic.

Speaker 1 It's a sewer by and large. But if you have people who have proper

Speaker 1 opinions and they're within the realms of accuracy, it can make a good difference. And the Internet, word of mouth, is the most powerful tool in the world.

Speaker 1 And the Internet just lets it go exponentially rather than arithmetically. Well, the problem is, though,

Speaker 1 with the internet and with social media, is that often some of these voices all come at the same volume and volume that they don't deserve.

Speaker 1 And so things get lost in the shuffle a little bit. Jason, I think you were referring to the approval matrix, right,

Speaker 1 that they do.

Speaker 1 And there was something about SPY that did that, which was

Speaker 1 it just held things up to a light and sort of brought them into focus a little bit, things that

Speaker 1 were... I remember there was a piece you guys did.
You probably don't even remember this, but there was a piece you did. You may have already left, but it was certainly

Speaker 1 really tonally right in line with the kind of thing that you had set forth at SPY, which was they had a woman holding a pair of rollerblades over her shoulder, and they had her go to different

Speaker 1 neighborhoods of the city to see what reactions she'd get in different reactions. They put her in the upper west side, upper east side, a lot of higher in downtown, and

Speaker 1 what people would say to her at different street corners. I mean, upper east side goes like that.

Speaker 1 Do you like to skate in the park? And then, and then the upper west side, the guy's like, hey, you look great. Why don't you put those down? Let's go get a drink.

Speaker 1 And then in Flatiron, the guy's like, why won't you talk to me, bitch?

Speaker 2 Lower East Side is get the fuck out of my thing.

Speaker 1 And that's the kind of thing that

Speaker 1 I do think that that sort of thing is missing because everybody is so nervous

Speaker 1 about offending the, and also everybody is so quick to be offended and this is going to get i i hope this will be a pull quote about me railing against big people being offended but there is that there was a notion back there was you know you know of like i don't give a shit if you're offended who cares you know as long as i'm not hurting anybody or saying this completely uh you know i'm offended okay yeah there there's a healthy space for that too that i feel has has been lacking in the last few years as we needed to make and are still working on this sort of correction for those that are marginalized.

Speaker 2 But I think the consensus is starting to come out that maybe there was an over correction and it's starting to come back to middle a little bit now.

Speaker 2 And so there's a healthy level of, hey, listen, offending you is part of the joke or part of this thing. And so

Speaker 2 there's some casualties that are a part of that metric.

Speaker 1 What do you think about that shift that's going on right now, Graydon? Will and I would know this

Speaker 1 better because we came from Canada, but

Speaker 1 the pendulum in America swings in great arcs like this.

Speaker 1 And in Britain, it swings like this, and in Canada, it swings like this. So America goes way out.

Speaker 1 I mean, in the 1960s, you know,

Speaker 1 the free love movement was much further out in America than it was, in, say, in San Francisco, than it was in Toronto.

Speaker 1 But then it swings right back. So in the 1980s,

Speaker 1 the the investment banker ethos was much more pronounced in New York than it was in Vancouver, say. So

Speaker 1 America is the,

Speaker 1 it just has larger swings, and so the extremes are greater. And

Speaker 1 I think it is coming. It will come.

Speaker 1 It's a correction from the far left. And then it's went way too far to the far right.
And it will settle somewhere in the middle. You just hope that it does sooner rather than later.

Speaker 1 And of course, nobody's advocating for the marginalization of people who are different

Speaker 1 at all. And that's never been, you know, I think that anybody, you know, certainly all of us,

Speaker 1 I assume none of us would ever advocate for that. But I must say, as someone, it makes sense for someone who likes to comment on culture and whose writing and whose profession is informed by that.

Speaker 1 Of course, moving to the States is a natural progression for you, right? Because you've. And you, yes.
And me as well, of course, yeah, because

Speaker 1 there is that ceiling in Canada where you can only go so far, unfortunately. It's a great place to be from.

Speaker 1 It's a great place to live still.

Speaker 1 I'm not suggesting anything otherwise. Keep going, Will.
Yeah, you've got to put out the fire here.

Speaker 1 You're offending somebody here, yes.

Speaker 1 I am definitely offending somebody. How far have I dug down? Can I even see the top of the hole?

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 I've told that story before, the difference between the Canadian lobster fishermen and the American lobster fishermen, right? What is it?

Speaker 1 They're walking on the road after their day of lobster fishing, and the

Speaker 1 American lobster fisherman says to the Canadian, he says, I notice you don't have a top on your pot thereby. Aren't you worried about your lobsters getting out?

Speaker 1 And the Canadian says, no, these here are Canadian lobsters. If one of them tries to get out, the other ones will pull them back down.

Speaker 1 That's great. That's great.
And

Speaker 1 there's an element of truth to that.

Speaker 1 But moving to the States

Speaker 1 and starting Spy Magazine and then moving to Vanity Fair, which has an even greater audience and even sort of a broader demographic, if you will,

Speaker 1 you must have been

Speaker 1 very excited at the prospect of kind of opening up and a huge demo to what you wanted to say and what you thought was important to talk about.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and talk about having a piece of media that

Speaker 2 anoints

Speaker 2 week to week or was it month to month.

Speaker 2 Who is it? You know, you and Lorne Michaels were basically had the two levers that existed on putting people together. Two Canadians, by the way.

Speaker 1 Two Canadians here.

Speaker 2 Putting people on top of the mountain

Speaker 2 at your discretion, which was pretty incredible.

Speaker 1 I didn't, it's funny, looking back and I realize some of what you say is

Speaker 1 evident to others. It never was to me.
It was a matter of survival for the most part. I wanted to, I had a lot of children and I wanted to, I had to feed them and clothe them and educate them.

