Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (August 28, 2024)

Hello there. Welcome to another Q and A about business innovation and managing life. And it looks like we have a bunch of questions that came in. So let me take a look at some of these. I think last time I was talking about books and. And the 10,000 or so books that I've accumulated over the course of my life. And I think there are a few questions that kind of trailed from that. One is a question here from Lola. Do you only collect books that you find useful or actually read, or do you have some books that are there purely for looks? I don't think I've bought. I certainly don't buy books for sort of as decoration because I'm the primary consumer of what my books look like and I don't. That's not my form of decoration, so to speak. I certainly haven't read every book that I own. I'm not a particularly diligent start on page one and read through to the end of books kind of person, but I do use them with considerable frequency to refer to. And a typical project that I do, particularly projects that involve more historical kinds of things, I'll go and get a bunch of books from my library and I'll make a big stack of them and they'll sit in my office for the period of a few weeks or something when I'm working on that particular project and I'll gradually be going through what I want to go through from them. I have a large supply of bookmarks years ago, well, we've made at different times sort of promotional bookmarks and I seem to end up with a bunch of those. Plus we've got some new kind of science bookmarks that are rather lovely. And I usually. My sort of workflow is I have a pile of books I'll be going through. I'll be looking at particular things. I'll stick bookmarks in them at places which I'm referring to. And then sort of as the project finishes, I have sort of the satisfaction of taking the pile of books and pulling all the bookmarks out and sticking them back in my bookmark holder. A little bookmark, little wooden thing for holding bookmarks and then go and return the books, so to speak. I would say that, yeah, I've sort of made the. I suppose there are books which I have in different places because they're more or less accessible, but I don't think I have any books that are there sort of purely for the sake of the look of the book, so to speak. I have to say, one of the things I discovered about books in libraries is that books are an amazing absorber of sound. Well, more particularly when you have a shelf with books on it and there's sort of a gap above the books, as there always will be because the books aren't all the same height and so on. And the sound goes into the sort of the gap above the books, and it's kind of a Helmholtz resonator kind of object. The sound goes in and sort of gets dissipated inside behind the books. So it's kind of like, you know, libraries can be quiet because sound's getting absorbed in this kind of. Not in sort of fuzzy stuff or something, which is a typical kind of sound absorber or an acoustic tile or something of this kind, but rather in sort of the mechanics of how sound works when it goes into the sort of hole between the books and the shelf and then gets sort of stuck behind the books.

Let's see.

Question from lc on topic of books, to what extent have you transitioned to electronic books and to what extent do you see physical books fitting into your workflow and so on? I have to say that I still buy a bunch of physical books. I find that for some kind of reference purposes, electronic versions of books are useful, perhaps more useful than the physical versions when I'm kind of searching for things and so on. But I find that the sort of browsing works better in a physical book. You have more of a sense of kind of the weight of what's there and where you are relative to the weight of what's there. I'm sure one could in principle simulate that with an electronic book, but I don't find that typically to be how it works. Plus, realistically, and I suppose this is a piece of, I don't know, some kind of laziness or something. I find as a sort of reminder that of, oh, yes, this book exists. I find it easier to have that reminder when it's sitting on a shelf in a particular section of my library than to have that reminder as some kind of virtualized thing on a computer. Now, having said that, when it comes to. I mean, it doesn't help that some kinds of ebooks and so on that live inside applications and such like, I can't just take them and put them as a file into the folders that I have projects that I have set up for projects. So I suppose. I suppose I could solve that problem. I'm sure there's a way to have some kind of stub that points to an ebook, even though the ebook is inside an application and so on. But it's all seemed too difficult for me. And if it isn't something that I can sort of just get as a PDF and stick as a file in the folder that I have that I've been storing perhaps for decades about a particular topic, I'll tend to prefer to have the physical book that I can find in the appropriate section of my library. And I do find, even with my own material, that there are things which I can find online, I can find them in physical books. There are situations in which I will look at the physical book because it is more easily browsable in some ways than the online version. I have to say that, for example, with the new kind of science book and some other books of mine, the kind of browser interface that involves thumbnail pictures of the pages of the book, I found that pretty useful because these are books which have lots of pictures, and I can kind of recognize a page by its picture, so to speak, and very quickly go there. And that's a pretty good way to. It's a very different way to browse than flipping through the book as it would be in a physical form.

Let's see.

