Gary Shteyngart

The competition among these kids, because it almost feels like these parents and the kids recognize that the pie is so small that it's so easy to get kicked out of the, whatever you want to call it, the upper middle class, the coastal elites, whatever you want to call it.

And

So the competition is breathtaking for just a little smidgen of the pie, you know.

God bless Glavicular.

As an economic agent, he's figured out his own path forward.

He's making 1.2 million or something a year by, you know, doing this complete horse shit.

That's incredibly cool for him.

And that, I think, that is the model that so many Americans are looking at.

It used to be, you know, oh, I'm going to be a basketball player, you know, I'm going to

being a cool rock and roll band.

Now I'm going to be mentally ill on TikTok and I'm going to make a lot of money off that.

People are trying to, and you were talking about this earlier, trying to sort of commodify their own sense of grief.

There's like grief maxing now where people talk on, you know, about all the grief that they've suffered, which I guess is called a novel, but right.

But now it's also a TikTok.

So

But again, these kids that I'm looking at, like, yeah, what happens to them?

I know parents who are decamillionaires, centamillionaires, and they're still incredibly worried for what their kids will do.

And so this isn't fun for the parents.

It's not fun for the kids.

It takes away, it creates, it recreates that sense of metrics that creates for claviculars down the line.