Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (August 23, 2023)

Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Q and A about business innovation and managing life. I see there are a number of questions that have accumulated from previous instances and from our submission form Paula has noticed A new piece I just posted was a sort of historical biography about a person called Ed Fredkin who I knew for about 40 years. And Paula asks what was writing this blog like? Do you enjoy these more biographical pieces more than purely technical pieces that I've written? Well, this particular piece was the most complicated biographical post I've ever written. I knew this person for 40 years, had a very colorful kind of improbable life with just a wide diversity of different kinds of activities, some of which I knew directly about, some of which I didn't. A great storyteller. Many of the stories deeply implausible. I have a good memory, so I tended to remember these stories and I was like, I didn't really know if they were true. And including stories that this particular individual told about me to me, which I knew weren't true, which didn't improve credibility. And so this was really a complicated process of trying to sort of track down what was actually true, what wasn't trying to once I kind of had the raw material actually writing the piece, which ends up being quite long. I think if you print it out, it's like 150 pages or something. Actually the writing doesn't take that long. Except sometimes what's difficult is when you have really quite a lot of information and a lot of detail, but it's just not that important to the whole narrative you're trying to explain. Sort of figuring out how to say the things that are really important to say, not say the other things, not feel too bad about not saying the things that you just were very pleased with having discovered from your research and perhaps giving some links, if you can, to those things. That's a bit challenging. But in terms of this particular case, I would say the research was the most difficult thing. And one of the things that tends to happen, it's true with all pieces I write, is there's a certain if one can do all the research first and then start writing, it's much easier than if you are kind of trying to build the plane while you're flying it type thing. The problem is that often you don't really know exactly what you need to explore until you've started trying to explain it, until you've started to kind of sort of lay out the whole narrative. And so you have to do a little bit of this kind of don't research everything. Research only the things that are sort of the core, and then fill in the other research as you go along, as you actually start outlining the narrative. But that tends to be one of the more difficult things. And one of the things that kind of drives me crazy with all pieces I write, but particularly these kind of historical biographical pieces, is you're trying to lay out what was the story, and you think you know what it was, and then some new piece of information comes in, and you realize you didn't get the story right, but you already wrote the story, and then you have to go back and rewrite it. It's very painful. And that's the thing. I suppose one of the features of doing biological biographical pieces is sometimes you just have the feeling you should just say, this happened, this happened, this happened. I don't know how they were connected in this person's life, but this person, you know, this particular individual was. Did a lot of stuff with computers, was in the Air Force, you know, for a while, was the president of a television channel, had a whole bunch of startups that didn't work out, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, was a professor at MIT for a while, blah, blah, blah. Lots of different things. And you might just say, well, just put them all in kind of mincemeat style. But in fact, it turns out there's a thread that joins all these pieces together and nothing kind of happens. Just sort of out of the blue. It's all things that. There's a kind of a thread of development that gets there. And I think that's true of people's lives in general. That very little that people end up doing is just sort of completely out of the blue. Sometimes there are opportunities that come out of the blue, but usually when it comes to something which one is sort of developing a paradigm for thinking about ending up becoming expert enough to be able to do it and so on. There's a thread that led to that. And often sort of finding these. Is a big puzzle in these kinds of pieces of biography. And sometimes, you know, you go back and you. You look at material and you kind of have to. It's a big challenge to find, you know, can you actually find that information? You know, is it. Is it. In this particular case, you know, I went and actually looked at physical archives. I talked to a whole bunch of people. When you talk to people, it's always challenging because people have a habit of. They'll tell you some story because they kind of remember it, but actually their memory isn't quite right. And it's kind of always challenging to give the expectation to people that, look, you know, it's really hard to remember stuff that happened 50 years ago. And, you know, you say it once, you might not get it right the first time. That's okay. Let's work through and try and understand how these pieces could fit together and try and see if we can reconstruct what must have happened and so on. So it's a bit challenging in terms of. I would say the things that for me are the easiest to write is when I am kind of when things are sort of flowing freely and where it isn't something where I'm trying to take something where I've got a huge bunch of facts and I'm trying to puzzle match them together to kind of get something of reasonable length. And that sort of makes sense to people. And it's also not something where I'm kind of just describing sort of technical things. The things that are easiest for me to write are the things where I have an idea in mind. And it's kind of a little bit like what I do in these live streams of given something, which I'm trying to say, it's just a question of sort of the mechanics of getting it written. That's very satisfying when one does it because it feels like it's rather. It flows rather freely. And often when one reads it through, when one's trying to sort of proofread it, one's like, oh, yeah, this isn't bad. This is communicating what it's trying to communicate fairly well. So that's always sort of satisfying to do. And in the case of doing technical kinds of things, it's always a question for me of can you grind it down to be as sort of as simple as possible? And then there's often making pictures and so on, and can you make those pictures sort of as clear as possible? One of the things that I always find important is. And it relates also to sort of do the research up front if you can. It's like, make the pictures up front if you can. Because the worst thing is that you wrote a description of a picture. You make the picture and you realize that description just doesn't work for that picture. And then the whole sort of thread of the narrative you've built falls apart. And so. And often when you make a picture only roughly and you kind of like, well, there's some effect here. It's really hard to see, though, and I really need to make this picture in a different way. So that you can actually see the part that's the most important. But when you do that, you realize, gosh, this picture communicates something a bit different than what I thought it communicated. So I made this mistake years ago of sort of wait to make the nice pictures until you will get to the end of the project. That's a mistake. You should make the nice pictures as early as possible because that way you kind of, well, you, you learn things from the pictures yourself and you get to know what you're actually describing. Let's see, Edis asks, when you first created Wolfram Language and other products around Mathematica and so on, how did you develop a team of engineers and scientists to work on building your vision? Well, it's been a very long time story. I mean it's, you know, 36 years since I started all of this. The very early group of people that worked on this, several of them, well, they're not, not all still, still alive and kicking, but, but several of them are actually still working with me and us all these years later. Some of them have sort of gone away for a while and then come back again. And so some of them have gone away for quite a long period of time and then come back. Some have not. But that, I would say over the course of all these years I've managed to get a lot of very talented, often very long term people. And you know, any company develops, particularly over a long period of time like that, develops a certain culture of the types of people who work well in IT and the types who don't. And that certainly happened for us. And I think, you know, we can deal with a very wide range of personality types and which not every company can. And I would say a, a very wide range of kind of, I don't know, approaches to life, cultural, you know, attitudes, all this kind of thing that, that we managed to do, I would say very well. We tend to find people who have, who are like just get the work done really well, don't have a lot of sort of posturing around it, so to speak. Don't do a lot of kind of corporate politics around it. You know, the way to success is to actually do great work, which is not true in many companies. In many companies there's a lot of, you know, get ahead by doing sort of internal politicking rather than by delivering great work. Also there's a certain, I would say, oh, perhaps even humility about, we're not humble about the projects we do. By no means we work on. Very ambitious, very, that couldn't possibly be possible type projects. But on the other hand, when we're actually doing things, there tends to be a sense of we're just doing the work. We're not kind of trying to do the work in this very fancy way for the sake of being fancy, so to speak. We often do intellectually complex things, but not because they are buzzword compliant with some particular thing that is, you know, the fad of the day, so to speak. And I think people who do well with us have tended to have a certain ability to keep thinking about at all times. It's kind of like not, well, I can do this very specific thing in a very, you know, technically wonderful way. But when there's anything else that comes along, it's like the giant freight train is barreling down and they don't even notice type thing. It's like, can one actually keep the thinking apparatus eng at all times? And can one do things where one is sort of independently able to deliver something that is without kind of being led by the nose step by step? That's another sort of important aspect for us. You know, a