Doug asks, you seem to enjoy what you do with your business very much. I'm curious what you enjoy to do for a vacation. With regard to managing life, I am not a good vacation taker. I don't think I have taken sort of a genuine, genuine, genuine vacation in probably more than 40 years. Somehow. I also have had the Pavlovian sort of experience that a few times, not in recent years, but a few times I was kind of like, okay, today I'm going to sort of unplug. And something always happens that day that causes me to have to sort of plug in again, even though most days nothing dramatic happens. So I've not been a. Oh, I'll just do this purification thing. I have to say, when I even get sort of a tiny way into sort of the. The purification thing, I quickly kind of get bored and want to do something. And the things that I want to do might be it's, oh, I'll think about some project that I've been meaning to think about for a while, and then I'm diving into doing that in a serious way. I do find sometimes that when I'm going on a trip or doing something which is sort of a sort of a pseudo vacation in the sense I'm going to a different place and such like that, I do find somehow that it helps in the pacing of the work that I'm doing because I'm kind of thinking, oh, on Saturday or something, I'm going to this other thing and I need to finish such and such a thing before that time. And there's a certain satisfaction in getting it all done on the Friday, so to speak. And then it feels more relaxed the next day, even though it doesn't really. It's not really that I'm sort of taking a vacation, I'm about to jump into something else. But there's sort of a relaxation from having, from having finished one, one project before one goes on to the next one. I do have to say that one of the things I find always is I do projects, they get very intense. The projects get, you know, they get finished and you might think, oh, when you finish the project, you want to relax and unwind. I, I find essentially the exact opposite. I find that having done the project and if it's been something which was an intense sort of photo finish, it kind of winds me up more than makes me want to unwind, so to speak. It winds me up to have momentum to do the next thing. And so I have a tremendous habit to say, okay, I done with that. And literally five minutes later, after I put that one, that project, which might have taken know, a month or something to do, when that one is like, boom, I'm done. I have a great tendency five minutes later to start something else. I just find that so that there's a buildup of momentum more than a need to kind of say, oh, few, that one is done, let me relax type thing. I think the fact that I get to do a range of different kinds of things, I think that is useful. And the fact that projects do finish for me at least, I mean, some projects are sort of non finishing projects, but they have stages like the Story of Wolfram. Language is a non finishing project that's been going for 38 years so far. But it has different sort of specific waypoints that represent kind of finishing those sections. And that's sort of the equivalent. But I think the fact that one gets to do a range of different kinds of things is for me pretty invigorating. And I think if I was doing one thing all the time, I would do it a lot less well than if I take that thing and do it only a quarter of the time and spend three quarters of the time doing other things, so to speak. I mean, I think that a lot of the things that I've been able to do in technology and science, even in business, have been the result of the fact that I've had Sort of, if I've been sort of going in a straight line doing one thing, I just would never have gotten to the things that I've actually been able to do. Partly because I've learned different things, been able to use skills from different areas and apply them. But also I think it's a matter of sort of motivation. When you're doing one thing for all the time. It. It's somehow you just get used to it and you don't feel like you. It doesn't stir things up. You don't feel like you get to sort of think about things in new and different ways. YOLO Comments Noticed a post we just did on X. It's kind of funny. I had noticed that my British driving license, which was issued in 1978, had still not expired. It doesn't expire for another five years. And I thought that was pretty amusing because I remember in 1978 thinking, this is never going to expire. It expires in 2029. That's the infinite future, so to speak. But somehow the way life works, if you live long enough, the future arrives, so to speak. You know, I originally learned to drive in the uk. I remember at the time the sort of. It was a big deal. You know, most cars were manual transmission cars and there was a lot of elaborate stuff about, you know, how do you start a car on a hill and have it not roll backwards and so on. And of course there's the difference, the quintessential national character difference in the way that traffic lights work in. Now I'm going to embarrass myself by not. Yeah, in Britain, at least it used to be the case. My gosh, I don't really know. There was a configuration of the traffic light where it was kind of red and then there was a yellow and then it was like, get ready, put the car in gear and then okay, now go. Whereas in the US in sort of a. I don't know, it feels like a feature of national character. It's like, boom, it's green, ready to go. I think it always, of course in, in the UK one drives on the left hand side of the road. In the US on the right hand side of the road. I have to say I didn't find it. I, I thought, you know, I thought many times that it's like super confusing going from one to the other, but I have never found it as confusing as one would expect. It just seems like, you know, you rent a car, whatever it is, or you, you move from one place to another and you find just sort of somehow it readapts. It's one of those things which for some reason one manages to remap easily. It's like I noticed when if you type on a keyboard with slightly different key layout I find that one remaps that very quickly as well. It's one of the just must be built into sort of the human setup. You know. I think in. Well, let's see. I don't know. It would be interesting to know. I know when people are setting up self driving cars that there are all kinds of questions about the aggressiveness of drivers and that affects various characteristics. Particularly if you're simulating kind of large scale motion of cars with lots of self driving cars and so on. It matters a lot what the kind of aggression level of drivers is which I think is quite regional in most countries and so on. So you know I always used to notice in, in the, in the UK there are, it's terrible how many of these things. Well it doesn't really, you know there, there was white lines in the middle of roads whereas in the US there are yellow lines in the middle of roads. And it always used to strike me as, as kind of I'm not in my home country when you see the sort of non white lines in the middle of roads. But I'm sure that's lots of things have changed. I mean I remember there was this brief time when I was did when the UK decided it was going to standardize, it was going to go metric and they started putting you know, kilometer road signs up and that didn't last very long. They took them down again. I think somehow the, there's a certain, I also find things like the, I notice maybe one, you know the fonts of road signs are different and there's a certain, there's again a certain sort of national character communication in things like the fonts and so on of road signs. I think anyway just strange views there.

Let's see.

Question here from natter about physical books and audiobooks. You know I have to say I've never used audiobooks in any serious way. I, I, I think at some time in the very, very distant past I had some books on cassette tapes which shows you how long ago that was and I think I sort of listened to them once but that was, that was before cell phones and ever since then when I've been driving which is one of those cases where you know, you, you don't get to read except by audio so to speak. If you're the one driving at least for now, the, you know, as soon as cell phones became available. And that was so what around for me around 1980. By 1989, I had certainly. I had a cell phone by 1988, but I think I started using it and it was sort of a routine thing driving by by 1989, 1990. And by that point it was kind of like, well, I'm going to make phone calls when I'm driving rather than listen to audiobooks. I don't think I'm probably the kind of person who is too impatient. I don't watch too many videos either. I'm too impatient. I'm kind of like just, you know, I prefer to look at the transcript of the video than to watch the video because I can kind of do it at my own pace.