Speaker 1 And so when I got to Venus, I was the least popular person to get there because we had spent five years at SPY making fun of the editor, of the house writing style, of many of the contributors.

Speaker 1 So when I walked in, there was just, it was funereal, the whole mood of the place.

Speaker 1 And I didn't fire anybody for two years, but I eventually, there was, most of the people, some of the people were left over just to talk about my inadequacies as they went around to dinner parties in New York and so I um but I let everybody stay for two years and I thought I'd give them a chance to come around my way of thinking and then I got rid of these three troublemakers on in one week and after being there for two years And all of a sudden it shifted and I could bring my children into the office.

Speaker 1 It wasn't as poisonous and people started saying thank you and please and working together in a collegial way. And because I don't like office drama, I like people to work together.

Speaker 1 I think you get something better out of it. And then, so I sort of built it from there.
And I was fortunate to have one of the great owners, Cy Newhouse, who gave me the tools to succeed.

Speaker 1 He gave me the budget so

Speaker 1 I could bring in the, I thought, must have been the greatest stable of writers ever. The first writer I brought in was Christopher Hitchens.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 Wow. He's great.
Oh, he was heaven.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, also

Speaker 1 I had photographers like Annie Leibowitz and Helmut Newton and Bruce Weber. So So

Speaker 1 I was blessed by having these incredible colleagues and I was so

Speaker 1 appreciative of

Speaker 1 what they did because

Speaker 1 taking pictures and writing stories is a lot harder work than being an edit and editor. You're just sort of a wage ape and kind of a

Speaker 1 kind of like a cross between a chef and an air traffic controller

Speaker 1 and a piece of mold just on your ceiling.

Speaker 1 We don't really have a point, but other than

Speaker 1 trying to assemble the thing each month. And anyway, I was just, it was a great perch during one of the greatest periods.
But by the same token, it was a golden age of magazines.

Speaker 1 But one of the reasons, anytime you have a golden age, it's a golden age because everybody is good. So every other editor

Speaker 1 was

Speaker 1 firing in all cylinders.

Speaker 1 All magazines were good in the 1980s and 90s. They were just, it was an extraordinary period.

Speaker 1 And also, the magazine business attracted the best and the brightest then. Right, right.

Speaker 1 And we will be right back.

Speaker 1 Say hello to the all-new Alexa Plus, your smart, proactive AI assistant. Chat naturally about anything and watch your to-do list disappear.

Speaker 1 Planning date night, one conversation handles everything from dinner reservations to entertainment. It learns your style, anticipates what's next, and puts thousands of services at your fingertips.

Speaker 1 Always ready when you are across Echo, Fire TV, and your favorite devices. Experience AI, that's all yours.
Amazon.com slash new Alexa.

Speaker 1 Whole Foods Market is the place to get everything you need for Thanksgiving and Friendsgiving celebrations throughout the month.

Speaker 1 With great prices on turkey, sales on baking essentials, and everyday low prices from 365 brand, people can prep for the holiday with big savings. Fresh whole turkeys start at $2.99 a pound.

Speaker 1 Explore sales on select baking essentials from 365 brand like spices, broths, flour, and more. Shop everything you need for Thanksgiving now at Whole Foods Market.

Speaker 2 The holidays are nothing without family, friends, and

Speaker 1 flannel.

Speaker 2 The flannel you can always count on, it has to be from LL Bean.

Speaker 2 It's the shirt you wear when you pick out your tree, the one you wear when you're decorating it, and the one you're still wearing when you take her down. And when I say her, I mean the tree.

Speaker 2 And it's the one you wear in the family photo where everyone's matching, whether it was planned or not. Now me, I'm a PJ guy.
I love a flannel top and a flannel bottom.

Speaker 2 And if you get me a pair of flannel socks, I'll say thank you very much. I mean, it's perfect to wear and it's perfect to gift.
It's the flannel of the holidays. Actually,

Speaker 2 it's the uniform of the season. And like all things LL Bean, it's cozy, it's effortless, and darn it, it's made to last.
Go check out LL Bean Flannel, invited to the holidays since 1912.

Speaker 1 And now back to the show.

Speaker 1 What was your ethos then when you got there at Vanity Fair?

Speaker 1 When you sat behind your desk for the first time in those first couple of years and going forward,

Speaker 1 what was your objective? Did you have an objective? Like, this is what we, the kind of stuff that we want to, that I want to do. Did you have something like that, a plan in mind in a way?

Speaker 1 Nothing so formal,

Speaker 1 but a sort of an evolving thought that what I wanted to do is every month present the reader with something that is highly, highly compelling, that they'll read and have wonderful stories that could range 15 or 20,000 words, which is the fifth of the size of an average book.

Speaker 1 And that they would come back the next month. I used to write thank you notes to all my contributors every month, thank you notes to our advertisers who paid for the journalism.

Speaker 1 The advertising came in at about $100,000 a page, and that sort of, you know, paid for the heat and the light and the electricity.

Speaker 1 But then there was, I got other ideas that really changed the direction of the magazine from one from David Halberstam to create something called the new establishment which is the in the in the past you know the the establishments were the head of you know general tire and general motors and and a bunch of new york banks but in the

Speaker 1 in the early mid to mid 1990s america became an entertainment uh um uh culture and uh economy and and so what we shipped around the world weren't cars and tires and things like that.

Speaker 1 It was intellectual property in terms of like video games and movies and television shows and magazines and technology. And so

Speaker 1 we did a huge portfolio that Annie shot and it sort of showed the world that there was a new, because there was a new economy, there was a new establishment to that economy.

Speaker 1 And then doing the Oscar party, which was

Speaker 1 started off small and terrified that it'd be a failure, and it just sort of grew each year.

