Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (August 9, 2023)

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Q and A about business, innovation and managing life. I'm not in my usual habitat today, so all sorts of strange things might happen and I don't think I'm as well lit as I sometimes am. Well, let's see. So I see from Jimmy here a question. What are the challenges of working in interdisciplinary fields? You know, I think we've talked about this several times in different forms here, but first thing to realize is what does it mean to be in a disciplinary field, so to speak? It means that you're in a field which is well developed. It's a field where there's a department of X at every university. It's a field where there are funding agencies that fund X. It's a field where there are companies that identify themselves as doing X. And to be in an interdisciplinary field means that you're not in one of these well developed sort of towers, but instead you're somewhere in between multiple towers, perhaps between two towers with something that is called blah, blah, blah, blah blah, where each one is a tower and you're sort of between those two or perhaps between several towers. You're somewhere that isn't quite math, it's not quite software engineering, it's not quite, I don't know, social science or something. You're somewhere in the middle of all those things. The thing to understand is the greatest progress is essentially always made in these things that are at the time when the progress is made, called interdisciplinary areas. By the time the progress has been made, by the time a big tower has been built there, it's no longer called interdisciplinary because it's got all this institutional structure. It is a discipline, so to speak. What's the challenge of working in something that's interdisciplinary? Well, you don't get to rely on all these structures that already exist. You don't get to be a member of the professional society of whatever. You don't get to be recruited for the department of whatever. You don't get to put in your resume something which has a name of some known thing, where people who are recruiters who are searching for everybody who knows about thing X. Machine learning nowadays would be a field that people search for. It wasn't in the past. The exciting thing is you get to have much more leverage. You get to do a lot more. You get to do more things that are kind of sort of make a change, so to speak. The difficult thing is you can't rely on existing tracks, so to speak. And so I think a very common thing is that you kind of have to, you have to be more entrepreneurial. You have to kind of explain to people what you're doing and why they should care if you're on an existing track. You know, I'm in a physics department or something. People say, oh, you're doing physics. I know what physics is. If you're in a kind of a, kind of a AI psychology effort, people don't necessarily know what AI psychology is. There isn't a well developed field with that name yet. So I mean, I think you have to be sort of more entrepreneurial. You have to explain to people what it is you're doing. I think it's usually a mistake. And I've seen people do this a zillion times. They're working on something which is really new and fresh and different and interdisciplinary and they say, well, but I've got to fit into this sort of tower or this other tower. So they try and theme themselves. Oh really? I'm a statistician. You know, this is in the past. People who are doing kind of early machine learning. It's like, really, I'm a statistician. Okay, well as soon as you say that, you're then subject to all of the value system of kind of, you know, this, the field of statistics. And that might not agree with your value system and it might be something where, you know, in order to be a winner in the field of statistics, you have to invent a new statistical test. Well, that doesn't happen to be the thing that is the focus of your research. And so you lose. So my advice tends to be don't pander to the existing kind of, you know, towers of institutional towers. Just do your own thing and do it as well as you can and then explain to people why they should care. It's a slightly different situation from one where everybody knows why they should care, but there are lots of other people who are doing kind of the same thing. Let's see. I see Sandra says nice light background. Yeah, well, this is my. For about a week a year I usually go visit this island off the coast of Massachusetts called Nantucket. And that's where I am. And this is the least distracting background probably that I can immediately find here. And yes, I guess it is kind of live, isn't it? Let's see, Prabh is asking, what do you make of one person businesses? They seem to be trendy these days. Well, I don't know. I think kind of there's a certain amount you can achieve with one person. But to do bigger projects you need other people. Now, can you get everybody else to be sort of a gig worker? Can you get everybody else to be some kind of contractor? Maybe, yes. I tend to think that's not a good deal because I know that in our company, for example, we tend to be very vertically integrated. We have our own in house graphic design, DevOps, you know, sort of infrastructure management, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's all in house. And there's a huge advantage to that, which is that you can get people who are in house long time permanent employees of a company or permanent people in a company. You can get them really up to speed on what the company cares about and why, and all of the things about how the company works, how the internal systems work, what the, what the kind of values of the company are. And then it becomes much easier to do projects and to do them well. You know, if you're doing graphic design, for example, and you're bringing in some agency where people say, well, what does your company do? It's like, well, our company's been around for a long time and it does all kinds of complicated things and, you know, hard to explain what it does. And it's this whole story and they're like, well, let me make something which is generic. But if you want to make something that is specific to the story of our company, you really need somebody who is integrated into the company. And that really requires somebody who's a long term person, a long term employee, contractor, whatever else. So there's a certain amount you can do kind of on your own, but it's more limited. I mean, I know for things I do when I write things, for example, a lot of what is done there is on my own, except that people are helping me do sort of research kinds of things. And then the actual production of, oh, I'm going to make this post, it's going to have all these pictures, they're going to be high resolution and they're going to have click to copy stuff that works. And it's gone through software, quality assurance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That tale involves other people. Even though to some extent just the act of writing is a solo kind of act. It reminds me there are industries like, I don't know, authoring books, like novels and things like that, where that does tend to be a solitary activity. It's kind of the one person company. You're just a novelist and you're off doing your thing. But then the kind of the cost of that is you have to plug into the whole agenting publishing kind of world. It's like, well, I don't think about how do I