Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (May 3, 2023)

Hi there. Welcome to another episode of Q and A about business, innovation and managing life. And I see all kinds of questions here. Gosh, where to start? Unusual question to begin with from ilux. Do you like philosophy? Do you see math as a part of it? What is philosophy? You know, back in sort of ancient times, philosophy was kind of just thinking about stuff in general, which included what we would now call science, understanding things about the world as a whole field of natural philosophy that had to do with understanding, with thinking about nature. I think this, this term kind of philosophy, the, the kind of, the, the, the practice of thinking about things. I mean, you know, the Greek philosophy, philosophy means, you know, love of sophos, learning, knowledge. It's kind of, it's about sort of the practice of thinking about things. It is quite interesting that sometimes things go from pure thinking about things to a more formal structured way of thinking about things. And in a sense, areas of that emerged into mathematics, like kind of, you know, the Platonic solids. Plato was a philosopher, but yet was talking about things about kind of geometry and so on. And that was kind of a. But those things that he talked about that were geometry, he might have said their philosophy, but later on they became mathematics. Similarly, you know, Newton, 1687, famous book Principia Mathematica, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. It was something which transitioned from philosophy just thinking about things to something that was then mathematicized to become kind of the modern calculus based approach. Well, modern until recently, calculus based approach to thinking about science and so on. So for me, I like to understand things deeply and I suppose that means that I am sort of pushed into thinking about things where we don't yet have a formalism for thinking about them and where one could say that thinking about them is a matter of philosophy, so to speak. The thing I realized recently is that the whole process of computational thinking, the whole process of kind of making a sort of a precise formal computational way of thinking about the world, that process is strangely similar to kind of the practice of philosophy and so on. And in fact, one of the big models for that kind of computational thinking is logic, which emerged under the efforts of Aristotle and so on from taking what was kind of just rhetoric and discussion and turning it into something more formal. So I think there's a strange convergence between the very ancient kind of ideas of philosophy and, and the very modern kind of ideas of computational thinking. Computational thinking, as far as I'm concerned, is a way of kind of trying to formalize things in the world so we can think about them more clearly. And so we can also have our computers help us with them. And that's, you know, what I've spent a large part of my life doing is building this computational language, which is this bridge between the things that we can think about in terms of computational thinking and the things that computers are able to help with, so to speak. I think the thing that goes across computational thinking and philosophy is they're both about thinking about things and thinking about things where you can actually figure out new things. And an awful lot of what happens is you're working on things where. Yeah, I've seen that before. Yeah, I can make. I kind of know how to deal with this. I can make this next step. And on what I at least find really fun is when it's like one has no idea. Nobody has figured this out. It's a new thing that just came on the scene. Can we figure out what to do about it? Very recently, a lot of things with large language models, LLMs, a lot of things we've been doing, linking computation to LLMs, it's completely kind of fresh stuff. Nobody's thought about this. The issues have never arisen. Now we have to think about them. You know, a thing we've been. We've been thinking about kind of how education evolves in kind of the large language model, post LLM world, thinking about that. Think about, you know, what should you teach people about how to think about the world computationally when you can sort of interact in part through LLMs with computers and so on, how should you think about what you should teach and so on, how should you do the actual teaching? How should you have kind of a tutoring LLM actually interact with people? What are the issues there? You know, figuring out those kinds of things which just have never been figured out before, when one's never, you know, this kind of, as is typical in the way intellectual things develop, when there's a new methodology, there's suddenly all kinds of new questions that can be answered. And to me, sort of thinking about those new things is really fun. But that's kind of almost. It's a place where the sort of philosophy intersects with other kinds of things because it's about. You just got to think about it. You don't know whether the way you think sort of building the tutoring bot or something is something which comes from kind of ancient writings about education and the theory of education, Whether it comes from technical aspects of machine learning, whether it comes from technical questions about linguistics, whether it comes