Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (June 5, 2024)

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Q and A about business innovation and managing life. Back after a week away from this. Let's see. Lots of interesting questions here. All right, here's a pretty general one from Jamie. What business opportunities could you see being successful in the next 10 years? Well, it's a question of successful for whom? You know, the thing to understand about businesses and their success and so on is there's a bunch of different components. Sometimes it's like you have to be in the right place at the right time with access to the right resources. And there could be. If you're in that position, you could be successful. If you're not in that position, even if you have the best idea in the world, you may not be successful. So there's a certain kind of, are you in the right place, the right time, right resources to capitalize on some particular kind of opportunity? Then there's the question of what are the ambient opportunities? Like in today's world, there are things that, whoops, you're 100 years offset from the time you. You'd need to be around for that to be a successful business. I mean, if you're, for example, you know, carting blocks of ice around as an alternative to refrigeration, that's probably not a sensible business. In Today's world, you're 100 years, a bit more than 100 years too late for that business. And similarly, if you're hoping to do something with, you know, communicating with neutrinos or something, you're probably 100 years too early for that. And so, you know, as a question of, are you. Is the idea that you have something that's sort of correctly timed for the world as it is, and are you in a place where you can capitalize on that idea? And another thing might be, you might have an idea that, like, it's a great idea, but it would cost a billion dollars to do, and you're just not in a position to have the credibility and, and access to raise a billion dollars to do that idea. And the. So those are some constraints. Another issue is if you are going to sort of start a business to do something, the probability of success is vastly higher if you yourself deeply care about that thing. I mean, one sees people who say, yeah, I'm just going to start a business, and it's just a business for the sake of a business. And sometimes that can be successful. But I think it tends to be, particularly for more innovative businesses, it tends to be vastly higher likelihood of success if the person who starts it kind of actually wants the thing that that business is going to build. I mean, I think with our products and Wolfram language and so on, the fact that they are good products is in no small way dependent on the fact that I use them every day. And I really wanted them to exist and have a lot of sort of personal motivation to create things in a particular direction along these lines. And so that's another kind of factor of what makes businesses have the chance to be successful. There's also a lot of practical things about how you actually have to sort of any strategy that you start off with is very unlikely to be the strategy you end up with. You have ideas about how things are going to work. You have, you have to be able to adjust and make corrections to adapt to what actually turns out to be possible, how the world reacts to things, what actually happens in the world and so on. But if you ask kind of what are some general directions where things will be successful in the next decade or so, I have to say computation is the kind of big new enabling paradigm for things in the world. But whether it's for doing science, whether it's for developing technology and so on, you know, AI is kind of a piece of that whole computation story by AI today. And the term AI has meant different things at different times. But the big enthusiasm today is for neural net type AI, which has certain capabilities that are similar to the kinds of capabilities that we humans kind of have easily at hand, like recognizing objects or generating language, things like that. But sort of the big picture of what is now coming into scope is kind of everything that is computational and kind of involves sort of taking the world and formalizing it computationally and being able to build mechanisms and automation around that formalization. And obviously I myself have been deeply involved in this for four and a bit decades now of trying to build the tools necessary to really sort of make kind of the computational paradigm be something that you can use broadly in the world. And that's sort of centered around our computational language, Wolfram language, as this kind of way of formalizing things in the world computationally. And I have to say, there are an unbelievable number of opportunities around making use of that computational language, of our computational language, and all of the automation that we built and applying that to sort of every possible industry and direction. And it's sort of a little bit shocking. I mean, there's plenty of people who have made use of that technology, built careers from using that technology, built companies from using that technology, but there's vastly more that could be done. And it's really just at the very beginning of using what I kind of view as sort of the superpower of computational language and, and applying that to lots of different things in the world. And I think, you know, we could talk about, if somebody has particular questions about particular domains, we can maybe drill into those particular things. But I think this sort of general theme of sort of computationalized things is it, it's a big sort of meta theme, I suppose, of what the opportunities are today. If you look at different, different kinds of domains, there are places where some particular form of computationalization, so to speak, is, is readily at hand. Places where, for example, neural net AI could immediately be used. Places where it's not really a good fit, but the, the breadth of what's possible to do computationally is very great. And I think that's sort of a, A, an important example of a direction. Now there are a lot of dynamics about businesses and what's possible and what's not and what resources it needs to start a company. If you're going to start a company that's doing drug development, for example, there's a certain sort of minimum effort that you're going to need to ultimately get regulatory compliance, things like that. If you're going to start a company that's sort of making just a little piece of software where it's all in the idea and there's an easy deployment channel for it, the resources you need are vastly smaller. And there are things in the middle. There are things where you might have a thing that's rather easy to make and cheap to make, but to distribute it to the world needs building some whole giant sales distribution channel type of thing, which again is expensive. So, you know, there are a lot of, lot of different variables. Hard to answer in generality. Let's see, Question from DES here. What do you think about the sort of density of information in science or philosophy? Like DES says, your TED talk could be a pamphlet, a book, a multi volume set of books. Same deal with philosophy. Well, so question here is really about, I think about the communication of ideas and the kind of packaging of ideas for communication. And it's for me the thing that is most necessary to communicate ideas is to kind of get them in a minimal form to be able to say what is really the point. I think that's a very important start in communicating ideas. Sometimes the point is pretty easy to explain. Sometimes the point requires quite a big tower of concepts before you can really explain it. And in my life, for example, I've had things that have fallen into both of those categories. Things, things where once you get the idea it's pretty easy to explain and others where big stack to be able to explain what's going on. So for me, for example, my big book, A New Kind of Science that I published in 2002 was an example of something where I knew that the ideas in that book were kind of required quite a lot of. Quite a, quite a lot of sort of. You need quite a big tower to be able to explain those ideas. If it was like, oh, I'll just write a few pages and say what the key ideas are, it will not be adequate to communicate those kinds of ideas. There are other types of ideas where it's just like, well once you see, oh, you know, there's a prompt repository we're making for LLMs, let's say that's a pretty simple idea. You can embellish it, describe the details, but the core of that idea is kind of a few