Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (January 18, 2023)

Sam. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Q and A about business, innovation and managing life. This is where I get to try and figure out why I do the things I do, because you guys ask me questions about that. All right, let me see. I see a question here from Paolo. What is one question or all questions a CEO must be asking themselves every day? Well, I'm always kind of big on the what's the point question, and am I doing what I should be doing? Does what I'm doing actually make any sense? I think those are good questions to ask. One of the things that tends to happen is you get in the middle of doing something and then you never kind of sort of stick your head up to look around and say, does this actually all make any sense? That's a tricky issue, because once you get into doing some big project, then the only value the project is going to have, typically, is if it gets finished. So it's no good to be like, oh, I'm in this project now. I'm two thirds of the way through. Let me stick my head out. Oh, no, it doesn't make any sense. Let's just kill it. That's probably a mistake. I mean, if I look back at my own life, I've been doing some historical work related to my own life recently, and I'm looking back at things that I did, like, 40 years ago and things like this. And I would say the only stuff that I regret is projects that didn't quite get finished and where I should have found a way to define an ending to the project, to define a way to kind of tie the project in a bow, to say, yes, I'm going to get this thing out, even if it's not everything I wanted it to be. I'm going to get something out that is some, you know, some piece of something that one can then sort of put on a shelf and realize was there and go into the future, so to speak. But, you know, I think this. Am I doing what I should be doing? Another kind of thing is I'm doing something and I really should be delegating this to somebody else. It just doesn't make sense for me to be doing this. That's another category of thing that I think people, myself included, you know, need to ask themselves. And I try to do that. Now, sometimes it is a. You know, there's the reverse of that. Is there something where I'm seeing it supposedly getting done and I'm going crazy because I'm seeing it supposedly getting done? It's not getting Done. And I should say to myself, no, I want to just take this on myself and I'm going to make it happen, or I'm just going to do it. But this question of, am I doing what I should be doing? As in, am I. How do I. Am I doing things that I should be delegating to somebody else? Am I doing something that has been. Is there something that has been delegated to somebody else where I should just, like, take it back, basically, and do it myself? Those are. Those are, for me, good things to be asking. I mean, there are other kinds of things, like, do I actually have the right people in the right places doing things, or am I seeing something, you know, is there something that's going on where it's really not going well and where it's kind of. If I were to really open it up, it's a big mess inside. And, you know, sometimes one of the things that can be a mistake is there's a thing and it's kind of going, and you kind of suspect that there's something wrong. But, you know, it's a huge amount of effort to open the thing up and find out what's happening. And you're going to get all kinds of, you know, people telling you, oh, yeah, it's really fine, you shouldn't be looking here, it's all, okay, look. Another, you know, look somewhere else, everything's fine. That's usually a very bad sign. And. But it takes. It takes effort. Effort. And so you have to decide, is that effort you want to spend or is what's going on there not so horrifying that you don't need to worry about it? And, you know, there are things where you could say, well, gosh, if we did this more effectively, you know, we would be more successful as a business. But to do it more successfully requires me to spend a whole bunch of time on it. And the time I'm spending on that might be better spent growing some other part of our business or. Or creating some new thing. And rather than going and chasing the things that I don't think are being done as well as they could be done. So that's another kind of issue of do you suspect, I guess, over the years that I've been CEOing, which is, gosh, really long time now, how long is it? It's 36 years for my current company and a bunch of time before that. It's my little antennae that detect things going wrong, are reasonably well tuned at this point of, you know, they're things like, you got A project. And you kind of know if this project is really happening, you're going to get a bunch of questions. If you get no questions, it's a really bad sign. It means it isn't happening. And you know, I'm, I'm thinking one thing that's going on right now where I pretty much know that I'll be amazed if the, you know, if the people involved just suddenly deliver the thing finished. I strongly suspect either nothing is happening or whatever is happening is off in some crazy direction. But takes effort to go, you know, open that and go figure out what's happening and go redirect it. So, you know, this is, this is a piece that I suppose it's kind of like when you, when you think something might be going wrong, you know, do you, how much, how, how quick are you to kind of drive in and try and fix it and how much do you say, well, it's not that important. It's the effort to fix it is high. I'll just let it run and you know, maybe it'll be okay. Maybe it'll only be 10% less efficient than it, than it could be. Maybe it'll be a disaster. But it's only a small disaster, well contained disaster and not worth spending time on. So those are a few of the issues. Let's see. The question here. Gosh. Another question from Paolo. Why did I choose walking as my main exercise? Have I tried other modalities? Is there a scientific reason or just personal preference? Okay, well, here's the, here's one basic point that I'm trying to take. Exercise. That is kind of a thing that I can do while I'm doing other things. So walking has this good feature that you can be talking on the phone, you can be, if you set things up right, you can be typing on a computer, you can be looking at things. If I was like playing tennis or something, not that I'm any good at that, but if I was doing that, then I'm not talking to people. I'm not looking at a computer screen or a phone screen. I'm only doing that. And I, so for me, and maybe there's another modality that would also work. But you know, any kind of thing that involves, you know, use your arms, use this, that or the other, it doesn't really work because I can't, I can't be know if I want to be looking at a phone or, or looking at a computer or whatever else. I, I can't be doing that. So maybe there's something I haven't figured out there. But the thing that I've always found for a long time is that, you know, walking is good because you can be doing other things at the same time. And realistically, you know, it's, it's. And this is something that's probably not optimized in my case, I'm not doing lots of getting out of breath type exercise, which means that I can sort of keep talking on the phone. And I kind of usually take it to kind of the edge of where I'll start to be, you know, huffing and puffing. But I don't get to the point where I'm actually huffing and puffing because I'm doing a phone call. And it's kind of, kind of weird to be in that state when you're, when you're doing phone calls or zoom calls or whatever they are. So that's, that's. But maybe there's something I'm missing. Maybe there's some great form of exercise that I just haven't thought of that that would serve those needs. But I haven't figured it out yet. Let's see, there are a bunch of questions here about ChatGPT and there's one here from Chrissy. Have you thought about using ChatGPT to help you write a fiction book? Well, the first question is, do I want to write a fiction book? The second question is, you know, ChatGPT is a remarkable thing and it writes lovely stuff, but it is what it is. It has a certain kind of, you know, it's kind of producing sort of mean of the population type text, which is good for lots of purposes. But I wouldn't feel very special if I was writing a book where it's kind of a mean of the population type book. For me to feel like I want to write this book. It's kind of like it has to be something special and me and egotistically satisfying because it's, it's, you know, it's something that I personally am able to uniquely contribute. You know, I have to say in terms of writing fiction, I've, I've written a lot of kind of non fiction stuff. I occasionally think about writing fiction and people tell me that fiction is a good way to communicate things. That it's a very straightforward way to communicate certain kinds of things that if you try and communicate them kind of directly in non fiction are much harder to communicate. I have to say that it is one of my deficiencies that I read very little fiction. I've really never read very much fiction. It's always been one of these things where I've said, know sometime later when I'm. When I can't do things that I'm doing right now, or where I kind of am just hanging out rather than intensely doing the things that I'm doing, maybe I'll read fiction. And that time, I'm sort of happy to say, keeps on getting pushed further and further out. So I'm just not a person who's read a lot of fiction, which means that I. I feel. I feel. Makes me feel even more inadequate in writing fiction. Occasionally I have tried to write little pieces of fiction just for fun because I think there are ways to communicate ideas that I have. And sometimes they're usually sort of science fictiony type things. And I've shown them to friends of mine who are professional science fiction writers. And their usual response is, don't try and write fiction. Now, I haven't really analyzed what it is that I do wrong because I've written a fair amount of nonfiction biographical material that people seem to like quite a bit. Where I'm writing about sort of real people and I'm writing things about their history and personalities and so on, and that seems to work just fine. But I have to say, when I start thinking about, you know, can I make up a fictional person and write about them? For some reason I have a. I have a very hard time with that. I think part of the problem is that. And I've asked a bunch of fiction writers I know about this issue and they tell me, yeah, it's a problem for them too, is that I feel like somehow that by writing fiction, by creating personalities, you're kind of somehow you're expressing. And perhaps this is why fiction is valuable. You're expressing too much about your own views about certain kinds of things. And you sort of have to get over that. I think to be comfortable writing fiction. I have to say I feel like there are. Well, I was writing something which I finally got finished talking of finishing things that is sort of semi fiction. Okay. It's about. It's an account of what it's like to be a computer, which is like people are concerned with, you know, the nature of consciousness and things like that. And people are very much, you know, it's a very unique thing to be. To be the way it is to be a person with your one's conscious experiences and things like