Time Spent Eating (cheese)

At a time of tense relationships between the USA and Europe, I think I have found the reason 💡. When you are a French-American citizen, you have to entertain two opposing ideas at all times 😵‍💫: a leisurely lunch or a cubicle lunch.

😱 How extreme this gap is can be seen with great clarity in this OECD infographic (data from 2015 but things have not changed much), with France and the US at the two opposite ends of the spectrum.

The importance of food, not just food itself but also as a nexus of communal gathering, is a central cultural and societal trait of France and its Mediterranean friends. The flip side was expressed crisply 🧀 in Charles de Gaulle's "How can you govern a country with 246 varieties of cheese?" (a drastic underestimate of the actual number of cheese varieties, but the point was made; it also suggests that Italy must be impossible to govern). With that many cheeses of different flavors, looks, "aromas" and textures, diversity of opinions is baked into the collective psyche.

Vive l'Époisses!

In the meantime, if you know a slightly schizophrenic French-American, you may stop wondering why.

Last week I had a chance to reconnect with one of the most inspiring people I know, Danny Hillis, the founder of Thinking Machines Corporation (maker of the Connection Machine), of the The Long Now Foundation, the inventor of many cool technologies (did you know he invented pinch-to-zoom on touchscreens?) and whose like intersected with historical figures, Claude Shannon, Marvin Minsky, Richard Feynman, Steve Jobs... This was our first conversation in years and it was as if we picked it up right where we left it.

The very same day, Mira Murati announced her new company, Thinking Machines Lab! Can it be a coincidence?

She also announced a stellar team, John Schulman (Chief Scientist), Barret Zoph (CTO), Alexander Kirillov, Andrew Tulloch, , Brydon Eastman, Christian Gibson, Devendra Chaplot, Ian O'Connell, Jacob Menick, Jonathan Lachman, Joshua Gross, Kurt Shuster, Kyle Luther, Lilian Weng, luke metz, Mario Saltarelli, Mianna C., Myle Ott, Naman Goyal, Nikki S., Noah Shpak, Pia Santos, Randall Lin, Rowan Zellers, Samuel Schoenholz, Sam Shleifer, Stephen Chen, Stephen Roller, and Yinghai Lu.

Thinking Machines Lab, I wish you the best of luck, hope that you can inspire even 5% of the people that Danny inspired (my own life trajectory was affected by him in ways I will return to) and that the new Thinking Machines will enjoy the business success that eluded the first one.