from kind of ideas about computational Law and trying to keep things on track and so on. You don't know where it comes from. The goal is to sort of have a connection between all those things, to figure something new out. And that feels a lot more like the activity of philosophy than it does a lot of the things that have arisen in more recently, which are often quite specialized, where you're in this particular silo of thinking and it's like, well, yes, we're building this thing and yes, we need to use learning theory, whatever that might be. And that's all we use. And well, it turns out, if you thought about more broadly, there's a completely different kind of thinking that's relevant to what you're talking about. And I think the question of the relationship between philosophy and math, back in the day people used to, in the Middle Ages, for example, what did you learn if you were to be an educated person where you learned a lot of stuff about the works of Aristotle and so on, but you learned some math and you learned some logic. And those were sort of neck and neck math and logic. Turns out math, particularly in the hands of people like Newton and so on, managed to accelerate and build a much bigger tower of kind of interesting kind of capabilities and significance in the world than logic on its own had built. And so logic kind of fell out of what you learn as part of sort of standard education. But I think this whole question about sort of the relationship between philosophy and math, to what extent one can understand, for example, the philosophy of math, what is mathematics? Is it about sort of things with numbers? No, it's much more general than that. Is it about anything that could happen in the world? No, it's a little less general than that. It's about a certain kind of thinking. What is it? How does one really think about it? That's a very interesting area. I just wrote a book maybe six months ago or something now about metamathematics, kind of the theory of what sort of what mathematics generally is it's about. I call it the physicalization of metamathematics. And well, it's a. It's a whole other topic to discuss which I don't think is appropriate for quite. For today's discussion. But it's a, it's a whole interesting area. All right, let's see going on here. Ollie asks, is it better to get a college degree in something practical like business and save interest as extracurricular classes or side up hobbies? Look, the best case, which I'm really happy I've managed to do in my Life is to have the thing you really want to like, doing, be aligned with what you make a living doing. And, okay, I have to admit that I tend to develop hobbies, which are sort of extra to the things that I do to make a living, so to speak. And sometimes those hobbies become sort of real things, too. But it's been, for me, just tremendously invigorating that the things I do, running companies, doing things like this, building technology, are things I really like to do. And if you can be in a situation where the things that you're sort of doing for work are things you really like to do, that's just great. Now, how do you get there? Well, the challenge is, first of all, you have to understand what you like. Then you have to solve that kind of puzzle of seeing what is there out there in the world that aligns with what I like. Or maybe there's a thing, you know, what you like, but you say nobody can ever make money just like, playing video games or something. Well, until esports happened, and then that became a whole profession, or, you know, nobody can ever make it, you know, make a living doing this or that thing. Often many things, if you do them well enough, you know, they turn out to be things that you can make a living doing. And I think, you know, it's always a specific kind of thing. What, you know, what you can. The thing you do, you know, if you say, well, I. I kind of. I'm, you know, I kind of like doing, let's say, math. Okay, if you're good enough at doing it, There are lots of ways to make a living doing it. And you could even be a math professor or something, a math researcher, whatever, if you're kind of sufficiently good at doing it. And so I think. I mean, in terms of the question of do you get the kind of practice. I would say it's. It's a disappointing thing if you have to get a college degree and something you don't really care about and you're not really excited about, because the thing that you really are excited about, you don't see a way to make a living doing. That's a disappointing conclusion. And I think my input would be, think harder about, is there a way to connect this to that in the thing you really like to do? And sometimes you realize that there is a topic area that is the thing you think you really like to do, but there's some aspect of what's in that topic area. Maybe it's coming up with these very aesthetic explanations for things. Maybe it's making the, some very beautiful kind of thing. And what you eventually realize is, well, the thing you really like doing is making beautiful kinds of things. And then, you know, and then, well, maybe you should be a graphic designer or a user experience designer or interior designer or something like that, because the thing you really like is making beautiful things, even though the thing that you knew about as an example of that was something that didn't seem to