Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (March 1, 2023)

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Q and A about business, innovation and managing life. I was away last week, so this is, I think, and we've had that. We had a sort of special one of these talking about ChatGPT. So we are back talking about business, innovation and managing life here, and I see we have a number of questions saved up. There's a question from Katie. What is your favorite blog or book that you've written? Any specific reason why or why not? You know, I have to say, in terms of books, I've written about 10 books altogether. Many of them are collections of things I've written elsewhere. But for me, the clear favorite book is my book A New Kind of Science, because it took me 10 years to write, which is vastly longer than anything else. It's the biggest commitment I've made to a single piece of writing ever. I spent most of the 1990s working on that project. It's a big book. I'm. I'm very happy with it. I refer to it usually in its online form. Oh, you know, sometimes many times a day. Other times there'll be a gap because I'm not working on things related to it. But it is a great source, both its main text and the notes in the back. The notes in the back are really, I think, quite good, succinct summaries of lots and lots of issues, and I use them a lot. It also has code in it that I also use. So, yes, that would have to be my. My favorite. But at any given time, I have to say I'm. I'm always working on a particular new project, and usually the thing I'm now working on is at least my temporary favorite. And I think that's necessary because I, you know, I tend to work on things that are really rather different in terms of the things that I write. And I'm always kind of like I'm making a change of direction and then I really have to be dived into that change of direction. It takes me a little while to do that sometimes. Like, for example, I just wrote, oh, came out, what, a week and a bit ago, this piece about how does ChatGPT work and why does it work? And I'm about to dive into something about kind of thinking about the future and AI and its relationship to sort of human activities in the future and so on. And so I'm really kind of diving deep into that, which is what I need to do in order to be able to really write the things I want to write. And so that will be at least my temporary favorite as I work on it. And I find it difficult. You know, these things require sort of a lot of focus and really understanding sort of all the, all the pieces of what's involved, then trying to write those down and then I go on to the next thing and try and understand all aspects of that. And while I'm working on something, that's always my favorite thing. But in terms of my sort of lifetime sequence, I would say that New Kind of Science has to be the favorite because took a decade in my life and you know, I put a lot into it and it's been a super useful reference for me and I think lots of other people in the time since then. I think it's only pity is that there are many, many pieces of it that should be kind of have found their way into the Wikipedias of this world and so on. I don't think as much of it has been put in there as should have been, which is disappointing. And I encourage people to do it. People are very welcome to do it. Oh, Judy is asking how was my trip? Was it for business or for fun? Okay, what was my trip? I. I went to Morocco and I went there because I had been invited to a conference about a field that I was deeply involved in, the kind of initiation of field of studying complexity and its implications and so on. I was deeply involved in sort of the initiation of that field or at least a version of that field in the 1980s, early 1980s. And this was a conference about that field, bringing together many of the people who'd worked on that field actually before it really existed in the 80s, and they're now quite old. And this was sort of an opportunity to see some of these people who in many cases I hadn't seen in 40 years. Plus I've never been to Morocco or even in fact continental Africa before. And I thought that would be interesting. And it was interesting. And no, I don't really do. I did spend. How long did I spend? I spent maybe two hours out of the five day trip or something doing the average tourist things and so on. But I'm not really a very good tourist traveler. I mostly meet the locals and visit different kinds of educational establishments, business things, sometimes government things and so on in different places. This was interesting. And as I say, the thing that I thought was kind of amusing was that of the sort of keynote speakers at this conference about complexity, I think I might have actually been the youngest. And since I'm pretty ancient by now, I was thinking this is kind of My this is the last time in my life, probably when I'll be the youngest speaker at a conference. The oldest was 102. He was very well preserved. An interesting chap named Edgar Morin. I even did a little bit of an interview with him. Although it was a challenge because at least at the beginning it seemed like he only spoke French. And my knowledge of French is actually turns out not as bad as I thought it was. But it's rather theoretical and challenging for me to actually speak it. But eventually, after a small period of thinking that the only form of communication was from English to Arabic to French, we did manage to discover that we could actually converse in English. So that was good. And in fact we did a bit of a video which hopefully will show up at some point on the web. Some interesting questions and answers, I think. And not sure I got my total tip about how to live to the age of 100 or beyond. I think the main feeling, which is certainly one that I anecdotally tend to see, is you have to be lucky health wise and so on, but you also have to stay interested in stuff. And that's a very good longevity tip I think. Do things that actually feel like you're interested in what comes in the future, so to speak. So that's the answer to my trip. Let's see. I have to say it's a complicated decision for me whether to do trips or not. I think this one was interesting, but before the pandemic happened, I'd been doing a fair number of trips for sometimes going to things like business events and business conferences and things like that. And I was a little disappointed. Looking back, I'm a person who tends to try and write trip reports where I try and sort of write down what happened. And sometimes that involves defining various follow ups of yes, I talked to this person, oh, I want to go and look up this thing or get back to that person about this thing. But also it allows me to kind of have a memory of what really happened on these trips. And then years later I can go back and see, you know, well, wait a minute, what did I get out of this trip? Was this trip really worthwhile? And I was a bit disappointed. Looking back at business trips that I. Business conferences and things I've been to that I would say that the, the sort of the obvious several years later, it's kind of like, well, what really happened? Answer not very much and sort of not a great way to spend my time, at least in some of these cases. Let's see, there's A question just came in from Cal asking, as a remote CEO, do you ever get cabin fever being home? Constantly. Do you try to work in different rooms to combat this? I don't, actually. I always thought that that would be a good thing to do, but never has been. I have to say that the sort of, the diversity of things that I end up working on are sufficiently great that the fact that I'm sitting in one place and I have all my computers set up and the, you know, the nice office chair and all that kind of thing, I mean, that wins out over, oh, you know, I need a change a place. You know, I have a change of activity without having a change of place. Now that said, I do like to. For the first couple of meetings, usually of each day, I tend to be walking. And when it's above 40 degrees Fahrenheit outside, which it isn't right now, sadly, I tend to walk outside. And that, of course, provides something of a. Of a change of scenery. Otherwise it's walking inside on a treadmill, which is less exciting. But for me, I don't tend to have that effect. And I think that for me, my efficiency in working is just much higher when I'm sort of sitting at my desk than it is, oh, I'm off in a hotel somewhere or something using my laptop or even if I bring sort of fancier stuff, it's kind of like, oh, it kind of gets uncomfortable sitting in the, you know, the chair for too long or it's, it's, you know, there's some other reason why it's kind of not, not as easy to concentrate on what I'm actually interested in as it is in my sort of natural habitat. So I tend to, tend to just do that. Aaron asks here, have you ever tried tracking your sentiment as you work by using a neural net to analyze the video feed of your face or body? You know, many, many years ago, it's like 25 years ago, maybe I did record some video of me working and I was like horrified by all the kinds of strange. Picking at different things that I did when I was doing that. And I also sometimes have the terrible habit, I suppose, of sort of whistling while I work, probably