paragraphs and some pictures. It's different things I think require different kinds of different kinds of packaging to communicate the ideas. Now you know what will happen if you wrong size the packaging. Well, if it's a small idea and you write a big book about it, the book is pretty boring. It may be the case that some people will like the fact that you explain it. Once you explain it again, you explain it again, you explain it again. That may be helpful to people in really absorbing the idea if they have the patience to do it or if you make the book engaging enough to sort of keep people involved. On the other hand, on the other side you can have a big idea and you can say, well, I'm just going to write a few paragraphs about it. I'm just going to give a TED talk about it. That's a sort of a dangerous thing to do because people can just completely not understand the idea. They can think, they understand the idea, they get a little piece of it and they've got sort of this weird piece and they say that's the idea. But it isn't really the idea in my own experience. I mean, I suppose I'm personally much more of a long form explainer as probably these live streams make clear. I tend to find it easier to try and sort of structure things and explain them in kind of many steps rather than try and say let me give my one paragraph summary and have that be the thing that I'm saying now. Again, I think it's a question of the type of ideas you're trying to communicate. They're ideas that are sufficiently new and different and sort of separate from the existing kind of conventional wisdom that if you just give a paragraph, nobody's going to understand it and nobody really has a chance to understand it. There's just not enough there for people to be able to connect it to things they already know. You have to give enough kind of structure that people can make connections to things they already know. Now, sometimes as a question, when you look at things you've written, you say, could I have said this in less words? I have to say, even though I often use a lot of words, I'm often hard pressed to say what exactly would I have taken out while not making this really hard for people to digest. And, you know, again, I probably set myself up for difficult cases because I'm kind of doing things that, that are kind of hard to describe because they require kind of new paradigms to be created. I have to say, in terms of how one gives exposition of things in general, particularly in written form, I mean, I've sort of developed a number of principles about that over time. I suppose my zero principle is if you're trying to explain something and you don't understand it, yourself, your readers, listeners, whatever, don't stand a chance. And, you know, what does that mean in practice? It means if you're going to try and explain something, well, you should do the work to try and really understand it. If you do not understand it, that's not the right thing to explain. If you have to be giving an explanation of it, you better understand it. But if you are just saying, I'm going to explain something, make the thing you explain, not be the thing, a thing that you don't understand. But then once you start explaining things, it is tricky to know kind of at what speed to kind of spool out the explanation. And if you. Again, you can have things where sort of an editor will say, let's chop out some words here, because you can make the prose more precise and minimal. But if you do that, it can often be the case that, that you're saying the thing that is really the critical thing. And it's very elegant and it's got seven words and it's making that point. But most people will just read right through that and not realize that's an important point. And so I've tended to, typically and particularly in writing, I find that it's very important to kind of give a buildup. This is going to be an important point. You know, pay attention to what's coming. You know, this is something that builds on this and this and this. Now, you know, Trumpet, you know, this is. This is the idea here. And you try and sort of highlight it. And that gives people a much better chance to understand. To understand it, rather than just, well, I read this paragraph and I was just, you know, paying a little bit of attention, but I wasn't kind of primed to know that this was the critical thing. So that's one thing. I think it is. One sometimes has a terrible habit of people end up getting into this situation where they say, I've got this really minimal way to say this incredibly powerful thing, and it just nobody notices it. You kind of have to have to some extent, the area on the page that something occupies has to be somehow proportional to the importance of that thing. So don't put really important things in these very minimal forms. And I think another issue is kind of what's the order in which you explain things? And to what extent do you say the important stuff up front? Because it's exciting. And to what extent do you make sure you've built up to the point where people can really understand the thing you're saying? That's often a big trade off. I was literally just before this live stream, I was writing something that's a description of part of new functionality, the new version of Wolfram language. And I just had exactly that issue of you can say the exciting things up front and people may not understand them yet, or you can say things that are not as exciting, in which case people may have lost interest before you get to the stuff that's actually exciting. So in that particular case, my compromise was to kind of give an indication of what's coming at the front. But you have to do that very carefully because you can't use concepts that are completely incomprehensible and yet you also don't want to say things that aren't correct that you're going to have to sort of say, well, actually, we said this earlier on because we're kind of glossing over it. But now when we come back to really talk about it, we've got to admit that what we said before wasn't right. And that's a tricky thing because you've got to be able to kind of say the words. So sort of vaguely enough that you're not sort of stepping on something where you're making a mistake in what you're saying, but you're also not having to engage with sort of all the details that people don't understand yet. So lots of interesting trade offs I could talk about kind of expository writing at great length, although I'm not sure that I've fully organized my thoughts about expository writing. It's more a question of when one, when one does it, one has to work out different kinds of things as one does expository writing. One of the things that's tricky is it's often a puzzle. How do you make the sentence one that cannot be readily misunderstood? And there are plenty of sentences where it's, oh, I don't know. Like, take a very simple example, the word recreate, okay? It happens to be spelled the same way as recreate. Well, if you can avoid using, if you can have a sentence where if you just sort of read that sentence on its own, you end up reading it as, what the heck is that word? You know, recreate. What's that doing here? Oh, it's actually recreate. But to know that it's recreate, you have to have kind of been primed to know what that sentence is really going to be talking about, because otherwise, sort of on its own at least, you end up not necessarily reading that word correctly. That's a very simple example, but there are plenty of cases where, I mean, it's something where when one's done it a lot, one sort of gets into the habit of thinking about every sentence and sort of thinking, how could this be misunderstood? And trying to block the misunderstandings so that people can just read through the sentence. You know, don't want a very stilted sentence with lots of weird subclauses to avoid things and so on. I mean, something that is a mechanism that I've tended to use is to use, you know, quotes around things when it's a concept that's sort of roughly that and everybody will kind of understand it. But if you kind of drill down and say, is it exactly that? It isn't exactly that. It's something which will be understood as that, but it is not kind of formally defined as that. And I found that to be a useful mechanism in explaining things. Let's see, Jamie is asking, would you ever teach a how to write course? You know, I, I, I did at our summer school some years ago. I did do a pretty extensive lecture about kind of technical writing. And it's most useful when you actually are looking at a document and seeing, you know, how do you really do this? How do you start, what do you say? And so on. Mean. It's also