that. And nothing else will have those experiences. But actually turns out that if you think about things sort of from the point of view of even a current Computer forget sort of the fanciest AGI, you know, general intelligence, AI thingy, just a current day computer. There's an awful lot of analogy between sort of the time from when a computer is booted to when it crashes. That's a, that's a kind of a period of experience much like a human life. And it's surprising how much analogy there is between kind of the things one can describe a computer as experiencing, in a sense, and the things one can describe humans as experiencing. So that's an example of a piece of sort of semi fiction that I was trying to write which seemed to be going okay, but. Yeah, so I have had at various times various ideas of writing fiction books and maybe I'm, I'll say only one that was I just, when my, my kids were young, many years ago now, I, I had this idea I'm going to write a children's book. And I had a, I had a great title, I even had a great storyline was going to be called My Dinosaur Needs a Name. And since I've been involved a lot in kind of communication and naming of things and naming of products, naming of functions, naming of other kinds of things, I thought this is a cool story and I can start with kind of the kid who discovers the dinosaur and nobody believes them, that this weird thing that's sticking up is actually the tail of a dinosaur. And got a great cover illustration with the dinosaur being lifted out of some suburban backyard or something with cranes and such like. The problem was I had lots of pieces to the. My dinosaur needs a name. How do you name something? And how do you, you know, and I had lots of kind of elements of, of talking about different, different kinds of types of communities that you run into that might say, hey, you've, you know, there's a great name. You know, you go talk to the academic who has some theory for how the dinosaur rolled itself in a ball and therefore it should have a name based on that. So you talk to the, you know, consumer products company that wants dinosaur as a pitch, pitch creature for its, you know, line of breakfast cereal or something like this. And there are, there are lots of fun things there. The thing that just stopped me, you know, kind of dead in my tracks was I didn't know how to end the story because I didn't know what name this, this dinosaur should end up with. And so, so that was the, that was the crash and burn of, of that effort of mine to write fiction. Maybe one day I'll finish it. Maybe that's what I, I need to do. You know, that's a grandchildren effort or something. Anyway, let's see, Let's see. So question here from Juan. What do you do when you're feeling that you're lost or unmotivated and not having a clear vision for what should be done next in business endeavors and so on? Ah, well, I mean, one point is that one thing I've done, and consciously so in my life, is that I have a pretty big portfolio of things that are going on, whether it's things about companies, things about science, things about, you know, kids, things about whatever, things about different activities and so on. It's very rare that I'm in the situation where like sort of things are going badly and you know, it's failing on all cylinders, so to speak. I think that's something that it's really helpful because it's like, okay, you know, there's this thing that's going wrong, I got to go deal with that. But you know what? There are five other things that are just humming along just fine. And that for me is a very helpful way to lead my life. Even though realistically I am pretty much of a sequential project doer. That is, I'll typically have one intense project that I'm personally working on at a given time. Even though there are many projects and many things that are happening sort of simultaneously. But I'm not the one. There's usually only one project where I have to be its sole sort of key energy source. The other projects that are going on have other people who are providing momentum for those projects and don't. It isn't in the, in the category. I mean, they're, they usually are projects that I have going on, like things I'm writing, for example, where if I don't do the writing, it's just not going to get written. It just if I don't do it with my own hands, so to speak, it's just going to stop. Whereas there are many projects that go on at our company that go on at, you know, events and things that I'm involved in. Things like this where, you know, the show's going to go on. It doesn't require me to make the show go on. Sometimes I have to be wheeled in to contribute to the show, so to speak. But I'm not the energy source that's causing the show to keep going. So I find that helpful in terms of not getting to the point where it's like, oh, everything's bad. There's always plenty of things that are just fine. Now in Terms of how to get motivated. I think usually it's like, well, what do you really want to do? And often people, myself, sometimes included, get wedged in these situations where there's something I feel an obligation to do, there's something I have been doing, and it's like, well, actually, I'm really pretty bored with this right now, and I really need something that's more exciting to do. And then I might at first say to myself, oh, no, I can't do that. I don't have any time. You know, I can't. I can't possibly find the time to do that. But the thing I've always found is that you have something you're really excited about doing. That's the new thing you're really excited about doing. You say, oh, I don't have any time to do that. Turns out you always find time. Turns out there's always something that you can kind of squash a little bit, and you get a bit more time. And that little bit more time of the thing you really want to do for me, generates more energy. And then the things I didn't so much want to do actually go better because I have this thing that I'm like, I'm really excited about this. I'm excited about something that helps pull along the things that I'm not quite so excited about. You know, I have to say, one of the things, for me, I mean, there's certain situations I sometimes get myself into. For example, something I'm doing right now, I got to finish a thing, big thing I've been writing, and I almost finished it, like, two months ago, but it had little trailing pieces, and it just. I hate having to go back to these things and sort of get myself back in the. In the. In the zone or something to be able to finish that project. It's a much better idea if I can just bash through and get to the end in one go, rather than having to sort of put it aside for a few months and then come back to it. And I find that, you know, you might think that, oh, you leave it with little sort of, you know, the unfinished bridge or something where it's almost finished, you know exactly what to do next. For me, that's usually a big lose because. Because I was in some state when I got that bridge half finished, and I was, you know, I know. And that state was really. I knew what was going on. I knew everything. I was all ready to go. Then I come back two months later, I've forgotten all that stuff. So now I Have to climb back up, you know, that part of the bridge or whatever it is to be able to do it. And that's very frustrating. And it's like, oh, I kind of resent the fact that, oh, I'm clearly wasting time here because if only I'd done it before, I could have. So. So that's always difficult for me. And I, you know, I have learned that it's much better to try and bash through the end, even if that requires sort of rearranging, you know, pushing, putting things off, not doing things you want to do right. Then better to just finish it and then go on to the next thing. I think that I can end up is one of the cases where I end up with terrible procrastination of, you know, oh, I really should dive back into doing this thing. But I know I have to get myself sort of back in the. In the zone to do it, and I don't really want to do that. And I don't have any great solution to this other than just, you know, suck it up and do it. And sometimes it takes me longer than I would like to admit to actually get to the point where I'm just, you know, just do it. I think one of the things that that happens for me is that I know something's going to take me a certain amount of time. I know I get up into the zone, so to speak. I really need to be working on this for a week or two. And then I'll have it finished if I can kind of see, oh my gosh, I've got to go do some event. I've got to be distracted in some way three days from now. That's always an excuse for not starting it now. And it's probably a correct excuse because as I say, if you, if you crash into that thing and you can't move the thing out of the way to really get it finished. That's a frustrating place to be. Now in terms of, I think this question had asked about next step in business endeavors. I mean, it's, you know, you just got to find something you're excited about and something that makes sense. And if the things. I mean, sometimes there's a big sort of machine that has to keep running. You know, it may be you've got some company where it's got something that's, that's making money. And you know, that is the, the lifeblood of what's going on is, is that thing that makes money, but you don't find it very interesting anymore. You know, you do have to keep that train running. And it's. And, you know, you have to hope you can get people in place to do that so you're able to go and put your energy into something that's. That's going to be more exciting to you. I mean, I think that that's the thing I've just noticed is that at least for me, when there's a thing that you're really excited about, everything else goes better. Even if you might think, oh, how can I possibly make things even work? Because if there's yet another thing I've added to my plate, I'm just not going to have time. It turns out it doesn't work that way. It turns out somehow the excitement kind of makes the other stuff go more quickly, at least for me, and works out better. Let's see. Okay, there's a suggestion from Harry here for a dinosaur name. A rule. Apta. Yeah. You know, maybe that's not such a terrible name. I think, you know, the problem was that. That back, oh, when was it 25 years ago or more, when I was sort of seriously thinking about this and had even, you know, drawn a bunch of sketches and all this kind of stuff for the, for the art, I, I just, I, you know, I kept on every, Every name I came up with kept on having sort of a. A bad resonance of some kind with. I don't know. I have no great excuse. It's one of those things. Which one should finish? Probably. Let's see the question from Doug saying they're impressed at the fact that I seem to be able to express myself well in these videos. Thank you. Do you think writing has helped you in this regard? I mean, I think it has helped me in doing these kinds of videos. Frankly, doing these videos has helped me do these videos. I, I know in the last couple of years that I've been doing these since the beginning of the pandemic. I, I can feel that I've gotten measurably better at explaining myself and giving explanations of things and so on. So, you know, it's one of these cases where, you know, practice helps. I think that about writing, the thing that happens with writing is, you know, do you have a clear thing to say? Have you got your thoughts