That "ego meeting" strikes a little too close to home for me; reminds me of the time I was briefly working with Google employees and a lot of them were very "cultured" and, well, used to everyone around them being likewise. It wasn't so awful like it is here, but occasionally it did feel like a really weird sort of peer pressure to be an "interesting" person.
(I guess, thankfully they were also all a bunch of nerds regardless—if working for a generic business office like this protagonist, maybe such a culture would indeed get this unbearable.)