Let's see.

Well, there's a more general question from Michael here. What's the key to happy content life in my opinion? Oh, I think do things you like to do and do a portfolio of different things. Those have been sort of good guiding principles for me. I mean, I think the challenge is often, well, first of all, figuring out what you like to do and then figuring out how do you solve the puzzle of matching the things you like to do with the things that the world kind of supports having happen. And I guess I'd been fairly lucky that sort of. I live in a time in history when a bunch of the things that I like to do are possible, but they're sort of on the leading edge of what is possible. And so it has the sort of extra feature that one gets to do them for the first time and so on. I think that it's sort of. One often sees people who say, I'm going to do this now because after I've worked for enough years, I'll make enough money to do this or that, and then I'll do the thing I really want to do. For me, that's not a winning story. I mean, for me, it's like I want to do the things that I want to do rather than have something where I'm, like, having this plan that many years in the future I'll be able to do what I want to do. Now, that being said, I am constantly doing projects where the inside of a project is hard work and may have, you know, various tires and features and so on. But it's not like I'm saying I'm going to do this because at some time in the very distant future, I'll be doing what I want to do. It's something that has a much shorter timescale to satisfaction. I suppose. I think that the things. For me, it's sort of, can you work out what you actually find it fulfilling to do? I like creating stuff. I like figuring stuff out. I kind of like doing things where I feel like other people have fun with the things that I've made. Those are attributes that for me personally are important. I find people interesting and so I like interacting with people. But there are plenty of things that I don't like to do and where I kind of avoid them. I mean, for example, I'm. I may, you know, for the last 38 years I've been running a company. I've not, you know, I don't. I don't. I don't work for. I suppose I. I work for my employees and for the world, so to speak. But I don't kind of have an obvious boss and I don't think in. For me, that's a good feature. In other words, there are. For me, it's much better to be in a situation where I'm the one who gets to decide what to do. Sometimes I'll get it wrong. Sometimes I'll feel stupid for getting it wrong. Sometimes it'll be a disaster because I got it wrong. But I'm sort of the one in charge. And I like that situation much better than being like, well, I'm not really the one in charge, so somebody else, you make the decision. I don't have to worry about the decision because it wasn't my decision, somebody else made it. And that's. For some people, that's a much preferable situation. They don't want the kind of. I suppose that what would for them be stress of making the decision themselves, they want to be able to say, somebody else made the decision. I'm just doing what they told me to do. And I don't have to have all sorts of baggage worrying about whether it's the right decision for me. I know about myself that I have a vastly prefer just make the decision myself. I don't get a lot of, you know, I don't get stressed about making the decision. I find I just can make decisions and sometimes I get them wrong and I try and get it right. But, you know, for me, it's vastly preferable to be the one sort of in charge of making the decision. But that's not true for everybody. And I think being sort of having that kind of freedom to do. I mean, when I say freedom to do what one wants to do, as soon as you've Built things. When you've built kind of companies, when you've built kind of a way of interacting with the world, things like this, when you built expectations that other people have, when you have people that rely on you in all sorts of different ways, the idea that you're sort of just free to do whatever you want isn't really a thing. There are lots of constraints, at least on a short term timescale. But I think that the things that I really care about, having the ability to decide what I want to do, which are particularly intellectual kinds of things, I think I have rather, I've managed to set things up so I have rather complete freedom in that regard. And for me that's a very, very good thing. But for other people, different things may be good things. I think what kind of floats your boat is a pretty personal thing. I mean, I remember when I was a kid and I started writing academic scientific papers and things like that. A thing that really floated my boat was that I write a paper, get published in some journal. I'd be visiting some totally random city. I could go into the university library there and I could find the thing I wrote. I thought that was really cool. Now that particular thing is no longer terribly cool because we have the web and you can log into the web from anywhere and find anything you put on the web and so on. So that's nothing these days. But back in the day, that was something I thought was cool. Whereas other things that people would say, oh, that's so cool, you won some prize, or this, that or the other whatever, I'd be like, I don't care, that's nice. It doesn't really float my boat, so to speak. But for other people, that was the thing that floated their boat. And maybe the thing that was exciting to me wouldn't be exciting to them. So I think these things are fairly personal. What is often difficult to, is to know what is it that you like to do. And sometimes you kind of have to watch yourself carefully to know what you like and also what you will be able to do effectively. I mean, for instance, for myself, it's like people say, oh, will you be involved in some committee that's trying to make some decision about something? Well, I know that I do horribly in those situations. I, you know, it's, it just, I just don't like it. I find it kind of boring, I find it frustrating, you know, etc. Etc. Etc. So it's, it's, you know, I think that's a thing. But I wouldn't, you know, in the abstract I might not know that about myself. They have to try it to see you don't like it or, you know, there are plenty of other things where, where, you know, some people like it, I don't, and other things where other people would be horrified by it, but I like it. Like for example, a lot of things where I do live streaming of things where I'm doing work. Like just before this live stream, I was doing a design review meeting with people at our company software design review. And you know, I think most people, many people would say, oh my gosh, you can't actually expose the stuff you're doing because you're going to do stupid things from time to time. But I kind of, I find it kind of, it's sort of fun and useful and somewhat invigorating to be kind of sharing the things one's doing with the world there. And I don't happen to care that every so often you know, I'll say something totally stupid in those meetings, but other people would care. So it's sort of a different optimization for different people.

