Evan Osnos' 'The Haves and Have-Yachts' is a book of essays about the new Gilded Age
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. It's hard to really feel in concrete terms how rich the super rich are. Yeah, they might have nicer cars and eat at better restaurants, but a lot of people have nice cars and eat at expensive restaurants. What we're talking about when we talk about the super rich is the tippy top, the people at the upper echelon of the 1%.

The writer Evan Osnos found the perfect vehicle by which to examine the super-rich, and that is the yacht. And not just any yacht, but the super-yacht. His new book, The Haves and Have Yachts, is an exploration into excess. And he spoke with NPR's Frank Langfitt for Book of the Day about using his skills and experience as a foreign correspondent, trying to understand this world as if it were some faraway place. Because for a lot of us, it is. That's ahead.

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This message comes from Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile took what's wrong with wireless and made it right. They offer premium wireless plans for less, and all plans include high-speed data, unlimited talk and text, and nationwide coverage. See for yourself at mintmobile.com slash switch. Evan Osnos, welcome to Book of the Day. Thanks, Frank. It's great to be with you. What do you think this book shows people that they might not fully grasp?

Look, this book is actually about what it feels like to live in the new gilded age. I think we have an abstract sense that we're living at a time when inequality has widened and there is a group of people who are living, frankly, very far ahead in wealth terms than the rest of the country. But until you look at the numbers and you look at the actual details of that lifestyle, it

it can be hard to visualize. And this is an attempt to make it as concrete as possible. And I think it can be quite an astonishing thing when you really sit down and realize that, for instance, over the last eight years, billionaires in this country, their net worth has more than doubled.

And they are steadily pulling farther ahead than the rest of the country. There are a ton of anecdotes in this book. Many of them really jump out. But for you, when you were reporting, was there one or two particular things that just astonished you that you found? I'll give you one that really stays with me. I remember hearing that there were

pop stars who were beginning to play private events for kids. I mean, for kids' birthday parties or bar mitzvahs and sweet 16s. And you hear a little bit about this over the years. And so I contacted the rapper Flo Rida and asked if I could embed with him for a while. And he said, sure. So I

went along with them to some of these private events and got to see what it's like when a pop star performs for a crowd of screaming 13-year-olds. The reason why it really stayed with me is it tells you a huge fact about the changes in our cultural economy. It used to be that the richest people in the country might buy front row seats or maybe a

seats in a skybox at a stadium to watch a big performer. And now actually they can afford to bring that performer to them. What got you first so interested in this topic for reporting and writing, the ultra-rich? Frankly, it was 2016 and the election of Donald Trump. It made me realize, in a way, the limitations of trying to analyze him in purely political terms because

After all, you had voters who might tell you that they hate the elites in this country, and somehow they were voting also for a billionaire from New York City who grew up in a real estate family. And I needed to understand what he represented in the minds of his fans and what he represented in American culture. And what I came to realize was he wasn't really a creature of the political world. He was a creature of the money world and the ways that Americans—

have very ambivalent, complicated feelings about money. On the one hand, every American deep down on some basic level wants to prosper. It's kind of part of the American dream. And yet at the same time, we have a lot of

resentment and cynicism about the very rich. In fact, last year there was a poll that found that about 60% of Americans will tell you that billionaires are making the country more unfair. And almost an identical share of Americans will tell you that they themselves want to become billionaires. And so that ambivalence is inherently interesting, and I wanted to bring it to life.

One of my favorite chapters is the floating world about yachts. Tell everybody what a gigayacht is. I did not know. The gigayacht is a pleasure vehicle, a luxury boat that is the length of a football field. And it can cost upwards of $500 million. It is in fact...

the most expensive object that the human species has ever figured out how to own. It's much more expensive than the most valuable art or the most expensive houses. I came to see the gigayacht and yachts broadly as these symbols of our era because they didn't used to exist in any significant numbers. A generation ago, there were only 10 of those in the world. Today, there are 170 of them.

So when I was reading the essay on yachts, I was struck by how much you were able to get out. I would think it was a very secretive world. What was the hardest piece of information to pry out of that world? It's always difficult.

to hear about the status anxieties and the little acts of competition and infighting. As one yacht owner said, "It's hard to talk about this without getting mocked." How did you get them to talk? Because in some ways there's really not much motive for them to talk about this extraordinarily expensive, you know, craft.