actually get my books printed, but then I have to plug into and kind of interface with this whole existing world of how the publishing industry works, for example. And you know, maybe you're lucky that the things you're doing are sort of a perfect fit, round peg, round hole and you can just make use of that infrastructure that exists there. But if you're doing something new and different, chances are it's not going to be around pegging around hole type thing. Chances are it's going to be like oh the, you know, well, we don't really understand how to publish a book like that and oh, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then you're kind of in this situation where you've either got to conform what you're doing to the kind of the mean of what people do or you've got to build your own structure which means it doesn't get to be a one person operation anymore. Let's see. Well, N00 is asking a question I'm wondering about how do I become world class in a subject. It might be mathematics or computer science or something else. Well, what to say about that takes a while. I think it takes, probably takes a decade to be a real expert in something. Certainly takes five years and I think that it always helps to know more. I think it will increasingly help to mow things more broadly. I don't think the idea of let me become expert in this one particular thing and go taller and taller and taller on this tower and not know about anything else. I think that will be, it is already and it will be as the world goes forward, increasingly a mistake. I think that to be a true expert in anything you have to be something of an expert in, well, not quite everything, but a broad range of things. So if you say you know mathematics, computer science, well, you can be a pure mathematician who just knows about functional analysis. But you know what, that's probably not going to make you really world class in that area because the things that will move the field of functional analysis forward perhaps come from combinatorics or perhaps come from computer science. And if you don't know any of those other things, you're really stuck in this box of what functional analysis has already been. So I think it's an important thing to have breadth of knowledge as well as sort of height or depth of knowledge in a particular area. I tend to think that, you know, different People learn differently. For myself, I only really learn well when I'm doing some project where I'm trying to figure something out and where I'm like, I'm going to learn everything I need to know to figure out this particular thing. I think that a strategy, you know, one can ask the question, should you, within a particular field, should you kind of make sure you know everything in that field or should you learn particular kind of pieces that are relevant to projects you do? My own feeling, and perhaps just my own psychology is it's better to do the learning specific projects, even if that means there are holes in what you know in that field. I'm saying it's useful to have broad knowledge all over. But it's also, I think more important to get to kind of the, one can say sort of the world class point in something. I mean, I should say that, you know, there is a way of doing things and it might be different for different people, but there's a way of doing things that's really the leading edge way of doing things. And if you've never seen kind of the leading edge, it's sometimes even hard to imagine what it's like. But you don't have a feeling for what it feels like to be on the leading edge. And that makes it, you kind of need to get there with something. It's kind of almost the value of people who go and get PhDs and things like this. It's kind of one of the things it does is even if you get a PhD in field X and what you're going to work on is field Y or Z or whatever else, the fact that you manage to get a project to the point where you have hopefully if you do a good PhD, some original, interesting piece of research that you've done, that very experience of getting to the sort of to the leading edge of something ends up being valuable in getting to the leading edge of other things later. And if you've kind of never got to the leading edge of anything, it's sort of hard to imagine what that's like. It's kind of like, well, you always need to be supported by what the textbooks say. Well, actually you don't. And if you're really going to get to the leading edge and do something new, it can't be something that was sort of already in the textbooks. I would say that for myself at least. You kind of learn the things around a project, but whenever there's a pillar, a piece, a footing of what you're doing and it's like Well, I don't really quite understand that, but I'm going to keep on going anyway. That's usually a mistake. I admit that I've done that a bunch of times because I really wanted to get the project to the end points. And it's like, well, let me not worry about that footing right now. I kind of know by now that you always. That always the foot ends up always being on sand, and it always ends up, you know, toppling things over. And you really have to understand those footings as you go forward. So it's like you're doing this thing and you kind of. There's this sort of area where you're making use of those ideas, but you don't really understand them. Go do that homework. It's really useful. And, you know, a thing that I think is also to be said in terms of how you get to kind of the. For me, there's a time when you try and learn a subject and you kind of maybe have some ambient knowledge of the subject, you've heard a bit about it from over the years or whatever else. You dive in, you try to understand it. And for a while, it always feels to me like you're kind of. You're drowning in this. Oh, my God, there are all these other facts. I didn't know that there's all these things that, you know, this is a whole giant subject. How am I going to ever learn it? And for me, at least, what usually happens is after. After a certain period of time, suddenly you start feeling like, oh, I'm getting it. And it starts being the case that every new fact you hear, you can kind of just fit into things you already knew. And it takes a while sometimes to get to that point. I mean, it's even, you know, almost everything I do. I happen to be writing a historical, biographical, obituary type piece now of a rather complicated life. And it's a person I knew for 40 years, but still, there were many, many pieces of this life that I didn't really know well. And the, you know, as I kind of explore it, it's like, oh, my gosh, this is a bottomless pit. You know, how am I going to get to the end? How am I going to understand how these pieces fit together? And finally, after a little while, it's like, okay, I'm beginning to see this fit with that, fit with that, and I'm beginning to understand it. And I find that with a lot of these different areas, and that's where you feel like you're getting to the point where you can really, you've got your arms really around this area. You could say, I mean, this particular case that I'm looking at right now, I don't think there's much of a notion of a world class study of this particular sort of micro historical area. But when you get to the point where each new thing you hear kind of more or less fits into things you've already heard, that's when you can feel like you're getting to the point where you're sort of at the leading edge and you can really feel world