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In brief: In the thirty years since he co-founded the firm, Jensen Huang has helped take Nvidia from a company with $40,000 in the bank to one of the ten largest organizations in the world by market cap. But despite its $1.19 trillion valuation, the Team Green CEO still worries that Nvidia may one day fail.

Huang made his confession during the 2023 New York Times DealBook Summit (via Insider), where the NYT’s Andrew Sorkin asked Huang why he keeps talking about how he does everything to keep the company afloat.

Huang said that the challenges Nvidia has faced in the past have left him with the unshakable feeling the company won’t survive. In 1995, following the release and commercial failure of its first chip, the NV1, Nvidia nearly went bankrupt and had to lay off half its employees, leaving just 40, and move to a smaller office. Nvidia has had other close calls since then, too.

“I think when you build a company from the ground up, and you’ve experienced real adversity, and you really experienced nearly going out of business several times, that feeling stays with you,” Huang said.

In 2021, Huang appeared on the cover of Time magazine after he was named one of the most influential people of the year. He topped the ‘Most Popular CEO’ survey in October and Nvidia’s AI-driven soaring stock price has seen him become one of the 30 richest people in the world with a net worth of $44 billion. That would make most people feel pretty good about themselves, but it’s not always the case with Huang.

Source: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says he constantly worries that the company will fail

When I decided to enrol at McGill University as a doctoral student in English literature, I was drawn to its prestige as one of the world’s great universities. Although rankings are, at best, unreliable and highly subjective measures, when I entered McGill, in 1997, The Times of London ranked McGill as the eighth-best university in the world.0 seconds of 30 secondsVolume 0:5903:5227:33 I was well aware that McGill produced more Nobel Prizes and more Rhodes Scholars than any other Canadian university, and that McGill had a stellar English program. I had previously studied at Berkeley and the University of Chicago, but McGill was where this American-born student raised in Virginia wanted to be.

Source: Opinion: Quebec should heed U.S. mistakes with tuition hikes | Montreal Gazette

Some are calling Quebec’s latest tuition announcement unrealistic, with the government obliging English universities to make students from outside Quebec learn French by graduation.The move will affect students looking to attend Quebec’s three English-language universities starting in the fall of 2025.Announced by Quebec’s higher education minister, Pascale Déry, the deal aims to address what she and the CAQ government have described as the decline of French in the province.Reaching that level of bilingualism is something Carolyn Moore, a McGill law student from Whitby, Ont., says could be “very difficult” for some students.Moore studied for five weeks in Trois-Pistoles Que. at Western University’s French Immersion School with the goal of reaching a passable level of bilingualism.It’s something she says she couldn’t have achieved solely through apps like Duolingo.”I had gone through the Ontario French curriculum,” said Moore. “But then it had been six years since I had even tried to speak French.”With the help of the summer program, she says the ability to reach a Level 5 proficiency was “more than doable,” but for students who don’t have the opportunity to practise in an immersive environment, she thinks hitting that level of bilingualism will be tricky.”I’ve been in Montreal now since September and I’m even taking two courses in French at the moment and I don’t feel like my French has improved at all being in Montreal because there’s a lot of English around,” said Moore.”You can get by going to restaurants [and] ordering in English. People will talk to you in English. So there aren’t a lot of opportunities.”

Source: University students from outside Quebec will have to achieve Level 5 French. Easier said than done? | CBC News

Some are calling Quebec’s latest tuition announcement unrealistic, with the government obliging English universities to make students from outside Quebec learn French by graduation.The move will affect students looking to attend Quebec’s three English-language universities starting in the fall of 2025.Announced by Quebec’s higher education minister, Pascale Déry, the deal aims to address what she and the CAQ government have described as the decline of French in the province.Reaching that level of bilingualism is something Carolyn Moore, a McGill law student from Whitby, Ont., says could be “very difficult” for some students.Moore studied for five weeks in Trois-Pistoles Que. at Western University’s French Immersion School with the goal of reaching a passable level of bilingualism.It’s something she says she couldn’t have achieved solely through apps like Duolingo.”I had gone through the Ontario French curriculum,” said Moore. “But then it had been six years since I had even tried to speak French.”With the help of the summer program, she says the ability to reach a Level 5 proficiency was “more than doable,” but for students who don’t have the opportunity to practise in an immersive environment, she thinks hitting that level of bilingualism will be tricky.”I’ve been in Montreal now since September and I’m even taking two courses in French at the moment and I don’t feel like my French has improved at all being in Montreal because there’s a lot of English around,” said Moore.”You can get by going to restaurants [and] ordering in English. People will talk to you in English. So there aren’t a lot of opportunities.”

