Gary Shteyngart

He needed to be ranked to know his place in this world.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, when I wrote that, I remember feeling a little chilled myself because I wondered if that's what the new technology that I was being exposed to, the Zuckerberg technology, was doing to me a little bit.

Because I travel a lot, and there were times when I would go to, I don't know, some kind of Uzbekistan-like country, and at that point, you just didn't have constant contact with the Internet.

And I would find myself going through withdrawal.

If I went for two, three weeks, and I was like, but who am I now?

I'm just...

Gary, on the block, I fell into that trap so quickly.

I have friends, relatives who work in Silicon Valley that they really create barriers between their kids and this technology.

They know exactly what they're making and they want their kids as far away from it as possible.

And look, none of this is 100% new.

Civilization began, there was, you know, the head caveman and the lower caveman and blah, blah, blah.

So we know that there's always been a hierarchy, but the need to know to the infinitesimal degree

Decimal point.

It was funny.

My preparation for some of this was going to a super competitive high school in New York, Stuyvesant High School, which was all full of immigrant kids like myself.

I'm from the Soviet Union.

Kids were from Soviet Union, East Asia, South Asia, etc.

And I, to this day, 86.894 was my average at Stuyvesant.