Speaker 1 It kind of rivals the Oscars itself in terms of its prestige.

Speaker 1 As you're well aware, lots of people go

Speaker 1 will often just go to the party and not the Oscars themselves. And a lot of people who are

Speaker 1 big film stars, people names that everybody, all of us know, and of course the three of us have gone many times and enjoyed that.

Speaker 1 And it has become its own thing, which is quite miraculous, really, if you think about it. It's kind of in some ways dethroned the Oscars at its own party in a way.

Speaker 1 You know, you spoke something, you mentioned something that's interesting.

Speaker 1 The idea that America's true expert expert is its culture and its obsession with celebrity peaked, you know, it reached a peak, a fever pitch, if you will, in the 90s.

Speaker 1 As my father calls it, celebrity,

Speaker 1 in a way that I think that he does that just to demean the term itself.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he will claim that that's the actual way that you should pronounce it. But he also says, tomato.

Speaker 1 Here's my point. It occurs to me, and I've long thought this,

Speaker 1 if we were really smart

Speaker 1 about wanting to sort of peddle influence around the world in a way that America seems hell-bent on doing, we would, and this would never go down with the people who, you know, with the military-industrial complex, which is, you know, a trillion dollars, I think as of yesterday, a trillion-dollar a year business.

Speaker 1 What we could do much more efficiently is if we wanted to influence a certain country and its people, et cetera, all we need to do are, at the time I used to say, drop our DVDs of our TV shows and dumb them down as much as we're dumbed down.

Speaker 1 If we could pump in Netflix and Amazon Prime and Macs to all these countries for free, they would immediately lay down their weapons because they'd become just as dumb as we are.

Speaker 1 And just as... Or as smart.

Speaker 1 Or sorry. Or as smart.
Thank you for allowing me. But do you know what I mean? I mean, that would seem to me to be

Speaker 1 the answer to all of it, right? Well, it's an element of soft power, and we've sort of given up all our soft power in the last three months.

Speaker 1 Why don't we, we should be pumping them with TikTok and YouTube and paying for it and starlinking it into their country.

Speaker 1 And believe me, they'll be like, hey, listen, we got to go, we're going to go and fight on the front line. Like, hang on a second, I just got to watch this thing about a cat teaching itself to read.

Speaker 1 Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, we do do that in a certain way.

Speaker 1 I mean, America, if if you look at the way most kids dress anywhere in the world, they're wearing, you know, American-style trainers, blue jeans, t-shirts with something written on them, and

Speaker 1 plaid.

Speaker 1 Everybody looks like they're in a writing room, no matter what country you're in.

Speaker 1 They do. And you see rallies, you see these people protesting, and they have effigies of the president and whatever.

Speaker 1 And they're wearing baseball caps backwards, and they're wearing a guest jean switcher. And you're like,

Speaker 1 wait a second. And the irony is completely lost on everybody.
That's our gift to the world.

Speaker 2 Well, and sort of expanding on that, Graydon, do you have an opinion about what sort of

Speaker 2 the current prognosis is for America being able to bear and withstand what some people are saying, kind of the hit that the American brand is taking across the world?

Speaker 2 Like, do you think after everything settles at whatever point that is, that America will still hold

Speaker 2 a respectable place in the world?

Speaker 1 I think it'll all depend on the next sort of three or four years. I think it's really tarnished.
And I, you know,

Speaker 1 we're leaving for Europe on next weekend and for a spell. And we have these little pins made up.
We made up for our airmail shop over in Hudson Street here. And it's just.

Speaker 1 It's a great shop, by the way. I was there two weeks ago.
It's fantastic. And the little pins, they just say, I didn't vote for them.

Speaker 1 And so when you're at a market in France or, you know, at a pub in England, people, it's just, because be it'll be difficult it was difficult during the years of George Bush George W.

Speaker 1 Bush as well and it may take a generation for the sort of the so-called American brand to to correct great and do you want me to send you over a couple of these Canada patches on your background

Speaker 1 they are useful to have they are useful all of a sudden everybody who travels is a Canadian you'll have Americans practicing their Canadian patois you know

Speaker 1 every ending because Canadians end every sentence with a question mark like an American will say say, I'm going to the store. A Canadian will say, I'm going to the store.

Speaker 1 As if, like, can I get you something sort of thing. Right.

Speaker 1 Wait, Grant, as far as journalism goes, and kind of to what Jason was saying about

Speaker 1 Scott Galloway. You know Scott Galloway? Oh, yeah.
Yeah. We got to have him on the show.
He's brilliant. I know.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 He's a great, very, very smart man. And I saw this clip either again on TikTok or Instagram or something.
And he said, we would take over your house in two minutes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You wouldn't get off the couch. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 He said, nobody wants to read anymore. That's right.
Period. And he goes,

Speaker 1 everybody's getting their information from, obviously, TikTok or Instagram because nobody wants to sit down and read articles or magazines or books or anything.

Speaker 1 And so, and that said, people know that people of influence know that. So they'll just speak to these kids or these people about what it is they should know.

Speaker 1 And that's how they get their information out. Okay, well, a counterargument to that would be that the fact is the New York Times has never been more successful.
It's never been larger.

Speaker 1 If you look at a magazine like say the Atlantic, The Atlantic is exponentially larger and more influential than it was say 15 years ago. But that's a certain demographic, I think.

Speaker 1 It is a certain demographic. But at the same token, most people watch TV with the, even with most people watch TV with the

Speaker 1 Chiron, you know, the whatever the

Speaker 1 professional show people call that. Subtitles.
Subtitles.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 young people, I think it's harder and harder. And I have a feeling that most of us, if we were growing up with TikTok and

Speaker 1 that we would have read less than

Speaker 1 and but it also, you know, most

Speaker 1 I've I have five kids and and I know that some of them didn't read that much when they were in their teens, but they're all huge readers now. They're all writers and so they're all huge readers.