have a way of making a living connected to it. So that's. And I think in terms of, I mean, I have to say when people say, should they get a college degree doing business? I don't know, I admit I don't really know what the curriculum for a business degree might be. But I have to say in as somebody who's quotes, done business and you know, run a company for 36 years and so on, I, I would say my 100% lack of official sort of business education I don't feel has held me back at all. I think that sort of, it, you know, if put it this way, there is, you know, maybe what I consider common sense, which is mostly just keeping thinking when business kinds of questions come up, rather than just sort of saying, oh, that's a business question. I can't think about that. Just applying one sort of thinking capabilities to all these different kinds of things has worked fairly well. And you know, what you sometimes see is people where frankly their sort of common sense about business is utterly lacking, and yet they went and they got some business degree or an mba and it's kind of like you put a veneer of, yes, they know the jargon of the business world. But then, you know, you say, well, what do we do about this? And it's like that requires actual thinking and you actually have to, you know, be able to think through, I don't know, logically, whatever else, you know, rationally what, what the thing to do is. And it's just like they don't have that, but they do have the veneer that they got from going to sort of the, the business classes and so on. And yes, maybe that's a, I can't imagine that's a satisfying or, or satisfactory kind of way forward. And I'm, I'm, I'm a little bit skeptical. I mean it in, in, you know, there are, there's certainly there are many mechanical aspects. I wouldn't say mechanical, they're difficult. But you know, there are many aspects of business. You know, how do you, you know, principles of accounting, principles of law, principles of hr, principles of kind of sort of how to think strategically about things, you know, products, things like this. These are all things that, you know, if you're going to be successful like running a company, you have to have some awareness of most of those things. I mean, well, I don't know, maybe, maybe it's partly a reflection of my own personal way of learning things. You know, if I went to a class about accounting, I don't think I would be able to stay awake. I just, in the abstract I wouldn't, you know, I'm just like, I don't need to know how this or that thing works. It's just not that interesting to me in the abstract. Now, you know, if you are running a company and you see, you know, PNL profit and loss statements, or you see weekly sales reports, you see cash flow, you know, statements, all this kind of thing, and it's, it's your company and you really have to pay attention to it, then at least for me, I kind of quickly learn the things that, you know, how to read these things. And I say, what does that line mean? What does this line mean? You know, what is a bad debt reserve? What is, you know, what say, you know, how do we deal with currency fluctuations where, where something is booked in one currency and then at the end of the month, you know, when is the conversion done? All these kinds of things. And gradually one learns those things. But to me it's learning in context is a lot better than learning in the abstract. And for myself, not true of everybody. I would find it very difficult to learn that stuff in the abstract, so to speak. Let's see. Schrodinger says, it just seems like being in a university allows you to spend more time learning, also lends you access to the best tools and access to published information. But is there time to do things that you're personally interested in, like invention at a university, for example? Well, it depends what stage of being at a university you're in. If you're an undergraduate student, for example, it I think is, you know, partly depends on which university you pick. And it depends on kind of how you choose to set things up for yourself. I mean, my impression is there are some universities that are more hard driving than others, but they're also, it's a lot of personal choice of yes, you can go and take six courses at the same time and you can go and involve yourself in endless sports activities and this activity and that activity. And then you're super busy and you don't really have time to think about anything. And Pursue independent interests of your own. I kind of think that it's perfectly possible to choose to throttle back a bit and get time to do your own kinds of things. I think that at universities. An important capability at universities is professors. And students often don't realize that they should just go and talk to professors if they have something interesting to talk about. I would say, I don't know, I can't give you a precise number, but let's just say half the professors you'll go talk to will be like, oh, great, a student has something interesting to say, I love to talk to them. And maybe half will be like, I'm busy, I'm off worrying about something else that I'm doing or something in my life or something in my research or whatever, I don't want to be bothered type thing. But it's really worth trying and seeing if, if you've, you know, particularly if you've got an interesting question, I mean, then, you