class or something in something. And I think that, and as I say to, to get to that point, it's like, do projects learn what's around them? Learn what's around what's around, so to speak. And you know, that's I suppose a, A, a reasonable strategy for doing that. And plus it just takes time. You have to do more projects, you have to get deeper into it. Usually when you get into a new field, at least I find this, every field has its way of thinking about things. The kind of way in which, oh, I don't know, let's say in evolutionary biology, let's say everything, you always think, oh, that has a purpose. The reason the bird has a, has a tail that looks like this is because blah, blah, blah, and you have to kind of get into this everything has a purpose idea. I'm not sure it's the right idea, but that's the idea that is the basis for kind of that field of investigation which wraps around evolutionary biology and Darwinian evolution and so on. And similarly, when you have something like economics, maybe it isn't right, but there's still a sense in which kind of everything has a utility and people are doing these things for this reason, that reason and so on. And it kind of has a, it has an inner logic to it. And every field has a sort of somewhat different inner logic. It's almost what defines the borders between fields, is there different inner logics. And it takes a while sometimes to get into those fields. I mean, it's same is true with for example, the areas of business. It's like, how do I think about, you know, if I'm going to be a consultant versus I'm going to be a person who makes products. Those are two different mindsets. I mean a consultant, it's like if you're going to do that, well, it's like you've got customers, you're going to deliver great value to the customers, but you're going to charge them for all the time you spend. And it's not never going to be the case that you are just like, well, I just feel like we have to do this to make it better. Even though that wasn't part of what you're charging your customer for, that's kind of how you lose at doing consulting. Whereas if you're building products, there isn't really, you know, if you start saying, well, I'm going to account for every hour that gets spent by the product designers and I'm going to have a statement of work that says exactly what we're going to do to build this product. That's kind of a losing way to build a great product because it's kind of like you've already boxed the whole thing in to what you're trying to do, which is exactly what you need to do to make for a happy consulting client where you've kind of said what you're going to do and then you're kind of filling that in and maybe you change what you're doing and you agree with them what you're going to change. But it's different from making a product where it's kind of a wide open thing. And so, you know, that's another case where kind of getting into that different area, it takes a different mindset to be able to do that. And same with, you know, if you have different monetization schemes, if you're monetizing everything with ads versus you're monetizing things by, by selling them to, selling the, the actual product to people and so on. Different mindset, different way of thinking about things. Let's, there's a question here from Internet. Who are some young people who inspire you? What are they working on? I know a lot of young people, I really have a great time interacting with young people. I think it's always somehow there's always a different view of the world in every generation. And you know, for an oldie like me, the thing that I do like to kind of learn what is sort of the new view of the world. And some things about, I don't know how social media works or something are just second nature obvious to, oh, you know, you're an oldie, you use email to do things. And you know, but all the cool modern young kids are using, you know, various kinds of text chat type things and so on to, or, you know, a chat system to kind of interact with everybody in their lives. Sometimes I'm like, okay, that's great, you know, I can, that's a good idea. Let me get into that. And sometimes it's like, well, no, actually, I've got a pretty good rhythm for my life, and I'm going to keep using it. Like email, I like, because I get hundreds of emails every day, and I batch them up and I respond to them as I can respond to them. And there isn't kind of a. And I. They get nicely archived and all those kinds of things, and they're nicely searchable and all that. And it's a very organized kind of industrial type of thing. Whereas if I'm getting all these chat messages and they're coming in every two minutes when I'm, you know, trying to do some live stream, there's a whole bunch of chat messages. I'm sure as I've been on this. This live stream, there have been a bunch of email messages that have come in. I obviously haven't looked at them. It's not an expectation that I would look at them, you know, every minute, so to speak. So it's a different sort of rhythm of life in terms of. Of, you know, again, I like to try to understand, you know, what are the thought processes that are the. The fresh ones that new people bring in. I do think sometimes that, you know, we're all a bit fated to have a certain set of things that we do well. And sometimes those get discovered by one quite early in life. And so it's like you meet somebody who is 16 years old and they have a particular set of unusual characteristics. And by golly, if you meet them 25 years later, they'll have the same set of unusual characteristics. It's kind of interesting to see what are the new, you know, what are these new sort of things that emerge there. And I think there's a lot where people. Yeah. So I mean, I think it's some of these things where it's just second nature to. Well, there are lots of people I know for whom writing Wolfram language code is second nature. So they're kind of fluent in it. They've been fluent in it since they were early teenagers and things. And it's just like, oh, well, I got to compute this thing. Type, type, type. I've got this computed. That's a thing which for some of the. Some older folk, it's just like that's an incomprehensible thing to just have that be an extension of one's own sort of thought processes. And that's something that it's really, really cool to see. I mean, something I certainly notice is there are ideas that I kind of introduced in science, oh, 30, 40 years ago now. And you know, it's really interesting to see another generation of people for whom some of those ideas are just sort of second nature. Of course it has to work that way, but let's now build the next step. You know, one of the things that's kind of ironic about science and other areas to some extent is the sort of first generation who invents concepts. If you say to that first generation of people, wait a minute, I'm not sure that concept is right, they'll say, yeah, you might be right. You know, I don't know, it's something that's a foundation. We might, you know, it's like, it's subject to debate still. You go a couple of sort of generations, like academic generations forward, and then everybody just thinks it's obvious and it's like, wait a minute, you can't dispute that foundational idea. You know, everybody knows that's how it works type thing. Now, sometimes that's healthy and lets one build further because one's not kind of second guessing oneself. And sometimes it's a big mistake because there are things that turn out not