clarified? If you do, you've got a fighting chance to do a good job of writing something. If your thoughts are muddled, you're not going to do a good job writing things. You know, Okay. I learned, you know, when I was a kid to, you know, write fairly fluently. You know, actual you know, chunks of English prose. And so, you know, I can. I can write decently elegant prose, but that's not the most important part. The most important part is having clarity in the things you're trying to say. The elegant prose is just kind of the veneer, I mean, and. And even some level of elegance is. Is absolutely chat. GPT achievable at this point. It's the, the. I. I think it's prose. It's okay, a little bit flat, but, you know, it's. It's certainly. It's a great way. If you are not native writer of English or something. It's. It's probably a great way to smooth that and make something which, you know, flows at that level. But the point about writing well really has to do with can you express ideas clearly? Do you really have those ideas clearly set up in your own mind? And I think that's something that, you know, sort of clarity of thinking is kind of a big story of something I've tried to learn in my life. And that's sort of the thing that drives the possibility of both writing well and perhaps being able to explain oneself in your video setting. Well, now, I do notice, for example, in writing, one of the things I find more difficult than I do in speaking, perhaps, is how do you start? So you've got some section of something you're writing. I always want to start with something which is going to be like, here's the big point. Here's the thing I really want to say that is kind of making. Orienting people to getting into it in the right direction, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it takes me a while sometimes to figure that out. Now, when I'm speaking, I don't have that opportunity. I'm not going to just sort of sit here and be silent for two minutes or 10 minutes while I try and think of what the first thing to say is. And so that is an interesting discipline, so to speak, to say, you know, I'm staring at this camera and I've just got to say something. And I think that that's a sort of a helpful thing to learn is how to do that. When in writing I can sit there for 10 minutes cogitating, you know, how should I start writing this particular section? So that's perhaps been. Been a useful thing here. But I would say in general that learning to explain oneself, it's, you know, practice helps. And it's always useful to keep asking, sort of, what's the point? What is the. What is the essence What I'm trying to explain, what's the real thing I'm talking about? Yes, there are cases in writing, more so probably than speaking in writing, where I have sometimes felt, oh yeah, I can sort of paper over the fact that I don't fully, fully understand this. I can still write something here and I always regret that and I always go back and rewrite it because it's like, yes, I could paper it over, but it didn't really work and it wasn't, it wasn't really clear and I've got to actually dive in and I've actually got to understand it and then I can write it. I have always claimed at times when I've been telling people about technical writing, and I would say that in our company, for example, we've at times had sort of professional technical writers. We've tended not to do that, mostly in the last many couple of decades, at least, that it's easier to take somebody who really knows what they're talking about and perhaps edit the text they write than it is to take somebody who has to learn what it is they should be talking about in order to write it. That's a much less satisfactory situation, typically. But I've always. My zeroth rule of technical writing is if you don't understand what you're writing about, your audience will not stand a chance. In past years, I would see technical writers who would be like, I'm going to write about this. I read what they wrote. I said, this is absolutely incomprehensible. I say, do you understand what the point is? And they say, well, no, not really. And it's like, well, then your readers just don't stand a chance. So let's see the. There are questions here about chat GPT. And there's questions here about the coming wave of founders starting generative AI companies. Yeah, it's fun, it's a new thing. And what's sort of interesting about it is that every kind of new phase of excitement, slightly different expertise is needed for it. Whether it's like I'm starting a social media platform, I'm doing a blockchain play, I'm doing sort of general machine learning. Each of these things, the kind of the expertise profile required is slightly different and that leads to different sets of people involved in them. I mean, you know, like the machine learning crowd, it's a. Was a lot of, well, a lot of physicists because it required sort of. It's a, it's a great application of multivariate calculus and things then, you know, an Increasing number of computer science educated people. You know, when it comes to like the cryptocurrency world, just that had a very broad spectrum of different kinds of people, from the very sort of geeky, you know, computer science encryption type crowd to the very kind of, you know, sort of, I don't know what kind of very business, you know, opportunities type, type crowd. A pretty big spectrum. And, and you know, when this generative AI thing is yet another new collection and you know, it's a little unclear to me. So one of the things, ChatGPT was a surprise to me as to many other people because I had been tracking what was happening with the various generative AI technologies, large language models, things like this, and they were interesting, but not consumer interesting really. They were things where I could see, okay, you can plug it in somehow. But it wasn't obvious, you know, it wasn't like a thing where the typical consumer just sort of walking up to it is going to say, wow. And I think the thing that is interesting is, you know, the pure large language model. And you know, just to be clear on what, what is really going on, the basic question is how does that sentence, how does that text continue? You know, if you are taking the statistics of English text, you know, that text, if you say, you know, typical example, if you have a Q in English, it's almost always followed by you. That's a very minimal example of statistical regularity in English. And what's happening in these large language models is they're kind of learning much larger scale statistical regularities. They're learning statistical regularities that you only see when you look at the whole corpus of a crawl of the web and millions of books and things like this. But it's statistical regularities. If you talked about this, it's going to follow like that. And the rather amazing thing is that these large language models emit text one token at a time. A token is a word or a piece of a word. And so, you know, this thing that seems like it's writing a coherent story or something, it's actually generating that a word at a time. It's like the next word it produces is something that's just based on, well, based on the words that were there, the chances are the next word is going to be this. Actually what tends to happen is that there's usually a, the most likely next word is this. But actually usually the way these models are set up and ChatGPT does this, for example, there's a certain temperature parameter that says, don't just make the word you put in next, be the most probable word, make it sometimes be a little less probable. And that adds some kind of randomness and sort of originality to what's going on. And sometimes even if it's the most probable one, it will just get stuck in a loop and be very, not say anything at all. But so, you know, it's quite remarkable that you can sort of a word at a time, more or less, just by sort of the statistical regularity, come up with things that are as good as they are. I think one of the things that's very important in Chat GPT was its reinforcement learning training. That was done where in addition to the actual language model that was trained on this whole chunk of the web and things like this, it was also actually sort of human trainers in effect was saying, yeah, that's good, that's bad. You know, that really is an essay, that's really a poem. That's really this, that's, you know, that's a horrifying thing to say, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Being able to put that extra layer of sort of kind of poking at the thing to get it to go in the right direction. It wasn't obvious how deep that had to be. And it's not obvious, you know, and there's a, there's a, in a sense, there's a certain amount of engineering associated with what you choose to do at that level. It turns out it was enough to make Chat GPT interesting. And that's, you know, and that whole sort of world of kind of the reinforcement training of these systems, that's going to be a thing and it's going to be a profession and it's going to be a weird profession. It's kind of the, you know, the, the AI trainer type thing. I mean, there's been kind of a, the world of preparing the data to feed to the AI has been a thing about, you know, labeling data sets and all this kind of thing. That's a different thing, that's a more technical thing. This is much more of a kind of a human level thing of, okay, you're, you're trying to wrangle this AI. I mean, there's already kind of this whole era of prompt engineering. How do you actually get the thing, you know, if you've, if you've given the initial text or you've given text that's going to have images generated from it. How do you, you know, how do you get, how do you set up the right words? How do you throw in you know, I want a persuasive essay, you know, might that turn out that that sort of extra word in the prompt has a big effect on the output. Nobody really knows what's going to happen there. It's like you can get intuition for it. It's like sort of training an animal or something. You know, you're. It's not like there's a theory where you kind of can watch the brain of the animal and see what's happening. It's kind of like you just have to get a feeling for what'. I think when people are starting to get more of a feeling for that, and certainly that sort of happened first in the prompts for generative AI, for images that people have been sort of getting this whole kind of feeling for, how you throw in random words that help make these images more compelling and so on. And I think that's going to be kind of a strange profession of sort of AI trainer, prompt engineer, etc. That's kind of part of the corralling of these systems. Now. You know, what the exact. You know, I think multiple things will happen. I mean, you know, one thing is, does it really need to be as big and complicated as it is sort of on the inside? Does it really need to be burning all that GPU, time, etc. Etc. Etc. I suspect, though, maybe some progress made once we, now that we have an existence, proof that this is possible, you know, tightening it up to be able to use much fewer resources. May turn out to be possible, may not. I suspect it will. Then this whole question about sort of, how do you put the sort of the outer layer of wrangling around the thing to get it to sort of do humanly useful things. That's another thing. And then probably the biggest thing is use cases. The biggest thing is finding, you know, what's this really good for? It's, you know, yes, it can write a, you know, a somewhat reasonable piece of fiction. I don't think these pieces of fiction, other than as a novelty item, I don't think they're going to be the next great, you know, great fiction that becomes a bestseller. I just think that that's. But, you know, for example, you know, there are many things, like if you're practicing, you know, a foreign language, for example, this may be a really good way to do that. If you're trying to, you know, do essentially translation or write in a language that's not your native language. This may be a great way to smooth things. If you're trying to, you know, file some paperwork where the details of the paperwork, it doesn't really matter if you're writing a great essay. It's just got to be a bunch of a pile of words there. This will be a good way to do that. If you're, you know, writing your, your school essay, this will be a good way to not write your school essay. It's, you know, I think that the, it's something where, and, you know, you could, you could say maybe it's a good way to say, well, give me an idea for what my school essay might be like. And then you look at it and I'm not sure how well that will work to say, you know, let me see what it might be like. I mean, I know when Wolfram Alpha came out in 2009, there was a concern that it would sort of blow up lots of kinds of, you know, technical math and other homework types of exercises. I have to say that didn't really happen as much as people had feared it would, partly because if the, you know, the point of these exercises is very much to kind of to, to understand what's going on and just getting the answer isn't the point. I mean, I think another point my brother Conrad, who, who writes a lot about kind of ideas about math education makes, makes this point that one of the things that's really weird about a lot of math education is that there's this divergence between the kind of what, how people actually do this stuff for real professionally and how it gets taught in schools. I mean, for real, professionally, people who want to do a complicated integral are going to use Mathematica to do it. They're not going to, you know, try and write things on a piece of paper and use up lots of pieces of scratch paper to do it. Yet, you know, it's, we're asking people to go through those exercises and it's a little different in the case of. I think it's, you know, it hasn't quite become clear what's going to happen in terms of the exercises of doing English writing and so on. But I think then there are other kinds of use cases. They're things like, well, I mean, one use case that's surely happening going to happen is writing marketing emails that are more specific to particular people. And you know, that may sound horrifying, but actually I don't think it's that horrifying because it's potentially useful because it means that, you know, insofar as you're trying to sell something to somebody and they actually want it, then all the Better if you can explain to them what the point is as clearly as possible. And if you can do that automatically, that's great. Better that they understand what the point is and yes, they can buy this thing that will really be useful to them than like they go another five years and they don't ever understand what this thing is because nobody could ever explain it to them clearly. I think that there are other use cases, like for example, extracting kind of structured data from unstructured text. I don't know how well that's going to work. I think extracting code snippets is probably going to work. I think generating large pieces of code is not going to work. I think, you know, we already have a great example in Wolfram Language with code snippets where we have this control equals mechanism where you can type a piece of natural language to get a little snippet of code. Most commonly things about units or entities, things like that. That works great. We've had that for a decade. Works great. If you try and extend that to say, and now I want you to write a whole big giant piece of code. I don't think that's going to work. I mean, in our particular language, because of the sort of unique character of orphan language, you can write code very incrementally, sort of one piece at a time. And I think it is possible that there's additional kind of natural language input capability that will work there. I mean, I realized, I wrote 12 years ago now, 12 years, 11 years ago, I don't know, I wrote a piece called Programming with Natural Language is actually going to Work, which was the beginning of our effort of doing this kind of one step at a time, natural language programming. And indeed a piece of that has worked out really well. And you know, I think the human in the loop way of doing sort of incremental programming is probably going to work and is going to be really quite interesting. But you know, there are. Well, there are other use cases one can imagine, like things like explaining code. I don't know. I'm not sure if that one's going to work. Well, it's the cool demos. Not, not clear it's useful. It's. It could be the case that it. It produces more distraction than utility. I'm not sure. You know, I. I tried some things recently. I was. When was it? Yesterday, probably. I was. I was searching for something where the thing I was searching for was described with small words, so to speak. It wasn't something was a boom, big keyword, you know, I can just do a search for the big keyword and I'm going to hit where I'm going. It was instead a thing where it's a bunch of small words. And I wondered is ChatGPT going to be able to do this? It wasn't able to do it. I was a thing where I was looking for, in that particular case, I was looking for quotation that was translated from another language and didn't involve big words, but it had an idea in it. And so I was wondering whether that was something that it would be able to sort of untangle from what it had read on the web. Now, it may be that this quotation actually isn't very common and I thought it was probably from some well known source, but I didn't know and it wasn't going to be verbatim because it was translated from another language and so on. So in any case, that's another use case. But I think in terms of the sort of who gets involved and how it works and so on, I think it's, you know, I think it's the use cases that are really going to matter. And I think there's a whole bunch of creativity around those use cases. I don't know what the sort of the core technology sort of how that's going to develop and whether that's going to be, you know, APIs from big companies or whether everybody's going to spin their own. I think it's probably going to be a mixture of those things. I think that, I would like to think that our technology stack is really very useful in this regard because we've got kind of a very different end of the world from, you know, we've got these large language models which are kind of learning the statistical character of what's out there on the web. We've got our computational language which is trying to make a precise representation of things in the world computationally, a precise representation from which we can do precise computations and work out sort of for certain this is the answer type thing rather than, oh, it looks statistically right, it kind of sounds about right. It's plausible. We're like, no, you can actually represent it precisely and computationally and nail the answer. And I think the interplay between these things is potentially super useful. I mean, for example, one thing that looks very promising is for a long time we built versions of Wolfram Alpha for large companies in which they're mixing kind of public data that we have in Wolfram Alpha with internal proprietary data that that company might have about their Internal operations and so on. And it's always a big project to go and sort of hook together sort of the linguistics of how one talks about what's happening inside a company and so on. I think it's possible that these large language models will have the ability to sort of read the documentation and have. So long as you don't give them too much, you know, you don't let them kind of have their head like with a horse too much, so to speak. The, you know, you don't let them run off too far. You, you keep them reined in to the point where, you know, you let them kind of oh yeah, let's find which database that's in or something. Or which, which, you know, which field in which whatever table in which database that's in. Oh yeah, we can do that. And now that gets sort of included in this precise computational system and then, you know, iterate again if you say to the thing, okay, go run my company for me, just write me a report on how I should run my company. Well, I don't think that's going to end well. I think that it's, it's, you know, a little piece at a time. That's where this kind of automation can really be helpful, I think. But again, I think it's a story of finding all these use cases. I think another good exercise there is to, To, to. To think about sort of the, the, the. These visual generation technologies, you know, the dalis and mid journeys and stable diffusions of this world and so on and try to understand what are they really doing and what are their real use cases. I mean for me, the obvious use case there is producing kind of attractor accent type graphics. You know, you're writing a, a blog post or something and you want some, some cool graphic to put at the top. It's not really going to be scrutinized. It's not really, it's not an infographic. It's not going to be carefully analyze. It's just something to, you know, say to people, you know, to give some kind of almost emotional kind of tenor to the piece you're writing. You know, can you put something there that's kind of like. It's not clip art, but it's kind of like it's, it's kind of, it's some kind of accent type thing. And I think that's a place where to me this, there's obvious utility. Now there may be lots of other utility. Let me give you another example of something that's really pretty obvious. That, I mean, you know, these kind of generative techniques where you're making something that kind of looks right is kind of the key thing. And kind of looks right in what domain? In text. Okay, there's a bunch of use cases for that in images in 3D. That's another one that's coming now. That one I think is going to be very useful because when you generate 3D geometry it has a terrible habit of having oh, it's got some detailed coordinate patch that's the wrong way round or some other piece of the mesh that needs to be repaired. It's a big nuisance to actually get that 3D geometry to the point where you can for example, 3D print it or where it is a meaningful piece of 3D geometry. And I think this is one of these cases where just make it kind of work sort of the way that seems right is going to be very useful. And that has been a major pain point in sort of of 3D 3D geometry. 3D scenery and things is like how do you actually make stuff in 3D? You can you know, kind of get it roughly right but having it really fill in correctly. That's something that I suspect is about to become rather easy. The There's a comment from parentes feel like chatgpt and the art related AIs won't be able to make full blown movies algorithmically. Yeah, I think, you know, it's videos are coming. I mean, you know, other things have been done generatively videos are coming. That will certainly happen. You know, I don't really immediately know the use case. I may be missing something. There may be some very obvious thing. I mean I, I think it's probably like I talking about with blog posts. It's like, like you know, there's an accent thing. Well, I can imagine, you know, if you have. I'm not a television watcher so I can't tell you what the lead ins to television programs and shows are but I have the impression there's kind of the, you know, there's the sort of Shazam, you know, flashing lights type thing. I'm being very unkind here but, but you know, at the beginning of some, I don't know, news program or something, you know, there's sort of flashing stuff that makes you say this is going to be exciting. And I can absolutely imagine that those things can be generatively produced and at least up to some level of quality. But I'm not sure. Well, actually. Okay, I'll give you an example of something we've looked at which is explanatory videos for things. In Wolfram Alpha, we have, you know, we have show steps and things, which is a textual thing. It's like, what about a video that explains this stuff? We've done some experiments on this. They haven't worked particularly well. Maybe this is a technology that, that can help with that. I don't know. Let's see. Comments here. I'm going to read these because I'm interested in what. Let's see. Let's just finish off on the ChatGPT things and then we'll talk about some other stuff here. Okay. Cap says they've used ChatGPT for writing technical instructions and procedures at work. Interesting. You know, the thing that I'm wondering and I'm thinking is quite likely is that one's just going to be able to write notes and these generative AI systems are going to be able to fill in the details. Like, I think it's already the case. You know, people who need to write text in order to interface with other people, whether it's, you know, some report that a doctor is writing, whether it's some piece of technical, you know, some report that an engineer writes, whether it's, you know, these kinds of things where the interface with the outside world requires a full piece of text, but the originator just says, I know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, I can really, I've seen, you know, the, the generator failed because, you know, rat ate through the cable. And I've seen this a thousand times before and it's just like that, say, you know, rat ate cable, blah, blah, blah. But that then is going to turn into a big report because, you know, because that's the way you interface with the outside world. I, I think that may very well be a use case. And in fact, I'm, I'm thinking of using that myself because, you know, I get a lot of email and it's often interesting but sometimes quite challenging to respond to. And just because of the diversity of the email, I mean, I have, I try very hard to have these buckets of useful things that can happen with email that, you know, have various endpoints that are things like, you know, we, I do, you know, we do these summer schools. I do these Q and A's. It's like, you know, somebody has some question they want to ask me an email, I'll say, and maybe people who are here have, have seen this email. I basically say, you know, ask this on a live stream. I'm not going to write you an essay as an answer, but I'm happy to answer it in this kind of verbal setting, so to speak. So and, and, and one that's sort of public and has additional utility beyond just responding to one particular person. So you know, I could just write, I mean I will, I will say that, that internally I have, you know, a three letter code, you know, ask aol Ask on live stream. And that's what I'm, you know, that's my internal version of that. But I would be very happy to have something that could turn that into, for the sort of human interface purpose that could turn that into a, you know, thank you for sending this mail. You know, suggest you ask this question on this live stream. These are, when these live streams are, this is blah, blah, blah, you know, that's the human interface, so to speak, that answers the question in a way that wouldn't be useful to just, you know, reply to the email and say aol, that doesn't. And you know, the mechanism in the middle of that that one tends to use now is to have to have a person who's going to turn that into an actual piece of email, for example. So, you know, I think that's a, another interesting use case. I mean my plan, you know, I'm planning to train a bot on my own writings. I have, I have, this is the current data I have is that I have 15 million words of email that I've written over the last 30 years. I have 7 million spoken words transcribed from these live streams and things like that. I have another 1.5 million words that I've written in kind of blog like writings. And I think I have another, I know I have half a million words that I wrote in my big book, New Kind of Science. So I've got, you know, I don't know, 30 million words, let's say of, of stuff. That is my way of yakking about things. And I fully intend to train a bot with all those words. Which means that, you know, my little skeletons of what I want to say can get turned into things that are reasonable kind of things that I might write. Now how am I actually going to use that? I'm not sure yet. It might be that I'll get those emails, I'll look at them, I'll read them through and it's like, yeah, that's what I would have written. Set, press, send, all good. I just didn't have to write it myself. Another possibility is I'll just put some big header on it that says, you know, you know, this was written by my bot, you know, if it isn't responsive complain, so to speak. And you know, that's the first line of, of sort of response to things. It's kind of like a, like an autoresponder, so to speak. You know, it's kind of like you've got a choice. You can either wait for three months for me to get around to responding to this email myself or you can get something which is likely to be a good response from my bot within an hour. And you know, I think that's. We'll see what, how that develops. I, I don't really know what the right, right way to use it is, but I am in the nice position that I have got an awful lot of, of data on which to train, train my bot, so to speak. The yeah, comment from Rock here saying I think you'd have to include that you used something as the aid for the email. Yeah, I think, you know, I wouldn't want to be in the position where I'm sending email out unless it is a. Very clearly this was sent by a bot. You know, I would definitely be in the. I'm going to read this. It's kind of like, you know, don't sign a contract without reading it type thing. It's, it's the same type of thing. One's not, you know, I've always been very careful that, you know, when I, you know, when I send a piece of email, I wrote the email, so to speak. It's not, you know, when I, when I have a, a thing that is, you know, posted by me, I wrote it. And not, not everybody in my kind of position does that. It's been a thing that I sort of made the decision a long time ago that, you know, there are situations in which, you know, somebody might prefer to get something nominally from me, but I'm not going to have time to actually write it. I don't like to do that. It's like I'm just going to, if it, if it says it comes from me, it really comes from me. And that's something that in the bot world I absolutely want to preserve. Let's see. Okay, let's see. I've got a few questions here. Okay, there's one. Let me, let me try and take a few here. There's one from Golagaz. How to focus on a problem while researching. There's so many aspects in the literature and following sort of cross references and things can be overwhelming. I think I've talked a little bit about this in other, in other cases but, you know, I know what you're experiencing because I'm often studying areas where there's. It can vary. I can study an area where just nobody's ever looked at this before. There's no literature, there's nothing to study. Or sometimes I'm studying areas where I've got a different way to think about them. And by golly, there's 50,000 papers about this area. Where on earth do I start? You know, I have had various strategies for kind of how you find. I always like to go back to the root of the tree. Rather than reading kind of the seven levels derived things that people write. I tend to like to go back to the origin. And sort of half the time the originating documents are actually clearer than a lot of what went downstream. Sometimes that isn't the case, but a lot of the time it is clearer. It's kind of less, it has less stressing on it and it's more to the point, so to speak. So that I find useful. I think that, you know, to me, I always have a high, have to have a sort of a hypothesis that I'm exploring rather than, you know, just sort of trying to learn for the sake of learning. I'm, I'm pretty bad at just learning for the sake of learning. I kind of have to have, oh, I'm trying to figure out this particular thing. You know, I've got an idea how it works. Let me try and check that idea. You know, sometimes I absolutely feel like, oh my gosh, I'm drowning. There's just too much literature. There's too many things to read. Usually it's, it's just a question of, of getting to the point where you know enough. Eventually you kind of, eventually you build a tall enough tower that you get out of the water, so to speak, you're no longer drowning. And you know, I can, I think I've talked on other, other occasions about some of the kind of strategies for doing that. But I think it's, it's really, to me, it's very important to have your own hypothesis. If you're just like, I'm going to learn this, I'm going to learn that there's this, there's this, there's this. It's very hard to get to the end of that. It's like, well, I don't really care about this part because it's not relevant to my hypothesis. And so on. Let's see, Tony is asking, how do you deal with distractions and not get overstimulated by external forces? How do you stay focused on, on hard tasks? I think one develops a certain kind of personal tenacity and maybe I've always had that. I think that there are sort of both structural things and things about the way that I choose to do things that help. So for example, I, you know, I'm in a quiet, isolated environment. I'm like, you know, I, I have, I'm not, you know, sitting at a cafe trying to work. I'm not hanging out with a bunch of other people. I'm on my own, sitting in a completely quiet place with, you know, without those kinds of distractions. I also choose to set up my life to have sort of, well, compartmentalized things. I'm doing this, I'm doing that, I'm doing that. And when I'm doing what I'm doing, I'm concentrating on what I'm doing. I'm not kind of like half doing this, half doing that. You know, when I'm doing some meeting about something, I'm like, I'm going to concentrate on that meeting and if there are other things that might distract me, I'm just going to ignore them. I'm going to have the force of mind, so to speak, to just ignore them. And you know, I will, you know, I'll sometimes glance at email that's coming in and, but I have to actively not really engage. And I know and people who work with me a lot know, you know, they can tell when I was reading something else and I just disengaged because usually I'm pretty, pretty intensely engaged in the thing I'm doing. But you know, I think the first thing is that, you know, it's like set up the structure so there aren't distractions all over the place. And like, I, you know, I don't like ever watch television. I don't, you know, go sort of spelunking in social media and things like this. I don't do a lot of these kinds of things that are kind of like, can just eat lots of time. I tend to, for example, with email, I get lots and lots of email. That's my main way of kind of handling my interaction with the world. I tend to batch up my responses to emails. So there'll be some time of the day, sometime of the week, you know, some time of the month or quarter pretty much. And they're not predetermined when, oh, my other project, sort of slightly low ab. I'll just go respond to some email. By the way, somebody asked before about sort of when one's Feeling unmotivated and so on. One of the things that I can sometimes do when I'm like, oh, I'm not really ready to sit down and work on this thing, and I'm procrastinating. I've always got email to process. And one thing about that is there's a certain satisfaction because I've got, you know, I've got. I have these, all these displays of, you know, what my email queue has looked like and over time and all this kind of thing. And it's like, okay, I'm going to go, I'm going to process some number of emails and it's like, boom, boom, boom. I've actually achieved something. And that feeling of, oh, look, I actually achieved something helps me kind of develop momentum for the more difficult thing that I'm then trying to work on. I think the thing that, you know, I. I suppose, look, it is something probably I've, I've trained myself or maybe I was, you know, built that way, so to speak, to have a certain force of will about things. I'm going to do things. I'm not going to do things. I'm not going to get distracted with things. I'm going to sort of switch from thinking about that to thinking about something else. I mean, there are things where it's. Yeah, I mean, and you have to. I mean, I think you have to have that kind of tenacity. If you're going to do large projects, you're going to do difficult projects. I think tenacity is really a fairly critical skill or a fairly critical attribute. Let's see. Question here. Peter asks, asking about team building, particularly with highly technical types of people, scientists, engineers, savants, et cetera. How do you build a team? Look, I think in my, you know, first point is there are many different kinds of leaders, many different kinds of managers. There are personalities we all have, and there are many kinds of personalities that can be successful leaders, successful managers. There are others that maybe not so much, but, you know, there are. So I can talk a little bit about, you know, the way that I tend to do these things or the way that it feels natural to me. I'm not saying this is the only way to do it. I would say in terms of sort of teams and so on. The thing that I've always thought was critical is you kind of have to define the mission. You know, if it's just like, oh, you're all kind of hanging around and we're going to do something, that's a difficult situation. You know, if you've defined. This is what we're talking about. This is the mission. Everybody's talking about this mission. Let's think about this mission. Let's engage over this mission. That, to me, is helpful. And also there are plenty of situations, particularly with various kinds of technical people and so on, where it's like, they don't do small talk very well. I'm an example of that. I don't do small talk very well. If I'm talking to somebody about nothing, I probably only get a few sentences in. As soon as there's a topic, as soon as there's something I can actually engage on, well, then it's a great conversation and everybody's exchanging a lot of information. And I found that's not uncommon among people who are sort of intellectually technically oriented, that if you try and make a kind of a small talk thing happen, it's just going to go splat. But as soon as there's a real thing to engage over, we're trying to solve this problem, we've got this mission, we're moving in this direction. Then everybody is like, oh, yeah, I can contribute a piece, I can contribute another piece, and so on. I think also, I mean, you know, it's important that people kind of know, you know, that there's some project that's going on. The first step is pick the right people for that project. If you have the wrong people for the project, it's just not going to work. And, you know, you say build a team, but, you know, if you just got the wrong people, they're going to be, well, I can't really do this. I don't fit in with this. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Doesn't really work. You know, a thing I've noticed is that I think, you know, there are people who have all kinds of funky personalities. Our company maybe collects more of those. I don't know whether we're more of those than typical. I don't really know. But I feel like we have plenty of funky personalities. And it just turns out that when the mission is strong enough, the funky personalities can work together just fine. Even if they were to sort of meet in different circumstances when they weren't being pulled by a strong mission, they would probably not get on so well and probably wouldn't work very well. But it just doesn't matter. If there's enough of a pull of the kind of mission, of what's being done. I think I would say that. That it is, you know, it's always worthwhile, you know, the thing, okay, it's worthwhile to define, this is a role. This is another role. This is another role. But most projects that get done, there are things where it's nobody's role. There are things that are sort of in the middle that you didn't predefine, oh, you're doing this, you're doing that. And those are always the things that are most difficult and require the most leadership and management is to sort of make sure you sort of corral people into crossing those, those, those, those, those sort of gaps between different things that were defined. And I think in, you know, to get to the point where the team is, is focused enough on the mission that people just say, yeah, I'm going to jump into that gap. I'm going to fill that, I'm going to do that. That's a sign when you think things are going well, when people are saying, oh, there's this gap there, well, I was only supposed to do this and this person was only supposed to do that. That's not a good sign. So I think that's another thing. I mean, okay, another point to make is a lot of people get motivated. A lot of people in the kind of technical, intellectual type area get motivated by building something they think is. Well, they get motivated in different ways. But I think that feeling that you're building something worthwhile is really important. If you're saying, I'm gonna. For many such people, building something that's just gonna be thrown away is very demotivating. You know, I notice with particularly large tech companies and other things, there are endless projects that get done where huge amounts of work get put into them and then the project is thrown away. I would not know how to manage people through that process. I mean, in our company, for better or worse, essentially nothing is thrown away. And worst cases, there are projects that are not at the right time. We kind of, you know, we, we hibernate them. But people know from the history of our company that hibernated projects do come back to life. They're not hibernated as a way to be killed, so to speak. And so, you know, I, I take it as one of my responsibilities as a manager to not have people work on things that will be thrown away. For me, when that does happen, big failure, and I'm kind of upset about it. It's like somebody worked on this and it just wasn't in the right direction and we have to throw it away. It happens to be something we've managed to make rather rare, very rare, actually. But I think that's an important motivating thing. You're building something that's worthwhile, it's something that's going to be used. It's not like you're just spinning your wheels and it's going to. And it's wasting time. It's a little different than other kinds of areas. Oh, I don't know. If you're doing, let's say, sales, you know full well you're going to make a bunch of calls. Some sales are going to happen, some sales aren't going to happen. It's a statistical kind of thing. I think often in these intellectual, technical areas, there is a desire for sort of certainty in the value of contributions. So that's a. You know, that's a thing that is a little different, I think, in the management of such folk. I think it's also to feel like one's doing something that's actually sort of worthwhile in the world and to have some sort of impression of that is good. I'm not sure that you have to actually go out and sort of, you know, talk to the customers every day. I think that the concept that one knows there are customers out there and they appreciate what one's doing is worthwhile. One of the things I realized about our company, I'm kind of embarrassed it took me this long to realize it is that, you know, we get, I'm happy to say, compliments all the time about our products. It's great. I'm really pleased about that. You know, we also get from time to time complaints, although we get a lot more compliments than complaints. I like the complaints, too, because they let us learn how to do things better. But I realized that, you know, I get these compliments and sometimes they're even, you know, an email to me and things. And most of the people around the company never see these. A few groups have had sort of send out compliments regularly, but we started just sending out a little digest of some, you know, the weeks, you know, a week's worth of things. People said. I don't know what the effect is going to be because we only just started doing it. And I'm kind of embarrassed that it's taken me decades to realize that was a worthwhile thing. But I think it's helpful to people to. I think it's helpful. I know in the abstract at least, it's helpful to people to feel that the things they're doing are worthwhile. People appreciate them. They. There's a, you know, all the effort they're putting in all of the, that hard work they're putting in is, is, has value that goes beyond just the, you know, delivering the thing they're supposed to do for their job and getting their paycheck and so on. I think that's a, you know, the idea that you're building something, particularly building something that will last, is often a motivating feature for people who are in the more technical, intellectual side. Some, some people's motivation can be slightly different. Another, another motivation can be, I just like solving problems. I just get a kick out of. You know, you give me this really complicated problem to solve, I'm going to be able to figure out, oh, I got it. You know, there's a, there's a, there's a tremendous satisfaction to that, independent of whether you're building something that's going to be part of, you know, a stone in a cathedral, so to speak. But there are plenty of people, myself included, for example, who are kind of, you know, it gives me satisfaction to think I'm putting a stone in a cathedral. So, you know, to build a cathedral and, and that it's going to be a thing that is sort of building up and will last. So a few comments on that. Let's see, Let's see. There's a