Speaker 1 You just have to wait a bit and they will come around.

Speaker 1 Sean and Jason, what are you guys waiting for?

Speaker 1 I always say to these guys,

Speaker 2 you know what? You know,

Speaker 2 I've got a boring story I won't bore you with about why I'm not a great reader, but I will tell you that Does it have to do with you don't know how to read?

Speaker 1 Is that

Speaker 2 top to bottom, left to right?

Speaker 2 That there's now you can, every article online is now you can listen to it as you read.

Speaker 1 That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 And it is something that's helped both of my girls

Speaker 2 where, you know, they have these large reading assignments for school. And now all those books are audio books as well.

Speaker 2 And so one of the teachers suggested, and I thought it was a great idea, get them the audio book so they can listen to it as they read it.

Speaker 2 And that's helpful. And you get some momentum going, you get engaged in the story.
And now maybe you don't need that crutch for chapters five through 10. You can actually just read the book.

Speaker 2 And so I do,

Speaker 2 that's helpful. That's somewhat of a phenomenon where, like you say, the New York Times, Graydon, I would imagine their online

Speaker 2 business is larger than their print business.

Speaker 1 I think it's nine-tenths of it, but still, they're reading it online. But they're still reading it.
I will say that, though, and I do bang this drum quite often, but there is a certain

Speaker 1 reading, for me, reading at the end of the day, I find to be such an extreme luxury. And it's very calming because we do live in a digital world.
I'm looking at my screen all day.

Speaker 1 I'm looking at my computer, at my thing, whatever.

Speaker 1 And to have that moment for 45 minutes every night to read, I do find that it is so calming in this sort of chaotic world in which we live, if nothing else, apart from the fact that it's interesting and you can be, you know, what are all the other great things about reading.

Speaker 1 But in that way, and I would, especially as we get older,

Speaker 1 I'm not speaking to you, Graydon, I'm speaking to Sean and Jason. Because I am older.
You need to calm down. You need to calm down, both of you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, I read a lot.

Speaker 2 I still read a lot online and stuff but um what do you uh what do you attribute graydon the the the the not the demise but the the way that magazines have have not um

Speaker 2 you know you say like the new york times for example never been more profitable yet it is nine-tenths online now why did the same not uh translate for the periodicals

Speaker 1 i mean the the the financial crash of 2008 was a was an issue because the first thing that people could

Speaker 1 um that could take off their balance off their their their their accounts were advertising because then you don't have to fire anybody so the advertising started disappearing the new and then even in new york city there used to be a newsstand at every major intersection sometimes one across the street from each other and there was a newsstand in every office building now they when you see a newsstand on the street it's it's you often a like a movie set thing because they're gone and in office buildings the if there was wherever there was a newsstand,

Speaker 1 it's usually they're selling gum and flip-flops and lotto tickets. So just the fact that you used to be able to see magazines everywhere you went.

Speaker 1 You know, in Los Angeles, those things in Hollywood, but the long walls of magazines. Oh, I love those.
Anyway, that's sort of, they're gone. And I think a lot of magazines companies were late to

Speaker 1 transform, transfer their the way a magazine looks to an electronic version.

Speaker 1 And the thing about Airmail is the Airmail was put together by magazine people, and we didn't have to work with a legacy brand and then transfer it to the internet or digital.

Speaker 1 We started it from that. And so I think that made a difference there.
And, you know, I read 20 magazines a month, but I read them all on my iPad. Right.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but before you go too far past Airmail,

Speaker 2 I just love what you,

Speaker 2 it's so, and this is probably not the right term, but there's nothing intimidating about the way it comes at you at its, at its initial point in that it isn't, it's an email.

Speaker 2 And there's just like, here's, here's, it's basically like looking at the table of contents.

Speaker 1 Are you talking about the subscription to a Vanity Fair? No, to Airmail.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Brayden's new thing is this thing called airmail. So you get this email, and here's like five stories that you can click on that then, if you decide to click, then it expands into the story.

Speaker 2 So, there's just like you don't have to buy a whole magazine, or you don't have to go to a magazine's website or anything and like have to like deal with all the advertising and the big pictures and all that.

Speaker 2 It's just here's some ideas, some stories. If it's interest to you, click on it.
If not, go to your, go to the next email. Like, so it's, they're not, it's not in your face.

Speaker 2 The medicine goes down easy, and they happen to be incredible stories. So, I don't know.
I just think you tacked

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 2 a format that speaks to the current reader's appetite as far as the attention they have to get.

Speaker 1 And there's a tonal shift too, right, JB? I mean, there's a tonal shift in it from Vanity Fair to Air Mail.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's no selling element to it that I think people have grown sort of an allergy to. And

Speaker 2 you're very current on that, which is not surprising coming from somebody like you.

Speaker 1 Well, and we wanted to look beautiful because I think design means is everything these days. And look at the amount of work that goes into an iPhone, say.
So,

Speaker 1 as I say, I'd written thank you notes to all my advertisers at Vanity Fair. And

Speaker 1 so, I wanted those advertisers in Airmail. I didn't want advertising for, I don't know,

Speaker 1 Foot Fungus or

Speaker 1 Geico insurance ads. I wanted much better to have Hermes and Dior, Sherelle Florence.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 all the advertisers, once I got Hermes, all the other advertisers felt safe coming in. But it's put out by people people from Time Magazine when I worked there, Spy Magazine, and Vanity Fair.