thing that sometimes amuses me is some of our. Some of our very long time, very great people I met because they came to some talk I gave or something and they essentially heckled me with like, oh, that couldn't possibly be right or whatever else. And you know, in a sense, that's a thing that's part of sort of the culture is, okay, you know, let's actually ask the question, does this actually make sense? And it's not really a question of does it hurt somebody's feelings to say this thing you're telling me doesn't make sense. If it doesn't make sense, we want to know, it doesn't make sense. And I think that's. That's sort of another aspect of, you know, just say it as it is that that seems to work well for us. Now, many of these attributes in different kinds of companies with different kinds of leadership and so on, very different things will be successful. Like, for example, the ability to deal with a wide range of personality types, that's definitely not always true. And when you have a sort of a small initial group depending on how it's led. I mean, for example, in the group that I had at the beginning, many of them had really not interacted much with each other, and they really mostly interacted through me. And even at that time 36 years ago, it wasn't like everybody was sort of in the same place kind of meeting with each other all the time? Not really. I mean, it was really a kind of hub and spoke type type situation, more so than a kind of, you know, people working with each other type thing. Now as an organization gets bigger, an important thing that you see is that that sort of stops happening and people are able to work with each other. Like for example, right now we have our new Wolfram Institute, which is sort of slowly growing and it's still in the small enough number of people that it's kind of very much of a direct sort of hub and spoke type model, so to speak, where it's very small number of sort of leadership people and they're dealing directly with sort of everybody who's involved. And that in a sense that's good when one sort of doesn't know what's going on. As the organization gets bigger, it is important that people that you don't. There are many kinds of things that can be resolved by peer to peer interactions or interactions with kind of lower level management folk that don't need to come sort of all the way to the sort of main leadership of the organization. And as, you know, as you scale it up to tens, hundreds of people, those kinds of things sort of almost naturally seem to my experience, seem to develop just the very sort of having a bigger pool of people with whom to interact helps with some of these things about, oh, do you have to ask the senior person every time some sort of trivial thing happens, so to speak. So I think, you know, an important point to make about recruiting people to sort of follow a vision is, well, it depends on who you are, who's providing the vision. You have to find people who are a fit for you. There are plenty of people I see in our organization where they have, they're managed by somebody and I'm like, my gosh, it's great. They're doing a fantastic job and the person who's managing them is really working well with them. I couldn't possibly manage that person if it was me directly doing it. Wrong type of person for me to interact directly with. I mean, for example, for me personally, you know, perhaps it's one of my weaknesses, but you know, when I work with people and I'm like interacting with them in a sort of a direct way, so to speak. And I'm kind of like, let me tell you something, an idea. And they're like, I don't understand, I don't understand. I'm very slow. I'm not getting it in real time. I find that very frustrating and it doesn't work well. With me, even if the person is actually completely brilliant and if you give them half an hour, they'll come back and understand it completely. For me, because of the particular way that I work, it's kind of like in real time. Do you understand what I'm talking about? And let's see if we can make progress from it. That is an important aspect for me. It's not an important aspect for other people who manage in a different way. So that's one thing. Another thing about communicating vision of organizations, you know, diffuse, getting the vision communicated to multiple people so that they sort of align with that vision is non trivial but very important. You know, it, it tends to be the case that vision originally comes from one person or a very small number of people. And then they have to be able to communicate that vision energetically enough that other people get it and can follow it. And sometimes that's non trivial, particularly because the outside world is, is telling you, hey, you have this funky vision out in this direction. There's a much more ordinary thing over here that the rest of the world believes, oh, you should revert to that mean. And if you're trying to lead an organization which has some sort of visionary direction that's deadly, you don't want to have your employees kind of reverting to the mean. I mean, this is something we've seen a bunch of times because we'd like to implement things in Wolfram language because we just spent the last 36 years sort of building this tower of automation and technology to let us implement things very efficiently. And occasionally they'll be like, oh well, I kind of know Java better and so I should implement it in this. And it's like, well no, don't do that. It's a bad idea first, because we actually believe in our technology stack and this is sort of our vision that things are better done this way. Even though the thing you learned in your CS class might be how to write, you know, Java classes or something, the, that it's, it's for us, the, you know, we believe in the technology stack we built and by the way, it works really well and it's sort of the wrong thing to be, to be not using it, but that it takes some forcefulness often sometimes really quite great forcefulness actually to sort of insist on the vision, so to speak, and not let people kind of revert to the mean in some way. So I think that's the thing now, you know, it also is the case when you recruit people, there's a question of sort of what level of I want to do my own thing and not your thing do you end up with? What level of kind of ego and so on Makes sense. You know, it is the case that if you have a strong vision and you're trying to get people to follow that vision, if the people who come in say, well, I've got my own vision and it's different from your vision, and I want to follow my vision and not your vision, it's not going to work. And I've seen that a bunch of times that there are people where it's a little confusing sometimes, because sometimes people will come in, they will have developed something which is kind of like going off in a slightly different direction. It's kind of their own vision. And then they'll come into our organization and they'll just be thrilled with kind of the leverage you get from a larger organization, and they'll very rapidly align to the vision that we have. Other times, you'll find a situation where people have, I've got my vision and I'm sticking to it, more or less. And, you know, it just doesn't work to have them align with the vision that you've defined for the company. And eventually, you know, I end up telling those people, you should go start your own organization. And sometimes that works out, well, sometimes it doesn't. But it's something where it's never going to work for them to be, like, always looking over their shoulders saying, you know, I don't. You know, I want my vision. I don't want the vision that is here. Now, it has to be said that one of the things that I've certainly found happened over the years is people say, well, I've got this vision, and it's different from the vision of the company. But actually, when you kind of take it apart, you realize, well, you know what? 3 out of 4 elements of that vision are really well aligned. It wasn't obvious because the thing you were emphasizing was some piece that was. Seemed like it wasn't well aligned. I mean, it maybe even more extremely. One could say that sometimes there's a wrapper on somebody's vision that sounds very different, but then when you take it apart, you say, what is that vision really about? It turns out it's really aligned with, for example, a vision that we might have at the company. Let's see. Hockey asks advice for students returning to school in the coming weeks. Well, it's probably a little bit different for college students and high school students and graduate students and so on. I would say One general thing, particularly probably for the college student crowd is, you know, go talk to professors and have something interesting to say. You know, it was always disappointing when people go through, you know, they go to some fancy college and they go through and they do all these classes and they've never talked to a professor. It's even tactically a bad idea because, you know, if you're going to go on and do the graduate school thing or something like that, and you go through college not having ever talked to a professor, when it comes time for somebody to write the great letter of recommendation or call their friend who runs the graduate program in such and such a place, that's not going to happen if you never even talk to that professor. Plus, you can learn a lot. That's where a lot of the most interesting learning takes place. A lot of the learning that you get in lectures and so on. Well, you could just read the book if you were correctly motivated. But I think, you know, to be fair to professors, so to speak, it's like you've got to have something interesting to say. You can't just wander in and say, you know, oh, I didn't do the home, you know, I didn't do the reading this week. Can you tell me what's in it type thing that does. That's no good. But, you know, people, some large fraction of people who are kind of signed up to be professors actually are very happy to talk to students who have interesting things to say. I would say there's some fraction who are not. I mean, I have to say, when I was long ago, when I was a professor, I really wasn't that interested in the sort of professoring aspects of things, the teaching aspects of things. I was really interested in research that I was doing. And I have to say, what happened when people would come, people would never show up to the office hours that I had, which I was always like, well, whatever. When they did show up, the conversation was usually, hey, so what are you actually studying? And why are you studying it? And it's been. And those were great conversations. And I have to say, and people said, oh, thanks. You know, nobody's ever actually asked me those questions before. All they ever asked me was about, you know, homework problems or something. And it's been very satisfying. Decades later, some of the people who I ended