useful if you look at existing documents and you say, wait a minute, this isn't done. Very well. Here's how it could be done better. And I have to say there's a. Sometimes when the document is pretty good, that's kind of the hardest case because it's kind of like if it's pretty good, as you start pulling on threads, the whole thing unravels. If it's really truly dreadful, then you're kind of like, let's try and extract what were the points these people were trying to make, and let's try and reconstruct them in a form that people could possibly understand. Let's see, There's a question from Nuno here. What's my opinion about space tourism? Is it a viable business at the present time? I don't know. I, I'm, I don't think I'm personally particularly in the target market for it. I think the, the, the question is really there are all kinds of difficult to reach places in the world and, but, okay, if you look in the past, there are places that are lovely to get to, if you can get to them, but they're hard to get to in the past. People didn't go there. Then kind of, you know, air travel became comparatively cheap. And you know, a lot of places that were previously pretty inaccessible, people started going to. And, you know, tourism really ramped up in those places. And. But then there are places where, I don't know, deep ocean, Antarctica, these kinds of places, which are just seriously difficult to get to and where, at least at the present time and where the amount of tourism is not very large. So my feeling is with space tourism, it's probably really cool. And when it's easy enough, probably there'll be a decent amount of tourism there. But, you know, it's certainly been possible to get to the Antarctic for, well, a long time, I mean, reasonably easily, for probably 70 years or something like that, more than that. But the total amount of tourism there is really quite small. And you know, deep ocean, well, you know, it's, it's again, there's sort of a few ways to do it. It's difficult. It's, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If it's, again, it's probably pretty cool, but how difficult is it to get there? And I guess that's the trade off, I think, with if it became really easy to do space tourism, then probably a bunch of people would want to do it. But exactly what the cost curves look like and the supply and demand curves look like of if it costs $100,000, who's going to do it? If it costs $10,000, who's going to do it? Those kinds of things. If it's cheap enough and safe enough, then probably lots of people will do it. I don't know. Sort of. It's a funny thing because if you look at sort of tourism in the world in general, tourism to destinations where there's sort of something to do at the destination, I think, in the end, probably win out over tourism to places where it's just cool to see. And so I don't know what will happen in space tourism. I kind of feel like there's a certain level of it's cool to see. It's cool to see the Earth from space, things like this. But then it's like, well, what are you going to do there? And then it becomes, what's the destination for space tourism? Is it a space station where you start to have all kinds of microgravity games, or where you start to have, you know, kind of do your cooking in microgravity or do this or do that or the other, where it's sort of a destination kind of activity thing to do rather than just we get to see the Earth from space, and that's the end of our story, so to speak. And I suppose when it gets to, you know, get to the moon kind of thing, it's like, well, what are you going to do on the moon? And to what extent are you then going to say, well, I want to see, you know, I've seen this crater, but what about that crater? Oh, there's this really cool thing to see on this particular crater. Let's go to that particular crater. But if it's kind of like, well, that's what lunar regolith looks like, and it kind of stretches, it's like a desert as far as the eye can see, then that doesn't create, I think, as much kind of potential demand. And if, for example, if you go and you do moon tourism or something, and it turns out that there is a whole diversity of rocks you can find, and you. You kind of going on these expeditions to try and find the coolest kind of rock you can, I think that will drive a lot more interest in that than if it's just something like, go there, see what's there, come back again. I do think one of the things that surprises me a little bit that hasn't really developed, and maybe it will finally is kind of remote VR tourism. So if it was a question, yeah, there are places in the world I'd be interested to go to, but they're kind of a super nuisance to go to. I mean, it's like, oh, there are all kinds of terrible diseases there. You've got to get all these vaccinations and you got to worry about this and worry about that. And it's, you know, days in a canoe going up this river or whatever else it is, and, you know, being eaten by mosquitoes or, you know, being attacked by whatever creature person, whatever it is. You know, it seems very, it seems like a high, high difficulty thing to do. But I'd be sort of really curious to see sort of what it's like there. And so the thing that I'm surprised hasn't happened is kind of proxy tourism with virtual reality where it's like you get a person who is, you know, the equivalent of the guide who's always used to going up that river and for whom, you know, they know how to deal with the mosquitoes and so on, and they go there and they have kind of their sort of, you know, VR camera set up, and you're kind of sitting at home watching what's happening, and you can say to them, hey, I wonder what's happening with that tree over there? You know, can you go look at it type thing and, and, and kind of go and do that. I mean, I, I have to say, going back, oh, I don't know, 25 years, you know, there have been times in my life where it been like, oh, I'm thinking about buying a piece of real estate or something, and I'm getting somebody to show me, you know, a video stream of, of what's there. And that's, that's a fairly routine thing at this point. But I, I kind of feel like this virtual tourism is something that one could imagine that there would be kind of a whole sort of network, a sort of a, A, an uber like network of, of kind of the guides who, who can go there and the people who want to sort of virtually go there. And so then the question is, for space, for example, what is it that's there? That's about kind of just seeing it. And as virtual reality gets better, the just seeing it will get easier. And what is it about sort of truly experiencing it. And in that particular case, if you're in orbit, it's microgravity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So a few thoughts there. I'm, I'm, you know, again, it's, it's a complicated issue. What, at what price, what thing can be done and then how many people are going to be interested? Let's see. Well, Ol asks, you think there's a missing feature of current tech that computer or phone developers are overlooking? How can they capitalize on AI? Well, I don't know. One of the things that I find useful, for example, is sort of enhanced memory from recording lots of things that I've done and do and so on. And I've been doing that for like 30 years. So I have very more than 30 years now. So I have, you know, all the email, all the, lots of detail, more detailed things about keystrokes and screen images and all those sorts of things. I think that something that I would expect will eventually come is sort of contextual, sort of memory autosuggestion where it's kind of like your system knows what you know and what you have done and what you care about and so on. And in any given environment, whether it's looking at a screen and seeing some pulling up some news article or whether it's being in person talking to people or something like that, that you can expect that sort of there's from your sort of history and knowledge, your personal knowledge base, so to speak, that there would end up being kind of the, the here's the connection of what's happening right now to things that you know or care about and so on from the past. And yes, I've, I've sort of started to build some of those kinds of things. I'm not sure that relates to questions about businesses earlier. It's kind of, it's like what do you really need to make such a business work and, and how do you need to plug that into everything and then how do you get people to actually have that be a thing that they care about and, and spend money on and so on. But I think that's an example of something sort of. There's a whole class of things that have to do with know the