Speaker 1 That's the core group. And then there's about eight young people who are in their mid-20s, and they form the core in the future.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention our mutual friend, the great Linda Wells, whom I adore. Me too.

Speaker 1 Yeah, whom I absolutely adore and have known for many years.

Speaker 1 And she's a big part of Air Mail.

Speaker 1 I'm not telling you, I'm telling our listener, our single listener.

Speaker 1 But I will say that, you know, when you were at Vanity Fair,

Speaker 1 there was a real balance between covering high society profiles, if you will, celebrity and investigative journalism.

Speaker 1 I remember there's a great article that I've referenced many times and had people read, which was about the Saltad Brunei's brother

Speaker 1 that you guys did about.

Speaker 1 That story is an incredible story. It still holds up.
It's incredible. It's hilarious and it's right on point and it's scathing and yet very fair.
So you do that at Vanity Fair.

Speaker 1 And then now that you're at Air Mail, how would you define,

Speaker 1 what is your relationship? Well, I was going to say what's your relationship with celebrity culture. Before I say that, what was,

Speaker 1 because you were at the forefront of defining celebrity and covering celebrity culture back at Vanity Fair, and you still are at Air Mail in a way.

Speaker 1 Did you, when you were in that position, what kind of incoming calls did you get from people, from publicists and celebrities themselves who wanted you to either amend something that you wrote about them?

Speaker 1 And I know you already mentioned this about Mr. Tisch, but if someone

Speaker 1 gets to the point?

Speaker 2 Did you ever get a call from that Donald Trump pseudonym?

Speaker 1 John Barron. John Barron? No, but I would get calls from Trump.
And once they invented Twitter,

Speaker 1 he went to town on me. He would call me a floppy.
I was a loser. The Waverly Inn was a failing restaurant.
The Oscar Party wasn't hot. The magazine was terrible.

Speaker 1 But I would take any phone call. But most of the,

Speaker 1 doing the covers was actually the least favorite part of the job. But the fact is, movie, you know, show people like you are more attractive

Speaker 1 than the rest of us.

Speaker 1 So having a very attractive person on the cover who happened to be talented, was a great way of getting the attention of the reader so that they'd pick it up and they wouldn't be embarrassed putting it on their coffee table.

Speaker 1 And, but once you, once you got that, that was sort of like the wrapping, and then the magazine itself was sort of the gift in the box.

Speaker 1 But I, in most of the calls, we did get a lot of complaints, but they were routed through the office of the person who, of the people who booked the covers.

Speaker 1 So, I got, I would get occasional complaints. Most of the complaints often would come from staff members.
And I mean, once one, I remember Christopher Hitchens did

Speaker 1 a pretty rough story on Mother Teresa, and

Speaker 1 he accused her of like cozying up to dictators and that sort of thing for money.

Speaker 1 It came out of the blue, and it was wild.

Speaker 1 And Ronaldo Herrera, who's the husband of Carolina Herrera, who was on the staff, and he came, he's a staunch Catholic, and he came into the office, stormed into the office, said, Great, you've gone too far this time.

Speaker 1 I said, What do you mean? He said, Mother Teresa, he said, I'm canceling my subscription. I said, You can't cancel your subscription.
You get it for free.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 at Spy Magazine once we did a story on the on the 10 most litigious New Yorkers and Gore Vidal was on that list and we were listed in the phone book and he called me up and he said,

Speaker 1 I really object to this. I had never met him before.
I really object to this and if you don't take my name, if you don't correct that, I'll sue you.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I said,

Speaker 1 wait a minute, minute, if we don't take,

Speaker 1 if we don't correct that, you're one of the most litigious New Yorkers, you're going to sue us. He said, yes.
And I said, don't you get the irony in his thing that he just hung off?

Speaker 1 That's great. That's so good.

Speaker 1 We'll be right back.

Speaker 1 Now streaming on Paramount Plus, it's the return of Landman, TV's biggest hit from Yellowstone co-creator Taylor Sheridan.

Speaker 1 Academy Award winner Billy Bob Thornton is back as Tommy Norris, facing higher stakes than ever.

Speaker 1 With an all-star cast including Demi Moore, Andy Garcia, and Sam Elliott, tensions rise as Tommy and Camille Miller fight to control M.Tech's oil.

Speaker 1 When his father returns, Tommy must balance life as both oilman and family man. Don't miss Landman Season 2, now streaming only on Paramount Plus.

Speaker 1 20th Century Studios presents the upcoming comedy Ella McKay. From Academy Award-winning writer and director James L.

Speaker 1 Brooks, Emma Mackey Mackey plays Ella McKay, an idealistic young woman who juggles her family and work life in a story about the people you love and how to survive them.

Speaker 1 Featuring an all-star cast, including Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Loudon, Kumal Nanjiani, Iowa Deborey, Julie Kabner with Albert Brooks and Woody Harrelson.

Speaker 1 Ella McKay in theaters December 12th.

Speaker 1 This message comes from the International Rescue Committee.

Speaker 1 The IRC has spent over 90 years helping people whose lives have been upended by crisis, often responding within just 72 hours when emergencies strike.

Speaker 1 Every day, IRC teams support recovery efforts in places like Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine, helping displaced children and families find safety, rebuild their communities, and recover hope for the future.

Speaker 1 Donate today by visiting rescue.org/slash rebuild.

Speaker 1 And back to the show.

Speaker 1 Your new book, Graydon, is When the Going Was Good, which is out now.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 talk a little bit about that. First of all, what a great title.

Speaker 2 You're clearly not talking about yourself.