Let's see.

Golagaz asks, Let's see, I've got several questions. Okay, Golagaz asks, what's the best arrangement in an innovation setting? That collaboration won't create a conflict on who would get what credit? Yeah, that's complicated. I mean, I think that different domains have different expectations for what people get out of things. Like if you're doing a startup company and it's going to be some venture backed company and so on and there's going to be lots of equity and somebody thinks that they might get rich from it and so on, then what matters is who gets what part of the piece. If you're an academic and you're seeking citations, what matters is who gets their name on the paper in what order. And so I don't know whether it matters, I don't know whether the order matters actually for citation rankings on papers, but those kinds of things. Another thing might be who gets to thank so and so in sort of thank you for doing this and write it somewhere, things like this. So different domains, I would say have very different kinds of expectations and things that people get out of their share of the credit type thing. I would say something, it also depends on what kind of a thing you're doing. If you're starting a company and you've got two people, three people who are starting a company together and they're all like, yeah, we're going to do this great thing and we're all aligned, we're going to do it, it's going to be great, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What I've noticed is unless companies are outrageously successful, the people who start them together end up diverging on timescales of maybe five years or whatever, somebody will have a different optimization in their life and they'll want to take it easier, or they'll think the company should be doing this or that there'll be some divergence. And so then the big question is, what happens at that point? Do the people feel very bitter that, oh, this person got this big piece of the pie, but now they're not doing what's relevant to the company, or do they have some whole setup where that somehow gets worked out and that. I have to say, when people start companies and they're sort of arguing a lot about who gets what piece of the pie, and then it turns out there's no pie after all, because they spent so long arguing about pieces of the pie that they didn't even start the company. That's kind of a bad situation. But I do think that in the times I've seen it, when in cases where people can sort of peel off in a way that's ultimately sort of fair to everybody, that that's a big win when that happens. And it often doesn't happen that way. It's often kind of messy. When it comes to academia, I haven't published a paper in an academic journal. Well, I haven't sent one to an academic journal since, I think, 1986. And I found that my sort of means of communication through just posting things on the web works a lot better. A lot more people see it, and it doesn't have kind of a lot of the constraints of academic publishing. I think I get to write much better exposition by just writing it at whatever length I want in the style that is a bit more informal than modern academic papers. I think the kinds of things I write probably read a lot more like the original academic papers from the 1600s, where people are kind of being more chatty about saying things, because I think you can communicate better when you can be chattier. Sometimes the very formal, stodgy communication of let this be a that and consider this and so on. It doesn't communicate nearly as well as what you can do. If you're a bit chattier and you're explaining the motivations for things, you're kind of avoiding confusions by kind of saying, well, this thing is named this, but it's actually not the same as that other thing you might have heard of all those kinds of things that you can do in the kind of style that I adopt. I've also found that when I write things, I just have to write them myself. I have not. Even when I used to write academic papers, I would sometimes write them with other people. And I always did the writing and I just didn't find that was a multi person job. And then in more recent times, kind of the style of things that I'm doing is such that my typical setup is when people work with me, and quite often people work with me on sort of the underlying research for things that I write. My thing is, okay, that's great, I'm going to write what I write. You can write what you write. And quite often they do. And that's great. Whether it's posted on something like Wolfram Community or whether it's on the web somewhere or whether it's in an academic journal. I think that this is a kind of unique thing that I've ended up doing is I'll write what I write and sort of say thanks to whoever helped, and they write what they write in the format that they want to write it. And I found actually in a number of cases it's been super useful because I write what I write and that is easy to read for certain kinds of people. And somebody else will write something that's much more academic, that is digestible in a different way by different people. And that's a big win. And if one tried to write those things together, one would end up with this thing that was a mishmash that wouldn't serve either of those two markets as well as the separate sort of publications do now. When I used to do academic write academic papers a long time ago, the world was a bit different. But I have to say I tended to always be in charge of the collaboration, so to speak. And I had various kinds of rules. Like for example, one was if somebody doesn't understand what's in a paper, they can't have their name on the paper, period, end of story. Even if they're like, well, I contributed this little piece. If you don't understand what's in this paper, you shouldn't have your name on the paper. And I'm not sure that everybody agrees about that. That was a principle that I developed, albeit in a different time. So the world may have changed since then. Part of the issue there is that people going, they'll talk about this thing. Oh, there's this thing, and so on. If the person doesn't understand what's there. It's kind of hard for them to meaningfully talk about it. I think, you know, as I say, I haven't done academic collaboration in, well, 40 years now. So it's, it's, you know, my. And actually, even in my later years of doing publishing academic papers, I think they were always single author papers. So again, when you ask, I don't know, in the case of academia, there's been sort of a development of things where you'll put a list of names and you'll put a star saying primary author or equal contribution for the two people whose names come first. Back when I was doing sort of academic stuff, different fields had very different conventions actually. So some fields were sort of always alphabetical. Some fields where the person who did the most work comes first, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I don't know to what extent if you're like citation counting, do you get extra points if you were one of the sort of made the biggest contribution authors? I have noticed one thing that gets very weird. I mean, there started to be very large collaborations in fields like particle physics where the, the author names would fill a page and a half of the journal and then the paper would be only another two pages. Those kinds of things I've noticed in machine learning now that there are sometimes these giant collaborations. And actually the thing that I've noticed just in the last year or so is it used to be the case that a paper with 500 authors, one would write in references Aardvark et al. And now I've noticed that sort of particularly I suppose in the electronic versions of papers that people are reproducing the whole author list now, probably for SEO purposes, that's a good thing. But it's still a little bit weird that you'll have this paper that maybe is three pages long and then you get to the references and it's page after page of slabs of names that come from these papers that had 500 authors and so on. So it's a bit weird and I don't really know sort of how that ends. And I think, you know, this question in academia, for example, of how do you sort of assess success? Is a tricky question because, you know, there's a lot of gaming, you know, if you think that SEO, search engine optimization is, is gamed, academic citations are also deeply gamed. And you know, people will sort of, certainly they'll cite their own work, but they'll also cite, you know, there'll be cycles of citation and all this kind of thing. And if you say as, as one time universities started to say, you know, what really matters is what, how many citations your papers get. Then it was kind of like what matters is the impact factor of the journals you're publishing in, which is sort of how many times papers in, in those journals are cited and so on. It's a, it's sort of, it's a weird proxy for, you know, a pretend objective proxy for is this work actually important or not? It's very hard to assess whether work is important. You might not know for 100 years whether work is important. And it's something which is never going to be a perfect science. Just like, you know, when you, but universities, when they're sort of hiring people or something like this, you know, I think you have to make an assessment just like one does in a company or whatever else is, you know, is this a good, relevant person for this job? Not a kind of, you know, rank them by merit, so to speak. I doubt that that's a, you know, that that's, that's hard to do in any, in any ultimately objective way because as I say, you won't know how important that paper was for 100 years. And it could be the case that the paper was really important, but the person is never going to write another great paper in their life or even do anything in their life, or the person is, is going to be somebody who will have no sort of ancillary value to the department. They'll just sit and never talk to anybody or whatever else. I, you know, I don't know what all the criteria are, but I don't think this. Who is the most kind of, you know, who is the bestest of them all, so to speak. Doesn't seem to me to be realistically the right criterion, even though that may be sort of a pretend criterion.