to be true. And that's something that we've discovered in our physics project and the stuff I've done in metamathematics and other kinds of areas where it's, well, yeah, people thought that was true for 100 years, but it actually isn't really true. And it was sort of thought to be true because probably the people who first invented it, if I talked to them back 100 years ago or something, they would say, yeah, you're probably right, that probably isn't quite right. But a few generations on, it's like, of course it has to work that way. Let's see, Looking here, Okay, Zanaya asks, when did you realize what you do now is what you wanted to do in your life? Well, let's see. I think it's true with a lot of people actually, that kind of, you know, the sort of the tween 11, 12, 13 type age, if people are not too busy, you know, doing everything they have to do to get to the next step in school and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think that's often an age when people, particularly when they look back, realize that was the time I kind of realized what I wanted to be doing. For me, I, well, I was interested in things about space and so on, because that was the cool thing in the 1960s and so on. And it was kind of something that reflected the future and I suppose I was like many young people, I was interested in the future. Seemed much more interesting than the past, I suppose, because, you know, I thought I could have an effect on the future and that seemed egotistically satisfying. Whereas the past is the past. Now, in later years I've become much more interested in history in the past and how things come to be the way they are. I find that a very good kind of way to understand, kind of. I like to understand why things are the way they are partly so that I can get some idea of how things might evolve going into the future. But for me, I got interested in things about space and spacecraft and so on, and that got me interested in physics. And then from physics, by the time I was like 12, 13 years old, I got interested in doing, using computers to do physics like things. And that got me interested in computers. And then I, well, became a big user of lots of computer systems and eventually started building my own. And that got me into doing those kinds of things. And then I've sort of alternated between doing basic science and doing technology development. Now one thing I didn't get in my sort of personal early life was, you know, I had been sort of a very accelerated academic kid, you know, got my PhD when I was 20 and started being professor and all those kinds of things. And so my kind of self image was, okay, I'm an academically accelerated kid and person, whatever, and something like, you know, running a company, that's not for me. So when I started my first company, which I was sort of backed into doing when I was like 21 years old or so, my instinct was, look, I don't know anything about running companies. I'm going to bring in people who can run this company and I'm just going to do the techie stuff. That turned out to be a mistake. Turns out I had reasonable common sense about running a company or what I would view as common sense. And so. But my self image as a result of having sort of been sort of, sort of accelerated in this kind of academic direction was, oh, that's not the kind of thing I know about now. If I look back at my personal history, it's actually not. It's actually there's lots of evidence that, you know, doing things like running companies wasn't completely crazy for me because turns out when I was a kid I always used to organize stuff and you know, a little bit like there always were the, you know, you can have the such and such club at the school or whatever it is. I would never be the person, you know, elected to be part of the such and such club. I would always just start my own club and organize people around that. And it's. So I start my own activity and so on. And I suppose that, that, you know, looking back, it's like, yeah, that's what entrepreneurs do. But at the time, I absolutely did not self identify that, oh, these things I've been doing are kind of entrepreneurial types of things. I also think. So that was something that, in retrospect, I was doing, but I didn't know I was doing, so to speak. And I think this is a common thing for people. It's like, what are you doing that you're good at doing? And one of the paradoxes is things that one is good at, one often devalues. One thinks that's obvious, that's easy. And things that one finds kind of difficult, like one concentrates on those. And it's like, that's really what I should be doing because that's the thing that I'm really concentrating on. But it's quite difficult. So for me, for example, doing business kinds of things, I have always found to be kind of common sense. And that's, you know, not. I don't know, I, you know, people seem to, you know, looking at me from the outside, people say, look, you're pretty good at this stuff. For me, internally, it's like, look, it's all just obvious. It's just common sense. And same with a bunch of other things. And I think that's one of the challenges is to not just say, look, it's obvious everybody must be good at this. But to be able to see, and sometimes it's hard to do from the inside, this is something which I'm actually good at doing. And I think that sometimes you have to. That's a place where you have to. Although it's dangerous to do this, kind of see what the world is telling one. Because often the world tells one all kinds of things that are quite different from what you know. The world tends to be a very conservative, very kind of, you know, if you're doing it the way it's always been done, then the world approves. If you're doing it differently, the world tends not to approve until after you've done it and been successful and you already know, and everybody already knows it's a success, then the world comes and tells you it's a success. But often when you're doing it, the world is kind of saying, no, no, no, don't do that. Do the standard thing that everybody has done before. And so sometimes that's a confusing feature if you're trying to get a sense of what am I actually good at, so to speak. And I suppose I think it's always important to understand, kind of to try to look back at projects you've done, what worked, what didn't work, what are you actually good at? And I think it's sort of what is the thematic analysis of what you're good at and what you're not good at. Now, for me, a few decades after I started doing projects, I kind of realized, if you look at projects I've done, a lot of them have the character that they start from something pretty complicated. They end up sort of grinding down to find sort of underlying primitives. What is the essential point about fundamental physics, about computational language design, even about business? What's the sort of essential point? Then kind of clarify that essential point and then build up to some more complicated structure from that. And that seems to be sort of the workflow of the vast majority of projects I've done. I think that's something that turns out that I'm quite well suited for. I think at least that's what I've done. And there are other things. Like, for example, I'm a person who likes people, which doesn't always come with the territory, if you're sort of a techie type person. But I like people. I find people interesting. I'm always interested in learning from people, which again, is something I'm