Speaker 1 Because things continue to have a nice artist. You're talking about a cultural shift, yeah.
Is that sort of talk a little bit about the book? No, I think that the, I think that the, you know,

Speaker 1 if you look back and the

Speaker 1 80s, the 90s, and the odds, with the except, I mean, the 80s and 90s in particular, it was a great time in America. It was very aspirational.
The middle class was doing well.

Speaker 1 We still had two World Trade Center towers. You could get on an airplane without stripping down.

Speaker 1 There was no cell phones or social media. And it was a...

Speaker 1 It was just a much more natural, organic time.

Speaker 1 My wife and I happen to love watching Fraser before we go to bed because they're like perfectly written plays. and there's no nobody has a cell phone

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 there's just something you know I mean the same thing with Will and Grace or Friends or

Speaker 1 I'm trying to think what else Seinfeld say and and

Speaker 1 there's it was just a great time and so the 80s 90s and odds with the exception of you know obviously 9-11 and everything that came after that were a great time for

Speaker 1 for television a great time for movies and I think television has overtaken movies now to in terms of driving the culture. Magazines do not drive the culture like they used to.
It's obviously the

Speaker 1 things like Instagram and

Speaker 1 television in a big way. So do you think we'll ever get back to what you're describing? No.

Speaker 1 No. Ever.
Or a version of it? A version of it, perhaps. I think young people will come to love magazines the way they love vinyl.
Yeah. But they'll be specialty magazines.

Speaker 1 They won't have millions circulation and they will be largely visual. Like, you know, you go to like CASA magazines on 8th Avenue over here.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And there's a ton of these big, expensive, $20, perfect bound thick paper magazines. And

Speaker 1 they get scooped up by young people, not by people over 30.

Speaker 1 There's one of the, there's a, one of those great, there are about four, every corner from, from West Broadway to 6th Avenue, there are three or four bodegas on every corner.

Speaker 1 There's that one at the corner of Sullivan and Prince that still has a really robust magazine section. You know that, you know the one I'm talking about.
I know exactly where you're talking about.

Speaker 1 I've been listening, I've been living half a block from it for the last

Speaker 1 sort of six months, and it's been phenomenal. And I've gone in there, I found myself going in there from time to time and perusing magazines again.
And I feel like I'm stepping back in time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think

Speaker 1 it'll come back, I think.

Speaker 1 What do you think is the, you know, we talk often about, and we've referenced it here today,

Speaker 1 the effect of social media has had on our culture, which to me,

Speaker 1 in large part, I think, has been quite a negative effect.

Speaker 1 What do you think the future is for things like social media

Speaker 1 going forward? Do you think there will be

Speaker 1 a whiplash or a backlash rather?

Speaker 1 I was going to say, I think I'm hoping that because

Speaker 1 I'll have you. I mean, we're not going to be able to do that.
No, no, but I want to. I was going to say,

Speaker 1 no, it was funny because you brought up social media because I think we've so over-shared our lives in such a massive way and billions of people, now we know everything about everybody always,

Speaker 1 that I think,

Speaker 1 if I'm guessing correctly, we will go the opposite way in 5, 10, 20 years, whatever it is, I don't know, where people will be like, wait,

Speaker 1 we've all overshared. I'm going to get off it.
I think it's cooler to hang out without it.

Speaker 1 I think it was a long way away, but I think that's what's going to happen. Great when you're going to be able to do it.
100%. I think, yeah, I totally agree with Sean that it is.

Speaker 1 Again, it's a correction. And so the correction now you share everything, pictures of your children, picture of your children's birthday of them having cake on their nose and all the rest of it.

Speaker 1 I have five kids.

Speaker 1 None of them have a social media presence and no tattoos either. So that's a major accomplishment.
But I don't have any social media presence. And I think, and

Speaker 1 I know this sounds strange for somebody who's just written a memoir, but I'm a very private person. And I think a private life will have greater currency in maybe three to five years than it does now.

Speaker 1 And it'll be considered much cooler than having a social media for young people than having a social media.

Speaker 1 Greater cracks.

Speaker 1 And it gives you more cachet. Much more cachet.
There's a mystery. Right, right, right.

Speaker 2 Well, it's so great. And kind of on this, this sort of this, this, this cultural, you know, transition period we find ourselves in, hopefully,

Speaker 2 and you being the head of

Speaker 2 a major, you know, media effort.

Speaker 2 Talk to us about your process with you and your team when you decide what stories it is you're going to go forward with there on Airmail.

Speaker 2 Is there any

Speaker 2 agenda, such a pejorative, but do you consider the effect and the move that you guys can make for people as you try to encourage them towards a better, healthier

Speaker 2 cultural position? Or is it just stories of interest to you guys personally?

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 I put the next issue together on a Sunday morning, and it's my favorite

Speaker 1 process of the week. But by and large, we look for stories that have not appeared in the American papers.

Speaker 1 It's sort of intended as the weekend edition of a non-existent international newspaper like the old International Herald Tribune.

Speaker 1 And the fact is there's so much to celebrate about life. It's not all about Donald Trump

Speaker 1 that we have, you know, it's hard to avoid Donald Trump. I mean, it's certainly worth the effort to avoid him, but it's almost impossible.
And so he winds up in there. But it was designed as a,

Speaker 1 it was, we started it during the first Trump administration.

Speaker 1 I was living in France and it was designed as a sort of not the same, like every single newsletter you get in America is, you know, it's all

Speaker 1 basic Boston to Washington to sell a corridor news. And we have very little of that.
There's enough of that to go around. So ours is very international.

Speaker 1 Stories have to be just interesting and things that

Speaker 1 reflect changes in the culture, hopefully for the better, not always.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 just sort of spirited writing

Speaker 1 that could be funny, but informative.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 some new fresh voices. And it's just something that you can wake up Saturday morning and read it without completely hanging your head in despair over the news today.