Let's see.

Let's see. Breck is asking, have I tried the daylight computer, meant to be a circadian rhythm friendly computer, eliminating blue light being the main feature. I have not. And in fact I don't have my computer set to go into weird sort of pretend cave existence type lighting states late in the day. I suppose I, you know, I happen to be one of these people who doesn't have much trouble, you know, falling asleep and so on. And I, I partly that's because I'm very regular in, you know, I'm, I'm a, I'm a 2:30am Go to sleep type of character. And it's pretty, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm a little bit shocked at how, how small the variance is in the. And I think that probably helps in the fact that I don't necessarily need as many of these, you know, take us back to the way we were evolved features of how light works. I did actually recently get, I got some new glasses and I did get ones that have this, this blocking of far blue light from screens. I'm not sure if it's a good idea. I sort of got it because it's interesting tech and I did notice that if I wear those glasses, if I were, we're wearing them right now, which I'm not because I'm not looking at a nearby computer screen. Because the total light that goes in is reduced by the fact that the blue end of the spectrum has been cut off. It's kind of like one has very dark eyes when viewed from the outside. But in any case. So I haven't tried that. And I think in terms of my main circadian rhythm hack is just to have a very regular rhythm, so to speak. And I'm sure in fact I know from when I was younger that my own intrinsic circadian rhythm is not 24 hours. If I really were living in the no external stimuli kind of situation. I think it's longer than 24 hours and I think I run would just go to sleep later and later. But I've kind of, I suppose in. For the last many decades I've become pretty regular in that and I, you know, when I, when I travel elsewhere to places with very different time zones, when it's, when it's just to the west coast of the U.S. i'll try and keep my, my usual, my, my absolute time schedule, so to speak. And I found that works well when I'm traveling to other places it's kind of a mess and I, and I don't, that's one of the reasons I don't like it so much. And I sometimes make an effort to keep on my regular US schedule. Sometimes that's a disaster and it's always rather messy bred. You ever raise money for your company? It seems you've maintained freedom far better than other entrepreneurs. Yeah, no, for my current company in the last 38 years we never raised any money. And that is, yes, it's hugely contributed to, to my, to the quality of my life that in a sense I get to make my own mistakes and it's, you know, it's kind of, I'm, it's, it's my fault, it's My, you know, I'm the one who suffers or whatever. It isn't, oh, I took a bunch of other people's money and now, you know, I have to worry about getting them a good return on that investment. I will say that the first company I started, which I started when I was 21 years old, I made many mistakes. One of them, which probably I didn't have much choice in at that time, was raising money from. In that case, that was 1981. So that was kind of a, an earlier epoch of venture capital and raised money from some sort of top of the line venture capitalists of their time. Don't know if they're still around. I'm sure the individuals aren't, but actually I'm not sure the individual, now they think about it, I don't actually know. But that wasn't a particularly positive experience in the sense that I had a vision for what the company should do. I also made the mistake of bringing in management folk to sort of do the management of the company who didn't have quite the right vision for quite the same vision, at least that I had. That company actually started doing mathematical computation software. And the venture capital people at the time, 1981, 1982, said, you know what you guys should be in, you should be in AI. And it's like, you got to make this company an AI company. Well, okay, cool idea. 40 years too early. At the time, AI meant expert systems, whatever that means. And the, I mean in that particular setting, the thing that I built was sort of the cash cow for the company and the company tried all kinds of things and you know, let's make AI stuff. They did eventually manage to get fairly successful in making various kinds of sort of AI inspired expert systemsy things for various kinds of large corporate customers. But from my point of view as a. I have a definite vision and this is what I want to execute. The venture capital folk there were purely disruptive in the sense that there was like, well, there's these other things you should be doing. It's like, well, because they didn't really understand the mission because it was not the mission that happened to be. Appeared to be kind of the cool mission of the time. I sound very negative, but. And I guess I think that's a problem that happens in venture capital and I think it still happens that maybe that there's a shiny concept out there. Oh, everybody's going