Likes São Paulo.

Transcript context

…Yes, that would get on my nerves. I’m tempted to say Panama City for myself. The name of the book that I’m working on about São Paulo right now, that I mentioned earlier, you’ll appreciate, then. The title is The Ugliest City You’ll Ever Love. It goes through this whole arc that I just spoke about and says why, even though it is a place that sometimes seems to be chasing away visitors — you come out of the international airport in São Paulo, and you immediately pass not one but two high-security prisons and a sewage treatment plant, and then you spend the next 30 minutes driving along an extremely polluted river, which is the Tietê. Not everybody falls in love with it right away, [laughs] but there’s such a great vibe. You feel so welcome there as a foreigner. This may sound strange, but if you like work — and I like work — São Paulo is a great place to be as well. It’s a place where people take pride in what they do without being totally consumed by it. It is still Brazil, and so people also know how to party and have a good time. I take it you agree with the standard view that most Latin American countries are fairly happy relative to their income levels.…

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