Mayor of the World | Gary Sheng

The Gift

My friend Melissa Turner gave me my favorite nickname the other week. She called me the world's mayor.

I laughed, and then I sat with it, and then I typed it straight into my notes because something about it clicked harder than almost any label anyone has tried to put on what I do.

This is the wiki post about why that name lands, and what it tells me about the kind of service I want to keep building my life around.

A Mayor Is Grounded in the Hyper-Local

Here is the part of the word that matters first: a mayor is hyper-local. You cannot be the mayor of an abstraction. You are the mayor of a specific town with specific potholes and specific small business owners and a specific park where specific kids play. If you stop caring about the intimacy of that place, you are not a mayor anymore. You are a politician.

That is the part of the job I never want to lose. I care about the person in front of me. The non-technical founder at the workshop who just realized they can build their own tool. The friend on the phone at 11 pm wrestling with a decision. The someone who DMed me after reading an essay and said "I thought I was the only one who felt this." Real people, in real moments, with real names.

If I ever stop operating at that resolution, I have stopped doing the actual job.

"World's Mayor" Just Means the Same Job With a Bigger Map

What Melissa was pointing at is that the hyper-local care has somehow not scaled down as my map has scaled up. I still want to know the small business owner. I just happen to care about the small business owner everywhere.

Not in an abstract "I love humanity" way. In a concrete "if God puts a founder from Lagos in my path next Tuesday, I want to treat them with the same level of attention I would give a neighbor in Austin" way. That is the only version of global service that does not rot into something gross.

The map got bigger through:

Austin as a base where souls of cities keep showing up in person
Applied AI Society chapters spinning up in places I have never lived
Writing that travels to readers I will never meet
People moving cities because something I wrote or said made them reconsider where they were rooted

None of that is me becoming less local. It is me being allowed to be local in more places at once, through people who are willing to carry the signal into their rooms.

The Pattern Is Older Than This Name

Here is what is funny. Melissa is not the first person to call me a mayor.

In Montenegro in 2023, at a pop-up village I was not even the main organizer of, the same nickname emerged. By the end of it people were writing thank-you cards and handing them to me, confused when I clarified I had not organized the thing. I had just been doing what I always do. Showing up. Noticing who had not been connected yet. Making sure the newcomers felt at home. Writing my own thank-you cards to the actual organizers. It turns out if you do that for enough days in a row in a small enough space, people start calling you the mayor whether you asked for the title or not.

So this is not a new identity. It is a pattern I have been quietly running for years that finally has a name I like. Melissa just handed me the word for a role I was already auditioning for every day.

Different Jackets, Same Gary

The other gift from that conversation: Melissa noticed that I show up in different "jackets" depending on the room. Leather jacket Gary at a founders event. Soft jacket Gary on a church call. Plain shirt Gary in a 1:1. She called it "different iterations of the mayor character," which I think is exactly right.

A mayor has to code-switch. You talk to the zoning board differently than you talk to the elementary school class differently than you talk to the small business owner who is about to lose their lease. The jackets are not personas. The jackets are context. The same person is underneath all of them, with the same commitments, the same values, the same loves.

If you see me in a new room and the jacket looks different, do not be thrown. It is still me. I am just trying to meet that room where it actually lives.

What This Looks Like as Service

If "world's mayor" is the shape, here is the actual service I am trying to embody inside it:

Trans-political, not apolitical. I spend real time with people at the highest levels of both parties and with the independent rebels who belong to neither. I am not trying to be neutral. I am trying to be a positive nudging force that keeps pulling whoever will listen in a less-evil direction. A mayor does not disown any of their constituents.
Attractor, not imposer. The Montenegro story is the template. I would rather do the actual work of noticing, connecting, and welcoming than grab a microphone. If people end up calling me an organizer afterward, that is downstream of the work. It was never the goal.
Intimacy at scale. Connecting the dots for people and being someone's guy are not side projects. They are the job. The mayor answers the email. The mayor makes the intro. The mayor remembers the detail.
A positive nudging force, specifically. God's standing instruction to me has been "be a light, keep nudging." Not "start a faction." Not "win an argument." Light and nudges. That scales better than either of those alternatives because it does not require people to agree with me to benefit from me.
Souls over demographics. Cities are abstract until you meet the people who hold their soul. I try to find those people wherever I land, because they are the actual city. Same principle applies on a global scale. The world is abstract until you are knowing and loving specific souls in it.

Why the Name Matters to Me

Titles can rot. "Mayor" could easily bloat into something performative. I am trying to keep the version of it Melissa handed me, where the emphasis is on the grounded intimacy and the willingness to care about that same intimacy everywhere.

If I drift into a version of this where I am broadcasting instead of listening, or where I stop being genuinely reachable by the person who just moved to Austin and needs a church home, or where I start acting like the microphone is the point, the title is a lie. Call me out.

While the name still fits, I am going to wear it. Mayor of wherever I happen to be standing. Mayor of the people who let me into their lives from three time zones away. Mayor of a world that I genuinely do want to see flourish, one soul at a time.

Thanks, Melissa. That was a hell of a gift.