up sort of doing those, those sort of random chats with come back to me and say, actually you gave me some pretty good advice, which I took and turned out to be, you know, important in a career and so on. That's, that's super satisfying for somebody like me. And I. I do think that sort of going and talking to professors, you know, you can't. Each person will have a different set of things that they're interested in talking about and prepared to talk about. But that's a. That's a valuable thing to do. You know, I think a thing for students in general, modern students have this terrible habit of being infinitely busy, which I always think is kind of a shame, because I think that if you're so busy, you'll never get a chance to think and you'll never get a chance to sort of realize what you're interested in, what you're not interested in. It's always just, you're doing the next thing, you're doing the next thing. You know, when there's a choice about what to learn, I would say that learning a broader range of things is really worthwhile. Learn things you're interested in. If you try and learn things you're just not interested in, that's going to kind of. It's very hard to retain knowledge there. I mean, one of the things that. That horrifies me sometimes is I'll talk to somebody and they'll say, oh, yeah, you know, I learned about this. I did this class on that a year ago. And then you ask them something about it and say, well, I don't remember any of that. That class was a year ago. And it's like, for me, stuff I learned 50 years ago, I remember pretty well what I was interested in. There were a few things I learned I really wasn't interested in, probably a bit more than, well, what is it now? I probably stopped learning things I really wasn't interested in when I was maybe 13, 14 years old. And. But I still, you know, there are a few of those that. That probably my memory is. Is much poorer on. But it's. It's something where, first of all, you know, even when, okay, you're learning whatever, I, you know, I learned Latin and Greek, for example, which at the time I thought were like, why am I learning these things? You know, I want to be a techie. And, you know, that's never going to be relevant. Of course, in. In future years, it's kind of like have the Latin and Greek dictionary within reach because I need to come up with names for things. And those are really good sources for that. So I kind of made a fool of myself, so to speak, my younger self, in terms of the fact that those did turn out to be worthwhile things to learn, but they're even. Again, I didn't really realize it at the time, but the fact that Latin, for example, is a language with a very simple structure where you really understand kind of the grammatical ways in which a language was put together, that's the kind of thing that I'm interested, interested in now. And the fact that I know those things about case endings and inflections and this and that and the other is very useful for random things that I'm doing. So there's, you know, occasionally there's things that I learned that I really didn't want to learn and I've never used them in my life. But an awful lot of stuff that I learned has turned out to be useful. I think it's also the case that every time you learn some new subject, you learn kind of a new way of thinking about things. And the more ways of thinking about things one has, the better off one is at working on lots of different kinds of things. You just never know whether the sort of way one learned of thinking about things when one learned, well, let's say history is, you know, is that going to be relevant to understanding something that one wants to do in some business type situation or whatever else? Or, you know, when one learns something about math, is that relevant to something that one wants to do in some question about marketing or some such other thing? And often it is. And I think that one of the things that I would say I didn't do as well at as I might have done when I was younger, although it was not terrible at this is any subject that you are ending up learning. There are interesting things there. It is, you know, to almost anybody. It's like you say, well, I'm just not interested in X. I don't know. That's very unimaginative. Even if you have to learn X and it's like, it seems kind of boring. Well, I bet there's things in there that to you, if you find them and you think about them, right, it's like, hey, this is actually pretty cool. I really, you know, I'm interested in learning about this. You know, if you're learning about, let's say math and it's very kind of, it's done in a very mechanical way, which it shouldn't be, but that's a different issue. It's kind of like, okay, but if you're interested in kind of stories about things, it's like, well, go find out who are the people who invented this math. What was, you know, how did they come to invent it. And by the way, when you learn about how that happened, it often is very helpful in understanding the actual math itself. But maybe that's a. An angle on it that you find interesting, even if you don't find the mechanics of actually doing the math so interesting. But, you know, there's. There's ways to get interesting stuff out of almost anything. And I would say that the. Some people are very definite in, you know, I want to do this, I want to study this. I have this end goal in mind. And. And then they have a very clear sense of what they should study. Hopefully there are some other things that are kind of hobby studies along on the. Along the way, which they'll just never look at any other time in their life other than when they're students. And it's worth looking at it. You know, I would say another thing about studenting is there's a certain. I don't know, I. I think there's a certain satisfaction in doing things well, and I think that's always a good thing. But there's also a certain, you know, I'm doing this because I want to get the credential, so to speak. And I want to get the credential because I want to do this. And this seems cool because. Why? Because, I don't know, it's a good way to make more money or something, or a good way to do this or that. It's often challenging for people to know what is actually going to be fulfilling to them. And often they're sort of proxies for that that they kind of see in the world at large, and they go for those proxies and. And it turns out it wasn't actually very satisfying to them at all. You know, one area that I suppose is a. Is something of a pet peeve of mine is, you know, there's an awful lot of people who go through very sophisticated schooling and wind up doing finance of some kind. Nothing wrong with that. It's a fine area. It's an area where one can make a very good living. And, you know, it's sort of close to the money. And it's a place where one makes money. It is also a place that can be quite procedural. If you're fairly bright and you can kind of do things analytically, well, you can just do it. You don't have to take a lot of initiative. You don't, you know, it is. It is something where it's a procedure that you go through and do. It's kind of like a profession, except it happens to be one that's sort of very close to the money and in many, in some cases has sort of unbounded earning potential. But I have to say that I see more people doing it than I think probably should. And there are people who do it where they really have sort of the capability to do things that they would probably find more fulfilling, more kind of creatively satisfying, but they don't do it because they kind of see the proxy of this is a thing that'll make a bunch of money and that's a good thing to do type thing. I'm not sure I said that very well, but it's one of these things where that has become kind of the default for a lot of people who do kind of elite education and so on and very talented. In many cases, it's sort of become the default thing to do. And I think that's kind of a shame. I mean, I suppose for a while, I'm not sure I can argue what I mean. My statement might be that you tend to be the most fulfilled if you don't do the default thing, but you find a thing that really is a match for you and a thing. And maybe this is a little bit of my own personality showing through that the thing for which you can feel unique in doing it, so to speak, rather than just like, well, I can do it and I can, you know, I can turn the crank like everybody else does. Something where you feel like, I'm doing this because I'm the one who can do this and I'm going to do something interesting with this, and it's sort of unique to me. It, at least with my personality or something, I find that much more fulfilling than something where it's like, well, I can do this, but a gazillion other people can do it too. And I'm just here because, well, it's something I can do. A few comments anyway, Let's see. Michael asks any advice regarding trying to promote technology from the future. Well, I can talk about technology I've built or been involved in building, like Wolfram language and the whole computational language story. You know, it's a. It's something where for the last, I don't know, decades, many decades, I've been kind of showing people, look, this is what you can do with things from the future. This is how you can take things that you've been doing in some other way and do them better, faster, stronger, and so to speak. With technology that's sort of from the future, I would say that the sort of just Doing exact. Taking things that people have sort of tried to already do and seeing how you can do them with computational language and so on, and showing them that that's pretty powerful one. It should be a slam dunk. That should be the end of the story. You know, you take something where somebody's been muddling around for three months and they can't quite figure out how to do it, and you come in and say, hey, look, give me an afternoon and I can show you how to do this. One would think that was a slam dunk and that it's kind of like they'd be saying, I got to learn this too. But sometimes they say it's an alien invasion. You know, I don't understand this. I'm confused. I want to go back to doing what I was doing before. To be honest, that's probably an opportunity, depending on the dynamics of what's going on, to say, hey, just hire my organization, me, whatever, as a consultant. I'll just keep doing this for you, and I'll give you that one afternoon. As compared to 3 months multiplier to keep doing things, so to speak. I would say it's better when you can kind of communicate that to the person and say you can do it too. And, you know, one of the things I've. I've tended to do in cases where I have the patience to do this is like, you type. I'm not going to type anything. I'm just going to tell you what you should be typing and. Or, you know, how to. How to go. Go forward with this and let them be the ones sort of in charge. I think that helps a bit in the kind