user and make use of what you know about the user to present things in the now, so to speak that are, that are relevant. And obviously there are lots of small ways that that's being done with all kinds of suggestions that are based on having you know, a store of your email or whatever else. But I think there's a vastly more that can be done along those lines. Yeah. RBS Comments Someone from NASA or SpaceX should be put a 360 degree camera on Mars so the people on Earth can just like look around. Yeah, I mean I think there's the, you know, eventually there'll be remote control robots probably that can go and, and wander around and let you go and do things. I mean, I think there's certainly a remote control telescope, so I don't think those are as popular as they might be. But you can certainly imagine the little rover that people can control. Now, controlling a rover like on Mars is not such an easy thing because after all, there is a 20 minute or so light travel time delay. So you move that little game controller to say go forward rover and then, well, you're waiting perhaps 40 minutes for the light signal to come back where yes, the rover moved forward. So it's kind of not as good a kind of immediate sport, I suppose, to the moon. It's only a second. So it's much more palatable as a. Just do it and see what happens. I think one is bitten by the speed of light when one's going sort of beyond things like the moon. But I think it might be a little bit easier in some ways to do that on the moon because on most places on Earth there are all kinds of things. You have that little rover running around on Earth there are all kinds of things that could happen to the rover. I mean, you see these things on college campuses today, delivering food and so on these little rover things, delivering food and such like. And I guess those things manage to lead a happy life and not get disrupted too much. But if you're out in the jungle somewhere with one of those things running around, you know, who's to know that a tiger doesn't come and eat it or something. I don't think it would have a very good time eating that. But in any case, it's a non trivial thing to not get disrupted by things that are going on on the Earth. If you're, you know, even if you had. Yeah, if, but if you're on the moon, there's not a lot that's going to happen to you other than while you run to that boulder or something like this. It's not like, you know, the moon creatures are going to come and start attacking your little rover. Let's see, names. Asks how important do you think interdisciplinary knowledge is for driving innovation? I think it's typically really crucial because most innovation doesn't come by taking a thing that's already well developed and just trying to grind it further and further. I mean, there is a certain amount, particularly in engineering where it's just like, let's just smooth out this thing we already have. But when it comes to serious innovation, it almost always comes by taking some idea that is from, not from the mainstream of the direction which one was going in, but it's something that comes from elsewhere and sort of fertilizes the direction one's going in. So I think, you know, if you look at it's, it's, it, it's kind of a, a self fulfilling thing to some extent. Because if you have a field and it's new, well, there might be a bunch of low hanging fruit to be picked because nobody was doing that field before. But by the time that field is sort of well developed and it's a discipline and you can go take courses about it and so on, it's well developed enough that the low hanging fruit will have been picked. And so to get to other low hanging fruit, you've got to come from somewhere else. And so it's sort of inevitable that that will come from sort of interdisciplinary or outside the discipline you thought you were working on. Kinds of knowledge. And I think in terms of what people should learn today, learning these very specialized towers of knowledge, there's a certain value to learning a specialized tower of knowledge just to know what it's like to learn a specialized tower of knowledge. Because really an interesting and different thing. But in terms of its content, if you say I learned this tower of knowledge and that's all I'm ever going to learn and I'm going to live my whole life within this tower, I don't think that's the, that's setting yourself up for an innovative life, so to speak. I think that's, that's something where sort of the, the value of learning that tower, there's a value of just being deep enough in that particular field to learn that big tower and see what it's like to do that. But in terms of innovation, it's likely that the more you know of different kinds of towers, you can sort of see, oh yes, from this tower that I know, I can see over to this other tower and I can see how to build another, another floor on it type thing. I think in my own life, for example, I've ended up learning lots of different fields. And I have to say all the time I'm making use of kind of cross connections between those fields and ideas that come from one field can be applied to another and so on. Let's see, I'm looking at other questions here. Gabriel says that entering college this fall, what advice do you have for a college student's first year? I think I've talked about this a little bit in the past, but. Well, you know, one thing, there tends to be an awful lot of stuff that one can do in college and there's sort of a question of how much of it do you want to do? And I suppose it's a. It's a lovely thing if there's a lot, a lot you want to do. But it's very easy to get completely submerged and say, yes, I can do that and I can do this and I can do that as well. And then you realize, well, that all worked fine in the first few days or whatever. But then there's this class that requires you to do a problem set that's going to take you eight hours and oops, you don't have time to do this other thing and this other thing and this other thing unless you're skimping on that particular, you know, piece of work. You know, I have to say that there's sort of a, you know, an initial thing to say, which is, why do people go to college? The terrible fact is that going to college for the sake of learning things is a minority reason for going to college. The majority reasons have to do with, well, so that I can get a credential, so I can go to the next thing, so I can kind of go hang out for a few years in an environment where I can be with other young people and sort of have fun, so I can sort of get away from where I was before these kinds of things. But the going to college for the sake of sort of maximizing learning of things as opposed to for other reasons is not the majority reason for people to go to college now, you know, should that be the reason? More people, people for people to go to college? Not necessarily. I mean, I'm a person who likes learning stuff, and so for me, that will be a motivation. But there's plenty of reasons that are sort of more social, and you get to meet this network of people that you'll probably stay in touch with for the rest of your life and so on. And those are all sort of worthwhile things. I mean, I have the impression that there's a certain sense in which people. Some people, it's like the day they arrive in college, they meet this person, this person, this person, and then it turns out you go 40 years later, and those are the people they're hanging out with, the people they met that very first day. I think there's a certain tendency to, you know, it's kind of worth, I think, expecting that you're just like, it's worth expecting you're going to keep on learning throughout your life. You're going to keep on sort of exploring new things, not just the Things that happen to fall into your lap on day one, so to speak. I think people, oh, I don't know. There are other things to say about college. I would say I'm always a believer in sort of actually interact with professors and if you have something interesting to talk to a professor about, go talk to them about it. I mean some fraction of professors might be kind of obnoxious, but the vast majority of people who sort of sign up to be professors kind of are doing it because they kind of like, well, different reasons but they have to like teaching and so on to some extent. And if you as a student have interesting things to ask them or to talk to them about, they'll probably be perfectly happy, maybe very happy even to talk to you, I think. And that's. And people sometimes say oh no, the professors, you know, they won't talk to somebody, some random student, but if the random student has something interesting to say, they absolutely