Speaker 1 I took the New York Times alerts off my phone. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Every 45 seconds is like the end of the world. And And it was just a lot of fun.
I know, same, same here. And I've been doing my best to try to avoid it.
Totally. Same.

Speaker 1 You've been a, for lack of a better word, a tastemaker

Speaker 1 for decades. It's just simply true.

Speaker 1 What cultural trends

Speaker 1 are there any that you now that you miss most or or and what do you think

Speaker 1 or what cultural trends do you think are wildly overrated now? Well, social media is, I think Sean points out that it will have a swing back because the

Speaker 1 not sharing everything will be a value both in your life and your personality and your interactions with others. I think kindness would be a wonderful addition back in the world because I think

Speaker 1 the sort of wanton cruelty you see coming out of Washington is a...

Speaker 1 It sort of reflects badly in us, even though most of us are not like that.

Speaker 1 I don't think it's going to get better soon, but I think it will get better.

Speaker 1 And I think so, too.

Speaker 1 He's a very strange man. I've known him for 40 years.

Speaker 1 He's both loved me and hated me.

Speaker 1 And he reads young,

Speaker 1 you know, he reads like a young 78, whereas Biden read like an old 81.

Speaker 1 I know.

Speaker 1 You got to give him that credit.

Speaker 1 It's hard not to. I know.

Speaker 2 Graydon,

Speaker 2 at the great risk of offending you.

Speaker 1 Okay. Go ahead.

Speaker 1 Oh, oh, boy. Oh, no.
This is his favorite.

Speaker 2 Can you please walk me through

Speaker 2 the genesis genesis of your incredible and impressive hair?

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. We'll take a good look at it because it's disappearing as we speak.

Speaker 2 No, no, it's no, no.

Speaker 1 What it is, is

Speaker 2 it's one of my favorite things about you. It always has been.

Speaker 2 To the extent you're comfortable, can you please walk us through

Speaker 2 how it started and what the process is to maintain?

Speaker 1 Is there a pick involved? Yeah, because put a baton in your hand. You can conduct the New York Times.

Speaker 2 I just fucking love it it so much.

Speaker 1 No, I had this hair.

Speaker 1 It's the same hair I have on the cover of my book when I was 30.

Speaker 1 And it's sort of, you know, in the old days when I didn't have much money, you get it all cut off and you wait three months and it would grow back.

Speaker 1 And now I get it cut every month or so. And

Speaker 1 it's just, but it's gone gray. And if I'm out in Los Angeles and I go and there's a lot of people my age in the room, I'm the only man with gray hair, which I find really amazing.

Speaker 1 How does that possibly be?

Speaker 1 It has something to do with with the water up here, I think.

Speaker 1 The styling of it is just

Speaker 2 because it's just a perfect juxtaposition between this incredible place of

Speaker 2 influence and success and

Speaker 2 sophistication that you hold and it's sort of offset. I mean, it's like Einstein, you know, like Einstein was like the greatest brain ever, yet he

Speaker 2 counterbalanced it with his mind.

Speaker 1 Well, Pete Davidson once said, Pete Davidson told a friend of my daughter, he said, your dad, he looks like he, and with that hair, he looks like he should be on money, which I think was the highest compliment.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 it sort of, you know,

Speaker 1 there's a confidence to it, which is which is intoxicating.

Speaker 1 That's code for what a fool who would do that. No, not at all.
No, no, no, no, no. Anybody who says, how brave of you to wear that or something like that? No,

Speaker 1 the opposite. The opposite.

Speaker 1 Well, Gray, I'll leave you you with this. And again, we pointed out all the great things, Spy Magazine, Vanity Fair, Airmail, and now your book,

Speaker 1 When the Going Was Good.

Speaker 2 Don't forget the Waverly Inn.

Speaker 1 And the Waverly Inn. And

Speaker 1 the Waverly Inn. Sorry, The Waverly Inn, which is, I must admit, I haven't been to in a long time.
I love the Waverly Inn.

Speaker 1 And you can make a reservation through my email. Is that true? Yeah, I do all the seating.
I'll do the seating every night. We'll treat you well.
No. Fantastic.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. What a dream.

Speaker 1 I'm coming back. I mean, don't put it on your website or anything.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, believe me, I'm going to guard it with my life.

Speaker 2 I will tell you, and this probably won't be much of a compliment because I'm probably one in a long line, but I just finished doing

Speaker 2 this show, and it's about an incredibly beautiful hip

Speaker 2 restaurant on the Lower East Side.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 Shots of Inside of Waverly Inn was up on our production designer's

Speaker 2 board, and we basically modeled the aesthetic in there is just so incredibly beautiful.

Speaker 1 And built down in Atlanta.

Speaker 1 No, that's what we shot in New York.

Speaker 2 We built an entire restaurant at Steiner. Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 That would be great to do. Let's do something like now that we have Griden here, let's do a thing where we get Thoreau banned from the Waverly Inn forever.
You know what I mean? Don't let him know.

Speaker 2 You don't see Justin Thoreau anymore.

Speaker 1 You're always busy, you're full. Yeah, no, everyone.
No, the Con Ed has shut us down. Yes.

Speaker 1 but when we open it we wouldn't take reservations from the 203 area code because that's greenwich and that's where all the hedge fund guys were

Speaker 1 so they'd make a reservation we'd say i'm sorry shut you know con ed like

Speaker 1 listen greaten you're speaking our language i i have said many times nobody has is more responsible for the destruction of this planet than than uh uh you know, sort of private equity guys

Speaker 1 and bankers.

Speaker 1 They have absolutely

Speaker 1 except for Dandy's, who's one one of the all-time great guys. One of the all-time great guys.

