The PC Generation
The generation that created the personal computer had no particular obsession with fitness and nutrition. It was more sports cars, music, sports and other bizarre pastimes that catalysed the interest of those young people who wanted to put a computer on every table.
From 1976 to 1979, Bill Gates whizzed along the roads between Seattle and Albuquerque (where Microsoft was then), with his Porsche 911, collecting fines and even a stop for speeding. Gates' classic Porsche went up for auction in 2012 and sold for $80 to a German citizen. Today Gates owns three different Porsche models.
His partner, Paul Allen, has a passion for rock and went so far as to build, at his own expense, a monographic museum in Seattle dedicated to rock (Experience Music Project Seattle - EMP). It is an incredible building designed by starchitect Paul Ghery. Sport also stimulates him: he has in fact been the owner of the Seattle Seahawks football team since 1997, which played two consecutive SuperBowl finals, losing them.
The other founder of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, is obsessed with basketball: in 2014 he bought the Los Angeles Clippers for 2,5 billion dollars, which in the 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 seasons won the NBA Pacific Division thus participating in the playoffs.
Satya Nadella, who replaced Ballmer at the helm of Microsoft, is a fan of Cricket and from this game, where his Indian fellow citizens excel, he seems to have learned a great deal. "Playing cricket at school - he said - he taught me a lot about teamwork and leadership, a lesson that has accompanied me throughout my career".
IBM, Gary and Dorothy Kildall and the birth of the PC
The passion for sport has also decided the course of technology over the last half century. When IBM was looking for an operating system for its personal computer, it decided to turn to Digital Research, a start-up in Pacific Groves on the wonderful Monterey promontory. The IBM executives, in their blue suits, moved from Armonk (one hour from New York) to the pleasant and alternative Californian location with the aim of proposing to Gary Kildall, the founder of Digital Research, the purchase of its CP/M operating system.
Arriving at the Victorian house where the Digital Research lab was, they were informed rather briskly that Gary was out hang-gliding and wouldn't be back until evening. His wife Dorothy, who had quite a temper, refused to sign, in Gary's absence, the confidentiality agreement placed before him by IBM's lawyers to just start talking.
And so the negotiation faded because for IBM it was inconceivable that any activity would be preferred to a meeting with its representatives who had moved on purpose from the east coast with a 5 and a half hour flight. Then IBM made the same proposal to Bill Gates who invented DOS, a clone of CP/M. The film Silicon Valley tells well the episode of the meeting between Gates and IBM and how Bill bluffed about DOS, which later became MS-DOS.
The founders of Apple
If we go to Apple, the founders were no less eccentric than their competitors in Seattle. Steve Wozniak flew an A36 Bonanza aircraft until the aircraft stalled on takeoff and crashed in 1981 at Santa Cruz, leaving him with no memory for several weeks. The report from the airport authority reports that the accident was attributable to the lack of familiarity of the pilot who was defined as an "unqualified person" to fly the aircraft. Today Woz is a rather unlikely dancer: paired with Karina Smirnoff he participated in the eighth season of "Dancing under the stars" ABC edition in 2009 where he reported the lowest score and entered into controversy with the jury with a lot of apologies due .
Legendary was Steve Jobs' obsession with food. In this field too he was a forerunner. Passed through various stages, fruitarian, raw food, vegan, more than health he was obsessed with the purity of food that he could not find in foods of animal or industrial origin. It is said that in Italy he found himself terrible and drove his companions crazy in search of a place to eat in his own way. His other great manifest passion was music. Before leaving, Steve had the satisfaction of seeing all the songs by the Beatles, his favorite band, on iTunes after Apple had settled a long-standing name dispute with the Fab Four's label, Apple Records, paying him $500 million .
While leading a rather frugal life and entirely devoted to work, Steve Jobs did not entirely disdain luxury cars, jets and yachts. These rather worldly interests came from his friend Larry Ellison, from whom he bought a Gulfstream which he completely rebuilt. In 2014 the jet was bought by Jony Ive who had helped Steve with the interior fittings. In terms of cars, he preferred all of them a metallic Mercedes SL55 AMG that he replaced every six months with an identical model so that he could drive without license plates, since the law in California allowed it for brand new cars.
The web and social generation
The obsession of the generation that created the web and social media is fitness and nutrition. The two things are closely linked in a relationship of mutual and indissoluble dependence.
The media tell us daily about the efforts of Silicon Valley technologists for the physical form that would like to be that of a real gymnast. The image of the slouching, flaccid and completely neglected nerd with regard to his physique, his clothing and his diet is giving way to that of the lean, sculpted, toned, tanned and, why not, unabashedly athletic super-nerd. And when technologists get one thing into their heads, they become maniacs like partial minds.
For example, an older lady, who cannot properly be called a nerd, like Arianna Huffington, who wrote an important page of the new journalism, has left the direction of her Huffington Post. She intends to devote herself full-time to a new start-up called Thrive Global, from the title of her 2014 book. This start-up, which precisely wants to be global, deals entirely with well-being, health, stress and styles of life. After a sudden and unexplained illness, which changed her Weltanschauung, Arianna became a missionary of meditation, mindfulness and physical and mental fitness.
An amusing article entitled Revenge of the nerds tells us how the metamorphosis of the nerd into a bodybuilder is really taking place. Silicon Valley's geeks are trying to turn themselves into jocks featured in the Economist's “Schumpeter” column. Below we offer the article in Italian translation. It's really fun.
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If 587 kilometers seem few to you
On New Year's Eve, Mark Zuckerberg informed the world of his 2016 resolution to run 365 miles (587 kilometers) and called on his legion of followers to do the same, running one mile a day.
