Under 280 in San Francisco during golden hour. Yesterday, I made the trek down to Palo Alto for Alex's birthday and had a great time in the afternoon barbecuing, laughing, and enjoying the South Bay summer. I was realizing it was the first time in the Bay where I've attended a large gathering that wasn't predominantly people in the tech industry. Alex is a graduate student in physics at Stanford, so the party was full of PhD candidates and high school friends who've covered a spread across the different fields. It was nice to be able to gush about passions with people who were coming from different perspectives of what kind of impact they wanted to make in life. When we meet other tech folks, it's easy for the conversation to slide into one that feels similar to those screening conversations you wait 30 minutes in line for at stuffy career fairs. Before you know it, you're deep in a dialogue about the tech industry and what you do in your day-to-day—the industry likes to consume, to subsume all topics around it, much like it does with society. It notably felt good to escape that cage for a little, even if just for an afternoon.
Neat write-up, Spencer! Love the focus on the nuanced implications tech has on society :)