will. I don't know, there are probably other things to, to comment on there. I mean it's been, I have to say that, that I my own trajectory through college, which I went to very young and was really very, I didn't really go to any classes because you didn't have to do that in England at the time and you just had to sort of do the exams at the end of the year and I didn't really, I was mostly interested in very specific things about doing the research that I was doing. And so I didn't, I myself did not have your average college experience. I've sort of seen that be had. Oh my children have mostly had sort of a more sort of ordinary college experience and I think the, but each rather different with different personalities and different interests and so on. Gosh. There's a question here from Isla. Can you think of ways to make a career out of learning? Know, I would say people who write about things they end up kind of often if they're writing non fiction and so on, they're often. They learn, they write, they learn, they write and so on. It used to be the case, it felt like that journalism was a place where people kind of would learn and keep learning things. I think modern, you know, journalism has become a very peculiar business and I suppose it's, it's much of it has gone to, you know, blogs and podcasts and things like this on the, and I, I suppose, yeah, in fact, you know, I, I, I see people who are like, who do podcasts and who interview people, they spend all their time just learning basically learning, learning from the interviews, learning in the preparation of the interviews, and so on. So that's an example of a. A way to. And if you're successful podcasting and. And I don't think not that many people are, but. But some are. You know, you can. You can make a living there, sort of just learning stuff. I would say that in. In many of the places where you're. You're learning things a bit more dilute. I mean, if you're teaching then, and you actually are kind of letting students, you know, pick projects or ask whatever questions they want to ask or whatever, then again, you're going to end up learning things to support that activity. But there's quite a bit of that activity that isn't just learning things. I suppose another key area that is sort of just learning at some level is doing research. In academia and other places, it isn't quite as good in terms of just learn stuff as you might like because you end up. Because of the structure of the sort of institutional structure of these things, one tends to be in a quite specialized area where it's like, well, this is the thing that I've got a job doing. This is the department that I'm in. These are the grants that I'm getting. So it isn't just like, just learn anything. You know, whatever you feel like learning, just learn it. So that doesn't. That it tends to be more specialized than that. And it tends to be the case that if you are doing sort of this is your mainline thing, maybe you get to do one or two sidelines, but not more than that. You can't just sort of learn at will. I think there are sometimes some sort of niche places where people are sort of just learning. I mean, people who are, I don't know, doing research to support things like journalism and so on, or to support various other kinds of activities. They'll be sort of. They'll be. They'll be asked to do research about lots of different kinds of things. I mean, I employ some people where, with all the different interests that I have, I'm asking them to look into this. Can you look into that? It's a very diverse range of things, but not driven particularly by their interests. Although I try to match it up so that I'm picking things with different people that are more aligned with their interests. But ultimately it's kind of my projects that are driving that. But that's a place where you kind of have sort of a diverse set of things that you're researching and learning about. I mean, I think, yeah, Those are a few thoughts. Gabriel asks how can I stay focused and work on projects that I'm not necessarily excited about with general education, especially where my major is not focused? You know, I have this theory that in almost any activity there's something interesting to find there and there's something interesting, some interesting way to look at it, some interesting thing to extract. Plus, I mean, at least for me, and it's sort of a personality dependent thing. Just doing anything well enough. Just doing something well enough is somehow satisfying and motivating. Other people find sort of the competitive aspect of I'm going to do it better than this other person or I'm going to be gamified into doing this. Other people find that motivating. For me personally, it's not particularly. I don't like that. I usually just sort of rebel against those things. But for me, kind of the internal satisfaction of doing things well is a driver. But also just things where you might think, oh, there's nothing interesting there. You realize, well, actually as I learn more about it or as you, you know, you're learning about something and it's like, well, there's this question, I'm curious about this and maybe that isn't the thing that you were specifically supposed to be learning that week, but I'm curious about this. Let me go understand that. And you realize, oh, actually there's a whole vast area that is sort of connected to the thing I'm supposed to be learning about that I'm finding really interesting and that will motivate me to learn sort of the mainstream thing that I'm, that I'm doing. I suppose the other thing that I find is that once I've done, in terms of the actual sort of progress of work, once I've done one thing where I can really do it efficiently and close it off and I feel very satisfied that I've done that. I have a certain momentum where when I start doing the next thing, you know, the next hour or something, I'm doing something different. I'm kind of already have some momentum going and I end up finding myself much more satisfactorily motivated to do that next thing after, you know, after I've, after I've got the momentum going than I would if I was like just starting from scratch. Oh, there's this pretty boring thing, I really don't want to do it, I'm going to put it off, I'm going to procrastinate, etc. Etc. Etc. A few thoughts at least I think that, you know, it's it's something where, particularly if you're learning things and you're not sure, you know, you. You say, I don't really know what direction I ultimately want to go in. It's kind of like, well, just learn about each of these things and just see, you know, learn them deeply enough. You can kind of tell, are you actually interested in this or not? I mean, I think one of the things that can be bad is when people are like, look, I just need to do this amount to learn kind of to pass the test or whatever. And then I move on. And it's like, that's a pretty boring way. At least for me. I suppose I find that a pretty boring way to imagine existing. I have to admit I haven't been in that position pretty much ever. But looking at it from the outside, it seems like a bad thing to be doing. And I suppose the test for me is I've learned lots of things and I remember a lot of things. And I think a large part of why I remember them is because I cared about learning them. I see people who say, oh, yeah, I did this course on whatever, whatever thing. And then you ask them something about it and they say, oh, no, I don't remember anything about that. I took that course a year ago. And I think, wait a minute. They're things I learned half a century ago, and I remember them very clearly, even if I haven't really used them in that half century. And I think the reason that I remember them clearly, I have a decent memory, so that helps. But a large part of the reason I remember them is because I cared about learning them at the time when I learned them. And it's kind of. Again, if you're. If that's why it's sort of worthwhile. Well, both to choose the things you're. You know, if you have a choice of classes and it's like, well, right now I'm kind of curious about this, so do that class now, and maybe later you'll be curious about something different. So do that class then. But if you're kind of fed a particular fixed set of classes, my claim is that you can find things that you will find interesting even in corners of. Of what's being discussed there. There'll be things where, I don't know, you're learning about some particular aspect of history or something, and the overall kind of arc of it isn't terribly exciting, but there's some particular personality or some particular situation that happened that somehow is something