Hello! Welcome back to Monocycle, a weekly podcast presented by Manrepeller and hosted by me, Leandra Medine.

So here's the deal. When I was in Paris last week, I was driving by the Louvre with a couple of friends, and they were talking, and they both sort of stopped short and were like, my gosh, it's just so beautiful. We don't have any of these magical landmarks in the United States, et cetera, et cetera. And I looked at them, and I don't know why my instinctive gut reaction to their commending the Louvre was,

are you guys kidding me?

When I look at the Louvre, what I see is not like beautiful architecture and like a stunning history.

I see oppression and I see death and I see slaves dying at the hand of these like elaborate moldings.

It just got me thinking a lot about this concept of excess

and I started to feel really, really dirty and kind of gross and like I've been living excessively.

And so that sort of parlayed into this conversation about essentialism and breaking things down

to the essentials. And I'm probably like a year and a half late on this,

but it made me feel like, oh, it's not just about cleaning your closet.

It's not just about ridding your life of the shit you don't actually need,

but it's also about coming to understand that happiness is not contingent on material things, and not just that, that

you will likely be happier with just the essentials.

But so after that, I really couldn't get my mind off of the concept of excessiveness.

And, you know, we were on our way to dinner.

We get to dinner.

It happens to be that it was like a sponsored meal at a

Michelin rated restaurant, and so everything was extremely elaborate. There's like a pre-dinner

drink and a pre-dinner snack, and then an amuse bush, which literally translates to mean

like mouth amusement or mouth. I don't, actually, I don't know, never mind.

If you're French, I'm sorry that I just butchered your language. But then there's an amuse

bouch, and with the amuse bouch is a different kind of drink, and then comes course number one,

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