Having reached his goal earlier than expected, Zuckerberg began working on his next sporting challenge: being able to compete competitively in the triathlon. But this summer he fell off his bicycle and broke his arm. However, he continued to train.
Gone are the days of nerds wearing loose shirts to show that looks weren't their thing.
Now they wear skintight T-shirts to show off the shape of their biceps and torso. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, is already on the treadmill at five in the morning. Twitter boss Jack Dorsey is a fan of squats (weight lifting), push-ups, jogging. Brian Chesky, founder of Airbnb, is a professional bodybuilder. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk love pecs.
Why limit yourself to such common activities as running, cycling and lifting weights when you have billions of dollars to burn for something more ambitious? Larry Ellison, the president of Oracle, competes with his boats in the big professional regattas (his team – BMW Oracle Racing – won the last edition of the America's Cup). He plays tennis at a good level and tries to improve his technique by watching the Indian Well Masters, which belongs to him.
Sergey Brin, the founder of Google, has himself photographed on roller skates with his partner Larry Page and dabbles in daring sports: skydiving (parachuting), roller hockey, ultimate Frisbee and high trapeze . Brin can be caught in improbable poses as he walks upside down in the office and shows up in unusual places like the circus arena where he learns the art of flying trapeze or tightrope walking.
Reinventing the concept of fitness
A vigorous exercise regimen goes hand in hand with exotic diets. Zuckerberg eats meat that he himself procures by hunting; since he lives in San Francisco and works 60 hours a week it means that he is in fact a vegetarian. Dorsey follows the Paleo or Cave Diet (no gluten, dairy, sugar or alcohol). It's not that the obsession with health is limited to a few fanatics at the top of the most famous companies.
All technology companies expect vigorous physical activity from their employees and make equipment available to exercise it such as climbing walls. On the streets of San Francisco, in addition to homeless people, one continually comes across gyms that offer gymnastic services such as the SoulCycle ("pedaling with the soul", a bike with a particular shape of which Michelle Obama is a fanatic), as well as CrossFit training, Zumba dancing. Gyms, in turn, often adjoin a restaurant that serves gluten-free or macrobiotic food.
Predictably, Silicon Valley, as it has done in countless other cases, is trying to reinvent the concept of fitness. In the valley, the matter of fitness is seen as a sector of the software: data collection and processing programs and as one of the hardware: devices, bands with sensors and other gadgets with which to adorn the body to measure its reactions to certain stimuli and provide material to the software.
In addition, the supernerds take direct action: they stock up on the most extravagant gadgets for training such as self-balancing unicycles (sort of overboards, but with only one wheel instead of two) and aquatic tricycles. Alex Debelov, the CEO of Virool, a video advertising platform, has a mask that filters the air to extract oxygen in order to optimize the time of training sessions.
Reinventing the fitness economy
Equally predictably, Silicon Valley is trying to reinvent the fitness economy. Former Twitter boss Dick Costolo is working on a software platform designed to help people train together and motivate each other. Zepp Labs helps golfers, tennis and basketball players improve their performance by collecting activity data through 3-D sensors. Strava, a mobile app, allows cyclists and joggers to compete against other cyclists even if they live thousands of miles apart.
There are two reasons why tech leaders are obsessed with healthy lifestyles. The first is that the American elite in general has rediscovered the Latin phrase “mens sana in corpore sano” (Juvenal, Satire, X. 356). Being fit helps thinking and fills you with energy, even though individual productivity in the United States was much higher when three martinis for lunch and a steak for dinner were in fashion. The second reason is that California has always been the cultural capital of staying fit: just look at the surfers of San Diego and the bodybuilders of Venice Beach. If you combine America's most ambitious people with the most body-obsessed state, you get the inevitable spread of the fitness craze. And that's what happened.
La revenge of the sedentary nerds
There is an even more intriguing explanation: the revenge of the nerds. In American high school there has always been a divide between athletic, kinetic types and sedentary nerds. The latter excel in school. But athletic types excel at everything boys that age care about — excelling in sports, winning track races, and attracting girls. With the technological revolution, the nerds got their revenge on the athletic types by earning so much money that the athletic ones could not even dream of.
Now they've gone further and challenged the athletic types on their own turf. The athletic guy can never outdo them at algebra or at holding positions of power and responsibility (and indeed many guys, who are athletic in their youth, gain weight as they get older), but the nerd can indeed become a physically dominant male. and intellectual, especially if he can afford to hire personal trainers and dieticians.
What they need is brainwashing and leotards to train.
A spatial escalation
The fact is that, no matter how much they work out, supernerds will not be able to remove the memories of their school years. Chris Anderson, the CEO of 3D Robotics (a drone start-up) and former director of "Wired," argues that alpha-nerds are doomed, not only looking for a super-revenge, but caught in an upward spiral in competition with athletic types. Windsurfing leads to kitesurfing which leads to flyboarding. Roller skates lead to the hover skate which paves the way for the unicycle. The unicycle leads to tightrope walking which leads to the flying trapeze which, in turn, leads to skydiving. Skydiving gives rise to the desire to fly an airplane from which one ascends to the jet which induces the next final step: extraterrestrial travel. And we end up here because, for now, there's nothing else.
The Silicon Valley craze for fitness still has a long way to go. But the spasm that feeds it is eternal. Tech billionaires can sculpt their bodies with technological machinery and scientifically administered diets. They can be launched into outer space. They can even discover the formula for eternal youth. But, as they orbit the earth in flamboyant physical shape and rejuvenated as a XNUMX-year-old, their bank accounts will swell with three more zeros and that's what will most satisfy their deepest ego; just them the frail, cowardly and mocked nerds who sweated and felt petty in front of their gym classmate and super athletic.
So if you're a nerd and girls avoid you, don't worry. You can have your beautiful and final revenge.