of transference of. And the feeling that somebody is actually empowered to go forward with this kind of thing. Now, I have to say, in general, that the real question is, you know, people will sometimes have dived deep into the trenches, and they'll be like, we're going to build this particular piece of code that does this particular thing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And by the time they're down in those trenches, the game is over. Things are, they're. They're going to do something in some very mundane, you know, artifact from the past kind of way. You kind of have to zoom out a bit and say, what's the big picture? What are you really trying to do? How can you think about what you're trying to do in kind of computational terms? What if you wanted to take all these things you're trying to do and kind of make functions out of them, make, you know, symbolic representations of what you're doing. What is the sort of symbolic representation of this aspect of what your company does or whatever else. Kind of zoom out and try and understand sort of what, what is the big computational picture. Sometimes it takes a little bit of kind of, oh, my gosh, you know, I thought we already figured this out. It's going to be this detail, this detail, this detail. No, zoom out a bit. Let's rethink this a bit. Let's see whether you can actually come up with a very clean, very kind of understandable and buildable upon kind of computational representation of what you're talking about. And then, by the way, it's only going to take an hour or two to make huge progress with this. I mean, I've seen that when, when it happens, it's just spectacular. And people, you know, usually are just really excited. And, you know, many companies have been built that way from us figuring out things like, oh, you could do it this way. This is the kind of symbolic representation of what you're doing. This is how you build kind of computational language, representations and functions and so on. And then you're off and running. And then, oh, you've got a new idea now you build on that, you've got a new idea. You can immediately add to that. It's kind of makes, makes big progress and so on. It's, it's really kind of exciting. And, and I think the same is true of what I've seen many times with, with younger folk at our summer school and summer research program for high school students and middle school camp and so on and so on. You know, one sees people who are like, oh, you know, that all seems difficult. It's a computer and its computers are scary and so on. And it's like, look, let's just look at this piece. And, you know, you can see how this piece works. Oh, that's really cool. And then you can go on and build from that and sort of build into the thing that you're trying to, trying to make. And this thing that happens with people when they get fluent in computational language and Wolfram language is spectacular. It's kind of like they can kind of start formulating their ideas in this kind of structured, formal way that they can then share with their computer and their computer can then help them to take them forward. It's really, really a nice thing to. Ochi asks says they would really like to program, but they feel like they need to grasp every concept before moving forward. Should they give up? Seems like there's always something I don't know and something others can't explain either. How do you deal with this? Well, I have to say this is a great advantage of Wolfram language and computational language. The fact that sort of you can understand it in fragments. It's not the case that, oh, you have to build this big piece of code before it does anything interesting. And it's really hard to get it to do anything interesting. It might be a thousand lines of code before it does anything terribly interesting. The whole point of Wolfram language is that tiny, one function at a time, things will take that image and do some interesting image processing on it, or will take that piece of text, do something interesting to it will generate this interesting thing, whatever else. And you know, I would like to suggest even a book that I wrote called elementary Introduction to Wolfram Language. If you look at that, I would hope that that would be a pretty good on ramp to getting very serious about computation. And you know, that book has. I sort of wrote it. The center of the market for that book was intended to be kind of high school students who didn't know about math and just were kind of just starting with, with computer kinds of things. It's turned out that book has been very useful to people with much more sophisticated education as well. But it did hit the mark with people who were really starting from nothing. And I encourage checking that out and come back on another livestream and complain if that didn't work out. See, Let's see. OP comments asks, do you think it's harder to kickstart a business than it was 40 years ago? Absolutely not. I mean, the cost of, you know, so many things have become kind of such and such in a box, HR in a box, accounting in a box, computer infrastructure in a box. All these kinds of things are things that you can essentially plug these pieces together. And a lot of the kind of infrastructural work that one kind of had to do in getting a business started back in the day has really become much easier now in terms of. And a lot of the channels for getting the word out, you know, if people start hearing about your business and sort of it snowballs and social media and so on. It's nothing like the kind of organized advertising, the complicated cycles of media coverage and so on that existed in the past. So I think it's become a lot easier. I think also the ability to have people working with the business who are very geodistributed, people don't have to move to a particular place that's all become easier, that all the communication between people has become easier. I think it's become easier also if you're getting investors. The whole mechanics of investment and the understanding of what investment is all about has become much easier. Now if you're trying to do something that is, you know, out of the mainstream, maybe it's a little bit more complicated. Maybe. I mean, I'm not sure how the balance lines up because anytime, you know, it becomes a thing to, you know, everybody knows what the seed round is and the series A round and so on. By the time that's all kind of proceduralized, if you have something that doesn't fit that sort of cookie cutter shape, then it's probably more difficult for the fact that there is a big industrial cookie cutter there, so to speak, a big sort of institutionalized setup for the way that certain kinds of things work. That, you know, that that may make it in some ways more difficult if you're trying to do something that is for some reason very different from what has been. But if you're doing something which is fairly, from a. From the point of view of the pure business structure, something fairly aligned with what's got, what has been happening in the past, then I think it's easier. I mean, there are, you know, at any given time, there are always crazy glitches that are going on. Like right now, there's a crazy glitch with the expiration of the R and D tax credit that has existed for 70 years. That is the thing that lets companies like ours that spend a lot of our resources doing R and D, that allows you to expense that just like you pay somebody to do R and D. And it's like an expense that gets subtracted from your revenue in computing your profit and figuring out what you pay tax on. And through a piece of, in my opinion, government irresponsibility that has, at least temporarily, one doesn't know what's going to happen in the future. Most people seem to believe that it's a temporary thing, will get reinstated, but for the time being it's like, well, actually, you can't make an R and D oriented company like ours really work. If the tax law works that way, hopefully this gets fixed. It would be a big disruption in sort of all of R D and certainly a company like ours if that didn't get fixed. When, you know, I have, I have, I. I hope that the level of, I mean, it's one of these things that sort of got dropped on the floor and then became a political kind of bargaining chip of some kind and it's all a big mess. But that's, you know, there are always things like that that are happening at any given time. That's the particular one of, of these few months and so on. And that can cause difficulty in starting some business or running some business or whatever else. But I think overall I have to believe that it's easier to start a business now than it was in the past. Now another thing is the question of what the expectations of people getting into a startup are. And I think the fact that startups are a thing and people know what they are, that has good features and has bad features. I think that sometimes the feature of, oh, it's a startup, we're all going to become gazillionaires may not be the best feature. I think that the idea it's a startup, we're all going to have to work incredibly hard. Well, that's probably true and it's good that people understand that, so to speak. Let's see, Ccro, agreeing finance, especially quant finance, is a black hole for talents. Yeah, well, you know, any one of these things, it's interesting when you're on the ground doing it, if you choose to make it interesting. But in terms of kind of the long arc of life and so on and how people feel about what they have achieved, so to speak, you know, there are people where the main thing they're interested in is making money and that's a thing. And it's a, you know, it can be a thing that is an end in itself. I mean, in the end, if you say, well, why do you do what you do? I can't explain from first principles why I do what I do. You know, why do I write some long historical biography? Well, I could say because I find it interesting or because I think it's a story worth telling. But in the end, there's no ultimate sort of, this is why I'm doing it. And when it comes to look, I just want to make as much money as I can, so to speak. For some people, that's a perfectly good end in itself. It's almost kind of a game. Just how much can I sort of get into my corner, so to speak? But let's see. Gosh. All right. Yugi is commenting. Picking a major that determines your life career at age 18 seems daunting. What advice do you have? I worry about picking something and regretting it later or feeling like I've wasted my time if I decide to change my major after a year or Two well, this depends a bit on different countries because there are some countries where it's kind of you're locked in, you are doing physics in college, you're doing this in college, you're doing that in college. In the US it tends to be much more free floating. And although people say, oh, I'm doing pre med and I have to do this class and this class and this class to