I had this romantic idea of university.
The version in my head looked like a Vienna coffeehouse — the late 19th-century “Vienna 1900” scene through the interwar years, roughly the 1880s–1910s and then again 1918–1938. Small tables, big sentences, and people who can argue about infinity and the proper thickness of foam on an espresso.
Vienna’s coffeehouses were where you rented a chair for the price of a cup and then tried to outthink the person at the next table. Newspapers everywhere. Philosophers wandering in like it’s normal. Mathematicians doing that thing where their eyes go slightly unfocused because they’re mentally rearranging the universe.
Cafés cycled as hubs — Griensteidl, then Central, then Herrenhof — and the pattern stayed the same. Public rooms where writers, artists, and philosophers could turn talk into a day job.
In my head, Gödel ideas began as a vibe. Someone says something that shouldn’t be true, and he can’t go home until it either becomes true or he destroys it.
That’s not totally fantasy. There’s a well-known anecdote that in 1930 he first talked through his incompleteness result with colleagues at a Viennese café, Café Reichsrat. A theorem debuting over coffee. Very on brand.
And because it’s Vienna, it’s never just logic. It’s also art.
Klimt makes geometry seductive. Schiele makes the human body look like an uncomfortable theorem. Somewhere in there is the idea that beauty is a kind of evidence — or at least, a persuasive witness.
I wanted college to feel like that. Like ideas were alive.
Reader, it did not.
At university we got close in a small ritual. A group of us would sit around and read sketches out loud from A Bit of Fry & Laurie — the kind of comedy that treats the English language like a trampoline.
That was Trudy’s fault. Trudy introduced me to Fry and Laurie. She’s now a professor of French at the University of Auckland, which feels exactly right — a life devoted to language, with a side hobby of making it do backflips.
Just a bunch of sleep-deprived students doing verbal gymnastics for each other sans costumes and a stage. Timing, cadence, the joy of a sentence that turns a corner and somehow sticks the landing — those were some of my happiest days.
Vienna it wasn’t. Still, it had the essential ingredient. People gathered around language, using it as a way to think in public.
That combination — silliness with a hidden blade of cleverness — stuck with me. It became my template for what “serious” conversation could feel like when it wasn’t trying to prove it deserved to exist.
So, naturally, I tried to host it in my grad-student apartment. Then in the tiny little apartment i had when i had my first job in California.
Last week — this is years later, you realize (sigh: autocorrect wants it to be tears later!) — I ran into Jon Bird, a friend I used to hang out with at university. He too is a professor now — it was that kind of group. We have a friendship you can resume mid-sentence. We started swapping stories and I realized, with mild surprise, that we did get a version of the café myth once.
It came back in fragments. The smell of cheap tea in chipped cups — I stayed in a hostel called Grafton. Our “chairs in a circle” arrangement that always looked like a support group for overthinkers. The accidental hush when someone said something genuinely interesting and then some dirty pun.
It didn’t happen often, which is probably why it stuck. A night in my apartment when someone asked a question that has lived rent-free in my head ever since.
So… what’s special about meat?
It hit the table like a joke, then refused to stay a joke. What makes meat as the medium on which thinking happens so special that silicon would be inferior.
Calvin would have treated that like a homework problem from the universe. Hobbes would have treated it like a warning label.
Grad-student Lighting Vienna Café
I was a starting working life — so if you’re picturing a grad student in an apartment with shoebox acoustics and peak IKEA-on-a-budget energy — you’re doing it right.
Still, I set it up like a salon. Chairs in a circle. Drinks on the table. A loose “don’t win by being loud” rule. The spiritual promise that if you came over, you might leave with a new obsession.
I even had my own version of the café newspaper pile — not actual newspapers (I’m not a monster), but a scatter of half-read books and printouts that made the place look like ideas had recently fought here.
And on the coffee table, Calvin and Hobbes collections. Which sounds like décor until you remember those comics are basically philosophy disguised as snowmen.
If you somehow missed Calvin and Hobbes, it was Bill Watterson’s daily strip about a six-year-old and his tiger. To everyone else the tiger is a stuffed animal; to Calvin he’s vividly alive. It ran from 1985 to 1995, got wildly beloved, and then Watterson ended it on purpose — which is still the most disciplined thing an artist has ever done.
The names are a nerd joke …well with teeth. Calvin is named after John Calvin. Hobbes is named after Thomas Hobbes. Watterson flips it in the best way: comic Calvin isn’t discipline; he’s a tiny chaos engine with metaphysical questions. Comic Hobbes isn’t a stern Leviathan; he’s a skeptical companion who understands that civilization is a thin veneer — and still chooses to be kind.
So on my coffee table, those books were a permission slip: you can be silly and talk about what it means to be a person.
The guest list rotated, but the goal didn’t. I wanted my little apartment to be the place where someone said the sentence that ruined your week (because now you had to go think).
Most nights were… let’s say disappointing but aspirational.
You learn quickly that the hardest part of recreating a Vienna coffeehouse is not the espresso. It’s getting people to stop doing conversational LinkedIn.
Also, I should mention that one night someone lit the carpet on fire.
By accident.
Then there was a night where we were on fire. Metaphorically.
To be continued
I didn’t realize I was building toward that single night — the one where the conversation stopped being silly season and for a moment went scary smart.
Part 2 is that night.
It starts with one word — AI — and then the room split into tribes. The jocks think they’re immune. The engineers want to give machines property rights. The policy students reach for the ban-hammer.
There’s that line about meat that still makes my brain itch. There’s a detour through slavery that nobody enjoyed. There’s a nuclear analogy that works perfectly right up until it doesn’t.
If Part 1 was me trying to recreate a Vienna café, Part 2 is the moment the café finally showed up… and immediately started an argument.
Gödel, Escher, Me — Part 1: The Coffeehouse I Tried to Host was originally published in Recursive Rhymes on Reason on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.