Source: University students from outside Quebec will have to achieve Level 5 French. Easier said than done? | CBC News

He has managed to concoct a Machiavellian trap to strangle Quebec’s English universities. First, he proposed a catastrophic doubling of tuition for out-of-province students that would have bled McGill, Concordia and Bishop’s of students, money and talent. Then, he left them twisting in the wind for weeks, while their rectors proposed measures they hoped would appease the government and meet its murky, contradictory objectives. Now, he is hanging the universities with their own rope, raising the bar on the commitments they made in hopes of reaching a reasonable resolution, while increasing fees to a lesser though still damaging extent anyway.

Source: Allison Hanes: Legault is setting McGill and Concordia up to fail | Montreal Gazette

My recommendations for the holidays

By Bill Gates | November 20, 2023

At the end of the year, it’s always fun to look back on some of the best books I read. For 2023, three came to mind right away, each of them deeply informative and well-written. I’ve also included economics courses by a phenomenal lecturer that I watched more than a decade ago but am still recommending to friends and family today. Just for fun, I threw in a playlist of great holiday songs from past and present, and from the U.S. and around the world.

I hope you find something fun here to read, watch, or listen to. And happy holidays!

The Song of the Cell, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. All of us will get sick at some point. All of us will have loved ones who get sick. To understand what’s happening in those moments—and to feel optimistic that things will get better—it helps to know something about cells, the building blocks of life. Mukherjee’s latest book will give you that knowledge. He starts by explaining how life evolved from single-celled organisms, and then he shows how every human illness or consequence of aging comes down to something going wrong with the body’s cells. Mukherjee, who’s both an oncologist and a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, brings all of his skills to bear in this fantastic book.

Not the End of the World, by Hannah Ritchie. Hannah Ritchie used to believe—as many environmental activists do—that she was “living through humanity’s most tragic period.” But when she started looking at the data, she realized that’s not the case. Things are bad, and they’re worse than they were in the distant past, but on virtually every measure, they’re getting better. Ritchie is now lead researcher at Our World in Data, and in Not the End of the World, she uses data to tell a counterintuitive story that contradicts the doomsday scenarios on climate and other environmental topics without glossing over the challenges. Everyone who wants to have an informed conversation about climate change should read this book.

Invention and Innovation, by Vaclav Smil. Are we living in the most innovative era of human history? A lot of people would say so, but Smil argues otherwise. In fact, he writes, the current era shows “unmistakable signs of technical stagnation and slowing advances.” I don’t agree, but that’s not surprising—having read all 44 of his books and spoken with him several times, I know he’s not as optimistic as I am about the prospects of innovation. But even though we don’t see the future the same way, nobody is better than Smil at explaining the past. If you want to know how human ingenuity brought us to this moment in time, I highly recommend Invention and Innovation.

Online economics lectures by Timothy Taylor. I’ve watched a lot of lecture series online, and Taylor is one of my favorite professors. All three of his series on Wondrium are fantastic. The New Global Economy teaches you about the basic economic history of different regions and how markets work. Economics is best suited for people who want to understand the principles of economics in a deep way. Unexpected Economics probably has the broadest audience, because Taylor applies those principles to things in everyday life, including gift-giving, traffic, natural disasters, sports, and more. You can’t go wrong with any of Taylor’s lectures.

A holiday playlist. This one doesn’t need much explanation. I love holiday music and have put together a list of some favorites—classics and modern tunes, from the U.S. and around the world.

You can find all these reviews on my blog now. Happy reading, viewing, and listening. And again, happy holidays.

Thanks for being an Insider.

Once the stuff of science fiction, lab-grown meat could become reality in some restaurants in the United States as early as this year.

Source: Lab-grown meat moves closer to American dinner plates

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Chief Justice Supreme Court Nathan Hecht and Governor Gregory Abbott are women’s worst nightmare in the State of Texas

A pregnant Texas woman whose fetus has a fatal condition left the state to get an abortion elsewhere before the state Supreme Court on Monday rejected her unprecedented challenge of one of the most restrictive bans in the U.S.Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two from Dallas, is believed to be the first woman in the U.S. to ask a court for permission for an abortion since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year. Her baby has a condition known as trisomy 18, which has low survival rates, and her lawsuit argued that continuing the pregnancy jeopardized both her health and ability to have more children.Texas’s abortion ban makes narrow exceptions when the life of the mother is in danger but not for fetal anomalies. Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that Cox had not shown that any of the complications in her pregnancy rose to the level of threatening her life.”Her health is on the line. She’s been in and out of the emergency room and she couldn’t wait any longer,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which was representing Cox.The organization did not disclose where Cox went. On Monday, she would have been 20 weeks and six days pregnant.

Source: Dallas woman leaves state as top Texas court rules against her abortion exception | CBC News

The European Commission and the European Space Agency will use satellites to monitor wildfires and illegal logging in European Union forests.

Source: EU to Use Satellites to Track Climate-Induced Wildfires and Illegal Logging in Forests – EcoWatch