land in the right place, it's usually the case that there's a lot of wiggle room in what you can do. And I think the most important thing going forward in the future as the world sort of evolves, learning to think and learning a lot of facts about different things, these are both really worthwhile and sort of, if you're doing, if that's what you achieve in college, that will be a good thing. I think that there are subjects that probably are more kind of things where there's sort of a complicated hill to climb. But that hill is very useful for a lot of things you do. For example, physics has always been a very good export field. People study physics, they go on, they go into, you know, biomedicine, they go into finance, they go into all kinds of different areas for some reason. And I have to say I think it's almost physics has gotten a free ride on this because it is the science that is both quantitative and involves mathy things. It also involves certain degree of precision and so on. But the actual detailed facts of physics are not going to be relevant if you're going to do, I don't know, some kind of thing in computer systems optimization or something. But the general methodology of physics is sort of almost unique in the world today as being very useful. You know, there are other fields that have a certain degree of export exportability. I would say math for abstract thinking is a pretty good export field. But it tends to be the case in many places that math is very narrowly defined. And the people who become, you know, math majors, sometimes being a math major is a good deal because actually the requirements aren't that stringent and you get to do all kinds of other things. And you can just tag that as that's my major. And by the way, people say, oh wow, you were a math major, that's impressive. As opposed to oh, you were a communications major. You know, people aren't going to be so impressed. Or are you a business major? People aren't going to be that impressed with that. You know, it's these things which seem like they're, and they are, you know, taller hills to climb are things where you both learn more sort of the general thing of thinking. And there's something that stands you in good, steady in lots of other kinds of things you might want to do. I mean, like for example, if you go get a degree in biology and then you want to go to math graduate school, that gets complicated. If you get a degree in math and you want to go to biology graduate school, that's going to be a much easier path. And I think in another field that is a very complicated, messy field is computer science. There are things in computer science that should be great export field, kinds of kinds of activities and data science or you know, some of the harder theoretical computer science kinds of things. But an awful lot of computer science in college has turned into essentially trade school for learning to program. And the best programmers typically haven't ever done any of that stuff. It's really not that, you know, sometimes that people are learning things which are kind of industry plug compatible in a kind of trade school type of way. But I think it's something where people have had the point of view, oh, I go get a degree in computer science, I can do anything. And people are impressed. Well, people are less and less impressed as more and more people have those degrees. And it's not true that you can go and do anything. Computation is really valuable for doing things. But the real thing you need is kind of computational thinking, which is actually rather different from what's taught in a lot of computer science education, which is really about the trade of programming and programming typically in low level languages in things where, gosh, in, in 10 years nobody's going to care about that skill and, and then you're kind of in the, the, you have a legacy skill that, you know, is, is not the thing that is the leading edge today, so to speak. So I think the, you know, some schools have this kind of core curriculum idea where it's just like, you know, you take this range of classes that covers ancient philosophy through some human language, through some mathy kind of thing and so on. And that's I think, a good thing. If you don't really know what you want to do, that's a sort of a good thing to learn from and so on. I think that in. Yeah, so my feeling is if you do have the opportunity to just take classes that you just happen to think are interesting, that's really worthwhile because you're going to get much more out of something where you go into it saying, hey, I'm just really curious about the subject and I know enough about this particular class that I'm not wrong about what they're going to teach in this class. It's not like, oh, it sounds cool to learn about, I don't know, some aspect of exoplanets or something. But then when I get in the class, it's all sort of detailed computations in celestial mechanics. I don't care about type thing, you know, I thought I was going to learn about astrobiology or something and I'm actually learning about orbit calculations and that's not what I wanted to learn about, so to speak. So long as you know what's actually there and it's something where it's interesting to you. It's, I think, a worthwhile thing to do because, you know, the, the retainability, retention of something that you're actually interested in learning and just, I don't know, I think it, it revs people up to learn things they're interested in and sort of doing, doing things you're excited about is, is always worthwhile. Let's see. Desk comments. Some industries just squeeze the juice out of bright young people until there's nothing left and you're replaced. They mention finance, consulting, law, advertising. How do you avoid this? Well, you know, in most of those fields you go in, you're a young person, it's kind of like you can be run ragged 100 hours a week and you don't want to be doing it. That's a total lose. If you're like, I love this stuff. You know, I'm really excited. I just want to go, you know, write another brief just for fun. If I'm a young lawyer or whatever else, or I want to, you know, if you, if you come away from it saying I'm just excited, I've spent, I've worked on this for 100 hours this week and I want to do more. I mean, for much of what I've done in my life, that's the way I am. I worked on it for 100 hours this week, but I really want to spend more time. If you get to that, if you find the place where you get into that situation, it's just a huge win. Now, can you find that? You know, I don't guarantee that every single person can find the thing that they want to spend 100 plus hours a week on, but I think a lot of people can. And I think it's one of these things where there are, sometimes there are these fields where there's a very well defined track. You went to this fancy college, you can kind of, you know, you go to the, the job fair, they have good cookies at that booth, the people there seem like. And they tell you, oh, yeah, you just do A, B, C, D and you've got a job for the next 30 years. And it seems easy. And you just say, I'm going to do that. That's not the formula for getting the best outcome. I think that spending more effort to understand what it is you like and exploring different kinds of things, doing some research about companies, organizations, whatever that are out there and, you know, saying, well, what is it that I actually want to spend 100 hours a week doing? And I'm going to be excited to do even more than that, so to speak. If you can find that, it's great. If you are part of the, let's just hire 200 people from this place and put them on the treadmill, so to speak, put them on the production line, run them through, teach them how to make a PowerPoint presentation for, as a consultant or whatever else. Put them out on the road, you know, send them around the world, you know, on a plane, five days a week type thing. And, you know, if you let yourself be put in that position, then, yes, you'll, you know, you'll go through that process now. You know, I think there are some people who get into that situation and they say, and they thrive on it, and they're the people who become the leaders of those organizations in later years. But there are also a lot who kind of burn out of it. And I would say that the difficulty comes if they don't burn out quickly and they keep going for a decade or something, long enough that they've got the family, the mortgage, the this, the that, the other, and then they're kind of locked in. If they burn out in two years and they're like, well, I made some money for a couple of years and now I want to do what I really want to do. You know, I want to go off and be a teacher or go to graduate school in this, you know, ancient literature subject or whatever else it is. And it's cool that I made money for a couple of years. I did something that was sort of interesting and sort of fun while it lasted, but I didn't really want to do it and I kind of burnt out of it. So long as they get out of it fairly quickly and don't get to the point where they have a lot of life commitments, I think that's, you know, that can work. I mean, there's more complexity with the whole student loan Repayment stuff, which I don't understand terribly well. But I think that's, again, one of these things where, you know, you're only. It's a question of sort of how you set things. I think sometimes I see people who say, I'm going to do this thing, you know, for a few years. If a few is a two or three or four, they can get out of it by the time a few is a decade plus, they'll typically stay doing it most of their career. Even if they say, I'm going to do this to make money, and then I'm going to go and do what I really want to do, which is study this obscure area of fundamental science or something, they'll never get back to that. And the thing that always surprises me is people say, I really want to do this thing. It's like, well, you're doing this job, but you're sitting on a plane a lot of the time, you know, going around doing your consulting jobs or whatever else. And, you know, what do you do on the plane? You watch movies on the plane. Why aren't you doing this thing that you were passionate about doing this fundamental science research or whatever else it is? Why don't you spend your downtime doing that rather than just sort of burning time, so to speak? It's very rare that people actually do do that, that kind of hobby thing, in my observation, at least, and I've always thought that was surprising. And it's even rarer that people kind of get back to it after a long time away. Let's see, By the way, in the original question here, comment about picking your major at age 18 and so on and deciding to change after a while. I kind of think that anything you learned that you wanted to learn was worth learning. And the only time when you lose is if you do something because you're trying to line these