quite tunelessly. I've never really tried to record it and embarrass myself by doing that. But yes, it will be an interesting thing to know what, what one's kind of, you know, because when I'm working, I'm, I'm usually really paying attention to what I'm doing. So I have no idea what you Know what expressions, you know, get made. It would be kind of interesting to correlate those things, I suppose. I sort of haven't. I haven't gotten. I did that just once and it was kind of like a bit horrifying and I haven't done it again. Let's see. So Gweel asks, says that struggling with nagging feeling that they're progressing slower than they want to. I know doing what I can, but still can't shake that off. Have you ever dealt with this? If so, how? Well, let's see. I mean, any project I do, I tend to do difficult projects. So there are often times when it's like things are going slowly, things are not working, things are not fitting together. And I suppose for me, and perhaps not such a useful thing to say, you know, I sort of know in the back of my mind, I've done hundreds of projects before and they typically work out. And so the fact that there's this sort of low point of, oh, my gosh, maybe I've got to. You know, it does occur to me sometimes, maybe I finally hit the one project that I won't be able to do. But I don't take that sort of feeling that seriously because I'm like, confident. Look, I've done all these other projects before and. And I don't really think this is. There's no reason for this one to be fundamentally more difficult than others. Although there may be some particular thing that I've run into that makes it more difficult. I mean, any one of these. To me, it's a sign that I'm doing projects I should be doing when they seem difficult, when they seem, like, super easy. I have to say that that's usually the time when I don't do a good job. And that's usually a time when it isn't really that interesting a project. I mean, it's sort of analogous to. I think I mentioned this in some of these Q and A sessions that I do, particularly the one about science and technology for kids and others. Whenever I get a question where I say, wait a minute, that's an easy question, I can answer that with no trouble at all. Those are the ones that go the worst. Somehow I think it is a feature of kind of when you get to a project that doesn't quite engage you emotionally because it isn't quite the thing that is really a stretch to do. Those are the ones, at least for me, that don't work very well. I mean, I had that experience in the. When was it in the mid-1980s, no early ish, 83, 84 type time frame. I had built my first big computer system, smp, which was a symbolic manipulation program, kind of a forerunner of orphan language. It was difficult, it was really difficult. Then I thought, look, I just want to do a software engineering project. And so I decided I'm going to make a C interpreter, interpreter of the C programming language. And it was sort of ahead of its time and all that kind of thing. But I thought, look, I know how to do this. This is an easy project. I don't think I did a good job. I had some other people working on, I made a bunch of probably management mistakes and ways of dividing the project up. And really I saw that project as just too easy and didn't do a very good job, I think on it. You know, I saw the same thing number of years later with Steve Jobs actually, who had done, you know, he'd done Apple, the first iteration, the Mac, all that kind of thing. Then he had his new company next where he's like, I'm building a computer. I know how to build computers. I'm building another computer. You know, I have this one, I, I can do it. And I think it didn't go so well. I think then when he came back to Apple and it sort of was difficult and he was solving a, oh my gosh, this is really a difficult problem. Things weren't really well again. And I feel like, I think it's a common thing for people that you do your best when the thing you're trying to do is really something of a stretch and you don't do so well when it feels easy. So I think that the feeling that things are difficult is not a bad feeling. It's a feeling which you have to think of as a way to sort of make, you know, it's a proof that what you're doing is really worthwhile. You're doing something that's outer limit of what you can do. You're not sort of wasting your time in some sense doing something that's easy for you to do. So that's at least my sort of psychology of thinking about projects when they get hard. I think this thing, that one thing in my opinion not to do is to say, oh my God, this is hard. Let me put it, you know, let me postpone it. That's usually a very bad idea, at least for me. You know, it tends to be the case. It's gotten hard. Okay, well maybe, you know, today I'm feeling kind of tired, so let me wait until tomorrow, but not, oh, let's just put this, you know, this thing will magically get better when, you know, over time because it won't most of the time the, you know, the project is going to be the same project that it ever was and you know, the sooner, you know. One statement I tend to make sometimes to teams is, you know, the project won't get finished until after it's been started. So you might as well get it started so you have a chance of getting it finished by a certain time. Now this statement about things don't get easier if you just leave them for a while. That's not always true. Some business and management kinds of things do get easier if you leave them a while. There are what I sometimes refer to as self answering questions where you just leave it. And necessarily by the passage of time something is going to resolve. It's like the oft quoted kind of medical prognosis kind of thing. Whatever you have, it's either going to get better or it's going to get worse. If it gets better, well, maybe you don't even know what it was and you don't worry about it. If it gets worse, it becomes more sort of localized what the problem is and you can figure out what to do about it. But so you know, there are situations there where it's kind of like it will just resolve by the passage of time. You know, some business question will just be, yes, if you let it stay in your kind of pending email for a month, then chances are it will have resolved itself and you won't have to spend all that time to figure out what was going on. I think that that is less true of a short time scales in my experience with intellectual kinds of things where it's sort of all on me to solve it. It's just it's all on me to solve it. So I'm either going to get it solved or not. Now, occasionally there'll be things where, well, I'm going to learn something about this. I'm going to be, you know, in some situation where I learn some background to this thing, but that will make it easier to solve. There's some sort of exogenous effect where it becomes easier to solve. The other thing that happens is over long periods of time, like decades, there are questions, problems, things you might do where it's like it was really hard back then, but it suddenly got easy. I mean, there are things with the modern large language model story in AI where it was like it was really hard before, but now there's a new technology and it suddenly became easy. And there are things where it's like, oh, I'm glad I didn't spend time on that back whenever, because it just got a lot easier, through no fault of my own, so to speak, just because of ambient technology in the world. And so sometimes, you know, I think this. When I think about what projects to do, I often think about is this the right time to do this project? You know, or is it the case that if I wait for a number of years, potentially that somehow this project will become easier to do, but it's not on a timescale of order weeks where it's like just procrastinating, so to speak. That doesn't tend to be the case with intellectual projects unless, as I say, there's some exogenous thing. Oh, I'm going to go to this event and I'm going to learn about this and talk to a bunch of people who work on this and I'll get a better way to kind of orient my thinking and then I should start working on it after that. Let's see. Yeah, but by the way, I mean, this question about sort of progressing slower than one wants to, I mean, it's kind of like, well, how fast should it go, particularly if you're doing something that's never been done before. The thing that tends to happen to me is that projects end up having some sort of inexorable rate. And if I try and rush them, let's say something I'm writing, I try and rush just it ends up wasting time in the end because I rush it. And yeah, I can get through that section or whatever it is more quickly. But then I look back at it and it's like, yeah, that really wasn't very good. And then you have this painful moment of was it good enough or do I have to rewrite it, let's say, and in the end it wastes a lot of time, I think, and it's better just to go at the inextricable pace you're going at and do it as well as you can do it first time around rather than come back and do it again. Now, having said that, there are sometimes cases where you do a project and you realize after the fact, oh gosh, I could have done that much better. And your best situation is start the whole thing again and redo