something from Trashank here. What's your advice for someone employed full time in industry, doing something else, doing research in another area? Well, I mean, then you have a hobby. I've had lots of hobbies in my life. There was a time when, when doing business was a hobby for me. Then it sort of became a profession. There was a time when, when, you know, the time when I did science for a living and did business as a hobby, then that kind of flipped around. I did business for a living. I do science as a hobby, you know, I've been doing so far. I do sort of education as a hobby. Actually, there was a time long ago when I was, you know, employed to be a professor. So I suppose I was doing education for a living at that time. That was, that was a long time ago. But, you know, I think when you say you're doing research in an area that is different from what you're employed to work on, you know, that means you have a hobby, so to speak. And I think that it is a question of sort of force of will to be able to carve out enough time to do your hobby. I mean, I, I, you know, I, I hear from people from time to time they say, oh, I'm doing this job. I do, you know, this full Time job, and I really want to do research in this area. I just can't find the time to do it. Say, well, you know, does your job take you to, you know, 16 hours a day, you know, all of your waking time? Well, no, my job's really nine to five. Well, it's like, well, okay, what are you doing the rest of the time? Oh, well, you know, I come home, I watch television, I do this, I do that. It's like, well, guess what? If you just switch the television off, suddenly you would have time to do your research. And, you know, that's an example of, you know, it's a question of priorities, a question of force of will of what you're going to do. I mean, it probably also helps. I mean, I don't know. I. Some people, you know, I happen to be fairly energetic person, so I, you know, I can, like, keep going for my 16 hours of the day, and I can keep doing energetic things. And I'm not like, oh, I've got to, you know, I've got to just chill out at this point. I think, you know, the main way that I keep energetic is by doing things that I want to do. And I'm sure if I was doing things where I was just like, oh, I'm just doing this, it's really boring, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, I would not be energetic. So I think it's one of these things where you find the time, and when you're doing things you really want to be doing, you end up getting that extra energy, I think, and that's kind of the way to do it. Now, I think that there's a question of when you do that outside research, how serious do you get about it? Do you do it kind of as an independent thing on your own? Do you engage with some whole community of people? How does that work? Some people do very well just doing things on their own, I have to say. I don't think that. I mean, in my own life, you know, I started off doing research and so on. Well, I kind of started off doing that when I was a kid, sort of on my own. But then I got, you know, enmeshed in the whole kind of standard academic complex, so to speak, and doing it in a way that was sort of very sort of, you know, the. The part of. Part of the big machine, so to speak. And then I've been doing things where I sort of built my own organizations and doing things on my own subsequently. I think it probably helps to, at some point have been Part of sort of a big machine research operation in, in some sense, you know, it just helps in terms of, of, of kind of knowing, getting some intuition for what kind of research is working out. What kind of research is just kind of like spinning your wheels, I think. I'm, I'm not sure that's necessary, but I think it's probably helpful. But I think that, you know, there's this question of sort of how deeply do you engage with other people as you do your research? You know, for, for me, for example, I know that I just, I just have to obstinately do my own thing. You know, I'm often working with people, but there are more people who are working with me, not people who are kind of like telling me. I don't think that, you know, well, they're often giving me lots of good input, but they're not like, you know, deciding you should go in this branch rather than that branch on a large scale, so to speak. It's. Let's see a couple of comments here that I thought something I was wanted to answer here. Jeff is asking, how did you find out that you me would excel at physics and computation and things like that? That's a good question. I mean, there were. Okay, I, I just started doing these things because I like doing them. And I started when I was pretty young and I started getting pretty serious about physics when I was 11 or 12 years old and I started just reading books and I started trying to figure stu. That I didn't really realize that, you know, I just started trying to figure things out that turns out nobody else had figured out. I didn't really necessarily know that. Didn't really put a big sort of big flashing sign that said now I'm, you know, going out into the unknown and figuring out something people haven't figured out. I just was like, I'm interested in this question. Let me go try and figure it out to know, you know, how I might rate relative to other people are trying to do the same thing. I have to say, at the beginning, I absolutely did not think about that. I, you know, I, you know, yes, I, I knew that other kids weren't spending their time studying physics. I happened to go to schools where there are a lot of bright kids who were doing all kinds of things. But the, you know, I was. My particular thing of studying physics and things like this wasn't, you know, I wasn't doing that in an environment where it was sort of a competitive, competitive visibility, so to speak. I would say that had I looked at, you know, how I did in school and things like this, I probably would have not concluded that this was any particular. I mean, you know, I, I, like, I think probably when I was 10 years old was my lowest point in terms of, you know, math and school because that was the, you know, chasing minus signs in algebra. And it's like, I can't do this. This is incredibly boring. I don't care. You know, it's like I, it's. It was sort of a little bit after that that I realized, hey, maybe you can get a computer to do this. Which turns out, worked out pretty well. But, you know, so the sort of feedback might have been, you know, that's not a thing you're particularly good at. And I might have, if I'd taken that feedback seriously, it would have been like, okay, that's not a direction to go. I mean, people, you know, I did do, when I was a kid in school, I did do fairly well at like, you know, English and writing and things like that. And I was good education in those areas. I also did fairly well in things like, you know, Latin and so on, where it's really just a question of if you have a good memory, you can, you can do well. But the, you know, I think that. So, you know, my external feedback mechanisms weren't really particularly there, saying, hey, you should go do science. Later on they were, but, but not, not early on. And I think, you know, I didn't really take the point of view. I, I don't think I viewed sort of, it's like, am I good relative to other people? Wasn't really a thing that I was just like, I like doing this and I can do it. And, you know, the comparative thing just didn't really enter. I mean, later on it was kind of like, okay, I'm going to go to the sort of this fancy research place and, and you know, then there'll be other people who do this better than I do it and so on. And then it's like, well, maybe they're not so fantastically better. You know, a little bit anticlimactic when you realize, you know, I kept on thinking, you know, I'll, you know, I grew up in England and I, I, you know, was first in places in England, then in the US and so on. And it's like, okay, I'm finally going to get to the place where I can find, you know, there's this whole population, this whole island of physicists, so to speak, where it's like, these people are all, you know, just Way ahead of what I can do. And, and I, I suppose it's, it's, you know, I never really quite found that. And, and that was a little bit anticlimactic and in a sense disappointing. And you know, so I suppose, you know, eventually I realized, okay, I'm reasonably good at doing this stuff. Although then the interesting question is what am I actually good at doing? And what I realized is that, you know, eventually in sort of self analysis, I realize after I've done a number of projects, I'm, I'm, you know, the thing I'm pretty good at I think maybe is taking some big complicated area, grinding it down, figuring out what is the sort of essential, what is the essence, what is the point, what is the underlying sort of primitives of that area, and then doing a bunch of building back up of, you know, building up a big structure, whether it's an engineering structure or an intellectual structure that builds from those sort of essence of ideas up to some big more usable sort of practical thing that turns out to be probably my, I think, my main skill. And you know, in terms of the projects I've done, whether it's building Wolfram Language or Wolfram Alpha or science or Physics project or whatever else, in the end, although those projects are very different in their deployments and in their directions, in the end they're all projects of that same kind. You take this big area, you grind it down into sort of an essence of things and then you build back up from there. And so I, you know, I eventually realized, yeah, that's the thing I'm reasonably good at doing. And you know, I don't know, I've not. I can sort of recognize in other people sometimes, including some people who've been sort of very successful in the world, that they have similar kinds of patterns of what they do. Well, that's certainly not the only way to be successful in the world and make contributions and so on, but that's my particular path for doing that. So the answer is, I would say that insofar as I'm good at doing anything, I've realized that usually long, long after, after I should have done so to speak. I mean, you know, one of the interesting mistakes I made in my earlier life was when I started my first company, which was 1981, when I was 21 years old, and I sort of was backed into starting that company. I developed a bunch of technology, needed to sort of, you know, that was the way forward for it. And I really had at that point the, the sort of the self Image that running a company was not really a thing that I was going to be good for. And so, you know, I brought in other people to do that. That wasn't a great success. I realized after the fact, okay, I'm actually not so bad at doing this, you know, company running type thing, at least for certain, you know, for the kind of company I choose to build. And you know, part of the, part of the issue there was the following thing that for me, sort of the things you have to do, to do sort of basic business is kind of common sense. It's sort of obvious you're going to do this, you're going to do that, whatever else. What I realized is that for me it seems very easy, but it turns out it isn't actually as easy for everybody else or for many other people. I mean, there are plenty of other people who also have that kind of common sense. But for me, internally, to me, it