very, you know, I tend to be kind of forcefully egotistical in some sense about what I want to do and figure out. But yet somehow when I'm kind of sort of when I have the opportunity to learn from other people, I'm really interested in learning from other people. Even though when it comes to what I'm doing myself, I'm not going to go and take what other people say and say I'll just do what other people say I should do. I'm pretty forceful in deciding what I want to do for myself. But yet when it's a question of kind of learning from other people, that's something I really like. And so those are some dimensions there. Now, I think people. One of the problems with particularly the modern world is people are so busy, particularly in their educational process. I mean, the thing that amazes me, it's kind of like I do a lot of stuff. I do a bunch of CEOing and science and writing and all kinds of all kinds of other things. And yet somehow when I run into Sort of high school students, particularly kind of more elite type high school students. It's kind of. It always seems like they're always busier than I am. And that's. And it's kind of. It's almost paradoxical to me that it's like they're being fed things to do at a very high rate. And now I admit that the things I'm doing are mostly things I'm choosing to do. So in a sense, I can control that a bit better. But I think one of the things that tends to happen is people, you know, in school, they're really, really busy. They're doing all these classes, they're doing all these activities, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that has the problem that they have no time to think about, hey, wait a minute, what do I actually want to do? Well, I don't have any time to think about what I want to do because I've got to go and show up to this next class and do this next thing and so on. And I think that, that, you know, that has a very bad effect because people end up, you know, I'm going to go to the greatest, best school for me, I'm going to do this and this and this. And you get through the whole thing. And then at the end, it's like, you're finishing college, let's say. And at the end, it's like, what am I going to do next? Well, I haven't really thought about that. I've been rushing, running so fast and so hard to kind of get through college. I didn't really think about that. And then, you know, there's a recruiting fair and, you know, consulting company X has the best cookies. And so pretty soon you find you spend the next 30 years working for that company. And that's not a great. In my opinion, that's not a great way to learn, you know, to do what you want to be doing, so to speak. I think it's worth spending a little bit of time thinking about what you want to be doing, maybe trying out different kinds of things. Do I like doing this? You know, get the internship, find out, you know, is this something I want to be doing or not? And don't really necessarily think about, oh, I'm going to get this internship to be a stepping stone to this thing, to this thing, this thing. I kind of think by the time you're really good at doing something, you can get hired to do that thing. And whether or not you went through all the right stepping stones to get there. And it's more important that you find something you really like to do and can really be sort of passionate about doing and do really well than it is to have sort of organized the stepping stones, so to speak, to get there and discover it's something you didn't actually want to get to. At least that's my point of view. And I think this question of sort of what is it out there in the world that you should be doing or want to be doing, it's a complicated puzzle. It's, you know, in a company like ours, for example, I find that one of the more satisfying things is kind of helping solve the puzzle problem of kind of, you've got these people, you've got these projects you want to do. How do they fit together? How does this person who thought that they were somebody who'd studied field X really, they're going to be very good at doing thing Y that wasn't what they studied at all. But that's just in their nature and they can, they know enough to be able to do it, so to speak, you know, making that connection and people, you know, people doing that for themselves, it can be not so totally easy. And I think one of the things that is perhaps a disappointment in some education is that there's less visibility of what is there out there to do. It's not helped by the fact that education tends to trail by 20, 25 more years. Kind of what's really happening in the world. It's like, well, yes, you can be a this or that or the other, and those are the things that were hot 25 years ago, but the things that are going to be hot five years from now are things that the folks who are in the middle of education aren't necessarily very aware of and aren't necessarily telling people about. So I, I kind of think that that's, that's one of the challenges is what is there out there to do in the world. And as I say, one of the other things that happens is you can pick a well developed field in which case there's a well developed track. You do this, you do this, you do this, and then you're going to be okay doing that particular thing. Or you go out and you try and start being, you know, the AI psychologist when there aren't any of those yet and you have to invent your whole career, so to speak. And it takes a slightly different kind of personality to have a good time with that than to say, well, I'm going to become a, you know, I don't know, a software engineer where there's sort of a well defined path in that direction. You know, I, I've been very interested in this question of, of kids kind of deciding, figuring out what they should do in their lives. Because I kind of think if you can figure it out early, it's really useful. I mean, I know for myself, you know, that I. Well, okay, I got interested in physics and then computers and things, and I haven't been doing sort of pure physics or poor computers all my life. Exactly. But those were things that, that I knew I had a target. Like I knew age 12 or something. So what do you want to do when you're grown up? It's like, I want to be a physicist. Okay, well, by the time I was like 19, 20, I kind of was a physicist. And that was cool. And then I have to say at that point I was like, okay, am I going to do this for the rest of my life or am I going to do other stuff too? And I ended up doing other stuff too. And that was really nice. But having that target of I'm really spent my kind of teens, so to speak, really pushing towards this objective of I want to be a physicist, that was really nice in many ways. I mean, you know, people could say, well, did you miss out on all those things that crazy teenagers do? Yeah, I missed out on those things. Am I all upset that I missed out on those things? Nope, not for me. Maybe other people would be. But for me, it was, you know, getting to the thing that I really wanted to do and getting to the point where I could be sort of a. A fully functioning adult doing those kinds of things. It was very satisfying. And, you know, I wouldn't, wouldn't change that, so to speak. Let's see, the question here from X and then some other symbols asks, have you always been an excellent public speaker? Well, thanks for the compliment. I've done lots of public speaking in my life. I have to say it was again, one of these things where when I was a kid, I would not have identified