to make money in AI this week. Oh, everybody's going to make money in blockchain this week. And there are often some Sort of leading venture capital folk who really understand sort of at the leading edge what's going on and know kind of the, the first line companies to invest in. But then there's, oh, look, money's being made in this area, let's rush in. That strategy sometimes works for some people. It sometimes also really doesn't work because by the time you're investing in the 65th company that's trying to do this thing, the chances that that one will be the big winner is not very high. So. But yes, in, in the way that we've set up the company, we managed to, we've never raised any money. We basically make money by selling products to people and you know, make, bring in more revenue than we, than we spend. And that's been a sort of a good discipline over the last 38 years. I think it's. And it leads to sort of a life where you get to make your own decisions, which I like very much, I have to say. We have spun off a few companies and we've tried to spin off more that have. Some of the companies we've spun off have had outside investment money. Frustratingly, those haven't done. They're often very good things, but they don't do so well. And it's a strange and frustrating thing. We actually also one time we were considering doing a kind of a launch pad for launching companies that are based on the technology we built and so on. And we had a bunch of investors for that. Unfortunately, the person who was going to run that had sort of an urgent midlife crisis and the whole thing imploded because it would have otherwise been sort of left for me to run and I was completely not interested in running it. So. So we just let it die before it really ever got. Before the launch pad ever launched, so to speak. But that was a concept of getting, which I think is still a valid concept of using technology that we've built and being able to launch companies from it. The challenge is always, you know, entrepreneurs are very, they're sort of, they have very unique directions and you know, finding an entrepreneur who, who has a specific direction that aligns with the thing you've already thought of to do or you already have technology to do is quite non trivial because entrepreneurs have definite unique directions. What you think should be done has a definite unique direction. Are they aligned enough? That's a big challenge right now. For example, I just wrote some things about sort of the foundations of machine learning. One of the consequences of what I wrote is kind of a new way to do completely discretized machine learning that I think is of quite significant interest both at a software level and also at a hardware level. And so that's a place where we'll see, maybe an entrepreneur will arrive who wants to take what is right now more or less just a scientific seed, although we have built some technology not yet released around it, and take that seed and really make a company out of it. As I say, it's a challenging thing. Usually entrepreneurs will show up with, I've got my own idea, I'm going to do my thing. And diverting that to something that might be a much better idea, but it wasn't their original idea is often quite challenging. Even though in many cases the skill sets, if they were brought together in the right way, would be very successful. I mean, one of the things that is a strange feature of sort of the typical investment funded company. I mean another thing that. Well, one thing that happens, people are always asking me, will I invest in company xyz? And I have years ago I did do some small investments of cash and they were always a disaster. And they were a disaster because statistically they will typically be a disaster. Even if the people are good, the ideas are good, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, things go wrong. And so I made the decision not to do that. And I do invest time and I advise companies and things like this. And that's worked really well because somehow it's like one's much more, one feels more useful. I don't even feel the times that I. And this is one of those strange sort of personal statements, I suppose the times that I've made money through just being invested in something where I didn't do anything, I made some choice about making some investment and then the thing took off like a rocket ship. But it had nothing to do with me. I kind of feel, I suppose, a little bit guilty about that money. Whereas if I've been there and I've been an advisor to some company and the company does really well and I feel like I've contributed to it, I feel good about, you know, whatever money I might have made from it. So I suppose that's again, maybe a personal quirk and something probably not optimized for making money. But making money has not been my optimization ever, so to speak. I mean, it's something you need to do, particularly if you're running companies that have hundreds of people in them and things like that. But it's not something that has been my sort of motivation as a thing, as an end in itself, so to speak.

Let's see.