Speaker 1 Double D. But I want to ask you this.

Speaker 1 As a sort of parting shot, if you will,

Speaker 1 what would you like your... God, this is a tough one to answer, I'm sure.
What would you like your legacy to be if you've even thought in those terms? As a Canadian, you probably never have.

Speaker 1 No, I mean, first of all, I'm really proud of being a Canadian, and especially now, I'm sure you feel the same way. I like Mark Carney.
And I think that,

Speaker 1 you know, you just want to leave.

Speaker 1 If you got to a beach and it's filled with candy wrappers, my inclination would be, and I'm sure

Speaker 1 for you guys as well, to sort of clean up the candy wrappers and try to leave something in better shape than when you got there.

Speaker 1 And in a large part, we do that through our children. And

Speaker 1 so my kids, I'm very proud of them. And they're truly good humans and

Speaker 1 funny and well-read. And that's because that's your legacy, because they're going to go on after

Speaker 1 you're turned to dust and all the rest of it. And,

Speaker 1 and, you know, leave a modest, you know, body of sort of decent work behind you. What a great answer.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, listen, Graydon, thank you so much for joining us. It's such an honor.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm really proud of you.

Speaker 1 The honor is ours. Yeah, we've been such fans and we've spoken about you before.
The three of us have.

Speaker 1 And we've been just a fan of everything you've done from Spy to

Speaker 1 Vanity Fair to Airmail. And now your book, When the Going Was Good, is out now for all our listener.

Speaker 1 All our listener. All our listeners.
Tell him to get there quickly then.

Speaker 1 Or her or her. Or them.
Or them.

Speaker 1 I encourage him or her or them or whomever it is to go out and get it today.

Speaker 1 Graydon, we wish you nothing but continued success. And thank you so much.
Thank you, pleasure. Thank you so much, guys.
Yeah. Nice to meet you, Graydon.
Yeah. Okay.
Pleasure. Thank you.
Cheers. Bye.

Speaker 1 Bye, buddy.

Speaker 2 Nice guest, Willie. That is

Speaker 2 now, you know, again, every time we have somebody that is not one of these big fancy A-list celebs whom we love,

Speaker 2 it is, I just love talking to

Speaker 1 other folks.

Speaker 1 I mean, think about it. And it is true, not only, and Jay, you said it, I said it, John, you said a version of it that he was a tastemaker.

Speaker 1 If only because he was

Speaker 1 because he was on the front lines of reporting what was happening culturally, whether it was a film or television or art or media, et cetera.

Speaker 1 And vanity. Because of that position, he ends up, in a lot of ways, steering culture because of what he decides to report on.

Speaker 2 And Lauren Michaels is still doing it. Like who's hosting Saturday Night Live and who's the musical guest? We'll tell you who's the top of the zeitgeist.

Speaker 1 He and Lauren are still doing it. And again, I should be pointing out that these are Canadians, and I think that there's something to that.

Speaker 1 Well, Canadians, we just inhabit

Speaker 1 just a slightly higher place in the space.

Speaker 2 You're breaking up a little bit. Are you going over Canadians?

Speaker 1 Manuna will be in you. No, I've got full bars.

Speaker 1 Shut off this mic. You turn off this mic.

Speaker 1 Well, you know what? There is this, and I've spoken about this before. As Canadians, we grew up, we are so culturally close and geographically close.

Speaker 1 So we are kind of observers of American culture in that way and very close. And so we do.
Wait, what do you think that is now, though, if it's not Vanity Fair?

Speaker 1 Maybe it still is Vanity Fair that is the quote tastemaker. Like, where do people look? Because it seems so fragmented now.
Yeah. Well, you know what? It's much more.

Speaker 1 I think that it's been divided into these different pieces. Vanity Fair was much more of a catch-all back at the time.
Right, right. That inhabited a big space.

Speaker 1 I don't know if there's anything that it's a very interesting thing. Unless it's this airmail, which I didn't, I didn't.
I think a lot of podcasts do. Oh, yeah, that's it.

Speaker 1 Maybe Smartless, maybe the Smartless podcast.

Speaker 2 You know, I haven't heard that, but I did hear about it, and I hear it's not great.

Speaker 1 The smart one of the it's a little overrated as well, very overrated. And these guys they swear too much, they interrupt people.
But you know what? They do have really down pat bi

Speaker 1 reference our own by as the bi.

Speaker 2 You mean how they say goodbye,

Speaker 1 meta,

Speaker 1 meta much, meta much,

Speaker 1 smart

Speaker 1 less

Speaker 1 Smartless is 100% organic and artisanally handcrafted by Bennett Barbicoe, Michael Grant Terry, and Rob Armjarf.

Speaker 1 Smartless.

Speaker 1 Go from skeptic to electric in the new Toyota BZ. Hesitant about going all-electric? One drive can change your mind.

Speaker 1 With up to an EPA estimated 314-mile range rating for front-wheel drive models and available all-wheel drive models with 338 horsepower, the Toyota BZ is built for confidence.

Speaker 1 Conveniently charge at home or on the go with access to a wide range of compatible public charging networks, including Tesla superchargers.

Speaker 1 Inside, enjoy a 14-inch touchscreen and an available panoramic view moonroof. Learn more at toyota.com/slash BZ, the new all-electric BZ.
Toyota, let's go places.

Speaker 1 You know those moments when you're trying to work through a complex problem and you can't stop until you've found the answer?

Speaker 1 That's where Claude comes in, the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough.

Speaker 1 Whether you're planning something big, researching a topic you're curious about, or just trying to work through a problem, Claude matches your level of curiosity.

Speaker 1 Try Claude for free at claude.ai/slash smartless and see why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner.