Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (December 20, 2023)

Sa. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Q and A about business, innovation and managing life. Probably one of our last ones for the year here. So let's see. I see a bunch of questions saved up. So one from Lola here. How do you handle the pressure of deadlines? Is it better to turn in something rushed or unfinished or complete it fully with the risk of it being late? Gosh. Lots of things to say about this. You know, I think one of the terrible things about some aspects of modern education is people are taught that you're just going to do things in the boxed amount of time that you have and you'll do the best you can, even if that means you can never actually do it perfectly. In my experience, in sort of the working world or something, it's typically important to do things, many kinds of things. It's really worth doing them well and doing them as well as one can. And I think this idea of there's this boxed amount of time, we'll do the best we can in that amount of time is sort of a somewhat deadly concept that is somehow related to standardized testing. And it's related to if you're trying to see how well can people do and you say, well, solve all these math problems, you've just got an hour and it's known that nobody's going to be able to do them all in an hour. That's a good way to kind of potentially, I don't know if it actually works well because it may be testing for things that aren't what you think you're testing for, but sort of to weed out the weaker from the stronger, because the stronger will be able to get through it in an hour or get through eight questions in an hour, and the weaker will only be able to get through two questions in an hour. And it's sort of a way of separating those kinds of things by. But it forces everybody to do an imperfect job. And I think that's really unfortunate because I think that it's great when it's much more satisfying. And typically the value of having the really perfect finished thing is much higher than having the kind of sloppy, roughly done thing in most cases. I mean, there are certainly exceptions to that in lots of parts of kind of the working world. But I would say that in general, the value of having the really good finished thing is very high relative to the unfinished job. Now, I have to say there are lots of situations where sometimes if you spend too much time on something, it might actually get worse. I've noticed that when I write things If I try and write something and then I revise it and I write it again, I write it again. The thing started off potentially when I wrote it the first time comparatively quickly, it had life to it. By the time I've rewritten it five times, it sounds like it was written by an LLM and it sounds very wooden and very formulaic and so on. I should say written by a late 20, 23 LLM. They'll probably get better again. I think they've been kind of forced into a state of, of somewhat formulaic, kind of don't say anything wrong, type or don't say anything that might offend people type setup. But any case, more seriously, this thing about sometimes things get worse if you kind of grind them further. Particularly with things like. In my experience with things like English writing, it gets more wooden the more you kind of say, well, do I really, you know, is it really quite right? I can polish that word more, I can do this, I can do that. And pretty soon the thing is very, very dead. Now, another thing I've noticed is the following thing. If you say, oh, I'm going to, I don't know, we're going to market some product or I'm going to give a talk, and you don't know all the facts at the time when you're first thinking about doing these kinds of things, you're saying, I'm going to write the marketing material, let's say, but I don't really know what the product is yet, or I'm going to write a description of some new version of whatever. I don't quite know what that version is yet. Well, you can start writing it, but realistically you're going to waste your time because it's only at the point where everything's sort of come together that you know what you want to say. Same thing can happen in my experience with giving talks. You say, I'm going to figure out this talk. I'm going to prepare it very carefully. And then you show up and you see the audience and you realize, oh my gosh. Or you show up an event and you see something about the nature of the audience. You say, oh my gosh, this thing that I so carefully prepared, it just doesn't fit. And it's actually going to be worse if I go through with what I prepared than if I do something that is much more quickly put together or winged or whatever, but is a better fit to the actual situation that I have at hand. So I think one of the challenging things is, at least for me is what's worth preparing in advance and what should be left to the last minute. Because it will actually be better if you leave it to the last minute and you know all the facts, so to speak, because they're only going to come in at the last minute. Now then the next question is, well, do you estimate correctly? Like for example, yesterday I was doing an end of year talk for our company and I had a lot of stuff that I wanted to talk about and I didn't start preparing it, I will say, until probably midnight the night before. So I had kind of two hours because that's my rhythm of when I go to sleep and so on. And I pretty much made it. It was a little bit of a cram things in kind of situation. But it was probably better that I did that because the fact is that the material I was going to use, you know, it hadn't really, it wasn't, it wasn't all in until pretty close to when I started working on, on producing the thing I was going to produce. And the question is, what was it? Could I been off? You know, I knew I had about two hours available to prepare the thing. Maybe I would be totally off and maybe it was going to be a six hour job to prepare it and then it would be a bad situation. I have to say I don't usually think carefully about, oh, it's going to take me this amount of time to prepare this, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but somehow it seems to usually work out. I've noticed that. I have to say when I give talks and things, most of the time I give them without much preparation at all because I'm usually talking about things where I hopefully kind of know what I'm talking about. And I find that the talk is better if I just talk about it rather than having kind of carefully figured out exactly what I'm going to say. But particularly in the past or in different situations, I would prepare talks more carefully. And then I kind of knew a bunch of rules of thumb of if the talk is going to take X amount of time, it takes roughly that amount of time to prepare it and so on. I think in terms of, you know, I'm not a. Well, this question of, You know, I think the original question was is it better to rush and make sure you get it in on time versus to do it carefully and be late? It depends on what you're doing. If you're giving a talk at time X, you're going to be on giving that talk at time X. And whatever you have prepared is what you have. If you're going to be developing some product and it's going to be released to the world and you didn't yet set up, oh, the announcement date is X and we can't possibly move it, then you might be better off just saying. Well, I thought I was going to get it finished by this time, but I'm going to let it go longer because then it's going to be better. I mean, I know with things that I write, for example, I very often will have a. Well, I'd kind of like to get it done by this time, but unless there's a very specific reason for a deadline, it's kind of more. Well, I'll kind of just keep going until I have what I'm satisfied with. I have to say. This whole question about things getting done by the time of their deadlines. I have noticed that when there's a long time available to get something done, it's actually much less efficient, often for somebody like me at least than when there's a pretty short deadline or I don't even start working on it until there is a pretty near term deadline. And then I really concentrate and I really get the thing done. And when it's kind of like, well, they can do a little bit of it here and a little bit of it there, it's much less efficient because often when you're working on something, at least for me, you, you eventually get your mind into that thing. Takes a little while to get kind of ramped up for the thing. Once you're ramped up, then it's sufficient to work on it. If it's kind of like, well, I'll work on it for half an hour today, an hour tomorrow, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Every time you get into it to try and do it, you end up with kind of having this restart period and it takes you half an hour to get back in gear and then your time is up and so on. And what I find is that the value of, for example, when you're doing things like writing, the value of being coherent is much higher than even having a bit more time to do it. This stop start thing is very bad for producing a coherent result. And I think for me, I tend to have some awareness of if I've done something and I get into a certain level of state about doing that thing, that state will be preserved for maybe a day or two. I kind of still have sort of remember what I was thinking and I can kind of get back to it. Easily by the time a week has gone by, that level of state has sort of decayed and I only kind of remember the bigger features of what was there. Now if I'm working on projects and reviewing projects and things like that, like I just was doing one today where, you know, I asked at the beginning of the meeting, I said, when did we last look at this project? The answer was a year ago. Well, it turns out I still remembered the big picture points about this project pretty well from a year ago, but the details and what had been said about this or that I wasn't going to remember. But it was, that was something where I knew there was a certain level of sort of what I could remember about and a certain level of, well, I'd have to go back and look at notes and things to know what was going on. But for me there are certain kinds of projects where if I can keep the pieces of doing them sort of close enough in time, it's as if they were kind of all done coherently and if it ends up being longer time, I have this whole restart period that's needed to kind of get in gear with the project again. So I don't know. A few thoughts on the kind of. Getting projects done. I mean, as I say, for me, sometimes having too much time to do something is quite deadly and the results are actually much worse than it being a more intense kind of thing. The question of whether you're in a situation where, oh my gosh, I just can't get it together in the time available for some reason that seems to happen much less often than one might think, given how late I sometimes leave it to get started on things and so on. And I think that's because one has developed some intuitive sense of roughly how long it's going to take and, and don't make that many mistakes in terms of, oh, I've got to start it by this time and so on. A few thoughts anyway. Let's see. Chris comments we are creatures of motion, not stagnation. Not just physically, but also in relation to careers and life events and so on. You know, I think it's very personal person dependent. I mean, there are people where they kind of continually need some injection of excitement or they just don't do anything. And there are people who like to lead this more monastic like life where everything is kind of quite regular and they don't want those kinds of perturbations. But I have noticed that there's a certain sort of natural timescale that people have in different kinds of things they're doing. So there might be somebody who is like, I'm really excited about doing this. They get really good at doing it. For a decade they do it and then you realize. And they realize perhaps, but it's sometimes more obvious from the outside that it's just kind of not that exciting anymore. They kind of know exactly what to do. It's kind of like the fire isn't there anymore. And then if they end up starting to do something slightly different, it's like, wow, now I'm re energized. One sees that the timescales are different for different people, different situations and so on. And often they're a little hard to recognize from the inside, I would say. And also sometimes as a practical matter, sort of navigating the world. To move from this one thing that you were good at doing to another thing is non trivial. I mean, you've built a career doing a particular thing. You have, you make a good living doing that. You've got a whole structure around doing it. And you realize I'm kind of lost interest in this. I want to do something different. How do you jump to the different thing? I think a lot of people, myself somewhat included, you develop a quotes hobby. I mean, for me, very little stays as a pure hobby. It usually becomes a real activity that I do. You know, like I used to do business as a hobby when I was mostly working as an academic and so on. And then I do business for a living and I do sort of science for a hobby and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, that's a good way of sort of simulating the let's do something different type thing. And I think that one of the things that I often find surprising, I can't really explain it, is see people who are excited about doing some intellectual kind of thing, science, whatever else. And they say, but I had to take this job doing some more as they see it, mundane kind of activity. And it's like, well, why don't you have a hobby doing this intellectual thing? Kind of. Usually the answer isn't very good. I mean, sometimes they do have that hobby and that's well and good. But sometimes the answer is, well, you know, by the time I finish doing this stuff, I'm kind of tired and I just watch television or whatever else. And it's like, look, if you're really excited about doing this intellectual thing or whatever, you know, just find the time to do it. And I suppose one thing that I've noticed At least for myself, is when there's something I really want to do, somehow I managed to find the time to do it, even though I'm busy with lots of kinds of things. So for example, in my own case, I CEO a company for a living and that's a full time job in many respects. But I also like doing science, I like doing a bunch of other things, and somehow I managed to find the time to do those things. And I think it's more a question of if you want to do them enough. Those interstitial periods of time when it's like, well, I kind of, you know, I'm sort of done with my work for the day, what am I going to do type thing. Well, if there's something you really want to do, you go and do it. And it isn't just like, I'm sort of counting the minutes until I go to sleep type thing. It's like, jump in and do that thing. And I think that that's. So, you know, that is this question about sort of do people end up doing things which they end up finding sort of where they kind of stagnate doing those things? I would say that people can be very happy doing a particular thing, getting really good at it, they really like it, they keep doing it for a long time. Maybe it's their whole career. Maybe they're very happy doing that their whole life. I mean, I've been doing sort of computational language design now for 45 years and I still like it and I expect to keep on doing it. And it has a certain, while its outline may be the same, the details of what one is doing, one is continually sort of discovering new territory, so to speak. And so it's something where there are things which can have a very long time scale. There are things where, by the way, in terms of this question about is it internally new or not, there are things where you do some activity, I don't know, maybe it's teaching. And from the outside it might look like, well, you've taught that course 30 times. But it still could be the case that from the inside, the way that you feel about it is it's new every time. It's different students, it's different, you end up saying things differently, it feels different. And so similarly, if you look at my case or something doing computational language design from a zoomed out point of view, oh my gosh, you've been designing functions that do particular things and it's the same thing for 45 years, but internally it's absolutely not the Same thing, because it's a different function every time after I've done one of these functions that one is done, and then we move on to another one and so on. So I think it has to be from the inside that you're viewing. Is there change or is there not? And another thing, another comment about sort of stagnation versus not for somebody like me. I have a very, in a sense, simple life in the sense that I, you know, most of the time I don't travel terribly much. I, you know, eat the same thing for breakfast every day. I have the same kind of daily rhythm, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I do very different things, sort of intellectually different days, and I'm doing different projects, and that's the place where I'm getting the kind of the sense of things happening, so to speak, rather than, oh, I'm going to have the excitement of eating a different thing for breakfast, different days type thing. Now, I don't know, I've wondered about for myself. You know, I do do a certain amount of traveling and a certain amount of sort of activities different from ones I've done before. I'm always very, you know, when people invite me to do things, it's kind of like, well, have I done five of those things just like that before? Or is this something new and different, which might be an interesting experience where I would learn something? And the latter is the one I'm much more likely to do. But to what extent is it the case that sort of traveling and doing something different stimulates me versus just distracts me? And I think in some periods of my life, I've had the conclusion that it just distracts me. And for example, in 2019, right before the pandemic hit, I pretty much decided I was going to stop doing travel, going to conferences and things like this. It just doesn't do that much. For me, the cost of disruption is higher than the value of stimulation, so to speak, in that particular time in my life. And for me. But I think these are variable knobs for different people, you know, does it. Sometimes it's like you realize, you know, for example, a good test is if you, if you do creative work, for example, you say, you know, what made me do this piece of creative work? Did I. Did I end up, if I just look at the pattern, did I end up doing this creative work just after I was at this conference or talking to these people or whatever? Did it really stimulate me? Or was it better that I had just complete peace and tranquility and, and I wasn't really. There was no outside stimulus and I just was able to sit and think by myself. And is that what led me to do this? I think those are the kinds of questions to ask. And I think it's probably different for different people. For myself, for example, it's been different at different times in my life. Sometimes I think it helps to have some amount of kind of not just a homogeneous and now you're going to spend the rest of your life doing this thing, but to have these sort of waypoints where, you know, I want to do this before that happens and so on. I have to say I have seen situations where people say, like people who do science and research and things like this, they say, gosh. And some people say, gosh, if I could only just do this 100% of my time, just think about, think deep thoughts all the time, I'd be a happy person. Turns out when people get into a situation where they can do that, it actually often doesn't work out very well. It's kind of like, oh my gosh, it's kind of like having a life sentence of I've got to think deep thoughts. There's never going to be anything else for me to do other than just think these deep thoughts. And I have to say that I think that having sort of other things that one is doing, whether they are. I mean, for me, for example, the fact that I do things that try to be practical and make technology and tools and businesses and so on, I think that definitely helps me and stimulates what I might do in creative science and things like that. It provides somehow more of a. Oh, I don't know. I think if it was just sort of a uniform slab of I've got all this time and I'm just going to think about science. I don't think I would do it as efficiently. And I found that to some extent in the 1990s, I worked on my big book, New Kind of Science. I spent a decade and a bit more working on that particular project, I suspect, and I really tried to block out other kinds of, sort of outside things, things that would take my time. I think that one feature of that project was I really had to be in the project and really keeping the sort of state of. It was a complicated kind of state of, kind of what I was doing and that was important. But it's possible that if I had kind of more things going on, the project might have actually more things that I was allowing myself to do. The project might have finished Faster? I'm not sure. An interesting question. I don't really know. Let's see. Richard is commenting. Parkinson's Law is the adage that the work will expand to fill the time allotted for its completion. Yes, I have certainly noticed that phenomenon both in other people and occasionally in myself, that somehow the the sort of converse of if you've got this amount of time, somehow you manage to fit the work into that amount of time seems to be a thing that works more is more significant for me. Let's see. A few questions here, which it seems like I might have talked about before. Aaron is asking, can you discuss working with people versus working as a hermit? Did I get lonely during my time working on my new kind of science book and so on? I think I've talked a bit about that before. But I have to say that it, I mean, for me, I am something of a people person. I like being around some people, but whether I want those people to be sort of involved with the intense project that I'm doing, that's sort of all in my head. Or whether I'm more interested in being in interacting with those people about other kinds of things. I have to say quite often the project that's in my head is something I really want to just be on my own doing. And when other people are kind of involved with, can often slow it down unless I can carve off pieces of what has to be done, where I can kind of delegate those pieces to people and get them done. But kind of the I'm not a very good sort of pure collaborative worker. I tend to, you know, I tend to like, once I understand it, I'm going to go off and do it, rather than it being something where it's kind of like sharing that load in that way. Let's see. Gosh. Prabh is commenting. I learned recently that Ramanujan, when he was in India back in probably 1910 or so, was discouraged from going to Cambridge because crossing the ocean was interpreted as leaving one's identity behind. How to manage this kind of thing? Well, I mean, I myself, I grew up in England. I came to the US when I went to graduate school, which I happened to do when I was 18 years old. And I think probably the cultural differences between the US and the UK are probably much smaller than the ones from, well, Ramanujan wasn't coming from that obscure a place in India, but probably those cultural differences were significantly larger than the ones I saw. I have to say I think that for me personally, I was quite attracted to what I perceived as being kind of the American land of opportunity kind of theory of things, as opposed to, at the time, the kind of British, you know, it's all in the past type thing kind of view of things. So for me, it was kind of like, look, I'm much happier being in a situation where sort of people are thinking about the future, so to speak, because that's what I'm interested in doing. I think it is true that it's certainly the case that there are things. Where there are sort of features of British life that. And ways of talking about things and things people care about and so on. That one, you know, really, if you try and feed those to Americans, so to speak, they'll be like, what are you talking about? You know, it's. It's a different. It's a different kind of thing. Now, of course, I'm so. So out of date with my British culture at this point that I'm sure those things, people in England would look at me and say, what are you talking about? And if they were, you know, less than sort of 50 years old or something, they'd just be totally mystified because those were things that, yes, they were a thing in England in the 1960s, but they're not even a thing there anymore. So, you know, it is the case that there are things where there are kinds of, I don't know, conversations, points of view, things like that, that one might have, that one can. In the kind of environment in which one grew up, so to speak, one can expect to have people understand those things. You go to a different environment, people don't necessarily understand those things. They might understand different things that you might be more interested in, but they won't necessarily understand those kinds of things. I think there's probably a bigger effect in countries where there is more cultural homogeneity and where people are like, as soon as you say this, everybody knows you mean that. I mean, I know in England, for example, there would be conversations you could have with people that were so nuanced that in the American way, at least back in the day, one of the features that I noticed was in the US People would kind of say what they meant. In England, sometimes they would say, well, I just couldn't say, what does that mean? Who knows? And things like this. But if you knew the kind of nuance of British culture, you could tell what that meant. But in the American way of doing it, it was just like, I don't know what you're talking about. And I think this is a feature of the US being a more heterogeneous society, so to speak, that unless people say what they mean, it's like nobody's going to understand because the person with, you know, with that background is just that, you know, the, the translation layer isn't. You have to, you have to say it explicitly or nobody's going to get it because they're not sort of steeped in the same. In the same nuances that you were. So, I mean, it is surely the case that, you know, you go to a different place, you lose the kind of the nuance of where you started and, you know, that's a thing. And maybe you like the place where you end up. Maybe you really like the nuance where you started. And certainly that's a choice people make. And, you know, some people, I think, find it. I mean, for me, as I say, at this point, I've blown it because as I say, I'm so out of date with, with my sort of British nuance that I'm not even sure. The kind of nuanced conversations that you could have in the 1960s, for example, I suspect they would be incomprehensible today because of the time that's elapsed, not because of sort of. It might even be the same people, but it's just like we've come to expect a different way of doing things. I would always notice that, you know, talking about, for example, the British American difference, back in the day, there would be ads that would run on television in, in the UK that were, you know, very nuanced. They barely mentioned the product, they didn't say why it was good, all these kinds of things. And the, and they would be ads where you look at them, you say, this wouldn't work in the us People would just look at the ad and they say, what the heck is this about? And a different situation. I have to say, talking of specifically of India, I know the one time I visited there, I was struck by the fact that there would be ads that would say things like, this is the best apartment building in the city type thing, which is a level of directness of ad that just doesn't play in the. You know, you say that in the U.S. people kind of roll their eyes and are cynical about it, but presumably, I don't know, I don't know that culture. But it was a striking thing to me to notice that there were ads like that that sort of said things with that level of, Gosh, let's see. Well, lots of questions here. Connor asks here thoughts about making Big changes in one's life, how does one approach them? Are there techniques that I've come to rely on to guide me in those sorts of things? You know, I suppose I. I've led a simple life, he says, and you know, the number of really big changes. I don't know, I mean, I suppose I. I suppose there are things that I've. That you, many people would think of as big changes. I, I tend not to think of them as big changes. But I suppose for me one thing that certainly can be useful to me is there's something that might happen or whatever. It's kind of like you imagine the worst and you figure out how you would remediate the worst and why it might not be so bad after all. And then that's a good way for me at least. I mean, it's personality dependent thing, but that's for me a good way to sort of feel better about what's being done. I suppose for me, another thing that's always the case is that action I always find much better than inaction, so to speak. In other words, if there's some issue and it's kind of like, well, I don't know what's going to happen with this and I'm concerned about how it might come out or whatever else it's like, look, if I'm doing something thing then it's. I'm trying to figure something out, I'm poking at this, I'm doing that. The action for me is in some sense comative. If I'm just sitting there and waiting for fate to take its course, that is much more stressful to me than if I'm scurrying along trying to make my own fate. Even if in fact really fate is going to take its course. For me it's useful to be sort of doing things that I at least believe could change that fate, so to speak. And I think similarly in kind of the. That's sort of related to, you know, there is some piece of fate that is arriving, so to speak and to think through, well, if that happens, what do I do in that case? And to be realizing that well, there's something I could do in that case and it's for me is a lot more is sort of comative in a setting like that, I suppose in the kind of make big changes category. One of the things that I find is when you do something for the first time, at least for me, I often don't get it right. And it's kind of. So sometimes there are cases where I'll do something. And you really only get to do it once. So that's difficult. But there are cases where, for whatever reason, you get to do it more than once. And you realize the second time around you do it much better than the first time around. I'll give you a big example. In my life, I built this system called SMP back in 1979, this kind of a precursor of Mathematica and Morphin language. And I built it, worked on it for a few years, then in 1986 started working on what's our current technology stack. And the fact is, the second time around, I didn't make a bunch of the mistakes that I made the first time around. Same thing could happen in, oh, I don't know, I'm in some setting where I'm dealing with, I don't know what's a good example, some situation with people where I'm dealing with a different kind of person than I've dealt with before. I'm dealing with some. And I realize, I have some conversation or whatever, and I realize afterwards, you know what, there was an obvious thing I could have said or done and I didn't do it. And that's sort of because I was doing it for the first time. By the time I come back to do it for the second time, I don't make that mistake again. And then I, you know, I do a better job. So I think it's this question about when you make big changes, if you can be in a situation where you kind of get to try the change. Let's say you're considering, oh, I'm considering moving to place X. Right. Maybe you get the opportunity to, well, try it out for, you know, rent a place for a month there or something and try it out and learn what this neighborhood is actually like or whatever else it is before you jump in and you spend all your money buying that grand, whatever it is to be there. Because in fact, you'll discover things that were. However much homework you do, you'll end up discovering things on the ground that were not what you expected. Not because necessarily the facts you didn't know, but maybe your reaction to the facts was different than you expected. I give an example of that in my life, at least in designing computational kinds of things. It's like sometimes you're designing some user interface, you're designing some piece of functional design, and you kind of have a theory for what it's going to be like. I've been doing these kinds of things for a really long time. So I've got a lot of experience and I should be able to say, you know, it's just gonna, it's gonna feel right, it's gonna work, or it's not gonna feel right, it's not gonna work. But often I'm in a situation where I say, I really don't know, you gotta try it and see. And you know, I see the same thing with, for example, graphic designers, even very experienced ones. It's, you know, you say, well, I say, I think that should be a brighter shade of green or something. And they'll say, and rather than saying definitively you're right, you're wrong, they'll just try it. And then everybody will say, well, yeah, okay, that works this way or that way. It's hard to imagine these things and it's hard to imagine one's reaction to these things. And so I think in the case of sort of life changes, it can be something where if you get a chance to test it and to understand your reaction to that thing, that's a very useful thing. I suppose the same for myself. There are situations where I might be in some situation. Like an example for me is, you know, I'll go to some event and I'll be involved in some panel discussion. Okay. So I've learned I don't do very well in panel discussions. I just, you know, unless they're about topics where I sort of haven't thought about it terribly much because I end up being, well, you know, it's, it's, it's a bad intersection of, of kind of me being a forceful personality versus me having lots of things to say versus whatever else. Doesn't usually work very well. But I needed to experience that. I could have thought about it in theory and it's like, well, yes, I could have an interesting conversation in that situation, but in practice it doesn't work. And it's one of those things where if you can try it first, it's a win. Let's see, EG asks, is there value to stimulating and inspiring people other than oneself in spite of the delays in one's personal research or other endeavors? Again, I think it's a very person dependent thing. I mean, for me, when I was younger, I was completely uninterested in education and, or at least I, I liked explaining things, but I wasn't interested in sort of the process of, for example, for kids or something like that. Kind of seeing education unfold. Just wasn't interested. Even when I was a professor, I wasn't interested in that. I'm sure if rate my professors had been out and about in those times, I would have gotten some terrible scores. Well, at least for some things. Fortunately I wasn't a professor of that kind for terribly long. But in any case, the thing that. And later in my life I have really been very much interested in inter education and I find it stimulating to be around young people, kids, whatever else, they ask interesting questions, they get me to try and express myself in different ways and so on. And I found it very stimulating. I would say that for example, doing these live streams, I find this fun and stimulating for myself. You know, you could say, well, I take, take this hour and instead of spending my time chatting with you all, you know, I could be sitting and trying to figure something out. I'm pretty sure that the time I spend chatting with you all will make it faster for me to do whatever it was that I was trying to figure something out on. Why is that? Somehow I suppose I've noticed for me at least, and I think probably for other people, when you get a certain degree of momentum and you're doing things, you're kind of using your mind, things are happening that that momentum carries through to other things you do also, I would say in this particular situation or these kinds of education types of things, it just forces you to think about things you weren't otherwise thinking about. And that often succeeds in unlocking things that you were wondering about where you didn't quite figure it out. And then you try and explain it to someone. I found that a very useful technique when I've sort of understood something and then I try and explain it to someone and maybe in the extreme case a kid or something like that, and you realize, and as you're explaining it kind of the momentum of the explanation gets you to sort of bash through some, some logjam that you had and you end up saying something that is a reasonable explanation that you just hadn't internalized before. And so it's really a positive thing. But I mean for myself it's. I, for whatever reason find it sort of interesting and stimulating to kind of help other people realize their potential. I don't know, I can't explain from a sort of a theoretical foundational point of view why I like that, but I like that. And even though it, in a sense, sometimes those are people one's mentoring who are part of a company one's running or whatever else. And then I suppose it does have a somewhat direct sort of payback, but in many cases it does not. But I've somehow I mean, I suppose every one of us is built to have certain things they like and certain things they don't. For me, I find that a fulfilling activity that I find personally energizing and personally satisfying and so on. And I think that different people are different. I mean, I suppose it is a. For example, some people. Let's talk about, you know, charity, philanthropy, those kinds of things. You know, it's. Some people say, look, I really like giving money away. It just makes me feel. Feel good. I have to say. My own experiments on that with myself doesn't do a thing for me. It doesn't, you know, in a case where there is some specific thing that is that, you know, where I say this, if you spend money on this, then something will happen. And I've done that. The fact that we provide Wolfram Alpha as a free thing in the world is basically a piece of philanthropy. And there are many things like that that I've done. We've done where it's, look, I'm going to spend some money and we're going to put something out there in the world. And I find it very fulfilling that that thing is out there in the world and lots of people can use it. In the case of when it's like, let me write a check to this charity, and that doesn't happen to do anything for me. For other people it does, but it doesn't for me. And I think that's. That's something that is, You know, that's a case where sort of sometimes people have the feeling doing something for someone else is positive, and I find that, too. But I find there are some ways of doing that, like mentoring and so on, that I find very personally fulfilling. And there are other ways, like writing a check, that I don't find fulfilling. So, you know, I, I think that, you know, there are things where I could imagine, you know, if, if somebody said, why don't you sort of help do some manual labor that will help some particular sort of person, whatever else, not, you know, I don't know. Actually, I haven't, I haven't tested that one for myself. My guess is that would not be a thing that, that I would be terribly into, as opposed to, you know, why don't you spend some time trying to help this person sort of unravel their life situation or figure out how they can learn about such and such a thing. And I'll be like, you know, I know that those are things that I find satisfying, so those are more my kind of. And those things help energize the other things that I do. I think somehow that, yeah, I mean I think there are things which tend to be common to different people. Of it's for many people kind of feeling that you're doing something that somehow benefits other people is something that helps sort of justify one's existence for oneself, so to speak. And I think that's true of a great many people. And it manifests in different ways for different people. I don't think one could say that it should manifest the same way for everyone. And that's at least my observation about that. Let's see. Ethan asks a very specific question. When is version 14 of Wolfram language coming out? What's its single coolest machine learning feature? Gosh. I happen to see that the builds we do when you build software, we do overnight builds of candidates for what we are releasing or if things were testing. And I think I saw this morning that the, the version 14 builds were approved, which means they'll come out as soon as, as soon as everybody isn't going on vacation, so to speak. So I think very beginning of January, it was going to be this week, but I think we. It was and maybe because they were, they were I think approved today. It might have been, but I don't think it's possible anymore because I think that the whole process of releasing a version of a piece of software just has enough extra tentacles of telling people and getting people running on machines and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that it isn't realistic or sensible to do it right before holidays. Actually, there's other reasons that have to do with. Well, what if something goes wrong and you've got to be able to sort of. Well, it isn't quite man the telephones. That's the thing from another age. But you've got to be able to respond if things go wrong. So it's a good idea not to make a major release right before people are going to be on vacation. Let's see. Paula is asking how do holidays generally affect work, life? I don't know. All four of my children are showing up. That's a good, that's a, that's a thing for me. It. I think I, I tend to find because I do sort of a mixture of working with other people and trying to make things happen on products and things like that together with things that are individual sort of projects that are pretty much just me. It's that that tends that, that rhythm that that balance tends to shift on holiday days versus other days. And I have to Say, I suppose it's an admission of something terribly workaholic. But our company, because it's distributed around the world, there are plenty of days where it's like, it's a holiday in the US but it's not a holiday in Europe or Asia or wherever else. And so, okay, on that day, I'm going to concentrate a bunch of work that I'm doing with people in those other places where it isn't a holiday. So that's probably the admission of a workaholic, but that tends to be my point of view. But it's a question of, I like my work, so I tend to do it when I can. Let's see. Jamie asks, how do you manage working in a global company? What advice do you have for scheduling around time zones and such? I'm not the one at the front lines doing time zone scheduling. I know that it's often complicated challenges to get sort of. To sort of for meetings that we want to have to sort of get all the right people in the right place at the right time. I have to say, when people end up being, well, I'm going to move to a different part of the world. Kind of part of the deal, at least for our company, is, look, you can live wherever you want, but the meetings are going to be at these times, and you should show up to them clearly. If we knew we're hiring somebody in some other time zone, that's a little bit of a different story. I would say that in. I'm trying to think about my own case here. Sometimes it's kind of cool that things can happen while one's asleep, so to speak. There can be things happening in some other part of the world. By the time one wakes up, something will have been done. I'm not sure that I have. You know, one thing that helps us these days is that, you know, we're using zoom and things to do most of our meetings, and we're recording them. And so it's really pretty common if somebody wasn't there, that they can listen to the recording, look at the transcript, look at a summary. Those kinds of things we also tend to have for the meetings that are sort of about projects, we will have notes from those meetings and people can look at those asynchronously. And that's helpful when people are kind of in a different time zone. And you don't have to have actually everybody hearing the thing at the same time at the same moment. Let's see. Oh, my. Somebody's asking, what will be my 20, 23 year end review. You know, it's. It's actually a thing I'm really bad at. If you ask me what happened in 2023, I know what happened, but I couldn't tell you how it was aligned necessarily with kind of the borders of this particular year. I mean, I have to think a bit to realize that. I mean, I suppose at the beginning of 2023, you know, the AIs were, were, you know, their spaceship was still a little bit off the ground, it hadn't quite landed. You know, the thing that was happening right around this time last year was the LLMs were landing. And I was thinking quite a bit about what that meant. And so this has been something of an LLM year. Although I think at this point, I think I feel like I understand fairly well what that contributes and I think I understand fairly well. So sort of that a lot of the value is in building around that and a lot of big projects that we have that are doing that, and they are at this point, I would say, much more on the engineering project side of things than on the side of a so what are we going to build kind of thing. So I'm less on the ground involved in that than I was at the beginning of the year. First part of the year I was very involved in. Like, this is very new stuff. Do we understand it? What do we do with it? And so on. And I think, let's see, I must have made maybe two books, I guess, of mine came out this year. The book about the second law of thermodynamics and my little book about ChatGPT, which I wrote rather quickly, explainer of ChatGPT and the second law of thermodynamics book is sort of interesting because it's a project that I started when I was 12 years old, like 50 years earlier, and I finally got it finished now. And that was. Whereas the ChatGPT book was one where, you know, I started that project a few weeks before it got finished, so to speak. So very, very different timescales. Two projects, same year, but vastly different timescales. And I would say that for this year, the kind of big picture, I suppose is for me is pretty cool because there are a lot of things that I've worked on for a really long time, these kinds of ideas about computational language and how do we have a language for computational thinking, how do we implement that, and so on, and ideas about foundations of computation and their implications for physics and, and other kinds of intellectual areas. And a lot of things I've thought About for a long time. A lot of a tower that I've been building pretty much my whole. Well, since I was a kid life. These things are coming to fruition. The things that, you know, there was a tower that got built and now we can see a lot further and do a lot of reach, a lot of things we couldn't reach before. And that's been a thing that's this year. You know, really a lot of it's become clear that, yes, the tower was really built in the right place. And there are really interesting things that can be reached from it. On the intellectual side, it's things where sort of really understanding that we can. We're in a position to, in a sense, derive the fact that the laws of physics are the way they are. For observers like us, that's pretty cool. I didn't see that coming. I didn't think there would be a way to derive the laws of physics. I think we thought we would have to discover the laws of physics, not derive the laws of physics. And so that's a pretty significant thing that kind of has lots of sort of philosophical tentacles and so on. I think that the kinds of things. So those are exciting things for me, I suppose, in terms of the big picture of one's kind of life and times. There are sort of different arcs of life that one can have. Like, there are people I know where they did something amazingly great when they were 25 years old, and then it was done. And then that's cool because it's like, well, I got this accomplishment and it was, you know, really got to the moon, so to speak. And then I'm like, okay, I've got the rest of my life and I can sort of live on that accomplishment. But it's sort of, you know, But I'm not stressing myself. I'm not stretching myself later on. That's one situation. Another situation is I didn't get, you know, the accomplishment didn't quite make it to the place where I wanted. And I'm continuing to stretch. I'm continuing to. To push to get there, so to speak. And let's say I'm continuing. For some people, it's like, I always want to make more money, or I always want to have a more successful this, that or the other. And you're always pushing to get to that point. And you do that through your life, as opposed to, I won the jackpot when I was 25 or something. And then it's sort of coasting from there on out. For myself, I've had kind of a funny version of that because I built a lot of things which I think for most people are artifacts from the future. That is, they're things where you look at them, whether it's Wolfram language, whether it's other kinds of scientific things I've done, where, for whatever reason, I've been able to. I've constructed my own sort of tower of tools and ideas, and I've been able to get a fair distance, and I've been able to get far enough that for many people, the things that one's doing are things where, yes, one can see in the distance that that might be done. But the fact that that's a thing that really is there and is that way now is not obvious. So it's kind of. There's this sort of strange situation where there are things where I can see. I think that it's sort of an inexorable future, that things will go in a particular direction. I say that with some confidence because I've said that for 40 years or more. And a bunch of things where I've said that's going to be what happens is exactly what happened. Whether it's things like going from sort of models in science being based on mathematical formulas to models in science being based on programs. That's a thing I knew was going to happen from the 1980s. And by golly, it happened, so to speak, even though in the 1980s, people had said, no way, no way, that's not how it's going to work. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Even up to probably the late 1990s, people were saying that, and yet it inexorably happened. And it was not one of these things where it was like, oh, maybe it's going to happen, maybe it's not. It was totally obvious to me that that would have to happen. And same with a bunch of other things that I can see, like the whole idea of computational language as a way to sort of formalize the world. It's totally obvious to me that that's the way things are going and will go. But yet, for most people, we're not there yet. There are plenty of people, I'm happy to say, who get it and for whom. We are there already, and they're sort of using artifacts from the future, but the vast mass of people don't get that yet. One day they will, but they don't yet. One day might be 50 years from now. I don't know if we're lucky. Maybe it's only 20 years I don't really know. There'll be a point at which that is the routine thing that gets taught to people and so on. It's sort of the long story here. But the thing that's sort of interesting is one, I could take the point of view, I suppose, that, look, I built these things which are sort of artifacts in the future. I'm done. Just wait for the future to happen. For whatever reason I haven't taken that point of view. I'm always both trying to pull the artifacts from the future into the present. And I'm like, well, it's really cool. I can build these artifacts in the future. Let me build something from the even further future based on what I've been able to do. Because it's so cool that I built this kind of tower that allows me to see a bunch of things that. Well, I suppose my own personal motivation is mostly I like seeing further, so to speak. It is a fulfilling, satisfying thing to see that the things I built end up being useful to other people. But it is for me personally, the internal motivation is mostly I want to see further myself. I really like figuring these things out, understanding more for myself. So in the sort of. If you ask about the year in