pieces up to get to a place that you want to get to that you think is desirable. But then it turns out it wasn't even that desirable to you, and you've done these things that you never wanted to do. That's. That's where you lose, I think, you know, if you did something you were really sure you wanted to be a. I don't know, let's say a chemist or something, and you do chemistry very seriously for a couple of years, and then you say, well, actually, I want to go into linguistics instead. You won't have lost anything by having, you know, if you were interested and you retain the knowledge, maybe you'll discover how you can apply ideas from chemistry or chemistry thinking to linguistics or whatever else it is. I'm very big on this idea that people should study the things they want to study, so to speak, rather than the things they think they should study. I just think it works better that way. Let's see. Running Bucket Isle asks, what do you think is the best way to organize creative work? Personally, they say, don't think much of creative. Much of creative work is possible to formulate in a step by step plan off the bat. I agree. I think as one gets more experienced, one has a better sense of how to kind of lay out. This is the kind of table of contents of what I want to do. And you know, it's always good to have sort of a concrete instantiation of the thing you're doing. Just this idea, at least for me, of I'm just going to think abstractly about this thing and I'm going to do that for months. That doesn't really work very well for me. I have to be writing programs, I have to be writing text, I have to be even giving talks about things, talking to people about things and so on. I have to be doing something sort of that concretifies what it is I'm doing. At least for me, that's, that's important and that helps structure. It helps not make it seem like, oh, I'm just being creative and I don't have anything to show for it. It helps have some rhythm of making forward progress. Now in terms of how long will it take? You know, what is it? What's involved in bringing this to closure? It's very hard to predict. I mean, I've done a huge number of projects of utterly unbounded difficulty. And it's often what you find is if you get fairly experienced at it, you're in this project and you had a goal and it turns out that goal is actually unachievable or is even the wrong goal. It's like that was the goal you thought was the right goal. But then you realize as you get partway through, you realize there's this amazing other thing that becomes possible you didn't realize was possible. Then you switch goals. That's a really worthwhile way of managing kind of the unboundedness and unpredictability of creative projects is you get a certain distance through the project, you realize there's another goal that was more interesting even than the thing you originally thought was the right goal. And that's the way you manage kind of the size of the project. I have to say an awful lot of times when I've done things. Well, that's happened many times. But also this. I've got this basic concept of this project and I've got this essentially table of contents of what I'm trying to do. And I really am just working through that. And that has worked for me an awful lot. If I don't have a concept at all, if I don't have an initial idea, if I haven't kind of, if it's a product, it's like written the marketing page, so to speak, or a draft of it about the product beforehand, or written kind of the summary. If it's a document, I won't get it right. But I've got to have, at least in my mind, some kind of. This is the big picture of what I'm trying to do. Otherwise, for me, it's very hard to kind of map what one should do and kind of make a coherent thing that makes sense. So I think, again, what I'm saying is do things where you make incremental progress. You're writing something, you're doing something like that, where you can see, I've got this piece done. And if you end up having to stop for a while, that project, you can go back and, you know, when you restart, it's like, okay, I know where I was type thing. Let's see. Des comments. I envy cats with their 18 to 20 hours per day of sleeping. Yeah, well, it's always you, you know, kind of you live your life and what you remember and experience is the part of your life when you're awake. And I think it's kind of a, you know, it doesn't make a lot of difference if we all slept, you know, koala style, you know, 22 hours a day or whatever it is. You know, the effective lengths of our lives would just be different and it wouldn't feel any different than it does does now, I think. Let's see. Giovanni asks, if you're running a business, is it necessary to have knowledge or an ability to run any aspect of the business yourself, or can you rely on people to run those areas for you? You know, I have a pretty strong point of view about this. I think, you know, you start a company day one, kind of the CEO has to do everything, know everything. I think any area of the business that you don't understand if you're running the business will not work well. That's been my uniform experience. You know, there are parts of the business where I decided it's just not that Important that this work a plus, you know, some infrastructure kind of thing, some. Some sort of just transactional aspect of the business, so to speak. It's like, look, let's get it so it runs okay, but we don't have to be a plus in that area. In those areas, it's okay for me not to understand as much. But I have to say, whenever, kind of it's turned out, years later that I go in and realize that piece of the business is really holding us up. And I go in and look at it. It's like, oh, my gosh, I should have understood this earlier. You know, it really went way off track because I didn't understand it. I couldn't provide leadership for it. The people who were working on it didn't realize that I cared about it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I would say that it's really important, actually, for people who lead companies to understand as much as possible about what's going on in them. And you might think then people who work at those companies would say, why am I here? The boss could do all this work for me. I don't think that dynamic is very common. I think that the more common version of that is, oh, I appreciate the fact that the boss understands what I'm doing and knows what's involved in doing what I'm doing and is interested enough in it that they care about it. Like, for me, I sometimes end up getting involved in computer systems, DevOps things or debugging pieces of code and things like this when I, you know, take the point of view. Enough time has gone by, people haven't been able to do it. I confidently believe I'm going to be able to do it, and often I am because I just have lots of experience and so on. It's like, well, let me take that hour or two and let me see whether I can debug this. And you might think that was a big negative for the people who've spent, you know, a month trying to debug this themselves, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But in my experience, it really hasn't been. It's kind of like, okay, they say, I've learned something from this that was cool, you know, okay, you know, maybe I believe the boss is. Is more worth being a boss than I might have thought. And also, you know, the boss cares about what I do, and that's an important thing, I think. And, you know, the thing that I've tended to take the point of view when people say I'm an expert, just trust me, this is the right thing to do. I take. I suppose I have enough confidence and so on that I never really go for that. I'm always like, you should explain it to me. You know, I need to understand it. I can understand anything I claim and, you know, just explain it to me. And sometimes, sometimes I'll make mistakes because the way of thinking that's relevant in whatever area they're talking about, I don't quite have. You know, it's kind of like I don't think that way, and it takes me a while to adapt to thinking that way. And the first time around, it's like, explain it to me. And they really, really can't explain it. And I'm just like, well, I'm not going to do it then, or we're not going to go in that direction then, because you can't explain it. And sometimes I realize I was wrong. Usually I was wrong because I hadn't really gotten in the groove of thinking the way I should have been thinking in that particular area. But I think it's a good general principle of have people explain to you what they're doing. You know, I think that way also, when you're hiring people to do those things, you know, what features they should have to be successful for your organization in doing those particular kinds of things. And I think that's, you know, that that's kind of. That's worthwhile. I mean, if you say I'm hiring a marketing person, but I have no idea what's involved in doing marketing, it's pretty difficult to interview a person for a job which you don't understand. So. And, you know, sometimes people say, well, I just don't know anything about. I, the leader, don't know anything about that. Well, you know, you should learn something, and you know you can. Your experience in other areas will stand you in good stead in learning the particular new thing that you want to learn. There's a lot of transferable skills that way, plus just the general ability to sort of keep thinking is really important in applying yourself to any area. Let's see. Yeah, I see various comments here from Nukatha about the fact that what you do in practice you get better at, and what you just watch other people or read about, you don't. And I agree with that. For me, particularly, I find this. And I don't know, it's always hard to know how universal one of these things is, but for me, it's like actually doing stuff, doing a project. I learn by doing Stuff. Usually it's after I've already thought about something and I'm like, I don't understand this, but I know I just need to know these and these and these things. They'll fit into the puzzle. Then I can go read something and I say, oh, wow, that's cool. They were very clever. The thing they figured out fits into this puzzle. I know what to do that works. But if it's just like on spec, so to speak, I'm off reading for the sake of reading. That really doesn't work well for me, at least. Let's. Jonathan asks, do you think philosophy is still relevant in all these areas? You know, I have never learned philosophy in an organized way. I. My mother happened to be a philosophy professor in Oxford, so I was sort of exposed to philosophy in some. I mean, I didn't really know what I was being exposed to when I was, you know, five years old or something like this. But I did happen to get exposed to people who would, you know, talk to the random 5 year old and have a. Why do you believe that? You know, what's the, you know, what's the argument for