just looks like common sense. Well, of course, everybody can do that. And so it's not, not really a thing. It's not really something significant. It's not really something that I should concentrate on or, you know, make use of the fact that I'm good at doing it. And I see this in a lot of people that there are amusing. I see it in my, my children sometimes is that they're, they're like, well, of course I, you know, they do something and they don't realize that they are much better than the average at doing that because it's always sort of come easily to them. And so they're just like, well, you know, of course everybody can do this because it's easy. And that's a, that's a thing that sometimes it's hard to see from the inside what it is that you're able to do that comes easily to you. And so you say, well, it's not really a thing, it's just easy. But looked at from the outside, people are like, wow, you can figure out how to do that. And it's, you know, so I found that a bunch of times. And, and you know, perhaps sometimes it's interesting to me to try and figure out sometimes the, the external assessment of, you know, how easy is it to do so. Like, like, for example, I'll give you an example. Live streaming things. Live streaming, you know, design reviews, you know, work that we do. Internal, the company doing these kind of yakking about different things, live streams. To me this seems easy. I don't know whether it's easy. I don't know whether it's generically easy to me, it seems easy to me. It comes fairly naturally. I mean, it's not like I have to say, oh, my gosh, I'm going to put a lot of, you know, I've got to build up a whole tower of expertise to do this. But, you know, I, I, I don't have an assessment really, of whether that's just because, you know, I happen to be built, so it's easy for me or whether, because it really is easy for anybody if they choose to do it, it's hard to tell from the inside. And, you know, I, I don't know about that. I've not really thought about it much, but, you know, that that's, and it's an example for Sometimes one has to make an assessment. You know, should I do this? Because sometimes I do know that there are things where I am in no way special at doing this. And, you know, it comes up when you're wondering whether you should delegate something to other people. It's like, I'm in no way special in, you know, in doing this thing, therefore I should delegate it. Whereas it's like, well, actually, I am a bit special in doing this. And so, you know, maybe I should try and do it myself. All right. I think I, Talking of which, I actually have to. Talking of live streams, I believe I have another one. If I know my calendar, I have another one coming up for as part of my day job right now. So I should go off to that in just a moment here. I'm having too much fun talking to all you guys here. Etori asks, will you open source the Stephen Wolfram bot? That's a very interesting question. It's a very interesting question. Well, open source now. What about the training materials? The training materials is every email I've written for the last 30 years. I'd probably better not open source that, that would have too many things that are too personal to different people and so on. In terms of the, so I don't know what the source is in modern times for a, for, you know, one of these sort of AI systems that's been trained on a lot of things. I think the training materials are kind of, that's a, that's a pocket unto itself in terms of the bot. It's like, can anybody just freely run this bot? That's an interesting question. I mean, I don't know. I haven't really thought about this. It's, you know, from some point of view, it's like, you know, it's not like I'm going to make a living from running my bot. It's, you know, on the other hand, it's a. Yeah, interesting question. I mean, I think, You know, it kind of feels like if one can provide something useful to the world and it isn't costing it one, you know, that there are plenty of things, I mean, in terms of the way that we, I've done software development, for example, you know, I very much wanted to align the value that we generate with the way that we're making a living generating that value, so to speak. So it's not like, oh, we'll give it away for free, but we'll run ads and we'll get money from this, you know, advertiser or we'll sell the data on how people are using things or whatever else. I'm, I've always found it much cleaner to say we're going to make something. If people find it useful, they should pay for it and that's how it should work. You know, people that, you know, in the industry, there's been sort of a, you know, there have been many excursions into different business models. For me, that's the one that leads to the highest long term innovation and I think we've, we've had a good experience of that. But that doesn't mean that there aren't things like Wolf Malpha for example, or you know, Wolf mentioned for developers which are free. It's, it's just a question of sort of what is the, you know, insofar as you want to keep driving innovation, what's the mechanism for doing that? And so with a, with a Stephen Wolfram bot, so to speak. I, I don't know. It's, it's probably not going to, you know, it's one of these questions. Does it need a driver of innovation inside it? Does it need to have kind of, or is it just a thing where I take this big blob of data and say, you know, and train something and then it's off and, and running for, for itself? I don't know. Good, good question. I have to think about that one. It's all right. Oh boy. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm kind of tempted to just answer a couple of other things here. Abhiyas asks, you have an overview of all the projects you have in your company. What do you think about too many versus too few projects? Yes, I am proud to say that after decades, I think I do have a reasonable overview that we in a fairly organized way produce. And I think that the Too few versus too many projects. One of the issues is when people finish a project, what they're going to do next. People for creative type people. And it's usually a terrible time when they finish a project. I mean, I feel this myself sometimes. It's. If I didn't have a next thing, you know, on the roller coaster. Not that I go on roller coasters, but, you know, you're rolling down and then, you know, it's kind of you, you rolled, you're going very, very fast. And then it's like, it's the end. Well, no, it's. It's kind of like you have to go on to the, the next thing. And I think a lot of creative type people really need that next thing to go into. And if you end up with a situation where we, oh, we got a list of projects, there's no next, you know, we don't really know what's next. That's a bad situation. So it's better to have too many projects bubbling around, at least in my experience, sort of waiting to be done. It is bad if you get a lot of projects which are all sort of moving, moving down the path, so to speak, and every one of them is not getting enough attention to really get finished. That's a bad situation and that's one that we try to avoid. But I think it's important to have other projects bubbling around so that particularly when something finishes, it's like, okay, great, there's an exciting new thing to work on. Okay, there's one last comment here and then I really have to go from Tycho. Do you think it's a good idea to treat coding programming as a sport? Like in football, where you score a goal to become famous? An interesting, interesting question. I mean, you know, one of the things that you notice in sort of general history is there are fields where, you know, at first nobody had ever heard of people who do X and then the people who do X well, become celebrities. And that's been true in a series of sports. You know, I don't know. I don't know enough about sports to know, but my impression is golf is an example, one of these where, where people who'd been, you know, the top at that weren't really famous until some moment where that started to be something. Tennis maybe is another thing, I'm not sure. But you know, there's a. There are these things where sort of suddenly it emerges that people who do that are famous. I mean, even CEOing companies is something where for a while it's like nobody really knows the names of the people who are running companies and then, then they start becoming sort of celebrity famous for a while and so on. I think the, I'm, I'm kind of language designers, computer language designers are not famous, you know, you probably, I, I, I would perhaps one day they will become so people. It was a time when people who were sort of the great programmers in the, in some of the early days of programming, the great kind of the people who wrote the great game, the great this, that and the other you could name them, you know. But then, then there come a, came a time when the teams that were building things got too big and, and you could no longer, you know, easily name the people who are responsible. I mean, with some things like language design, it does tend to still be one person at least initiating the thing. I'm, I'm, I'm the, I'm the unique example of the person who's kind of kept doing language design for, you know, for decades, so to speak, on, you know, developing because ours is a sort of a computational language rather than just a programming language. There's sort of much more to develop and that's how come it takes me decades to do it, so to speak, rather than oh, I did it over a weekend kind of thing. But, you know, that's an area where people don't know, you know, that there's no, when it comes to programmers, it is the, you know, it's, most people will be hard pressed to name great programmers and even, you know, in the earlier days of programming, maybe 20, 30 years ago, 30 years ago, there were a few examples of people who are sort of celebrity programmers. There hasn't really been a thing in recent times. Now it's interesting in terms of, it's an interesting thought, you know, in our company there are occasionally like, you know, horrible bugs that happen that are just like nobody can figure them out. And then somebody, it's like yes, I figured it out type thing. And I'm not sure how well celebrated that is and maybe it should be better celebrated. I think sometimes though, it, you know, what, what is it that makes somebody a great programmer? Part of it. I mean there's the design, there's the functional design part, but then there's also the implementation part. A lot of that is very, it has a sort of a different character. It's kind of a, a, it's a question of building up all the structure and so on. It's not kind of writing the witty novel type thing. It's not the, it's not so much of a. Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting thought. I have to ponder that whether there's a. Because it is something one would like to celebrate, you know, the intellectual and practical and and corporate success of, you know. Yes. Somebody managed to, you know, write this great piece of code. It somehow always tends to get diluted by this sort of large team aspect of things and so on. But it's an interesting idea how one how one better pulls that out. And I need to go to my day job live stream. So thank you for a lot of interesting questions and comments and getting me to think about things better. So I appreciate that and look forward to seeing you another time. All right. Bye for now.