it. Now, typically, I think it's a common statement made in sort of various technology things, the sort of plan to throw one away and then the kind of the sub part to that is, but you never will. In other words, you never end up sort of doing a project a second time in my life, I actually have done projects second times, but usually spaced out by more than a decade. And for example, I built smp, this first sort of computational language initiative that was done 1979 to 1981, 1982 type time frame. And for all kinds of complicated reasons, I ended up sort of restarting that in a quite separate fresh start in 1986. And yes, it is really true that the fact that I'd sort of done one before, made a bunch of mistakes, was doing it again, didn't make those mistakes, but for all kinds of reasons, it was a very fresh project for me. It wasn't something where it was like, oh, I'm just doing the same thing again. It felt very fresh. Even though I'd had the experience of doing a similar project before, same thing a little bit. With our physics project, I had kind of done a precursor to that in the late 1990s, and then came back to sort of do it again in late 2019. And that again, there were different circumstances, different people involved, some slightly different ideas. It felt very fresh. But the fact that I'd sort of done something similar before was. Was very useful in being able to frame what to do. Let's see. Okay, 0dd is asking, what management strategies do you use to get the most out of your employees? I suppose there are a few things to say. I mean, one is, to my mind, the sort of most important thing to begin with is defining vision, defining direction, providing that kind of sort of vision leadership, and being able to kind of show that direction. That's one thing. Another thing is it's always challenging. You've got projects you want to do, you've got people. Maybe you've got people you've found over the course of many years that are know fit very well into the culture of your organization and so on. But, you know, do they fit with the projects you want to do? Can you. Can you fit these puzzle pieces together? That, to me, is a big challenge. And when you do it well, you get very good results. When you're kind of feeding people projects they really can't do or don't want to do, it's not going to go so well. I think the other thing is that when you define a project and you say, okay, do this project, you kind of have to have a sense of how broken down that project has to be for any given person to be able to be successful with it. You know, I See, plenty of cases where there's this project. It's a bit fuzzy and it's just not digestible by the group of people it's been given to. It's, you know, maybe some other group would do it, but, you know, some would be able to do it from. In that undigested form. Usually when it's like that, they'll take it off in a direction where you look at it and you say, well, that's not really what I would have done. Although you might be happy with it. But, you know, the question is, have you got it into a form where it's kind of. Where it can be taken from that definition by the people you've actually given it to to execute it? So I found that that's, you know, being able to find the right people, connect them to the right project, define a good vision for the project and make sure that it's in. It's kind of defined to the point where the people you've given it to can actually make progress with it. I think then, as far as I'm concerned, you know, part of what I feel is my responsibility is to give people interesting things to do and to. And to make it be the case that one is sort of pulling people, stretching, you know, people so that they're doing things that are appropriately challenging for them. Maybe a different level of challenge for different people at different times, all those kinds of things. But, you know, giving people interesting things to do. And of course, there may be some particular thing, what needs done, which would be super interesting to one person and quite uninteresting to another. Maybe the person to whom it will be super interesting. It's a bigger stretch to do that project than it is for the person who it isn't so interesting to. That's again, a complicated balancing act of do you give the project to the person for whom it's a stretch, even knowing that it might be too big a stretch and the project might not get done properly? I think I perhaps err on the side of giving it to the people for whom it would be a stretch more than the other way around. And, you know, then I think a general point is that at least in my style of doing things, sort of different people, you handle differently. I mean, there are people where it's very cut and dry. There are people where there's quite a lot of latitude in what happens. There are people where just. Just a different style of interaction. And insofar as one can have a reasonable repertoire of different styles of interaction that fit with different people. That allows one to have a sort of broader range of people working with one on, on projects and so on. I think if one has a very fixed style, then that sort of constrains a set of people, because only people who can work with that particular style, certainly my own repertoire isn't far from infinite, so to speak. And there are people for whom it's a good fit, and there are people where it just doesn't fit at all. And they're not going to be people I can, I can work with. And I think sometimes when you, you know, it's. It's a question of picking the right people. And, you know, gradually over time, I've, I've certainly in our organization has learned the kinds of people who have the right kind of, you know, thinking approach to things and sort of independence of mind and so on to be a good fit in our particular kind of corporate culture. Okay. Ire is asking, how can I increase the chance of my admission to a master's degree in complex systems or cognitive science? Look, I think one thing to say about things like that is there are situations in which you just sort of file an application and hope for the best. And there are situations where you're effectively making a deal. You know, there are situations where there's a. There's a giant organization and it's like they're going to be, you know, 50,000 people applying for admission to this college, and you just, you know, file your fit, file your, your documents, hope for the best, check the boxes, etc. And there are cases where, you know, you're getting a job with a startup or something and the startup has five employees. You're not, or you shouldn't be or not. Realistically, are you just filing your paperwork and hoping for the best? That's going to be a sort of a personal interaction with the CEO or whatever else it is. And it's going to be much more of a, you know, is there a deal to be made where you go work for that startup than it is just file the paperwork, so to speak. And I would say at different stages and sort of the education process in different countries, it's different. You know, it kind of eventually becomes in many cases, much more of a, oh, there's an advisor there, there's a person, and you, you know, interact with that person, you develop a relationship with that person, and they're interested in what you're doing, you're interested in what they're doing. And it's like, oh, yeah, you should come here and you can my grant, you know, paid for by my grant or whatever and you know, that's sort of the way it happens rather than just you blind send in, oh there's, you know, I'm going to apply to 300 places. That wouldn't be 300 but you know, 20 places or something and you know, and hope for the best, so to speak. And I think it tends to be the case in, at the college level it's much more of file the paperwork and hope for the best at the PhD level for smaller subjects, probably excluding things like physics and math. But for smaller subjects with smaller departments it is I think much more of a personal interaction type story. I think master's degrees is probably an intermediate case and it depends on the size of group size of the university, all those kinds of things. But in terms of how do you sort of present yourself so that somebody believes you'll be sort of able to do the program, be, be useful potentially in some research program. Well, I think, you know, having done research yourself and being able to say look, I did this thing and you know, if you get the person to read it, if they don't read it, well that doesn't really work. But that kind of, you know, it's a two way street. I mean, you know, it's kind of like, I think to some extent some of these kind of recruiting, I'll call them mechanisms in academia and so on have a certain degree of efficiency. That is if you apply to Place X and Place X rejects you, maybe that's a good thing. Because actually you wouldn't have fitted in in Place X even though you didn't know it and even though you didn't do enough research to find out you wouldn't have fitted in in Place X or you wouldn't have liked Place X. They kind of do it for you. You know, I think one of the things that I tend to think about like things like college admissions is that nobody really completely knows what they're trying to achieve there. In the following sense, you know, if you're an HR person at a