know, professors do what they do in large measure because they like thinking about things. And if some student comes and asks them about something interesting, there's a good chance that they'll be happy to engage. And it's a great resource and it's a place where you can really learn stuff beyond just being in a class and listening to the broadcast kind of lecture and doing the kind of industrial assignments and so on. Let's see. IG asks, looking at all my blogs, what's been my favorite to write? What's been the hardest? Well, gosh, I write a whole range of kinds of things and I would say that first thing is that they often end up getting quite long. And you know, am I writing a blog or am I writing a book? And sometimes the blogs turn into books and sometimes it's like, I think this is going to be easy. And it turns out, well, actually, no. This subject has a lot of different implications and tentacles. And I'm just, you know, pretty soon I've written 100 pages about it. I think the, in terms of, oh, gosh, you know, I write different kinds of things. So some things involve kind of research as I write type science and so on. I like really getting the research results there. That's fun. But it's also really hard work because you can't write about something until you know what's true. So that's that kind of thing. I mean, there are blogs that I write which are much more kind of idea blogs and where kind of, when I think I've understood the idea, it's just a question. Of writing it out. Those are in a sense, much easier. And there are ones that I write that are more historical in nature, and those ones are very often they kind of have the same aspect, like the science ones, but it's kind of like, can you puzzle through what on earth actually happened? My observation about history and particularly biographical histories and things like this is there really always is a thread of explanation for what happened, but sometimes it's quite hard to find it. And it's kind of like that. Sometimes it's like it's kind of fun because you're kind of writing a story. And I kind of like the sort of the writing down a story that's often quite fun, but that has the difficulty that you have to get the story right. And that means, you know, you have to dive into all this detail and solve all these kind of historical problems. And then the thing that can happen, which is super frustrating, is that you think you got the story right and then something pops out after you've written a whole lot about what the story is and you realize, oh my gosh, I got this wrong and you've got to go back and start it again. But that's. I don't think. I'm not sure I have a favorite quite. But that's a little bit about sort of what's behind that. So Katie asks, how successful do you think educational games will be for teaching children higher level skills? Do you think they would absorb information faster compared to traditional education methods? You know, some people really believe in games and really believe. I think a large part of education is motivation. You know, do you want to learn that thing? Do you. And people have different motivations. And some people just, I just want to learn it because I'm just really interested in that subject area. And some people are like, you know, I'm motivated to learn it because I'm going to get another badge, I'm going to get to another level. I'm going to. I really want to get, you know, an A because I like getting A's or because there's something that, you know, some goal that I'm aiming for where I really need to get an A or something. That's not the best situation. I would say that the place where people probably learn the best and have the best time is when the thing they're learning about is something which, for whatever reason, they're highly motivated to learn about. And partly that's a question of how the thing is presented. You find often, I know when I was a kid, there were things where I would have a really good teacher on a subject which I didn't think I cared about. But then sort of the enthusiasm of the teacher and the extent to which that subject really engaged with me made me start really being interested in it. And I think that part of the. A lot of kind of what happens with gamification is kind of. It's sometimes a substitute for really sell the subject matter, really get the person intrinsically interested in the subject matter and it becomes more, am I going to get to the next level and see turtle dancing type thing. Now I think there also is a question of when you kind of are simulating, you know, you say, well, what will be it be like to be in this situation that can be useful. It's a way of kind of personalizing kind of something which otherwise would seem like it's a very abstract thing to learn. You know, I do think in terms of educational interaction that the world of large language models and modern AI and so on is going to be somewhat transformative there. Because I think the thing that's really quite interesting is with the sort of linguistic interface that's now possible with large language models and so on, you can expect to have kind of at least a surface level of presenting things that much more obviously relates to the interests of a particular learner. So, for example, let's say you're doing math word problems and you're doing them with a kid who is absolutely into dragons and, I