I think that there is some pride there. There's pride in having assembled the fortune that allowed him to buy it. Perhaps the most telling detail that I ever heard in that reporting was something that the owner of a very expensive yacht told one of his guests, which is he said,

It is ultimately the last true marker of great wealth. He said, you have a driver and I have a driver. You have a chef and I have a chef. You fly private and I fly private. The only way that I can tell the world that I am in a different effing category than you is the boat. And I thought, I can't imagine a statement that is perhaps more evocative in capturing the...

internal engine of endless pursuit and acquisition and insatiable desire for more and more stuff than a statement like that. How did you feel about these yachts when you were on them and when you heard about what they were like?

I sort of approached it like a foreign correspondent. I mean, I've spent my career, as you have, going around the world, encountering new cultures and trying to write about them through the eyes of the people in them.

And that became for me the goal, because I want someday for historians or let's call them archaeologists even, who are going back and looking at our time. And as I wrote in the book, they may look at these things and think, what were these giant arcs, these sumptuous vessels for? What did they mean? What did they tell us about the societies and the countries that

and the people that created them. I saw my job in some small way of trying to get that down on paper. So that's a dark image, which then kind of leads us to another essay that I also found really interesting, Survival of the Richest. You're talking to these super rich doomsday preppers. And if I remember correctly, some of them are buying up apartments in converted missile silos. Others are buying up land in guarded estates in New Zealand. What drew you to the preppers?

It was a tip that I heard from a stranger. I was on a plane. And you know how it is. You might end up talking to the person next to you. And he worked in San Francisco in technology. And I said, is there a story out there that you don't think is getting covered that would be interesting? And he said, you know, you should write about

the guys who are preparing for the end of the world. And I said, what are you talking about? I'd never heard anything about this. And he said, yeah, you'd be surprised how many people are. And what really caught my attention was

Silicon Valley's self-narrative, of course, was a place that was endlessly optimistic. It was forging the future. It was creating the platforms that were going to unlock human potential. And yet it turned out, as I wrote in this essay, there was a simultaneous subculture of people spending larger and larger sums to build bunkers and getaway plans. And frankly, they talked to me about it. I quote Steve Huffman, the co-founder of Reddit, who said,

Talking about the fact that he had eye surgery in order to get rid of his contact lenses, because as he said, if society falls apart, I don't want to have to rely on eyeglasses. It came to see it as a kind of gilded

despair, honestly, that this feeling that they had created platforms and technologies that just might slip out of their control and in fact might generate and organize a level of public disarray that could ultimately imperil them. And I will tell you, I encounter people in Silicon Valley who

who also told me on the record that they were very bothered by this kind of prepping. They thought it was a mistake, a kind of moral error. They said, why don't you take that money and put it into preventing the worst consequences rather than trying to protect yourself from them? So I found these essays sort of hilarious and chilling. And you have this hedge fund manager, a guy named Paul Tudor Jones, that you quote a number of times.

And he worries that the chasm between rich and the rest would lead to, quote, revolution, higher taxes or wars. And I'm just wondering, given all of your reporting, where do you think the country is headed? I think we are at a genuine reckoning point. And if I'm feeling a little darker about it, I can imagine a scenario where it does drive the country apart. But I will tell you, I actually am concerned.

and more optimistic than that, because we have actually in our history been down this path. The Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century was remarkably similar to what we're living through now. You had the advent of new technologies, things like the telegraph and the elevator and all kinds of new communication technologies, the typewriter. And it was also generating these massive fortunes, particularly because you had monopolistic enterprises.

And our system, even our democracy, as flawed and imperfect as it is, has a way of channeling the public will. If people register their discontent, they make it known, it can have surprising effects in our politics.

In the spring of this year, remember, there were protests around the country that were far beyond the scale of the projections in advance. That was a sign of genuine and deep public dissatisfaction. So there is a public appetite out there for somebody to organize this feeling that this doesn't make sense. This system right now, this arrangement of our economics that's driving more and more money to the top,

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