company then you know, if you're doing your job well, what you are trying to do is to hire employees who are going to help the productivity of the company. And the, that's, you know, that's the overarching objective is, you know, increase the productivity of the company by hiring the right people or the best people, whatever. I think that at a university it's not so clear, you know, there might have been a time when the goal was, let's Bring in students who are going to, you know, have the professors, have fun teaching them. But I think at this point, the sort of admissions process, at least at American University, not so true in all places around the world, is sufficiently detached from the actual teaching part that that's no longer really a factor. And then, you know, if you get cynical about it, it's like, oh, well, bring in people who'll, you know, be good donors or their. In the future, or their families will be good donors now or whatever else. That's kind of another, Another piece or another piece might be some kind of, you know, theory of. Well, there's another piece which is the school has a certain number of computer science professors, a certain number of swimming pools, a certain number of French literature professors. You want to bring in a freshman class that will not want five times as many French literature professors as you actually have, so to speak. That is a resource match with what the university actually has on offer. So that's another thing. And, you know, you might want to bring in a, you know, you might have other constraints. You might want to bring in just sort of a class that you think will have. Will lead to sort of vibrancy of the university community, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, or you might have particular kind of socially oriented goals about the costs that you're bringing in or whatever else. But I think the sort of, the net thing that tends to happen is that it's like, let's bring in a class that's like other classes we've had before. Let's bring in students who are like the ones we had before. Because the university has sort of evolved to deal with students who are particular, you know, with particular characteristics or particular sort of culture, particular kind of pattern, so to speak. And insofar as it's evolved for that, well, if we bring in more that are the same, it's going to work next time around. So there tends to be sort of a, A, you know, is the person a fit? Well, the person might be great in some sense. They might be spectacular academically, they might be, you know, fantastic, you know, social, you know, whatevers. They might do this and that and the other, but they might not be like the, you know, they might be sort of different from what has been there before. And it's not clear you want the academically best, you might want the ones who are kind of like what's been there before. So I tend to think that's the, you know, that's sort of the effective evolved feature there. And the Same is sort of, I would say, perhaps decreasingly true as you go to sort of higher levels in the academic sequence, so to speak. I mean, it's worth realizing that at the PhD level, particularly, lots of students at that level are supported by outside research grants. And a large part of that picture is, okay, I get the student, they're interested in this, they can be attached to this grant, they can be put to work on this project, and so on. And you know, an important thing to ask, ask at that level is, well, do you actually like the projects that are on offer there? If you really don't like them, there's likely to be a problem. Now, in, in rare cases, you'll be in a situation where you, I should say most students at the PhD level do not come in with their own projects. They mostly come in and sort of get attached to some project that some professor is already doing. It's a very rare case where a student will come in and say, I really want to work on this and have their own project and their own project definition and just want advice on that project. I think it's great when that happens. It's sometimes very, in practice, inconvenient or even unmanageable in an actual sort of practical setting because it's like, well, this student wants to work on this. But unfortunately we have no grant, no funding that can be applied to that particular thing. Even though it might be fun to talk to the student about it, you know, the student is going to have to, you know, there's no way to support that student. So those are issues that come up. Let's see. There's a question here about, from Saadi. How do you decide when to make a big change in technology that you use? For example, using the example of switching from Wolfenberg bench on Eclipse to VS Code? It's a complicated thing. You bet on a certain technology, you build a bunch of things on that technology, and sometimes you say, grat, that technology didn't make it, even though it should have made it. In neural nets, for example, we have sort of the base technology we're using. We're switching it for the fourth time. And each time we bet on something we're not, I think, stupid in what we bet on. And I would say that one thing to say about technologies and what you bet on is you got to look at what's been happening with that technology. Is it being sort of worked on by an energetic organization that has a future? Is it something where it all sort of went to seed and nobody cares about it, is it something where it's liable to be, oh, yes, it's working. There's a fine little company that's doing it now, but that company's probably going to get eaten by a bigger fish and the bigger fish is going to be very difficult to deal with those kinds of things. It's a complicated assessment for a technology. You know, does it, does it have, what is its trajectory? And you know, I don't think it's the case that you always, and certainly we don't always pick, oh, that's the most popular thing. Everybody's doing that. Let's do that, let's, let's do that too. That's actually not a great strategy. Often the thing to do in my experience is you try to understand what's the trajectory, you know, how good is it, you know, is it well put together and you know, is it going to be a solid foundation, etc. Etc. Etc. I think that this question of you bet on one horse and then you realize you have to change horses, that can happen. It's very frustrating actually when it happens because usually a lot of work to change horses, to change technologies and so on. And you have to hope that we figure for some kinds of things, if we've got a five year run with a particular technology, particular investment in it, that's sort of good enough and that's an okay bet. And yes, it's going to cost a bunch of money to retool things when we sort of change bets, but at least we had that five year run. I think there's another question of when adopting technologies too early. That's another thing that can happen. Say it's a fantastic technology, but it's not really ready yet. And I can tell you, when we first started working on Wolfram language back in 1986, there's a question of, we were using C C programming language, but C wasn't really ready yet. C was always compiled back into C. The code was very inefficient, it didn't really work very well. So we built our own kind of object oriented extension of C. And that was an expensive thing to do at the time and it worked out fine for us, but it was the right thing not to bet on C because it was too early. Later on, 10 years later, it would have been the right thing to bet on C and just use that as the main implementation language. But at the time it was a little bit too early. I mean, there are other technologies where it's too early and you don't bet on them. And you say, you know, you say few. I didn't bet on this because in fact, it didn't make it. And there are other cases where you say, you know, so different things can happen within our company. One of the things that is a, is, is a, is a challenge is I try to get kind of when we make a bet on a technology, I try to have a sort of serious group of people from around the company try and assess that technology before we make that. Because I found that, you know, you need to have. You need to look at it from a kind of a business and organizational point of view of what's the organization like? Somebody to do some due diligence on that. You need to look at it from a technology point of view. You need to look at it from the. How does it fit into our technology stack point of view? There's a bunch of different things and it's a place where experience really counts. And so having people from different parts of the company, even if they don't know about this specific use case, this specific project, having them kind of look at some technology we might be betting on is really quite a useful thing. And sometimes, though, it's very challenging to make that happen. Because what tends to happen is somebody, some developer that somewhere, some engineer somewhere will say, oh, I'm just going to prototype this. I'm going to try it out. Let me see whether this technology is worth looking at. And they build that prototype. And then it's like, well, this is working pretty well. Let's just keep going with this. And it's very hard to get that actual moment when it's like, we're going to make a