that kind of kind of discussion, which I think probably for me in the trajectory of my life was a super useful piece of early exposure and I think kind of learning how to think about things, learning questions like that. Why do you think that's true? How could you know if that was true? A different question, not so much in philosophy is like, what would be a question that will be worth asking about this particular kind of thing, these kinds of things, things where you learn to think about things. Those are really important now, you know, knowing what Plato said versus what Aristotle said versus what Epicurus said versus what Locke said or Hume said or whatever else, I have to say I am quite negligent in some ways in learning all of that stuff. And in fact, in recent years, I've made some effort to really learn those things. And for me, sort of in my perhaps maybe egotistical way, I learn it best when it's like, okay, I now understand a bunch of stuff from our physics project. Let me go understand what Kant said and how it plugs into what we are now saying. And that for me is a better, more plausible way for me to understand things. I mean, the number of times I've sort of vaguely tried to understand arguments that Kant, or for that matter, Plato made sort of in the abstract has been much more difficult for me than, oh, I'm actually thinking about kind of these questions about the foundations of mathematics Let me understand, what did Frego really think? What did Plato really think, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Once I've got my own view of what's going on. But this question about learning to think about things and learning how to make arguments and learning sort of how thinking fits together, that's super important. I would say that this moment is kind of a high point in terms of the relevance of philosophy in the world. And that's true in I would say this is a point where sort of structural things about the way that the world works may change. I think it's interesting that a sort of high point of philosophy, an earlier high point of philosophy, was kind of 1600s to 1700s, which was the time when sort of things like modern democracy got underway. And that was a time when a lot of sort of political philosophy and things like that was important in the practical world and flowed into the making of the U.S. constitution or whatever else. And a lot of other kind of general thinking about how the world should be set up. I think we are about to be at such a time again as we start to see sort of more of the effects of AI and what can we delegate to AI and how do we think about AI and how do we think about kind of our responsibilities to AI, of AI, etc. Etc. Etc. You know, I think that a lot of the questions quickly boil down to questions which are long term questions in philosophy, although they have been given a different spin and a different urgency by the things that we are now confronted with. And I think this is a moment when that's an area where probably even knowing what Aristotle said, so to speak, is probably even useful. And being able to do the exercise of taking apart what Aristotle said and seeing, oh, do we believe it now, do we not believe it now? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, is really worthwhile. I mean, when I was a kid, I would always say, you know, this philosophy area, it's just crazy. I mean, people are still arguing about things that they've been arguing about for 2,000 years. I want to work in a field where there's progress, like science, for example. And I have to say I'm not sure that my younger self was quite right about that. Because philosophy is a deep area where there's kind of, yes, you're arguing about the same things you did 2,000 years ago. But that's because there sort of isn't a cut and dried answer, given it's a broad and deep enough thing that there isn't a cut and dried answer. And it's the kind of thing that it's worth continuing to talk about, so to speak. So I think now is the few hundred year sort of great opportunity for philosophy and something that, well, mostly the learn to think thing is really important. I think it's kind of an interesting point that learning computational language, learning computational thinking. Computational thinking is a formalization of thinking, just like logic, for example, is a formalization of thinking. Philosophy is kind of a different kind of formalization of thinking. Mathematics is sort of a formalization of thinking. But computation is another formalization of thinking which happens to have the extra sort of boost that once you can formulate things computationally, your computer can help you think that way. And I think that sort of. There's a strange commonality between learning to think like philosophy teaches you to think, and learning to think like computational thinking teaches you to think. There's a strange similarity between those kinds of modes of thinking and the fact that they're both about sort of generally learning to think. One might say, oh, this computational thinking thing, it's very, very stemmy. It's off on the stem side of things. It's only for the techie geek types. And this philosophy thing, oh, it's a humanities thing. It's off in this other direction. I don't think that's true. I think these two things kind of join and I think it's all about kind of general thinking, and that's a really worthwhile thing to learn. I mean, I have to say, in terms of what to learn, both the general idea of thinking is really important and facts are really important. Facts and ways of thinking that exist in different areas. These are really worth learning because kind of you can have all of the abstract thinking you want, but unless you can anchor it to facts in the world, you don't really get very far. That's. That's kind of the way that you actually have the kind of the. The steps to walk up, so to speak, as opposed to just being able to sort of, you know, operate your legs without having to actually have anything to walk on, so to speak. Let's see, recursive asks. How do you deal with falling down the recursive rabbit hole? Too much? Because this makes learning about a specific subject extremely slow. Yes. I mean, for me, I tend to have a goal, I tend to have a project I'm trying to do, and there are many rabbit holes. And I guess I'm directed enough that I'm like, well, that's an interesting rabbit hole. You know, one thing that's, that's a worthwhile thing, is I'll collect what I found from that rabbit hole. And I'll say, that's a rabbit hole. One day I want to go down, I'm going to put all the material I'm finding in a folder with a good name and one day I'm going to spend time and go down that rabbit hole. And actually, it's interesting, the last few years, there are several rabbit holes that I kind of identified years ago that I've now even written books about. And where, you know, I kept that rabbit hole, I chose to be, you know, have the discipline to not go down that rabbit hole. And then, you know, I left it. I collected those things. I didn't feel bad about not going down the rabbit hole because I had collected the material. I'm like, I know I can go down there sometime. I don't have to do it today. I'm not losing anything by not going down it today because I'm collecting all this material. Let me go down it in the future. It's kind of like when you, when you wake up and you have an idea when you're asleep and you, you know, you wake up and you have an idea and it's like one of the things I've learned is you got to write it down, otherwise you can't go back to sleep. You write it down. It's kind of you, it's, it's done. You, you don't have to have it in your mind. It's like, you know, you, you, you go back to sleep if, if you're trying to keep looping and I better keep that idea, I'd better keep that idea and commit it to memory. It's different thing. I think it's sort of the same kind of thing with the, with rabbit hole avoidance, so to speak. So long as you kind of know you can go back to it and you don't feel sort of psychological trauma for having lost that rabbit hole, you can kind of just keep, keep going. Gosh. Prabh asks, what do you make about company governance? Is there a best way to set up a company board? Oh, I don't know. That's a challenging thing. You know, the problem with boards is they tend to diffuse responsibility and, you know, there may be a few people on the board who are like, very energetic and then everybody else is just kind of hanging out and you don't know, sort of. And it's, I think, I would say I'm not, I don't have brilliant suggestions about this. And, you know, I've. For many years, I wouldn't agree to be on any boards. Eventually I agreed to be on some. I always found that I was a weird fish on all of them. I have been a weird fish on all of them because most boards, most people say nothing. For me, you know, I'm in some meeting, whatever, I'll either just shut down and really not be able to pay much attention, or I'm going to be talking a whole bunch. And, you know, people say, oh, there's a lot of good suggestions. You know, you actually made a bunch of suggestions. Nobody ever comes here and makes suggestions. You know, the thing with boards, I mean, I've been an advisor to many companies and that's a, that's a slightly different dynamic because that's typically sort of CEO counseling of some kind, where it's kind of like I'm only talking to the CEO. And, you know, it's kind of like I often find it even confusing to talk to other people in the company because I really, I know the view of the company through the eyes of the CEO. And if I start hearing from other people, it's like a huge amount of work to piece together all these different views of what, what's going on in the company. And you can provide useful advice by kind of, you know, if the CEO is going to implement the advice, sort of giving that through the CEO is much more useful than talking to the CTO or something and giving some separate piece of advice that doesn't match properly and so on and so on and so on. And I think so. You know, people generally say that by the time a board is getting involved in the detailed operations of the company and talking to, you know, people in the, in the organization, that it's sort of doing the wrong thing. And that is probably true, but I've just seen an awful lot of boards where they really should have done something and they really didn't. I mean, perhaps the most useful thing you can get, I mean, sometimes boards are kind of forced by investors and things like this, of, yes, we'll invest money, but we want somebody on the board, not unreasonable from the point of view of an investor, so that you can kind of get some visibility into what's going on. And maybe if you think highly of yourself, your representative on that board will be able to give good advice. Unfortunately, that's often not the case because often that representation on a board is, you