don't know, castles and things like this. It's much more likely that the kid is going to be kind of engaged in, let's see, the dragon laid X number of eggs and another dragon stole some eggs, and how many eggs got left and things like this than the pure, you know, than something where that was being formulated in terms of something that the kid has no personal engagement or interest in. And one of the things that's pretty neat with a large language model is you can trivially say, take this math word problem or something and cast it in terms of dragons and castles and things like this, and it will do a decent job and sometimes, and you can tell it, you know, be amusing, it'll do a decent job. The flip side of that, of course, is as the student, if the student engages with it by giving a whole conversation, you kind of have to worry, you know, are they going to lead the thing down the garden path into some crazy thing where they're talking about some horrifying, you know, I don't know, dragon torture? This, that and the other weird thing that one doesn't think is, you know, is a great thing for, for them to be talking about. And that's sort of a challenge is how do you avoid that happening? How do you have the AI watching the AI or something to make sure that kind of thing isn't happening. And that's a challenging thing and it relates to a lot of kind of AI governance issues. But I do think that the kind of engaging through games to me is when that's being done as a substitute for other reasons to be motivated. I think it's, I'm personally not such a fan. You know, having said that, I, you know, I certainly know plenty of examples with kids as well where it's kind of like, oh, they want to keep going with the streak because they did this, you know, every day for the last year and they want to keep going and it kind of gives a little bit of extra motivational push. And it isn't, that's not, it's not a, it's not propping up a total lack of motivation. It's just giving an extra push. And maybe that's useful. I would say that, I don't know, maybe, maybe it's a question of how strong willed one is, whether one just says, look, I'm doing this because I want to do it. And the fact that I do or don't keep my streak is not the most important thing to me. Let's see. A bunch of interesting questions here, but let me keep going a little bit. It's a question from Hassan. Do you tend to focus on multiple tasks at once or focus on a single task until it's complete before moving to the next one? I feel like I get overwhelmed by folders if I try to work on several projects at once and like advice about how to manage the overload. You know, I would say that that depends a little bit how you're working with other people. So for me, I tend to have, I am much more a sequential worker on projects as far as my personal, you know, sort of solo activities on things are concerned. I tend to like to do one project, get it done, move on to the next one because I build up a lot of state, you know, I'm right, I'm doing a project, maybe I'm writing something, maybe I'm creating something. I, I kind of, you know, by the time I'm really into it, I built up a lot of mental state and that's really much more efficient for me just to do the project right then I kind of know if I get a gap, I Hate the gaps. Often as the days go by, it gets more and more difficult to pick up from where I left off. One day perturbation, I can pick it up. Two days, three days, yeah, it's okay. By the time it's a week, two weeks, I really have to get back in my mental state again for that project. And that is both painful and difficult. So I tend to prefer just work it straight through. Now, sometimes that's not possible because the project depends on lots of other people. And a thing that I tend to do is I try to be fairly disciplined about really not thinking about the project until the sort of the pieces are in place for me to be able to do my part. And, you know, if it's going to be a project that's sort of going to be an intense solo project, maybe there's some research thing, there are pieces, there's tools that are needed to be able to do that research. Just wait until those are done and then jump in. Now projects which are more like they're happening, but they're not all on me, you know, I have kind of a fairly structured way, I would say perhaps even very structured way of kind of reviewing projects and, you know, in a company setting like ours, having project managers and so on, who are kind of paying attention to the flow of projects and making sure that, you know, in the weekly meeting, every two weeks meeting, whatever else it is, you know, I'll come into those meetings. I have a decent memory usually. So in addition to whatever I see from project managers summarizing where things are at, I do remember what happened in the previous meeting and the meetings before that. And so you're kind of picking it up. And I'm trying to add my value, so to speak, to that project at a one hour a week type basis. But when it comes, I mean, for me personally, the idea that I'm working sort of simultaneously on. Okay, let me make another point about projects. So there are projects that go through different phases. There are projects that in intense kind of creative phases where I feel like I have to be in the mental state to be able to do that intense creative phase. Then there are