that, oh, in the list of things you're good at, public speaking would not have entered yet. I did a lot of public speaking for all sorts of different reasons. And yeah, it seemed to work pretty well most of the time. I found that back in the day when I was in high school, went to a fancy high school in England and in some kind of modernization move, they had this thing that they would get the kids to run the morning assembly every, oh, I don't know, every week or Two. And so for some reason, me and one other person were always the only people who seemed to volunteer for this. Unfortunately, the person I often did this with, a good friend of mine, died young. I think he would have ended up as prime Minister or something in England, which was sort of his ambition. But unfortunately, he died young. But anyway, it was always surprising to me that, you know, that other people didn't volunteer for this. And in the sense, I was an implausible volunteer because I was kind of a techie, sciencey type kid. And why is this kid doing public speaking? Kinds of things. But I did, and I guess I got lots of practice with that. Although back in those days, one of the things that's interesting is you're talking to a group of people in a big cavernous room. And so a big part of the art of doing that is, you know, project your voice and so on. It's like no microphones, no, you know, none of this modern stuff. I'm not sure. I'm sure I've lost any of that skill, and I haven't had to use that in a zillion years now. But that was a large part of what one had to sort of think about is, you know, speaking distinctly and so on. Perhaps more so even than the content of what one had to say. I have found that my own efforts in public speaking are. It's sort of a strange thing because I find that I either do best if I have absolutely no script welcome in these live streams to a situation in which I have absolutely no script, so to speak, or in rare cases, particularly when I'm trying to compress a bunch of things that I want to say into a very short time where I've written out every single word. I haven't done much of that recently. I think I'm signed up to do some TED Talk type thing in a little while where I probably have to do that, even though it kind of pains me to do it, because you just can't fit a big complicated set of things to say reliably into whatever it is, 15 minutes or whatever. Unless, at least for me, if I have a lot of stuff to say, I'm not going to be able to put the pieces together kind of compactly enough to have it fit in that space unless I kind of write it out. So there's. For me, those are sort of the bimodal cases of either I really don't have, you know, it's really very off the cuff or it's very orchestrated, so to speak. And I think that's how I've always found it. You know, I found a speech that I gave that I wrote out when I was 12 years old whose content was a little bit cringy, but actually it was about AI as, amusingly enough, that was from 1972, with some points of view that I'm not sure I necessarily agree with anymore. But it is kind of amusing that some of the phraseology and the kind of presentation are sort of embarrassingly similar to what I might use today. And one of those one doesn't change much over time type situations. Look, I think in terms of. Of what. What I found in public speaking, I can say a few things. One thing that I found repeatedly is if I've got a live audience and the live audience is engaged, and it's kind of a sort of a warm room where there's a, you know, kind of a, oh, I don't know, lots of tiers of seats and you can kind of see people in all directions and so on, and people seem like they're paying attention. I do much better if it's a dead room and it's kind of all flat and you can barely see people. And it's kind of like I do much worse. And I really find that just the energy one gets from having an audience there that one is reacting to is really good. I mean, I suppose I've taught myself to be like, look at the camera. Think of it as an eye. And I can try to talk to you guys in a hopefully fairly energetic way. And that I've sort of taught myself to do that. But when it comes to a live audience, if the live audience is kind of dead, I find it really hard to sort of feel, at least feel like I'm doing a good job in public speaking, I have to say, when. I suppose sometimes it was years ago now, but the first times I was in some big public speaking venue and there were lights, which meant that I was talking to a completely black giant room. That really threw me for a loop the first time it happened. It's just such a strange thing because it's kind of like I'm. Okay, I'm. At least I'm talking to a camera. It's like a big eye. I'm talking to a room full of people. Okay, I understand that. It's very human. I'm talking to complete blackness. That something was difficult for me the first time that happened to me. And I think somehow the. Yeah, it's. I mean, do I have tips for public speaking? I don't know. It's, I think one thing is there are these sort of formulas for doing public speaking. I don't know any of them. And one time, for somewhat strange reasons, I said, okay, I'll do a couple of hours of kind of, you know, speaking coaching type stuff. And I was like, yeah, you know, I could learn to do things that way, but it will be super artificial. And I wouldn't feel, it wouldn't feel natural to me. And my tendency tends to be to say that any of these kind of devices that kind of are like, oh, you turn your head in this particular way. I've never learned to do any of that stuff, maybe to my detriment, but it doesn't feel authentic to me. And it would make me, I think, feel so kind of self conscious about what I'm doing that it would have a net negative effect. So a few thoughts there. Paolo asks. Tom Watson used to use the Think slogan to exhort employees to take everything into consideration. Can you share some things you do as a manager or CEO to create a culture of people who actually think? Yeah. I always thought it was interesting that IBM had this kind of Think motto even as they were deeply regimented in the way that they did things. Even though a lot of their success in a sense came from the deep orchestration of the IBM salesperson should wear a white shirt and should comport themselves in this or that way. That it was very, very orchestrated. Even though, and yet there was this kind of the Think slogan. You know, back in long ago, I did some consulting for a company called Thinking Machines Corporation, which made massively parallel computers. I think I even was somewhat responsible for the name that they ended up using for their company, but as a kind of a. I think an alternative name had been International Thinking Machines. And so they were going to be itm. And the joke that they had was that they would have a slogan that said business. Just like, you know, IBM has a slogan that says think. They're international Thinking Machines. They should have a slogan that says business. It might have been a good thing for them. But in any case, I think one way to encourage thinking is to model it, so to speak. That is to think oneself as a leader, to make it clear that one thinks and to think in public. And so I think for me, a lot of the things that I do, where I do internal meetings where I'm always thinking in public, many of them I live stream and people can see the thinking in public, so to speak, I think that really helps. I think that makes people realize that thinking