Cross the Cafeteria

Hey everyone,

What if we've gotten too good at sorting ourselves?

When I was in high school, I was a nerd, a jock, and an artist.

I don't mean that in the retrospective way where everybody decides thirty years later that they were secretly a nerd because they liked Star Wars. I mean I genuinely occupied all three worlds. I played sports. I was into computers and nerd shit. I was a musician. I had friends in all of those groups, and I moved between them pretty comfortably.

The funny thing is, nobody really cared. My jock friends didn't give a shit that I was a nerd or an artist. If anything, they respected it. My artist and nerd friends weren't always quite as enthusiastic about the fact that I hung around with the jocks, but even then there was a recognition that those guys weren't necessarily bad people. They were just another tribe. Another table in the cafeteria.

There were castes, obviously. High school has probably always had them. We made fun of each other. We misunderstood each other. There were assholes in every group. But there was also some underlying sense that we all belonged to the same place.

I keep thinking about that scene in *Can't Buy Me Love*.

Ronald has spent the movie desperately trying to climb from one social caste into another, and by the end everything has gone to hell. Kenneth, one of the nerds, gets caught in the middle of it and finally stands up to Quint, one of the jocks. And he reminds him of something Quint has forgotten: when they were little kids, before all of these identities hardened around them, Kenneth had stood up for him.

Before they were the nerd and the jock, they were just two kids who knew each other.

There's something about that scene that has stuck with me, because I increasingly wonder whether we've lost that. Not high school cliques. Something much bigger.

We've become incredibly good at sorting ourselves. By profession. By education. By income. By geography. By politics. By culture. By algorithms. By the media we consume and the neighborhoods we live in and the companies we work for and the people we follow and the people we block.

Eventually the caste becomes more real than the community.

I think we're seeing the consequences of that now in technology.

This is going to sound strange coming from someone who has spent most of his adult life building software and is currently building an AI company. I'm not suspicious of technology. I'm fascinated by it. I love builders. I love ambitious people. I love the slightly crazy person who looks at something everyone else accepts and says, "Why the hell does it have to work that way?"

But somewhere along the way, I think we confused winning with leadership.

Being brilliant enough to build a model doesn't mean you know how to lead people. Raising \$10 billion doesn't teach you civic responsibility. Winning a technological race doesn't confer wisdom. Being able to optimize systems doesn't mean you understand communities. And being extraordinarily successful among people exactly like you may actually leave you less prepared to understand the people whose lives your decisions suddenly affect.

Those are different skills. And we're handing people extraordinary amounts of power as though they aren't.

A person can be an exceptional engineer and a shitty steward. A person can be a phenomenal entrepreneur and have almost no understanding of the community outside the walls of his company. Someone can understand GPUs, capital markets, scaling laws, distributed systems and model architecture at a level I never will and still have absolutely no fucking idea what it means to be responsible for the lives affected by the decisions he makes.

That shouldn't be controversial. But increasingly it feels like we've constructed a culture where winning the economic tournament is treated as evidence that you are qualified to referee everything else.

And I don't think that's working out particularly well.

You can see it in the increasingly ugly fights over data centers. Companies need staggering amounts of power, water, land and infrastructure to build the next generation of AI. Communities are being asked to accommodate that buildout because the technology is supposedly important enough that we all need to participate in making it possible.

Okay. Then you're part of the community now.

That's the deal.

You don't get to arrive as an extraction machine. You don't get to think of the people living around your infrastructure as obstacles on a permitting map. You don't get to consume enormous local resources, negotiate the best economic arrangement you can possibly get, capture the upside somewhere else and then describe whatever remains as an externality.

Those aren't externalities. They're people.

And this connects directly to something else that has been driving me fucking crazy lately: watching leaders in frontier AI warn the public about potentially enormous dangers from the technologies their own organizations are racing to build.

The warnings themselves may be legitimate. Some may be incredibly important. I want researchers to speak up when they see danger. But leadership can't mean collecting the upside when your decisions work and distributing the responsibility when they don't.

That's not stewardship.

We've had ruthless concentrations of wealth before. The robber barons weren't saints, and I have no interest in pretending they were. Some of the labor practices and economic arrangements of that era were brutal. But there was at least a recognizable idea among some of the people who accumulated extraordinary fortunes that wealth created an obligation to the civilization that made that wealth possible.