you're really curious about or relates to something that you care about and that's the thing to dig into, so to speak. Let's see. Aviv asks says, I have several ideas for real world applications of my work and I am a scholar at heart and it seems that a math PhD, currently doing a master's and then continuing being around academia is the best way to do that. What are your thoughts about this? Should I leave academia and work on these or mixing things together or do it only after getting a PhD? You know, it's tremendously dependent on details of personality, situation, topic and so on. I mean, most efforts to start companies are all consuming. It's not something you can do sort of as a, an after hours hobby. If it's a serious company, if it's something that can be done as, oh, I'm going to write some, I'm going to produce a website that's showing, you know, how to do some, some cute mathematical kind of thing with, you know, I don't know, knotted pretzels or something, whatever it is that is kind of a hobby type thing, then for sure you can mix that in with doing your math PhD or whatever else. But if it's really going to be a serious company that has employees and has investors perhaps and is going to deliver a product and so on, I don't think that's realistic to do, particularly not the first time you're doing it. It's completely not realistic to do that except as the only thing you're doing. I think that sort of getting ready to do something and kind of building up the knowledge, the network, et cetera, to do it. Sure, that's the thing to do. I mean, you can start going to these events that have, you know, kind of entrepreneurism events and start to sort of get to know people in the, in the right space and things like this and pay attention, you know, keep a file of all the things that are relevant to the thing you might want to work on. But I don't think that the serious starting a company thing is really mixable with kind of doing something like a PhD. I think that doing a hobby thing is absolutely mixable with that. And maybe the hobby thing is kind of the run up the on ramp to doing a thing more seriously. But there's some kinds of things that can readily be done kind of hobby style where the output is a blog or a podcast or something and there are other things that can only really be done sort of work style where the output is a, is a software product or whatever else it is. I think in terms of sort of the longer term story of kind of academia versus companies, you know, in. I mean, I see people increasingly today sort of mixing academia with companies. I think that it sort of works. If the academia is a hobby and you're mostly doing a company, I think that doing a company as a hobby is not so easy. I mean, after you've done it for a while, after you're 10 years into it and you've got a lot of experience and so on, maybe it's more feasible. But at the very beginning, when you're first doing it, I just don't think that's terribly feasible. I think that in terms of, for different people kind of should you do a company or should you be a professor kind of thing? There's sort of ways to be a professor that are a bit more like how one runs a company, but there are also plenty of ways to be a professor that are much less sort of worldly than what you need to run a company, so to speak. I mean, I think the things to understand if you're a professor, well, you might have to teach classes and so on, but you kind of do that and you show up, teach your class. But the need to have sort of continual pushing and continual sort of tenacity is a bit different from running companies. I mean, running companies, you kind of have to have continual, the, the willingness to continually push things forever. I mean, that's the nature of running companies. And if you, if you don't do that, things tend to molder fairly quickly. So, you know, that's a certain personality and thing you're signing up for. In, in the, in the company case. If you. There are also things where you say I really want to do this and you realize it just can't be done in an academic setting. It's just like nobody's people. You do that, you build this thing and it's wonderful. It'll be a product that 100 million people will use, but you'll never be able to, you know, publish a paper in an academic journal or get tenure based on that. It's just a different kind of thing that you're doing that fits into the world in a different kind of way. So I think that's another kind of consideration. But I think in a sense academia defines a particular track for doing things. You go through these steps and eventually if you do well and you sort of are diligent and smart about what you're doing, you'll come out of it as at least some level of whatever it is, professor or whatever in sort of entrepreneurism, it's mostly not nearly as tracked. I mean, people like to imagine that with incubators and this and that and the other, that there are tracks for entrepreneurism. And I suppose that works to a little, to a small extent, but I think in most cases, most things that are entrepreneurial are almost by definition things that really haven't been done before. And there isn't really a track and it's a lot less kind of certain what's going to happen than it is in something like academia. Yeah. DES is commenting on their advice for education. To take classes that teach you how to learn or solve problems in different ways and think about subjects. I mean, I think there are areas where technical knowledge is useful, something like math, for example. You just need a certain amount of technical knowledge to be able to do things. I would say that the thing to understand is that every field has its way of thinking about things. And it is very interesting to get exposed to those different ways of thinking about things, at least if you're primed to care. I mean, the way that things get thought about in philosophy or economics or, I don't know, chemistry or whatever else these are, you know, they're all kind of. Each one of these is a. Is a window into a different way of thinking about things. And, and that's an interesting thing to be exposed to and, and a worthwhile thing to be exposed to. Although, as I say, you know, it's. It's. I, I mean, sometimes there are, it's rare, I suppose, that there are classes that are specifically about, kind of sort of at a meta level, how to think about things. I'm not sure how successful those are. I think that they tend to be best. You know, the best way to learn to think about things is to actually think about things. And you know, there are, there are fields that are a bit more kind of general thinking about things, and there are fields that are very technical and where it's kind of like you just have to learn this sort of technical skill to be able to pursue that field. I mean, if you, if you take, I mean, it depends. Every field can be taught in an incredibly sort of banal way. But, you know, if you take fields like, I don't know, philosophy and so on, it's ultimately a field where you're thinking about things. And at least if it isn't just learning, you know, philosopher X said this and that and the other and some very technical, formulaic way of describing things. But, you know, and I do think that, I mean, look If I were to have my, if I'm going to say my pet peeve about education, it's that decreasingly it actually teaches people to think about things. Increasingly it's all kind of technical mechanical knowledge. And even fields that you would think would be fields where you would learn to think about things end up being ground down to the point where there's sort of industrial production line kind of technical knowledge. And I think the kind of. Yes. Learning to think about things and learning, for example. You know, another kind of pet peeve of mine is people are always taught to solve problems. They're rarely thought to. They're rarely taught to kind of learn how to decide what problems are worth solving, so to speak. That's a different kind of skill. It's one that's a little bit less on the track, on the kind of assessment path and so on of what can be taught in universities. Yeah, there's a comment here I see. About education does not equate to success. Absolutely. I mean, in, in, you know, if you want to be learning stuff, you should be learning stuff. If you don't and you just want to start doing things, it's probably a good deal to just start doing things. I mean, in my own educational background, I, I did never. I went to college. I never didn't finish high school, although the system is a bit different in England. So in some sense I kind of tested out of finishing high school. In some sense. Then I went to