know, there are other forces at work for the investor about aligning with other parts of their portfolio. Or whatever else that are not necessarily super useful. And there tends to be a, oh, I heard this from so and so. And the board member will say, you know, you should be doing this. And the management will say, no, that's a bad idea. And, you know, and then there'll be a huge time waste because the, the, you know, the board person has really not correctly sort of internalized what the point is. I mean, it's also the case as you, if you're involved in boards and, and even being advisors to companies, sometimes it's like totally obvious what the company should do and they do the exact opposite or they go sort of off the track. And it's very frustrating. And it's something where, you know, I've learned you only go so far. You, you know, you kind of take the horse to water. You kind of try and put its head near the water, but if it just won't drink, you give up. Because you can spend an awful lot of effort, you know, telling people you really, really, really should be doing this and they don't do it. And, you know, I've had the experience many times when I've done that, I pushed reasonably hard. And then a few years later, the person who was running that company, which is by that point, let's say failed, comes back to me and said, ah, damn it, you were right. You know, I wish I'd done that. And it's like, okay, well, that's, you know, it doesn't, that doesn't give me any, you know, it's useful for my sort of database of did I give them the correct advice? But it's like, well, I wish you had done that. You know, everybody would feel better now type thing. But, you know, I, I don't know. I don't have a great theory of how to make a good board. I mean, sometimes I think having people on your board who, you know, people on your board are going to care a bit about your company. They're going to have, they're going to feel part of it. And if you need advice about something, that's a good thing to, you know, it's good to have people on your board who can ask for advice. You know, some people are better at giving advice than others. You know, advice is always through the lens of the giver and it tends to be what worked for them, so to speak. And sometimes it's like, it's got to work for you too. And sometimes there's not as much admission of this is the way it works for me. It's you know, but it might not work for you. I mean, I, I try to remember that point when I give advice that, that, you know, it's always through the lens of what's worked for me. And although I've seen a lot of stuff of what's worked for other people, I have to remember that, that, that, that problem, so to speak. Let's see, I should probably go back to my day job here, but is there anything else I can quickly answer? Oh, wow. A lot of interesting questions here. Maybe more suitable for some of my other live streams. All right, there's one here from Giovanni. All right, let's try and take this one. Says they're really curious about thoughts about UAPs. What's their opinion about what's going on? UAPS are the modern name for UFOs. UN. Unidentified aerial Phenomena, I think is, is the, what UAPS stands for. Yeah, I've been a little bit involved in this just because to me, sort of things you don't know and things you don't understand are always kind of interesting. And particularly things where there's been kind of, where there's a lot of smoke of a lot of people saying, you know, oh, we've seen these things and this and that and the other. There's usually fire of some kind. It may not be the fire you think there is, but there's usually something going on. By the time people say, enough this or that's going on, there's usually something, something there. Now, you know, I have to say, I think there are. It's a funny thing to watch in the kind of political arena. I don't really follow. I'm not, don't know much about politics and don't follow it that closely. But I kind of feel like sometimes it's like, let's release information about UFOs today because it will distract from this other thing that we don't want people to be paying attention to. You know, that that's the cynic's point of view about some of this. I think that kind of. When you say, are there things going on in the sky that we don't understand, the answer is going to be yes. There's all kinds of meteorological phenomena, all kinds of things where, you know, people, I don't know whether it's ball lightning or whether it's some other kind of strange cloud formation or whatever else. There's always going to be physics. One doesn't understand that's going on and that it's very hard to predict that that would happen, that you would be able to get a spherical cloud that does this or that. I don't know whether those exist or a lenticular cloud. There are lenticular clouds, but one that has kind of the exact flying saucer kind of shape, and that kind of falls and does this and the other. It's very hard to predict, just knowing the equations of fluid dynamics. One doesn't sort of say, oh, yeah, I can predict as a consequence of this whole computational irreducibility idea of mine. But it's a. A sort of an obvious feature you don't immediately get to predict. This is what's going to be the phenomena that can occur. So there'll always be unexpected phenomena. Now, it's like this whole question about, are the aliens visiting us? Type thing. This is a philosophically complicated question because sort of nature is an alien intelligence. All the things in our brains, there are all these neuron firings going on. That's just some physical process that we happen to be very, you know, proud of and keen on because it's the way our particular brains work and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, you look at the average, I don't know, pulsar magnetosphere, it has all kinds of complicated things going on and all kinds of things. And every so often, it'll produce this big radio pulse and it'll do all these things. And it's like, how do we distinguish that from the stuff that's going on in our brains? And the answer is, at some sort of deeper philosophical level, we can't distinguish these things. It's just we have our human intelligence, and then everything else is some kind of computational process. Just like we're a computational process, but it's a computational process that isn't perfectly aligned with us humans. And the same is true for AI. We're having something which is, again, a computational process that we've actually tried very hard to align with human thinking, but it still has aspects which are not aligned. So when we say there's this thing, it's out there, is it an alien thing? You know, you look at the red spot on Jupiter or something, and you say, is that an alien thing? Is that some kind of. Can we think of that as some sort of, you know, alien something or other? Can we even think of it as a piece of, you know, alien technology? Is it this thing? Well, yeah, it's this thing that has this very organized pattern of winds, and it's been lasting for hundreds of years and so on. And it's kind of like, is That a technological thing? What is that? And usually the thing for us humans is can we apply it to human purposes? If we find out that, I don't know, the red spot on Jupiter, we can do some new special. It's pretty hard to get to Jupiter, but let's say we could. We can do some amazing process of purifying some type of crystal or something by dropping it into the red spot and having it zoom around there like a centrifuge or something. I mean, I just made that up. I doubt that that's a real thing. But, you know, can we make use of this thing for our technological purposes? And then we might say, well, you know, that's kind of an alien piece of technology that we're making use of there. So, you know, I think there are a lot of definitional questions, but I think, you know, if we say, is it like, oh, the guys from Torsetti, you know, dudes just like us coming in their spacecraft and with a weird, you know, language that. That's a bit like ours. And no, that's. That seems deeply, deeply implausible to me. You know, one of the things I like to think about, this construct of what I call rulial space, the space of sort of all possible ways of having a model for how the universe works that sort of all get packaged together in this thing we call the ruliad. And it's kind of this question about how far apart are different minds in rulial space? Like, different human minds might be quite close together. We can communicate pretty easily, you know, humans to your average domesticated pet, that further, humans to a plant, much further, and so on. And I think this is kind of a way of sort of thinking about the distribution of where different sort of thinking things are. One thing I looked at recently wrote this piece about the mental imagery of alien minds. And that had to do with, among other things, looking at things like generative AI for images and saying, if you just make a generative AI and just say, just go generate something, I'm going to tell you randomly in terms of in your internal representation what to generate. It turns out that the region of the space of things you might generate that is populated by concepts we know as humans, is like one part in 10 to the 600 in particular case that I was looking at. So all but that 10 to the -600 of that space is what one can call inter concept. Space is space that lies between concepts that we humans have identified. That's kind of all out there as sort of alien concept space. It's not necessarily that it will be always be alien to us. We may gradually expand our ways of thinking about things to encompass that. But anyway, so I think it's one of these things where I'm sure there are interesting phenomena to discover. There are probably things we'll tag as being meteorological phenomena rather than alien intelligence phenomena. But philosophically, it's not clear how much difference there is between those two ideas. But I do think it's one of these things where people develop this kind of notion. What should one study? Should one study these far out kinds of things? Should one study other kinds of things? This is one that I think is worth studying because there's like, there's a, there's a fallback. In other words, worst cases, you discover a bunch of new meteorology. Worst case, you identify a few more meteorites that were, you know, coming to the earth or something than you did before. Best case is you discover something super, super surprising that you didn't expect at all. But it's something where, you know, you'll, you'll probably discover something. The base is already something. All right, I think I should go back to my day job. Thank you all for a lot of interesting questions and comments and helps me to do these, these live streams. Helps me to think about things and thanks for, for encouraging me to do that. All right, well, bye for now. See you another time.