Build a library. Build a university. Build a hospital. Build something that will still belong to the town when you're dead.

There was paternalism in that, certainly. Ego too. Plenty of reputation laundering. But underneath all of it was an idea I think we've somehow managed to weaken:

Power creates obligation.

Not entitlement.

If a community gives you the conditions that allow you to become extraordinarily successful, you owe something to that community. If society educates the engineers you hire, builds the electrical grid you consume, maintains the roads leading to your facilities, creates the financial system that funds you, enforces the contracts that protect you and provides the political stability that makes your company possible, then your success isn't evidence that you somehow transcended society.

It's evidence that you benefited enormously from it.

You owe something back.

And maybe that's what bothers me about the particular flavor of leadership emerging from parts of the technology industry. It sometimes feels strangely adolescent. Brilliant, ambitious, extraordinarily capable people who have spent their entire lives being rewarded for being the smartest person in the room, suddenly finding themselves responsible for things much larger than the room.

Nobody taught them that part.

Because leadership isn't optimization. Leadership is obligation.

It means sometimes doing something that is worse for you because it is better for the people you are responsible for. It means understanding that the person who can't do what you do is not therefore less important than you. It means accepting that having more power gives you more responsibility, not a larger exemption from it.

And most importantly, it requires being able to see people outside your tribe.

That's the part I keep coming back to. Because I was lucky enough, somehow, to grow up moving between tribes. The jocks taught me things. The nerds taught me things. The artists taught me things. I belonged to all of them and completely belonged to none of them, which meant I had to learn fairly early that intelligence comes in different forms, status changes depending on which room you're standing in, and somebody who looks ridiculous from your side of the cafeteria might turn out to be the person you want standing beside you when something actually goes wrong.

When I was younger, though, I don't think I understood any of that as a gift.

If anything, there was always a little sadness in it. I never really had one group where I completely belonged. I could sit at a lot of tables, but there was always some part of me that belonged somewhere else. For a long time, I think I experienced that mostly as absence. I didn't have a tribe that could completely claim me.

I'm starting to wonder if that was one of the greatest gifts I never asked for.

Because if no table completely belongs to you, you learn how to cross the cafeteria.

You learn how to listen to people who aren't like you. You learn that the person who looks ridiculous from one side of the room can be extraordinary once you understand the world they inhabit. You learn that intelligence comes in different forms, that status is mostly contextual, and that no tribe has a monopoly on courage, creativity, decency, leadership, or truth.

Maybe that's part of what we've lost.

We stopped crossing the cafeteria.

We found better and better ways to surround ourselves with people who look like us, think like us, work like us, earn like us and reinforce the things we already believe. Then we handed extraordinary power to people who became extraordinarily successful inside those increasingly narrow worlds. We shouldn't be surprised when some of them struggle to understand their obligations to everyone outside them.

The factory worker becomes a labor cost. The homeowner becomes a ratepayer. The artist becomes content. The customer becomes a user. The town becomes a jurisdiction. The consequences become externalities.

And eventually the people making the decisions can become so insulated from the people living with those decisions that neither side recognizes the other anymore.

That's how you end up with Kenneth getting his ass kicked by a kid he once protected.

The caste became more real than the relationship.

I don't know exactly how we fix that. I'm suspicious of anyone who claims they do. But I don't wish anymore that I'd found the one table where I completely belonged.

I'm grateful that I had to walk between them.

I'm grateful that the jocks taught me things the artists couldn't. I'm grateful the artists taught me things the nerds couldn't. I'm grateful the nerds taught me things the jocks couldn't. I loved people in every one of those worlds, and every one of them complicated whatever easy caricature I might have formed about the others.

Maybe that's what leadership actually requires before any of the titles and money and power arrive.

You have to cross the room.

You have to remember Kenneth.

You have to understand that the people at the other tables aren't NPCs. They aren't abstractions, demographics, users, voters, labor costs, ratepayers, externalities, or obstacles between you and whatever you're trying to build.

They're still your people.

Being successful doesn't make you wise. Being brilliant doesn't make you good. Being powerful doesn't make you a leader.

Leadership begins when you recognize that your power creates obligations to people who may never understand you, agree with you, work for you, invest in you, look like you, vote like you, or sit at your table.

You still owe them something.

Because we're still in the same fucking school.