college. I didn't stay there very long. I never got a college degree. I went and got a PhD. I managed to do that rather quickly. So that sort of my, my one qualification as a PhD. Although I realized recently one of my kids got their PhD and I realized I never actually went and picked up the certificate for my PhD. I suppose, well, maybe I have a copy of it somewhere, I don't know. But I never, I never went to the ceremony to pick it up in any case. The. But this whole question of sort of if you're ready to do stuff, yeah, you might as well just do isn't, you know, and there are people who get to the point where they're just itching to do stuff and they're capable of it and yeah, it doesn't, doesn't make a lot of sense to be hanging around in college doing things or whatever other level of school you're at doing things where, where you're just sort of, you know, ticking. Things are ticking over and you're spending time for the sake of spending time. I mean, one of the things that can happen, actually that's sort of an irony in some sense is that there are people who did a comparatively small amount of formal schooling, but who are very knowledgeable and interested in a very wide range of things. And then there are people who've done all the possible layers of schooling. And they get very narrow, they kind of know about this very narrow tower of things and they're actually less interested and less broadly knowledgeable than people who had vastly less formal schooling. I also notice even at the level of quite mechanical things like being able to write well and so on, that's not fully mechanical, but there are aspects of it that are like forming your sentences well and so on. I've noticed that there is not nearly as much correlation between sort of numbers of years of schooling and people's ability to do that as one might expect. So yes, it's a. I think, yeah, it's, you know, if you want to be learning stuff, learn stuff. If you're itching to really just do stuff, then don't just spend time sort of ticking over learning things for the sake of it. Isla Comments could there be an argument for different types of schooling versus common curriculums to better fit different learning styles? I absolutely think so. I know that in my own case I was lucky enough to be able to sort of get through the educational process with not being having all my time submerged in kind of things I didn't find very interesting and weren't very well aligned with with how I do things. I mean, for me, I've always been interested in doing projects and learning stuff by figuring things out for myself. And that's a great way to do it if you have the right motivation and the right kind of ability to find the information and I suppose the right strategy and tenacity to be able to do those projects. It's a terrible idea for people who sort of don't have those attributes to kind of do this project based thing. I mean, there are some people like myself, where I sort of prefer to learn things for myself and be, be, you know, I go seek out knowledge and there are other people where it's much better for them if they're in a class with somebody feeding them the knowledge, so to speak. And yes, I think there are very different styles and I think there is this tendency to say we've got this amazing educational innovation and it's going to work for everybody. I don't think that's going to be the case. I think we're all somewhat different and the things that work for one person may or may not work for other people. And I think it's, you know, sometimes it's like, yes, this person is capable of zooming ahead and, you know, going three years ahead of their. Of their age, so to speak, in school. And sometimes that's a great idea and sometimes it's a terrible idea. And it really depends on the person. And it's, it's, you know, it's a tricky thing to sort of tease out what actually makes sense for any given person. And there are lots of forces that tend to sort of push in directions that have nothing to do with the individual person and a lot to do with kind of the institutional structure and things like this, or for that matter, the kind of belief about, oh, you need to get this credential at this time to do this and so on. And, oh, you shouldn't do that because nobody can ever make a living doing those things. You should do this other thing instead that you're really not interested in, not going to be able to do well versus well, you sort of aspire to be the rock star, but it's never going to happen. And so, you know, it's worthwhile to develop a thing. You're another a plan B that you're also interested in. Let's see. Maya is asking, how do you compare the scholarly life with the entrepreneurial life? Well, it depends how you do each one of them. I mean, there's a. There's a way of doing both the scholarly thing and the entrepreneurial thing that involves sort of have ideas, chase things, sort of strategically do this and that. That's actually rather similar. And there's ways to do those things that are very different. I mean, in the scholarly side, there's a way to do that much more procedurally, much more. Kind of like, I'm just going to study this thing and I'm going to sort of do this detail. Same with entrepreneurial life, that there are ways to, you know, run a company that. That's very procedural, very much like, well, I'm going to do this review today, I'm going to do that review tomorrow. I'm going to do these very procedural things all the time. And again, the different kinds of things you end up doing and sort of procedural scholarly work, but they're both kind of procedural. I think in, you know, in the scholarly business, you can probably get away with that, interacting with anybody, just sort of hiding in the library and doing your thing. Depending on your situation, you may or may not need to sort of market what you're doing in the entrepreneurial case, it's pretty difficult to do that without interacting with anybody because the sort of the, the what's inside companies is people and you end up interacting with people. And I think it's, it's really tough to do entrepreneurial kinds of things if you really don't want to interact with people. I think that in terms of the sort of the path, if in a scholarly type situation, you can probably. Well, in the entrepreneurial case, you have to kind of keep pushing or the whole thing kind of wilts. I think in the scholarly case, there are certainly situations in the world where you're a tenured professor somewhere and you're just kind of cruising and you don't really. There's no push to do things. And you know, you, you can sort of just do very little for two years and nobody will notice. That's a, that's a much tougher thing to do in an entrepreneurial setting. On the other hand, you know, you can also end up on the sort of more scholarly side. You can end up with, oh, well, I got to this position and I'm so excited that I managed to become a professor in this place. And you kind of have, by that time you're kind of burnt out, you've lost motivation. And then 20 years go by and it's like, well, what have I been doing for the last 20 years? And you get all upset that you can't really figure out what it was. And I think that's sort of a danger of perhaps cushier situation that can exist in kind of scholarly settings. But those are a few thoughts. I mean, I suppose again, there are just different ways to do entrepreneurial things and different ways to do scholarly kinds of things. In my own life, I tend to mix what would be considered kind of energetic kind of entrepreneurial kinds of things with energetic scholarly things. And in fact, they, they fit very well together because they're really, for me, both about kind of having ideas and executing on them. And they are, they kind of synergize with each other and they energize each other. If I've spent time kind of figuring out strategically what to do in an entrepreneurial way, it kind of spills over into, okay, you know, what's the real point for something scholarly that I'm doing and so on, versus from the scholarly side, it's like, let me really understand what's going on and that's useful. On the entrepreneurial side, Let's see. Hyvie asks, can being a CEO be taught or is it something a person innately has the ability for? What would you study? You know, I've wondered about this quite a bit and I've seen a lot of CEOs and I've seen a lot of people where it's like, I can't believe this person is going to be a successful CEO. And there are other ones where this person seems like a great CEO and when it's they, this person can't possibly be a successful CEO and then they make a real go of it and they're very successful. And it's like