Gary Shteyngart

We can never achieve that level of being interested in another person or even being interested enough in our own interiority to access that kind of level of interaction.

So we're just going to, it's hammer time.

We're going to get that hammer and just chisel ourselves.

There's been a fascinating recent trend among Silicon Valley types where they're on a tear against interiority.

You had Marc Andreessen talking about how he doesn't want to have interiority.

He doesn't want to have introspection, which he described as looking backwards, which not quite what it is, but nevertheless.

You said something that I love and I never hear other entrepreneurs talk about, but I think it's super important, that you don't have any levels of introspection.

It's a real problem, and it's a problem at work, and it's a problem at home.

And I've been trying to think on this, right?

Because, I mean, these are smart people, right?

And I do think it is in some ways a... If I'm being maximally generous, it is in some ways a reaction to what I was talking about a minute ago, where a lot of modern intellectual culture is very neurotic and very anxious and is endlessly displaying how anxious it is.

And

But then you go all the way to the other side to where you're not thinking in a deep way about yourself at all and not trying to self-understand at all.

And that is the opposite problem and dysfunction.

Right, right.

Yeah, that's a very interesting way, and I think a correct way to put it.

There's a lot of interesting things about who these people are, and this may seem a little out there, but I would say that you can't look at people like Musk and not think of...

neurodivergence, but also neurodivergence combined with terrible parenting.

Now, you have somebody like Elon, right, who obviously proclaims to be neurodivergent, who was raised by possibly the worst father this side of Woody Allen.

I mean, so you have someone who obviously cannot deal with somebody with special needs, and at the same time, somebody who possesses all of the gifts that those special needs, in the case of neurodivergence, give him.