review, so to speak, there's sort of two dynamics. One is how much of the artifacts from the future that have already been built have arrived more in the present. And the other is how much further out in the kind of into the future has one been able to build. And I suppose this year has been pretty good on both of those fronts. And I would say that. Those are good things. I think there are all sorts of dynamics of the details of business and the state of the technology industry and all this kind of thing where, I don't know, I would have perhaps been happier with them. I think there's. There's things where things that sort of should have happened and should have been very kind of linear are still sort of in a turbulent phase. And that's a thing where sort of the future still has to play out on that. And I would say it is an interesting thing that people sort of sometimes say, I really want this accomplishment because then I'll be done. And turns out, be careful what you wish for because often the accomplishment is like, okay, that, you know, went, you know, you know, that water went under the bridge. That's done now. And now what's next? And it's kind of like, like, you know, you can be very satisfied with that accomplishment, but it's going to decay in your. In your Kind of. And you know, you can. I would say the following thing. It is often the case, and it's certainly been true in my life, that the fact that I've been able to do a bunch of things has given me lots of confidence to do more things. It is not the case that I could say I've done these things. That's so cool. Now I can just look back on the things I've done and decide not to do anything else. Maybe that's a personality dependent thing. That, that's not what, you know, that's not how it works for me. But it is certainly true that, you know, that when, you know, I notice this all the time with people who've worked on big projects with me and so on. Where the project goes from, oh, it was just being defined to. It's a real thing in the world. And people get this kind of glow of, you know, of kind of accomplishment that allows them to go on and do other things. That comes from the sort of confidence of seeing that you can really go from nothing to something and that you can be, you know, you can make that happen. I think it's. But on the other hand, there are, you know, there are people certainly where it's kind of like, okay, I'll say something for myself here. I remember when I was 25 years old, I remember I gave an after dinner speech about things, about complexity and so on. And this was, Well, I mean, 1985 or so, and things about. I was showing my Rule 30 cellular automaton making complicated behavior from very simple rules and so on. And I came back from giving that speech and I said to myself, you know, I could spend the rest of my life giving the same speech. And then I said, and I don't want to do that. I want to do different things. So I find it every time I'll give a talk and I'll show Rule 30, for example, I get a little bit of a twinge of, oh my gosh, it's whatever. Nearly 40 years later and I'm still living that same thing. I'm still, you know, the world hasn't quite caught up. There will be a time when, when I don't need to say that. And there's certainly audiences now where I don't need to say that. It's like everybody knows that there's no reason for me to say it again. So it's, it's. But, but that's a case where, where I, I feel like I still have to say these things because they're, they're necessary and useful and it's sort of fun to show people these kinds of things. But somehow I'm glad that I haven't kind of just decided. I didn't just decide at that point. I'm going to just keep giving the same after dinner speech, so to speak, for the rest of my life. It isn't the way that I'm set up. I think there was a question and comment earlier about sort of stagnation in life. And at least for me, you know, it's kind of like if you've managed to build to this point, then you look around and you can see all these things that are now possible. And so then you want to go do them as opposed to just saying, look, I built to this point, you know, I'm just going to sunbathe on this platform, so to speak. And that's the end of what has to be done. There's a comment here from Prabhu about recent thing that I wrote about Observer Theory, which was kind of an essay sort of describing kind of the philosophical underpinnings of some of the things that I've worked out in the last few years about how kind of our nature as observers relate to the reality that we observe and what observers really do and so on. And there was an encouragement here for everyone to read that essay, and I encourage that too. I think it's fun and interesting. I will say that that's a case where I made a kind of strategic decision about what to do and what to present. Because I've been thinking about kind of the things that go into that Observer Theory essay for a while. Well, at least a couple of two, three years now since our physics project kind of got launched. And I realized there's a lot of detail about particularly how every different kind of measuring device works and kind of having a global theory for that. And there's a lot of I's to dot and T's to cross. And for a while I was like, I better dot all these I's, cross all these T's and really present sort of. It would be a book length thing that is kind of the full story of all those I's dotted T's crossed. Or I can just tell people how it works because I pretty much know how it works. I don't need to dot all those I's and cross all those T's. The big picture is already very clear. And so I made the decision I'm going to write something which is really a big picture story, more of a you Know, you can see it more as philosophy. It doesn't have. Doesn't have pictures and so on. It doesn't have, you know, diagrams and detailed sort of derivations and such like. And I made the decision to do that, which I think has worked out well. I think it's probably more readable as a result. But it would be my natural tendency to sort of want to dot all those I's and cross all those T's. I decided not to do that because I have a bunch of other projects that are really nipping at, you know, I really need to get. Get started on them. I will say a project that I just started on two days ago. Yeah, three days ago, I forget, is a project about. I've talked about computational thinking, and I've talked about kind of the block that people have of how do I conceptualize what I'm trying to figure out in a computational way and how to get people past that block, how to kind of expose the idea of computational thinking, get people to really. I mean, the important part about computational thinking is it actually involves thinking. It's not one of these things where you can sort of mechanize it. The. The mechanization already happened inside the computer, inside the computational language, inside the work that we've tried to do is about that mechanization. So what you're teaching to people is those aspects of what has to be done that are really about the thinking side of it. And teaching thinking is, I think, very valuable. I think it's also there's an increasing tendency in education to teach mechanics, not sort of the arbitrary thinking side of it. So anyway, so I set myself the task of writing a book and course and so on about computational thinking. And I just started it. And it's sort of interesting because at first I was a little bit kind of grumbling, actually a lot grumbling. People who know me will. Will have seen about, you know, why am I having to do this? You know. You know, why haven't. Why haven't people already done this? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And sort of, as I get into it, I realize it's actually a lot harder than I thought, which is not bad. I find it kind of interesting sort of explaining what is computational thinking and sort of how does it relate to thinking in general? How does it relate to other kinds of ways to formalize the world? And how do you learn to do it? Do you learn principles of doing it? Do you see examples of doing it? Do you learn facts that contribute to sort of ways of thinking about things. I don't know, it's a mixture of those things. But anyway, right now I wrote the first section, kind of. It's called what is Computational Thinking? A very kind of short thing. And I'm now on to a first computational thinking adventure, kind of trying to show sort of from the very theoretical side at first and now the very practical side. And there's sort of a lot of challenges. Like to what extent do you just put computational language, put Wolfram language in there and just sort of say, you know, you're, you know, not really explain it at first. And that's kind of what I decided to do. It's kind of like the immersion learning of a human language or something. You just start hearing it, you just start seeing it, rather than say, step by step, how to explain it. When I wrote my book, it was 2016, I think, on elementary Introduction to Wolfram Language. That was a thing where I did it the other way I did it. You know, let's really build up from the beginning, and I think that book has been rather successful actually for people where it's really a step by step, let's build from the beginning rather than dive in. Here's this thing, here's this idea that I'm expressing. And by the way, there's this piece of computational language that expresses that idea. And so anyway, that's not a 2023 story. It got started in 2023, but. But part of the reason, as I think about projects and so on, part of the reason that kind of the observer theory thing, I decided to write as a more sort of philosophical piece rather than really write. The book length dot the I's, cross the T's was because I really have a bunch of other projects I want to do. And I don't think the main points I can make. I know what the results are. It's a question of how much sort of scaffolding do you put in there. I also hope that people will follow up on that observer theory initiative and dot those I's and cross those T's and so on. And there's lots of work to be done there. And there will be things discovered as one goes and digs into those details, things that I didn't see and things that I think that there are particularly directions about. What do observers assume about the world, which I think are very important to understand better. I mean, observers assume about the world, things like that they are persistent in time, that we have a single thread of existence, a single thread of experience. We assume that we are more or less localized in space, that we're not at every moment kind of darting around to different places in space. We assume things like that we can do any experiment we want to do, that we have kind of free will to do whatever experiment we want. There are a whole bunch of things that we assume about the world, but. And as we understand better what we assume about the world, we're going to end up being able to derive things about what our perceived world, our effective laws of physics and so on will be. But, you know, I've got. Got so many other projects. I mean, one big one is about our physics project sort of in two directions there one is kind of understanding its foundations better, building what we're calling infra geometry and infra calculus, trying to understand sort of how you erect essentially mathematical structure that starts from our kind of discrete structure of space and so on. Different from what people have done from Euclid to Newton and so on onward. That's all been made different assumptions about what the underlying structure is. So we have to build new underlying structure there. I was kind of. So that's one direction. The other direction is more on the experimental implications side of, okay, so you've got a big telescope. What do you actually look at to find out whether we know what we're talking about and so on. And that's another interesting direction there. And then there are. Well, I have a bunch of other projects to do with things about LLM science, but more to sort of extracting more of a kind of the essence of, of what LLMs have shown as possible in understanding meaning in language and being able to extract that in kind of a symbolic form. There's also, oh, gosh, what else is there? There's so much the. Well, there's. I'm also two areas, biology and economics, both of them. I'm really pretty sure that the ideas that have emerged in our physics project have really interesting things to say about these areas. And I'd really like to dig in more on those areas. And what I've been doing, and it's what I typically do on projects is I've been sort of gradually accumulating sort of knowledge and kind of gradually learning a little bit more and thinking through it a little bit more in each of these areas, sort of making gradual progress. Before I kind of jump in and say I'm going to take this very seriously and try and really do something here, I find that very useful because if I say on day one, I've never touched this field Before I'm just going to learn everything and do it. There's a certain. I don't know, there's a certain sort of aging process that has to happen to the knowledge. One gets that the first time you start looking at, let's say, economics or something, it's like, well, you try and look at this thing and you look at this thing and maybe you see these things, you didn't get quite in the right direction. But by the time you've kind of poked around at it for 20 years or something, you kind of have seen and you've talked to different people about it and so on, you've kind of seen around all the corners, at least a bit. And so that means that when you're really going to dive in and take it seriously, you've got some idea what's behind each of those corners. You know, I noticed recently with this observer theory piece, for example, I been getting, you know, all sorts of messages and things from people, philosophers and cognitive scientists, people like that. And it's a little bit. A little bit scary to me because people keep on mentioning, do you know about this theory? Do you know about that theory? Do you know about this other theory, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well, in many cases I don't because, you know, cognitive science, for example, is not something where I have thought and I've been paying some attention to it, but I wouldn't say I haven't seen around all the corners, so to speak. And I always like to. Again, a thing with this observer theory project. It's a question of what is the project you decide to do. And there is a project there which has to do with, well, how are the ideas that I'm thinking about related to sort of historical ideas? And that's a project in and of itself, a project, a big project in that case, because there are a lot of ideas from whether it's, you know, Leibniz and Descartes and Kant and whether it's modern neuroscience, cognitive science, whatever. There are a zillion different ideas that somehow connect to this sort of observer theory concept. And, you know, really understanding all those historical connections is a lot of work. You know, I did this in my work on the second law of thermodynamics. I decided that that was a finite enough piece of work. I was really surprised nobody else had done it, but a finite enough piece of work that I would try and really unravel the history of the second law and how people had gotten the points of view that they got right or wrong about the Second Law today. It took a bunch of work. It took several months to do that unraveling and I think I was very efficient at doing it and it helped that I'd sort of been poking away at that for many, many years. So I kind of already had some ambient knowledge of it, but it was a lot of work. But that one is actually much more definite than the observer theory 1. That one is even more difficult to do the history for it. And I kind of made the conscious decision I'm going to just do what I can do and write what I can write. And making all those historical connections is a separate project that I doubt I'm going to have a chance to do. It's, you know, I think it's just there's too much of a flow of other projects to do. So. Any case, Emma's asking, will there be a German translation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics book? I don't know. I mean, I think the one book that's had lots of translations now is my book on ChatGPT and I guess it's a small book and it's a popular topic and so I think it's in 13 languages or something now, maybe 15. And I do enjoy the COVID designs that the different publishers in those different countries have come up with. Some of them are quite wild and definitely show cultural differences in the attitude towards AI and explanations and things like this. But I think some of these more technical books are both probably more challenging to translate and have smaller markets in these places. I think actually the book I wrote called Idea Makers, which is a historical biography book that I published in six years, seven years ago now that's actually getting, I think that just came out maybe in Chinese and I think it's getting translated into some other languages. So those are, those are coming into some other languages. Let's see. I think it is time, I'm being told it's time for my next day job activity here. So fun though this is. I probably better go do that. And so. Well, thanks for joining me and happy holidays and so on. If you're in a place where that's happening at this time of year and otherwise I will be doing these. I will be continuing this in 2024 and look forward to chatting with you all again then. Bye for.