I think Penguin says, happy early birthday. Yes, it's my birthday tomorrow. Do I feel my age? I'm going to be. I'm just totally ancient. You seem surprisingly active for somebody at retirement age. Yeah, it's kind of traumatic to me to see all the people that are sort of contemporaries of mine, people I went to school with and so on. They're like, oh, yes, I'm retiring now. And it's like, really? What will you do when you retire? Because I do the things I like to do. So I suppose I can say that I retired when I was 20 years old or something. I feel very energetic. I actually was just sort of making kind of an inventory of the things that I've done in the past five years. I actually will do a live stream about that tomorrow. I think it's kind of interesting because five years ago I did a live stream talking about things I was planning to do. And it's one of those happy situations where the things that actually happened were vastly better than the things that I planned. I don't know whether that's ever happened to me before. And somehow the last five years have ended up being the most productive I've ever had in my life. So long may it continue. I feel like I have lots of kind of momentum to do more things. And yes, I don't so far. So far. Who says? Kind of. There's nothing that makes me feel old, so to speak. The only thing that makes me feel old is that I can remember a lot of history. But to me, that's actually, in a sense, I kind of make use of the fact that I can remember a lot of history and that I've seen a lot of things play out. And I use that all the time knowing, oh, yes, I saw something like that 45 years ago and here's how it played out. So in a sense, for me, that's a great trade off. Okay, so I'm older and sort of more ancient, although I don't so far yet sort of feel more ancient. But sort of the compensation for being more ancient is I get to make use of more kind of experience of what's actually happened. You know, I think it probably helped in my not feeling ancient, something which was absolutely not planned and I don't necessarily recommend. But when I was younger, I really didn't, you know, I paid no attention to what I would eat. I paid no attention to what, you know, taking exercise, things like that. And then probably 20 years ago or something, now I Have a little bit more than that. I started like walking every day and I started being, you know, eating things that weren't totally crazy to eat and doing those kinds of things. And so I, I kind of was, was. I had been in, in sort of crummier shape in a sense, but younger. And then as I got older, I kind of was in much better shape, but older, so to speak. So it's kind of, it's kind of not really planned that way, but it's kind of leveled, evened itself out. I did notice that in the last five years I walked, I think, 21 million steps, which is, I consider to be at least respectable.

Let's see.

Delamort says, I can't see the point of retiring. If you do what you love, then why stop? I completely agree. You know, I have to say, I think retirement, and I don't know whether it's cause or effect, is kind of probably the single most dangerous to health thing people do. Now, I'd say I don't know whether it's cause or effect because people, if they're not feeling very well, may decide, oh, this is all too difficult, I'm going to retire. But I think there's also a lot of the other side of it, which is you've been energetically doing things and you've got, you know, I know what I'm doing, I've got some purpose, etc. Etc. Etc. And then you're like, no, I've retired, I don't have anything to do. And unless you find something that you really like to do, I think that's not, you know, probably our species was not evolved to be in a situation where a particular individual was like, eh, there's nothing for me to do. I think that, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if it's one of those things that sort of will be discovered at some point. Maybe it's already known that people who think they have a sense of purpose tend to live longer than people who kind of like, oh, well, I'm sort of having fun, but I don't have any particular point. I don't know. But that's at least my anecdotal impression. I mean, I have to say, has been. And again, I don't know if it's cause or effect that retirement is sort of the most dangerous thing you can do. Now, what I often see with people who, when people do retire successfully, so to speak, they do something which they've always wanted to do but never been able to do in the past. And I often wonder to myself, let's say it's somebody who says they really want to travel. I always wonder to myself, couldn't they have tweaked the job they do so that they end up traveling a lot? Couldn't they have done that 30, 40 years ago and had the opportunity to do that throughout their lives? Maybe not, but I tend to feel like these things where it's like, let me wait until I've retired because then I will have the freedom to do X or Y. Unless the thing you do has absolutely no place where you can make a living doing that in the world. I am skeptical about that now. What tends to happen in the arc of people's lives and careers is that people will get started, they'll get all trained up for some particular career. They'll get into that career sometimes in a very random way because they went to some college recruiting fair and some consulting firm had good cookies or something like this. And then they'll get into that. They often are paid pretty well at the beginning and they'll end up, yep, this is what I'm doing. And then 20 years will go by, they'll get a mortgage, they'll get this and that and the other. They'll be kind of locked in place doing that. And then at some point they'll realize, oh my gosh, this was a pretty boring thing to do. The thing I really wanted to do was this other thing. But they're kind of locked in place by that point because they have a lifestyle and a life where they have to be making X amount of money per year. And if they went from being the high priced consultant to being, I don't know, the school teacher or something like this, or the person who kind of makes interesting art or something of this kind, they realize they go from the X number of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year of salary to the oh, I don't know whether I can make any money at all type situation. And I think many people have gotten themselves in a situation where they just can't escape from that path, at least not for many decades. And then that's a situation where it's kind of like, okay, let's wait for retirement. Because then the world is set up so that in principle I don't really have to. I'm not on this treadmill anymore and I can go do these other things. But I think it's a shame when that happens and somehow one is better set up to figure out earlier in life. Don't take the, you know, the Candy of the high priced job, you know, right out of school, just because it's a high priced job, you know, it's, that's a time when you probably have the freedom to not be locked in with, oh, I've got to, you know, make a great living type thing. That's a time when you have the opportunity to try other things that maybe are the things that will be a better ultimate satisfaction for you than, but don't have, you know, don't get you, don't make you such a good living, so to speak. And I think, you know, I think when people do do those things, it's a good thing. Now, you know, there are often practical constraints of oh, I've got student loans to pay back, oh, I've got this or that, you know, financial constraint. But I think it's, you know, it's a shame when people, when there is a thing that people really like to do and if only they could have figured it out, they could have sort of connected that to a thing that can get done in the world.

Let's see.

