Second Brain

The Greg Egan Sci-Fi Lunch at Anthropic

The Story

Boris is a voracious sci-fi reader. Hard sci-fi is his genre: authors like Greg Egan who write about the far edges of physics and consciousness.

During his first lunch at Anthropic, sitting with co-founder Ben Mann and other team members, Boris mentioned an obscure Greg Egan novel. He’d literally never met anyone who’d read this book. He expected blank stares.

Instead, everyone around the table had read it. And they didn’t just nod politely. They started debating: “Oh yeah, that book was good, but what about this other book?”

Boris knew immediately he was in the right place. “It was just this group of people, these intense sci-fi nerds, these people that think so deeply about these same problems I care about.”

This cultural fit, combined with Anthropic’s mission around AI safety, is what drove his decision to leave Meta. “I wanted to be at a place where in the tiniest way I could make sure this thing goes well.”

Lesson for Creators

Finding your people isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a force multiplier. When you’re surrounded by people who share your obsessions (not just your profession), the quality of your work improves because the conversations push you. Boris went from being “the only person who spoke English in my town” in rural Japan to a lunch table full of people who’d read the same obscure books. The environment changed. The output changed with it.

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