is A good thing. And thinking is a thing that people are expected to do. I think when, you know, when people are in these meetings, when one's interacting with them, it's like, well, explain that to me. Why is that true? Oh, I don't know. I was just told that, well, that's kind of not good enough. You know, Tell me. You know, you got to learn why is it true and be able to explain it. You have to pass it through your brain. It's not good enough to just say, well, I got this information from so and so. Even though I'm leading this project, so and so told me this. I don't really understand it. I'm just passing it on to you. That to me is kind of not good enough. You kind of have to pass it through your brain and get it to the point where you yourself can explain it. You know, you really have understood it and you can, can stand behind it. I think that's, that's an important thing. I think that, yeah, I would say that's probably for me, the most important kind of thing is just sort of show thinking in action. And also by the very nature of what the company, our company tends to do, we're always doing things that haven't been done before. And there's a certain. That involves thinking. You know, I also, I suppose I can be quite critical of situations where people are bringing me things where they obviously didn't think about it, where it's kind of like the, I don't know, there are plenty of bad examples where it's like, oh, here's this piece of UX or something. We have a very good UX scoop these days. But, you know, and we've often, we've usually had a good UX group, but sometimes there have been times when people have said, here's a thing, and you look at it and you're like, wait a minute, you didn't think about this. That's the most important thing about this. How could you not have thought about that? And I think in these kinds of situations, my general personal principle is I don't sort of go after the individual and start sort of telling them that they're a loser as an individual. But I will go after the work that they do and say, look, you just didn't think about this. How come? And push quite hard on that. So I suppose those are things which try to encourage thinking because it's like, you're going to show up to this meeting, are you going to be able to explain what you're doing? Have you actually thought through what you're doing? And in a culture like our companies, the answer is typically yes. And that's kind of what people expect. Let's see. Okay. Stephen asks, says, and previously I've said that I personally learn most efficiently by doing small self initiated projects. How do you generate the project ideas? Could you give an example? Is there a systematic way to do this? Well, gosh, you know, tell me a fact or tell me an area and we'll, you know, we can talk about, you know, how to generate a question. I think, you know, I'm looking around here, there's some, there's some trees here and there's wind blowing. And you know, an immediate question that I might have is, you know, you hear the trees, you know, rustling in the wind. I don't actually know how that works. I don't know what the, you know, you've got a flexible thing that is the branch of the tree and you've got a bunch of leaves and you've got a gust of wind and you've got this thing that is going to be pushed back by the gust of wind and then when the gust is over, it's going to come back. And I know a little bit about kind of the spectrum of velocities and wind, but I'd be curious, something I'm not going to do because I don't have time, but I'd be curious to make a simple model for the structure of a tree and the gusts of wind and so on. And it's like, okay, how does that actually work? Simple, simple, very sort of trivial example. Another thing, I don't know, I can, I'm just looking around here at what I can see. That gives me sort of an inspiration for a question. Well, okay, here's another one. That question I would have, you know, I'm sitting outside and there's some traffic noise here and I guess I'm sort of curious. I'm aware of the fact that different frequencies of sound are absorbed differently by different kinds of things. And I'm aware that. And I'm kind of curious, you know, I don't even know for wavelengths, certain wavelengths of sound. You know, you'll hear a truck going by and it's got some low frequency sounds and so on. I don't know whether those, you know, those are presumably diffracting around trees and things like this. How does that actually work? You know, try and figure that out. These are, these are rather physicsy questions which I'm, you know, happen to be Wondering about as I'm just sitting here right now, I think, you know, the question is always, you've got things that you are ex. You know, you're exposed to what? You know, ask a question which is based on what of the things you're exposed to. You know, a funny thing is that kids ask questions all the time, particularly young kids are like, why does this work this way? Why does that work this way? And somehow people lose that skill. People are like, well, you know, I can't really ask the question because, gosh, it must be too complicated to know the answer. Well, sometimes the answer is complicated, but very often you can get at least some distance with that, you know. And I'm now, I'm hearing some seagulls in the background here, and I'm now quite wondering what, you know, they go squawk, squawk, squawk. I don't know what the purpose of that squawk is. It would be interesting to kind of model the, you know, one seagull squawks, does another one squawk? Do you get a whole squawk orchestra? How does that work? And you know what I mean? This is another type of sort of sciency question that one might ask the. Gosh, I'm, I'm, you know, I think given a field, maybe, maybe somebody can, can ask about them. I, I'm, I, I can try and come up with these things, but I would say, you know, channel the inner what would a kid ask? Type question. What's the obvious thing to ask? What's the thing that is so obvious nobody ever asked it. You know, what's the thing about, oh, why are you, you know, why does it work this way? Well, you know, maybe there's a good reason. Maybe people have known the reason for a long time. Or maybe it's like, actually nobody bothered to ask that. You know, I was confronted with something like this very recently. What on earth was it very recently? Why did nobody bother to ask this question? I forget what it was. Let's see, another question here from Jamie. Has live streaming changed any aspects of development meetings? How has it changed my workday? It's really, I would say that it's been very useful both because we get great suggestions from people in live streams when we live stream our software design review meetings and so on and our other, you know, our science meetings and so on. Um, it's been, it's been useful, it's been good for people, it's been very good internally for people. Say, I can find out what happened in that meeting, I just go look it up on YouTube or whatever. It's been useful in, in quite a few cases with people like getting a sense of our company, you know, hey, do I want to come work for this company? You know, I, I, what's it like? Okay, well, you can see a meeting, you know, and you get a sense of that. And is it for you, is it not for you? What would be involved in kind of adapting to that culture? I think in terms of the actual carrying out of the meetings, I would say maybe people are a little bit more kind of alert than