technology decision. Because also it's not worth convening the big group of people to do the deep dive if the person could have tried to do a prototype and the prototype was just a complete failure. There's no point in even discussing it at that point. So it's a little tricky to figure out where's the moment where you say we're betting on a technology. Let's go do an assessment of this and see whether this makes sense. But that's something that, is something that I've been trying to do. I get kind of upset when I discover we've just started using some technology and we never really talked about it. And it's just sort of crept into our technology stack because, you know, when you introduce, for example, let's say, code written in some different language, it's a certain commitment to do that because you're Going to have to maintain that, going to have to have somebody who knows about it and so on. So I think that that's a, you know, that's a piece that we, we think about. Let's see. So let's see here. Okay, there's a question from Eigen here saying, good project definitions. Formalizing what a project means is one very important part. But how much does money, stock options, vacations, to avoid burnout and so on, influence employee morale? Or giving them a project that they want to work on or people they want to work with? You know, maybe it's just me, but I think having something one really wants to work on and feeling like one's doing something that is significant to one and to whatever one cares about, so to speak, I think that is the most important thing. I think the mechanics of kind of, if your main motivation is, you know, I'm doing this to make money, for example, it's, well, okay, you know, I should say, because I've mostly worked for the last 36 years on a company that isn't on a track to kind of have a giant sort of liquidity event where everybody makes lots of money from it. It's really on a track to try and build something useful and hopefully gradually make money, so to speak. It's not the same kind of motivation by adventure of I'm going to join a startup and, you know, oh, the startup's going to be really big and I'm going to make, you know, gazillions of dollars from it. You know, I think it's a very different motivation structure because, you know, the vast majority of startups fail. And I've certainly talked to. I remember for some reason sticking out of my mind, one person, a longtime employee of ours, who ended up deciding he was going to go off to Silicon Valley and, you know, and sort of make payment fortune there and so on. And a number of years later I talked to him. He says, yeah, I've worked for a bunch of startups, actually, it's seven startups and every single one of them has failed. And, you know, it's a very different proposition. It's kind of like it's an adventure way to lead life as opposed to, look, I'm working on something that I care about and that's what's important to me. It's like, well, maybe I'll hit the jackpot, maybe I won't. It's a different kind of thing, you know, different. Different sort of psychology and personality and so on. I think the particular things I've done. Have not really been of that character. Actually, we're in the process of doing a spin off company right now that might be a little bit more of that. Well, we'll probably more of that character. But that's an unusual thing and it takes a bit of a readjustment. I always like to do things that are a bit different. This is something different and where it will be more of a kind of an adventure story, so to speak. I think that this question of when somebody says, if you give me more money, I'm going to care more about what I'm doing. I don't know, I've. I've not seen that work, you know, that that tends to be a. It's kind of like, like people saying, you know, give me a better title and I'll do my work better. It's like really, I mean, it's somehow that it's kind of a proxy for the satisfaction people get from actually doing something they're interested in doing. The proxy is sort of give me more candy, so to speak. And I just don't think. I think it's just a way of delaying sort of an inevitable kind of I don't really like what I'm doing type type thing. Now that said, it's, you know, there are situations in which people feel they kind of. It sort of eats at them to have something where, oh, I'm just called a junior such and such and you know, it kind of bugs them that that's the case. And then it could be the case that if that's kind of fixed, then they're not bugged by that and it helps. I'm not sure how significant that effect is, but I think this question of, okay, so then there's the question of sort of the burnout and so on. I'll tell you something that I've noticed, which is I've done lots of big projects in my life with lots of people with lots of intensity. And when you have these projects that are very intense and people have to work very hard and it's lots of long hours and so on, you're pushing towards this project. You might think, oh my gosh, people are going to say, I just don't want to do this, I'm quitting. Doesn't happen. The time when people quit is after the project got done. There's this kind of anticlimactic moment when we worked very hard, we did something we really found interesting and fulfilling. We. We achieved something and then, oh, there's this big vacuum afterwards that's the time you really have to worry about people, you know, people quitting because it's like, okay, what's next? You know, I, I did this big thing. It was exciting, it was fulfilling. And then it's like, oh, I'm just looking at, you know, years of. I don't know what I'm doing now. And so, you know, for many people, it's really quite important to find, you know, what's the next intense project that people can at least think about, even if it hasn't reached its moment of intensity yet, a sort of a direction to, to look forward to, so to speak. And so I've, you know, my, my tendency tends to be, you know, in a situation where there's a high amount of intensity. Yes. There are people who have all kinds of things going on in their lives and they, they booked a vacation at the time that coincides with some grand, you know, product release and so on and so on and so on, you know, and people say, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry I booked this vacation. But look, you know, you don't know when the product is going to ship or whatever, and you booked your vacation or whatever. And, you know, unless it's really, really, really, like, super impossible. My tendency is just work around those things. Just, you know, people take their vacations when they wanted to take them and when they booked to take them, and you figure out how to deal with that and you kind of. And people are, you know, you try and get enough information from people that if they just say, oh, no, I just don't work after 5pm or something, and it's like, really? Why not? And they say, well, because I've got to go collect my kid from somewhere. Okay, fine. But then, you know, then you understand what's going on rather than it's just kind of the, oh, as a matter of principle, I'm not doing this, which usually is not such a good thing. But if you do understand what their actual constraints are and so on, being able to in a civilized way, work around those is, I think, valuable. It takes more management effort, but I think that's the valuable thing to do. And certainly we've had over the course of time, many people who work in their particular hours and days and times when they can't work and they're in a different time zone and they're this and that and the other, and it's kind of like, so you adapt to that. And if you figure out how you get the most productivity, rather than trying to make the sort of cookie cutter, where, you know, we're defining it has to work this way. It's like, well, you've got this particular asset of this employee, let's say, and how can you sort of adapt that to what you need to do in terms of. Yeah, I think sort of my own tendency is to feel that the sort of the number one driver of employee morale is having interesting things to work on, I think. But maybe that's a statement only about the particular, you know, company I've built and the particular sort of culture and type of people that it has. But that's certainly been my observation. And I think that other kinds of things, like, you know, put an extra foosball table there or something, not that anybody shows up to offices anymore, but, you know, is a very secondary effect in my experience. That's interesting. Eigen comments. They've been one to say, if I get more money, I'll care more. And in the end, it didn't work. Yeah, I'm not surprised. I completely, you know, from what I've seen, I know for myself, for example, you know, many, many, many life choices I've made are do the more interesting thing rather than the thing that makes more money, for example. You know, I think it's one of these things where there's a, you know, there, there are. There are certain kinds of things in life which cost certain amounts of money. And, you know, it may really matter to you that you can achieve those particular things. But I would say that sort of the. It can be the case that the main thing you're interested in is making money for the sake of making money just because it's kind of fun and it's kind of a game to make more money. But I think that's, you know, that that can be a motivation in its own right. But if you're motivated by the. As many people are by sort of the content and the daily work that people are doing, then it's, you know, that is a secondary issue. Typically it doesn't, you know, in terms of quality of life and satisfaction, it doesn't seem to be, you know, it's like, well, it's kind of cool that one has, you know, it's a question of. Of. I would say the limiting case of that is let me do something I absolutely don't want to do for 40 years so I can retire and do what I actually want to do. And I have essentially never seen that work. Well, is that true? I've seen a few cases where people quotes retire much younger because they Sell a company or something like this and then do something that is kind of a second act that really works well. But I would say that's a rare case. The case of let me do something I really don't want to do just to make money so that later on I can do the thing I want to do is just. I think that's a, that's really a bad setup. Not least because people often, when they actually get into doing the thing they always wanted to do, they realize, oh, it's not really quite what I expected. It's not really what I want to do. Oh my gosh, I just spent 40 years getting ready for this and it wasn't the right thing anyway. And I think sort of being able to mix in the thing you really want to do with the thing that makes you a living or whatever else is a much better strategy than, you know, do the thing where you're, you're sort of pushing really hard to, you know, to get the, to get the capability to do that. You know, having said that, there are things where, oh, I don't know, I mean there are, there are cases where you have to make a certain amount of money to be able to do a particular kind of thing and, but you know, don't save it up your whole life, you know, expecting that, you know, when you retire you'll do this. That's, that's, that seems to be, in my observation, kind of a mistake. Let's see. Uray asks, actually. Okay. Eigen is asking, what do you think about code review and peer review? Does it slow down a company or research? Do you think there are alternatives to this? Well, those are very different things. I mean, in the notion of kind of the pull request code review type mechanism, that's pretty good. I mean we've been doing that for years now and I think that's a pretty good, nice mechanism to be able to kind of have, you know, when you're developing something like software, being able to at the moment when code is being committed, you know, having somebody review it, it's a good idea, seems to just work fine. The sort of the peer review where you're asking person A, what do you think of person B in a company? We haven't really done that. And that seems, sounds to me like it's one of these weird sort of political favorites kind of stories that is just will lead to horrifying gaming and doesn't seem like a great idea to me. I mean, when you look at other examples of sort of the peer review process like in academia, it's a flaming disaster in my opinion. I mean, it's a heavily gamed process where if you're peer reviewing some journal article. My theory of what most people do is it's kind of a natural selection theory. It's kind of like if this article promotes their interest and refers to their work and so on, except if it doesn't reject. And over the course of time maybe that improves your, your research is lot and so on. I think it's really not a great mechanism. It's one where there's, you know, in my own experience, back when I haven't published a, you know, I haven't done the, the traditional send a paper to an academic journal since 1986, even though I, I write and produce lots of kind of academic type material, I've not chosen to do it that way because one of the things I noticed was anything you do that's actually really quite good and original, it's sort of hopeless in this institutional structure. It's kind of like the only way it gets through the institutional structure is by essentially social gaming, as in, oh, you got to know the people and attach it to this and that and then you can sort of socially have it, have it succeed. Even though intellectually people are like, what the heck is this? It's something new. I don't understand it. You know, and many people, though, a small number of people who'll take the point of view, it's something new. I can see it's kind of interesting. You know, let's put it out there in the world, let's support this. But most people don't do that. Most people are like, it's something new. I don't understand it. It's bad. You know, it's, you know, let's just, you know, push it aside, so to speak. So I think in those settings, I, I don't think it's a, I think it's a rather bad mechanism to do this kind of, you know, peer review. Let's, let's. It's kind of a, a thing that forces kind of a reversion to the mean. It's, it's kind of like a, a lowest common denominator way of proceeding. I think that, and I think the same is true, although we haven't, I think, tried it significantly in our company of having sort of people rate other people in that kind of way. I don't know. My intuition is it's not a very good idea and that, you know, you hear all these stories about companies where people have come up with these amazing rating systems, like one from a large tech company. You can probably guess which one. But they had an idea that they would rate people. And one of the criteria was how much computer time have you used for the projects you're doing? And it's like, that's just not a good idea because, you know, it leads to people sort of running idle loops on computers just in order to improve their ratings and so on. It's kind of like a gameable thing. And I think that's something, you know, in a company like mine. I'm rather pleased with the fact that I think we've managed to largely make things be something where people succeed if they're doing things that are actually good, as opposed to people succeed if they're gaming the system to get, you know, socially supported in this way and that way. And the other that it's kind of you succeed by doing a good job, so to speak. Is. Is I think, a good thing to aspire to from a management structure point of view. Let's see, Let's see. RBS is asking how often do you work on the physics project in terms of weeks or months? How do you manage your life to work on this one? Finding the rule for the universe the has no business case. Well, you know, I do things that I find interesting and the. In the last little while, I have not been working directly on that aspect of the physics project. I just did a big project on the second law of thermodynamics, which has really informed a bunch of things that I want to do with the physics project. And it has been an example. I've used sort of a piece of foundation for the physics project. So I really wanted to nail that down. Now it's kind of segued into a project on observer theory, which is really directly relevant to the physics project. But there are a bunch of other pieces of the physics project that I really want to do in terms of why do it? Well, because I want to. Is there a business case? Not that I know of. I mean, in, you know, I certainly went into the physics project thinking there is no business case for this in less than 200 years. And it turned out that there are many things which have come out of the physics project more conceptual than direct, but methods of methods and formalism and so on, which I think are in the much shorter term applicable to things like distributed computing, the mechanism. We started our Wolfram Institute few months ago now, and that's kind of, I hope, will be kind of part of my venue for working on things for which there is no business case. And it's sort of developing its own kind of culture and way of doing things. And I'm not the one running it, so I'm again, something very different. For me, it's kind of like I'm just getting to do science and not kind of organizationally running what's going on. I think. For me, you know, the which project should I work on next type thing. I would say that it's a big mixture. I mean, right now, for example, I just spent a little while working on sort of things related to ChatGPT, both because I find them interesting and because it's a great opportunity for our technology stack. The connection of WolframAlpha to large language models is really something quite spectacular and quite unique and quite unexpected and important. So that's a thing. But also it is realistically writing sort of an explainer of ChatGPT, which I want to do for my own purposes. At the time I did of a week or two ago, it's kind of like it was a good thing to do because lots of people want to read it and lots of people have read it, and that feels good, that it seems like it's useful. And so that's a thing to do at this time. And I just made sort of the active decision of I've got various physics project things queued up that I really want to do, and I'm going to postpone them a little bit because I want to work on this particular project right now of sort of the implications of AI, because I think a lot of people are sort of wondering about that and I want to figure it out. And this is sort of my excuse to kind of try and crispen up things that I've been thinking about for decades and try and write something coherent about them. Let's see, Etore is asking, how do you deal with confusion and the feeling of, I don't understand this, at least for now. I usually find a concrete thing to work on. You know, usually the. I don't understand it happens when I'm not kind of, you know, standing on bedrock. It happens because I was sort of floating a bit and I kind of like, oh, yeah, there's this definition of this. I don't quite understand that, but I can kind of. I can kind of swing in the. In the tree canopy or something from here to there, and maybe I won't, you know, crash, but for me, if I'm sort of standing on the bedrock and can really sort of build things from Those foundations where I really understand what's going on, even if it isn't quite as fancy as the thing that I'm, I'm trying to do. For me, that's the thing to do is sort of go back to the bedrock, go back to the foundations, and try to build back up to the thing that you don't understand and try. And you know, a very common thing for me is, okay, there's this thing, I don't know, one's looking at transformer nets or something, and it's like, well, let me find the simpler, simpler, simpler, simpler, simpler case of this. Now sometimes when it gets so simple, it's like the structure isn't there and you really can't tell what's happening. You can't tell about the real case from the super, super, super simple case. But the thing I found more often is when you get to that super, super simple case, by the way, people often never thought about that case because they were always like, oh, well, the simple, simple case, that's not relevant. So we got to think about this much more elaborate case. And by the way, when they do that, they understand much less. So it can even be a great kind of research strategy to just go down, you know, what's the simpler, simpler case? One thing I like to do is sometimes there'll be some effect, some phenomenon, whatever, and you say, well, what's really behind that phenomenon? Let's get the simpler, simpler, simpler case where that happens, because at some point you're not going to see that phenomenon anymore anymore. The thing you're going to be looking at just doesn't have the structure it needs for that phenomenon. I like to see the thing fall apart because that helps me to understand what really is that phenomenon. You know, is that phenomenon ultimately something whose origin is extremely simple, or is that phenomenon, does it need some other level of structure for one to be able to, to get that phenomenon? So I find that useful to be able to do that. Okay, there's another question here from Eigen, who's asking some interesting questions here. Several, actually. Okay. Given my knowledge of foundations, of things like math and physics, do you bother to research fundamental theories of project management or try to formalize project management and those kinds of things? You know, I've often felt a bit embarrassed that, you know, I know all this basic science. I've even worked on sort of a lot on the science of complex systems, things like this. And yet I find that those, I think I use those scientific ideas. I don't really use them in, like, Running a company, it feels much more seat of the pants, you know, emotional kind of intuition based, do this, do this, do this. My guess is that if you really untangled lots of decisions, I've made lots of things like that, that they are pretty deeply informed by things that I know from doing kind of science and analytical kinds of things. But it isn't front and center. It's not like I have this, you know, the simulation of a company where I'm working out this and that thing. But there's an intuition that you develop about things that can be figured out, things that can't be figured out, and so on. Plus in management, in managing companies, things like that, one of the biggest elements is people. And I've always been interested in people. And I've sort of gotten to the point where I think my ability to have some level of analytical sort of thinking about people and what they're interested in and how they'll do things and so on is decently good, I think. And that's a thing that's often applied and there sort of isn't really a science of that very much, at least as far as I'm concerned. Now, it sort of amuses me that if you look at like prompt engineering for LLMs, it is charmingly like psychology, or maybe it's like animal wrangling. You know, it's like, can you coax the LLM into doing this or that thing? Can you understand? Can you get an intuition for this black box of what's happening inside the AI to the point where you can say just the right things to it to elicit some particular kind of response? But maybe I shouldn't have said that. There's sort of no science of kind of the psychology of how people work. I mean, the science of psychology has plenty in it, most of which I know nothing about, but sort of over the course of time, I think I've developed kind of mostly by example. I've kind of been the. The machine learning training, you know, being trained by just seeing lots of examples. Look, I've seen something a bit like that before. When I see this particular characteristic in individuals, this happens, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So that's. Let's see, the Eigen is also asking about mentoring. What's about the process of picking a mentoree? Do you look for specific clues and is there anything an individual can do to stand out? You know, I've ended up with two types of mentorees and I really, I've enjoyed, you know, over the course of gosh, 40 years more than that. Mentoring all sorts of people. I would say that the, well, two categories. It's usually I would say that the top categories are CEOs and kids. And I was realizing recently, you know, what is in common between CEOs and kids. And I think the answer is that both of them are types of people where they sort of believe that anything is possible. You know, CEO of some tech company. It's like, we're going to do amazing things, we're going to get to the moon type thing. Kids often are like, I can do anything. It's some do, some think that at least those are both sort of interesting moments. They're interesting kinds of situations in which to sort of do mentoring because, you know, it's, it's sort of the, that you can, you can help people go in a direction where they could do anything. I think the other case that I found interesting in some situations, particularly with kids, is like the, the situation is just a total mess. Actually that happens with CEOs as well. And it's like, can you find your way out of this box? You know, can you be creative and solve this problem and find a path out of this box? And that's kind of satisfying thing to do. And sometimes the box that's. That exists is one that I know nothing about. It's a, it's a situation in the world that I really have not encountered myself. I really don't know anything about. And that makes it interesting to me as something where I learn something about the world and also have the, you know, the, the sort of fulfilling feeling of having helped some, some person with some situation that one can help untangle, so to speak. But. So, you know, those are a couple of cases. I would say that the, the case that is probably less interesting to me is the case where it's kind of like sort of everything, you know, it's on a path. There is a well defined path and you kind of, unless you fall off the path, you're going to go on that path and everything's going to be just fine. And there isn't a, you know, really high upside. There isn't a really low down downside. Just follow that path. I don't feel like I can be that useful in a case like that. And it's not, you know, unless it's particularly when it's a path where I kind of seen that path before. It's like, well, you know, it's not really, I'm not learning much from this and they don't Think I'm contributing much to it. It's usually, I would say the cases where I'm probably the most useful are where it's just a totally wild situation for one reason or another. It's a company in a wild, you know, in doing wild things or in a wild problem situation or. Or similarly with people. I mean, when. When the wildness with people gets more into the psychological issues thing, then I've. I've, you know, that point, I. I don't know enough and I sort of give up. But when it's more sort of exogenous factors of. There's a complicated tangle of things going on and there is a path that is not so much about, you know, that's not an issue of its own internal making. It's more. Well, it's not quite fair to say that one doesn't always. One doesn't deal with that because I think even with the CEO crowd, for example, it's pretty common to find. You know, a very common question is, you know, you got some person with a company and they're doing this and they're doing that, and they're trying to figure out whether to do this or whether do that. And it's like, okay, what do you actually want to do? And it's like, well, I should do this and I should do that, and I. Whatever, whatever, whatever. What do you actually want to do? Because, you know, often that question, people have felt they can't really ask that question of themselves, but