Gary Shteyngart

So you have this strange combination where it's not, it's somewhere in growing up, these people were not given the opportunity by the school system, by their parents, by relatives to look inwards.

Looking inwards was considered something so wrong that there was never a skill developed for it.

Let me go back to the Mark Andreessen's of the world, because I think what they might say on your riff on Elon Musk there is,

is, and Musk hates his father, to note that here.

But listen, it created the greatest industrialist of our age, the richest man in the world, a guy who is able to put reusable rockets in space.

Isn't that success?

Isn't that what humanity needs to go forward, even if the New York writerly class, literary class doesn't like it?

Let me tell you this.

I do think that space colonization really is not something I'm terribly interested in.

I don't think going to Mars is going to answer any of our problems.

I don't think we'll ever...

live on the kind of scale we live in.

You know, we have a really nice planet here, which we're destroying.

We really don't need to discover, you know, the marvels of Mercury anytime soon, right?

So a lot of this is complete bullshit, as far as I'm concerned, that part of it, right?

Now, of course, electric cars, et cetera, all that stuff is very good.

And if anything, the

Musk did that was good was Tesla, which now will be probably brought to scale by Chinese automakers, right?

That will make it cheaper and possibly better at some point.

But when I look at what the great industrialists of the world have given us...