they would otherwise be. There's a somewhat lower rate of oh, so and so wasn't paying attention and should have been type thing than there would be without live streaming. But I would say that's a minor effect. In terms of my workday. It really hasn't changed at all because I have scheduled meetings all the time. And we live stream the ones that we think might be of any external interest. I mean, there are lots that are kind of project kind of status meetings which maybe one day might be fun to live stream some of, but they're pretty internal. Kind of what's happened to this project and what depends on that and what should our strategy be for this? And those kinds of things, they're a little bit different in character, but for me personally, it's like meeting, meeting, meeting of these different kinds of things. I mean, the only thing that is sometimes in effect is that I tend to like to be walking for my first hour and a half of meetings in a day, a couple of hours of meetings in a day. And I haven't yet kind of crossed the bridge of live streaming while I'm walking. Maybe I will at some point, but it's a little bit too goofy for me to, to go for that. And it's also kind of like your arm gets awfully tired holding up your phone to kind of be, hello, I'm live streaming. But I think, and maybe actually I, there's no good reason. I haven't actually, I have live streamed sometimes when I'm walking, particularly on a treadmill when I have to walk inside. I have live streamed in some of those cases and I think that's probably been okay, but I haven't, I haven't crossed the bridge of when I'm walking outside and things live streaming. I probably should. I don't really think there's anything technically wrong with that, but I just haven't done. So let's see, Internet asks, are there any classic novels or non Fiction books that have helped sort of form my particular mindset. I books that soothed anxiety about potential negative implications from scientific advancements. How do you stay brave? Well, the most important thing to say is that my internal self image does not consider me brave, risk taking or anything like that. I consider myself to have taken essentially no risks in my life. And I know this to be many other people I know who do things that are kind of out there and sort of kind of sticking your neck out. Externally perceived as high risk, they also have this feature that internally they don't perceive that there is risk to what they do. They always have enough confidence to say, hey, I'm going to do this, I'm going to make it work. There's no doubt I'm going to make it work. Now, you know, having said that, it's like I'm going to make it work, but I'm going to think of the 20 things that could go wrong. It's not like I'm going to say I'm going to make it work. And it's just the stuff that could go wrong that's not real. You absolutely think about the stuff that could go wrong, but you don't have the sort of the image of, oh no, it's too difficult for me, I'm never going to be able to do it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. For me, it's always like it's going to work, okay, I have to be clever about this and I have to watch out for this thing that might make it go off track and so on. But internally it's always kind of, you know, I know it's going to work, I'm confident it's going to work. That's always my, my internal self, self view. I don't think I would say that that leads to, I mean, the fact that things I've done have actually worked out gradually over the years and decades sort of built up that I feel more confident. And even when I'm like, you know, when I see a new thing that I'm trying to do, I certainly am like, yeah, this is hard, this is hard. You know, it's going to be difficult, but I don't think, oh my gosh, I'm never going to be able to do this. I'm always like, yep, I'm going to be able to make it work. It may be difficult, but I'm going to be able to make it work. Now probably there are projects where I've said to myself, I'm just not going to do this because I just can't imagine it's going to work. But once I kind of decide I can do it, it's like I'm convinced I'm going to be able to do it. So I don't kind of concern myself about that. I think in terms of should I do it? Are there things that I might do which might sort of make the world a worse place type thing? Yeah, I mean, I try to avoid doing things which I think will make the world a worse place. Fortunately, most of the things I'm most interested in doing aren't of that character. I don't think, at least when you build technology, you can do things where my tendency is I'll build technology, that is, I try to build the best technology I can, knowing that there'll be good uses, there might be bad uses for it. The only thing that I'll tend to do is if there's a piece of technology where the only uses I can imagine for it are bad uses. It's like, I'm not going to build that now. There are times in my life where I've had complicated moments as one. I think I may have talked about this before in, when was it? Early ish, 1980s, where I thought I had figured out a scheme for detecting neutrino emissions from orbit. So neutrinos don't interact very much. They can pass all the way through the Earth and so on. But I thought I had this way of having kind of a coherent detector of neutrinos so that you build this particular thing. Even though these neutrinos don't interact much, they interact enough in this particular kind of thing that you could detect them. Okay, so what? Sounds very nerdy. Well, the so what is that nuclear reactors always produce neutrinos and nuclear reactors are what power nuclear submarines. And a big piece of the sort of Cold War story was there are these nuclear submarines that are prowling around under the oceans and nobody knows where they are. Well, at least the bad guys don't know where they are. And so if you can detect neutrinos from orbit, then immediately, suddenly it's kind of like X raying the oceans and you see all the nuclear submarines. And I had this moment when I think I figured out how to do this. What on earth am I going to do with this? Yes, in that particular case, I was, I would say, quite sort of concerned. What am I going to do? What should you do with this information? It's like, okay, tell it to somebody in the US Defense department, post it somewhere for the whole world. What do you do? Well, I was actually quite happy in that case when it turned out that you can't really do this in practice, at least in the current state of technology and so on. So it was a question I didn't really have to answer, but that was an example of that kind of thing, I would say. There are other cases. Like in WolframAlpha, for example, there's this moment when we were like, oh, well, people can use it to cheat on their homework. And people can tell that people use WolframAlpha for a homework because the steps that it generates are kind of fairly deterministic steps. Well, we could have randomized them more. We could randomize them more. Decided not to do that because I didn't see an upside, and I could only see kind of a downside to that. It didn't seem useful for educational purposes. It seemed only like a thing that was going to be kind of a disruptive kind of thing in a rather negative way. All right, I should probably wrap up here and. Yeah, lots of. Lots of interesting questions for another time. So thank you all for your questions and look forward to talking to you another time. Bye for now.