when they do, it's kind of obvious what they should do, and it's kind of obvious. And it's like, okay, but, you know, can you do that and not, you know, damage your investors, employees, customers, whatever else? Okay, first figure out what you want to do. Then figure out, how do you, you know, how do you get a good outcome for other people given that you know what you want to do? At least I found that that's a useful way to think about things in certain cases there. So that's been a sort of a rough outline. But plus, I mean, at some level, I kind of, you know, there are mechanics of, you know, you can't really mentor somebody who you can't communicate with in English, in my case, you can't really. If the person is really, really closed and just won't express themselves about things, and that happens both to CEOs and kids, it makes it much more difficult. You can't really tell, you know, you can't really tell what's going on. If there's a. If there's a kind of a shell that's too thick and you can't, you know, there's nothing really to help with if it's just. If you're just dealing with some kind of outer shell, I think. And it always helps if you just enjoy the person, find them, find them interesting. Although I have to say, for me, there's a pretty wide range of people for whom I find that to be the case. And so that's much less of a factor as far as I'm concerned. And sometimes it's like you're dealing with people who you think are super arrogant. It's like, I don't really care. It's kind of amusing. Or who you might say, oh, this person's totally obnoxious. I can't deal with them. That isn't usually the problem, so to speak. All right, maybe one. Let's see. Ire is asking, saying I seem to care a lot about history of ideas and scientific areas. Do you think this is a must for producing meaningful work in research? No, I think that it depends how much you need to understand what has gone before. There are plenty of areas of research where the problem is pretty well defined. It's kind of a barren landscape. There isn't a lot there, and you just have to build something new. In that case, understanding what's gone before is not that important. In cases where you sort of need to really build on the ideas that have gone before. And particularly when the ideas have gone before don't ring quite true, they don't really quite fit with what you think. Now, it's really useful to understand the history because often the version of the idea that you thought you had based on textbooks, papers, current research, and so on, is actually not what the original idea was. And the original idea actually makes a lot more sense often than the evolved version of the idea that was being presented in textbooks today. And for me, often to understand what the idea really is, it's super useful to go back and see kind of where that idea came from. And sometimes it's kind of like, where's the magic in something? Take neural nets, for instance. Knowing that the neural nets of today are structurally, at least in general terms, very similar to the neural nets from the 1940s is quite useful. It's kind of like when you're looking for what's the magic today? You're not looking is the magic in the foundations like that, and you're looking for sort of other sources of magic. And knowing what that historical progression is is important for knowing sort of where's the magic? So to speak? So I found it really useful. And I've also found, because I often work on sort of foundational kinds of things, people thought about the foundations when an area was being formed. Later on, they didn't think about the foundations. And sometimes you have to drill through all of the structure that's been built on top of the foundations. You have to drill through those to get to the point where you can engage with the foundations you're actually interested in. And sometimes, quite often actually, you find actually those foundations are built on sand. Those foundations were very wonky at the time when, when they were originally constructed. And yet people have built on top of them, and people have built so much on top that they're really, you know, they just assume those foundations. And it's really important to go back and see why that happened. Now also, I just find when I try to get an intuition for a field, understanding the type of thinking that was going on among the people who created the field is really useful. I mean, understanding that something was done, oh, I don't know, for some particular application, because all the language of that field may be oriented towards that application. It's like, why do they call it that? Oh, it's because they were thinking about making these kinds of machines and that's why this whole field was named in that way. And that's useful because otherwise. And then it helps you kind of reason about the field to know sort of what the original application area was. Why did they go in this direction and not in that direction? Oh, it's because they were aiming for this particular application area. All right, maybe one last question here from Olikus, saying they work as an innovation consultant and for a year started a journey to create, redesign, innovate, develop new type of computer case. Case as in what you put a computer in, or case as in thing that you do with a computer? I'm not sure, but anyway, I feel like I don't have a chance against all the giants. How do I overcome this feeling? Well, I think if you're doing something that the giants are already doing, then it's tough. I think the thing to do is to find the niche that for whatever reason is not of interest to or not sort of philosophically compatible with, or business compatible with the, you know, what the giants are doing, so to speak. And there are things where there's a distribution channel that's been built by giants that you simply don't have access to and will make it pretty much impossible for you to, you know, to enter that. What I would say is the thing to do is, you know, what's the twist? What's the thing that is the reason you're doing your project? Because if your project's already been done, why are you doing it? It's kind of like, well, there's a thing that maybe you have some particular use case and the giants are not ever going to sort of tackle that use case because it's too small. You know, the giants don't care unless the thing is a 10 billion dollar business and the thing you're going to do is a 10 million dollar business. And that's great for you, but it's kind of too small for the giants to ever care. That's an example of a type of thing. But I think that the, you know, it's like, well, how are you unique? Emphasize the uniqueness. Don't, you know. And if you think the thing you're doing, I mean, one feature of very big companies is, as I say, they don't do things which are the 10 million dollar opportunity. So unless your opportunity is visibly a $10 billion opportunity, they're not going to come and squash it, so to speak. Typically most cases, I think that sometimes what happens is the big companies thought that was a $10 million opportunity and ignored it. And it gradually grew and became a billion dollar opportunity. And then they're like, oh drat, we ignored that. Now we're going to spend a gazillion dollars to try and buy that thing so that we can now get back on that track. The I think that that's, you know, that's the type of thing. But I would say that my main comment would be, you know, you just have to have a unique niche and if you don't, that's a problem. And you know, in terms of, you have to be able to explain sort of, I mean, you know, if you say, well, an interesting case actually in recent times is search engines. Okay? Sometimes there are cases where in a case like that people had the idea it's super, super difficult to build a search engine. So nobody tried. And maybe it wasn't so difficult actually. I mean, the details are difficult, no question, they've become a little bit easier, but the details are difficult. But it's sort of a case where somebody says, well, I'm going to build a search engine. And you might say that's hopeless. I, I think in, you know, so long as you have a thing you're going to do that's like, well, I'm not, you know, let's say I'm not going to have advertising. I'm going to have subscriptions instead. Well, you know, that's just not something the big players are going to do because they have a definite business model and, you know, collecting, you know, $5 million a year in subscriptions is completely uninteresting to them. So it's not a, you know, if somebody proves that you can make billions of dollars with subscriptions, that story may change. But I think it's, it's. Yeah. Anyway, so, I mean, my, my main point would be just make sure you have a thing where you can explain why the niche you're in is. Is not a niche that is just sufficiently different and is presented sufficiently differently and reaches customers in a sufficiently different way that sort of. There's a separate thing to think about that isn't just the, you know, that's not sort of already drowned in what's been done by the sort of, the big, biggest tech companies. All right, I better stop and go back to my day job, but thanks for asking lots of interesting questions and I look forward to doing this again in due course. Thanks and bye for now.