Do tell

I read the Transformers paper.

I read a few papers, they're educational. Better on average than the stuff linked to by HN. That one was special though: Most CS papers are about things I don't know but I can read them, that's why I read them, but I know the foundations and get the point of each paper. The Transformers paper, though, has foundations and assumptions beyond what I know, and explained its point in terms of those foundations.

It's all based on NAND gates when you go down to the ultimate foundation, so in a way you could say it's all just a big fancy spreadsheet. Saying so stretches the words big and fancy well beyond their usual meanings. Saying so is misleading because of that stretching.

Ok, but how would you explain it to a non-technical person? Like, an analogy.