this person seems like they got all the attributes they need and they don't manage to make it work, typically because they have some kind of self limiting issue that kind of tangles them up. But I have to say it's perhaps, well, there's a definite domain, at least for me, where you can pretty much call it this is not going to work, this is going to work. And you get that, right? You can't necessarily say are they going to make a company that's worth billions of dollars or only tens of millions of dollars or are they going to. But you can pretty much say this person's going to be as likely to be successful. This person is not. But I think in terms of the. How teachable is it? You know, I don't really know. I think it's the kind of thing where it, I'm suspicious that it isn't as teachable as one might think it is. In my own case, for example, I kind of backed into starting my first company when I was what, 20, 20 years old? 21 years old, something around that. 21, I think. And you know, at first I kind of had the self image I can't actually run this thing. I got somebody else to run it. Later on I realized that was kind of a mistake. And I'd been running my current company now for, for 37 years, which is shockingly long. But the, the thing that I realize, you know, I, when I started my first company, I was an academic type. I was like, I don't really know anything about companies. Why should I be able to run a company? What? You know, that isn't my kind of thing. And then, you know, I discovered later on that actually it was something that came fairly naturally to me. And then I look back and I say, was that obvious? Should that have been obvious? And I realized actually be a better story if it wasn't obvious. But in some sense it was obvious because, you know, when I was even in elementary school, I Used to organize stuff, and I always used to organize things. You know, there were typically in, I don't know, high school or whatever, there'd be some club, you know, in the high school I went to to play a club that was started 200 years ago or something. But, you know, it was the club for doing this, that or the other. I never got involved in those kinds of things. I started my own, you know, clubs or things for doing this or that thing. And, you know, looking back at the time, it was just like, well, this is just a thing I'm doing. I didn't really see any particular significance to it. But looking back, it's about as entrepreneurial as it comes. And it was kind of like organizing people, creating things, you know, going from nothing to just invent this thing and make it happen. And I, you know, the first thing I remember really doing along those lines was a little kind of class newspaper when I was 8 years old. So it was kind of like looking back, my self image had been, I'm just an academic, you know, science type. I don't know anything about running things and entrepreneurism and so on. But if I look back, I was doing entrepreneurial stuff, although I didn't think of it as entrepreneurial stuff kind of all through my life. And I don't know to what extent that is a thing that you see repeated in lots of entrepreneurs. I know it in some particular cases now. Flip side of that. Well, there are people, I would say, for example, I'm thinking of people at our company who worked at the company for a long time doing technical kinds of things. And I've always said, I think you'd be a good manager. People say, oh, I don't do management. I don't really believe in management, I don't know anything about it, et cetera. And eventually, for one reason or another, you finally get them to do management and they're really good at it. And you know, but I don't know, I'm not. I should really do the study of going back and seeing whether, in fact, if you looked back at their history, there were signs that that was obvious based on things they. They'd done or chosen to do. But, you know, I think a lot of CEOing, it's a. I don't know and it's a. I mean, I don't find it, I've always found it fairly, a fairly natural thing to just decide what one's going to do, try and do it, try and persuade other people that it's worth doing, try and Sort of untangle the problems that come up and sort of, you know, can this be taught? Certainly the, the, the kind of, the, the details of, of how to think about particular things, you know, what I don't know, you know, issues about HR or finance or whatever else, or issues about products and markets and so on. A lot of that kind of factual knowledge absolutely can be, can be taught in terms of sort of having the right instincts about what to do. I'm not sure. I mean, I think that the. One of the things that tends to be a failure mode is people who are really have a lot of intellectual horsepower, but they believe their intellectual horsepower can only be applied in one direction. I think I was that way to some extent when I did my first company. It's kind of like I'm can apply my intellectual horsepower in science and technology, but I didn't think I could apply my intellectual horsepower in figuring out things about setting up companies and so on. But, you know, that's one of the common mistakes is, is, you know, to not apply intellectual horsepower in, you know, to these sort of practical problems in the world or setting up companies and so on. And for some reason, some people really find it hard to do that. They really, they fantastic at doing some, you know, mathematics or some, you know, very technical thing. But when you give them the problem of, oh, we've got these two people in the company who are both fighting because they're. Because of some issue that's come up and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and it's like, how are you going to solve that? And they're like, I don't know. And you say, well, why don't you try and think about it and, you know, break down the problem as you would if you were solving a technical problem. And sometimes you can get people to realize, wait a minute, Yes, I can figure this out. Sometimes it's just confidence of, oh, I've never figured out something like that before. Can I really do this? But sometimes I think there's some other kind of block of. It's really, you know, you can only apply the intellectual horsepower in this one domain. You just can't break out of that. And I don't know whether that's teachable or not. I mean, I think one of the dangers in some of this. Let's teach everybody to be an entrepreneur is you wind up with a lot of situations where people have the sort of veneer of being able to sort of do entrepreneurial things and they can talk the talk and so on, but in the end it makes no sense. And in the end the things they do fail and lots of people lose out and so on. And I think that in a sense it's sort of the over education in that direction. It's not to say that, you know, it's in. Well, you know, there's certainly factual things that you have to know to start companies and so on, although not as many as you might expect. But, you know, I'm, I'm. I don't know, I think, you know, teaching, it's interesting. I mean, I suppose it's like teaching people to do research, teaching people to invent things that have never been invented before. That's something where definitely there is a certain, there's a certain kind of way of thinking about things, a certain confidence, a certain can I really do that? That you can teach. And perhaps it's to some extent the same with entrepreneurism that it's a question of. It's almost more of a coaching psychology type thing of yes, you really can be the person in charge, make the decisions. You don't have to say, let me consult somebody before I make this decision. You can actually use the experience you have and just say, hey, I'm going to pick that direction. And maybe that is a thing that definitely can be taught or coached, so to speak. Perhaps the sort of intrinsic traits of do you have the sort of tenacity and so on. Again, maybe that's as much a thing that you, that you, that you can learn by doing. I'm not sure. So I, it's something I've, I've definitely wondered about because I've seen lots of examples and you know, I, I think there's maybe, maybe the right thing to say is entrepreneurism can definitely be coached. Whether it can be outright taught, I'm less sure. All right, we should probably wrap up there. Just see if there's one last question that I might be able to answer quickly. I'm pretty bad at the short form answer here. No, I think not. All right, well, thanks for joining me. And I think I get to do another of these live streams on Friday. I believe this time it'll be talking about future of science and technology. So hope to talk to you then. Bye for now.