Dojo comments. Okay, says I help people to retire. I would suggest that if your job is stressful, retirement is strongly correlated with better health. Fair point, fair point. I mean, I think, you know, an interesting thing about sort of stress and stressful jobs, I suppose, is that somehow stress feels like something that is usually in the. I mean, there are certainly plenty of jobs where I can't imagine doing them. They're way, way too stressful and perhaps physically demanding for somebody like me, but way too stressful in all sorts of different ways. But I feel like stress usually is in large measure something determined by the one getting stressed, not necessarily the stressing forces on the outside. I mean, there are plenty of things that I've done that I do repeatedly where many people would say, what's an incredibly stressful thing to do? How can you do this thing with that short deadline and pushing that hard and having to push people that hard and so on and so on and so on. That seems very stressful. But it isn't stressful to me. But then there are other things which other people would say, ah, that's a piece of cake, that's not going to be stressful at all. But they'd be strangely stressful to me for all kinds of reasons, like my being on a committee and getting people to agree to this or that thing. Very stressful for me. But so, I mean, I kind of tend to think that there are maybe I also think people have a certain inevitable set point of how sort of happy, stressed, et cetera, et cetera they are. And that while sort of external forces can affect that, at least over short periods of time, one tends to end up back at the point where one was originally set up. And I think that the. So it's. But I take the point that if for whatever reason you've been in a setting that is sort of highly stressful, then being able to sort of get released from it is a good thing. I mean, I'm sure that there are situations of, oh, you know, all kinds of things where things went well for a while and then they went badly, but you're kind of stuck doing the thing and you have responsibilities to do it. And it's like, okay, now I sold that company or now I, you know, I retired from that role. I take your point. That's the situation in which. In which there's sort of a you're in a better place. Although hopefully you don't find to be the case that what that when you're in that totally released I'm free, I'm relaxed. That you don't find that that is actually not what you want. And it's like you're keeping on checking your email but nobody's sending you email type thing. Dellamort Comments I'm a baker by trade. I wanted to do mathematics when I was a teen but dropped out. Mentioned that programs were an inspiration back in the late 90s and now in my 40s and looking to go back into math and engineering. It's interesting. I wonder if there's a way to leverage baking skills in kind of math and engineering. I certainly know people who are into kind of apply sort of technical, mathematic, well, engineering at least ideas to optimize the perfect baking experience type thing. One always wonders whether if one has a bunch of experience from doing something, whether one gets to leverage that experience because it kind of comes for free for one when one's doing something that maybe the thing one really really wants to do. But that's interesting. I have to say. When I have seen people who have made kind of changes of career in their 40s, for example, it usually works out really well. I mean, I kind of feel like people by that point in their lives, they kind of know what they want and if they have the freedom to make a change, the place where they land tends to be really good. I mean it's kind of like there are plenty of things that people do. People who end up going to college a bit later after they've had a bit more experience, or just people who've had more experience before they go to college will just make better choices, pick better courses, know why they're there better, and have in the end a better experience than people where they're sort of rushing into it without, without that sophistication. So I, I, you know, I have to say I've seen an awful lot of good outcomes for people who change, you know, who say, okay, now I really know what I want to do. And fortunately, I'm in a position where I can make that change and, and go do it. Although, as I say, when you can sort of use, in a sense for free, the thing, the skills you built up in that other area, why not see if you can do that, so to speak. The.

Let's see.

All right, maybe one or two more questions here. YOLO asks, what's your favorite birthday cake flavor? Oh, probably some chocolate thing, spongy chocolate thing. Because that's I'm, you know, I think I only have one obvious vice, which is eating lots of chocolate, as. I somehow I've that's been a lifelong thing of mine that I do like chocolate and I eat plenty of it. And so. Yes. Huh. LC Comments Brain vascularization and oxygenation through exercise is such an underappreciated competitive advantage in cognitively demanding fields. It's interesting. I mean, I, I certainly, I anecdotally feel that I don't know, you know, and I have to say I feel like I have more energy now than I had in some past years. And perhaps that's because I'm sort of a, a meticulous walk more than 10,000 steps per day kind of person. And I think, for example, in the decade of the 1990s, when I was working on my new kind of science book, I was pretty sedentary and I think I had, you know, I was pretty out of shape. And I kind of suspect that that added some years to that project, that there just was a bit less energy that I had to devote to it, so to speak, available for it. And that even though I was younger, that was kind of a lose at that point. So I certainly, for me, it's also partly sort of a habit that one gets into. If I don't walk, then I feel crummy. So, you know, I'm sort of at this point probably addicted to that. Just as if I don't eat chocolate, I feel, I don't feel right either.

Let's see.

Peggy observes, when I went to Switzerland, I indulged in chocolate frequently you know, I have to say that maybe it's imprinted in one, but I do still like certain British chocolate forms. Particular favorite of mine are these chocolate flakes, which have existed since I was a kid, that are some kind of aerated chocolate that are available in the U.S. but not widely sold in the U.S. i've always thought that that was a negative comment on US Consumers because they are very messy to eat. And I've always thought that that was one of these things where the US consumer was thought by the least by the manufacturer to be not as capable of successfully eating such a messy food, so to speak.

All right, let me see.

I think maybe we've gone through some collection.

Let's see.

Yeah, maybe we should wrap up for now. I am going to try to finish the thing that I was writing. I thought I've had a very productive five years. I'll try and write a little bit about that because among other things I've done all these different projects and even for me to figure out what's the relationship between all these projects has been difficult. So I thought I would try and write little bit bit about both sort of what these projects have been, how they're related and sort of how they position for the next set of projects and a bit about kind of how that, how that all worked. And I, I started writing this three days ago, two days ago. And so now it's urgent because I have to finish it before, before tomorrow. So I better go work on that right now. So thanks for joining me here and see you another time.