projects that have tales of various kinds where like, for example, right now I did a big project on the second law of Thermodynamics, which is actually a project that I had started 50 years ago, horrifyingly enough, and finally got to a good point earlier this year. And, you know, so the things I wrote are turning into a book and I'm creating the index for the book which turns out to be one of those kinds of things, which I've long ago realized. Indices are kind of a creative thing. And indices are still useful even in the world of full text searching, because they kind of give a much more kind of idea, structured way of accessing information. But in any case, the, you know, I got to write the index for this book now. You know, I finished that work a long time ago. Writing the index is almost a mechanical act. It requires, you know, some. It requires me knowing the material. It requires these kinds of things. But the actual process of, you know, it takes a long time. I've spent probably six hours on it so far, and I think probably got another two or three to go. It's, you know, it's something which I can do. It contributes to that project, but it doesn't require me being in this kind of intense mental state of remembering everything about what's going on with the project. So, you know, sometimes projects have these. These sort of mechanical pieces that you can do without, do much more asynchronously. You don't have to do them. At least for me, you don't have to do them all in this kind of intense thing. Now, you know, one thing that can happen with intense projects is they depend on somebody else, some other organization, something like this. It's kind of like. And yeah, it's super frustrating, at least for me, that you have to kind of like you're running along and then screech to a halt because something isn't ready or whatever else. For me, it's much better to just kind of put the project on hold and work on something different and then come back to it than it is to kind of have it sort of humming away. And my way of sort of putting it on hold is maybe there are other people working on it or something. Then it'll be like I'll meet with them in some structured way. But it's a small amount of time, and I don't expect to do any sort of homework outside of that meeting. And then when the project, when things are ripe enough, then I jump in and I do a whole bunch of individual work. So at least that's my way of handling this kind of thing. And I'm not, in other words, only one intense project at a time. And if there are other projects which you are contributing to as an individual contributor, maybe you are sort of interleaving the kind of mechanical aspects of those with the creative aspects of really one project at a time. At least that's the way I've tended to work. Let's see. Okay. 008 asks, are there conditions or situations that make you particularly creative? You know, I had a friend years ago, well known physicist named Richard Feynman, who always used to say peace of mind is what's essential to being able to do creative work. At the time I was, you know, in my early 20s, I guess he was in his 60s at the time. I always used to be like, yeah, I don't believe in that. And in fact, I have found that in there are. It probably is true that when, you know, when there's all kinds of complicated, you know, things going on, I don't know, I'm not sure that anyway that that's his point of view. For him it was like peace of mind was a prerequisite for being able to do creative work. I have not so much found that to be the case for me. I mean, there are different kinds of things. So for me, I really like situations which are kind of wide open fields where rather than something where there's all these pieces that are in there and I have to kind of navigate between them and so on. It's like, here's a project. We don't know anything. We're starting from nothing. Got to figure everything out. So to some people that. That feels very daunting. It's like, oh, what can I possibly do? But for me, it's kind of very liberating that it's just like anything I figure out is a win here because there's nothing there right now. And that's a nice situation. I would say that at a more microscopic level, I do tend to know that certain projects, they will have a certain running time. It's kind of like it's not worth me thinking about this because in two days I've got to go off and do something else. And I'm just going to be frustrated because I won't have gotten far enough with that particular thing. Another thing I've noticed is, you know, sometimes I'm really feeling incredibly alert and sometimes I'm feeling a little bit more, you know, tired. I didn't get enough sleep. I was, you know, whatever else, I'm something like that. And it's like, okay, what am I going to do now? And I know there are certain kinds of activities that I can do when I'm not at my absolute most energetic and whatever else. I mean, I'm lucky enough that I'm usually pretty pretty. I don't have big sort of ups and downs. But you know, there are days like today actually, when I'm a little bit more tired than other times. And I think the thing that I've noticed is there's certain kinds of activities that I can do even when I'm a little bit tired. Like writing code I can do when I'm a bit tired. Doesn't really matter. Writing good, interesting prose I don't do as well when I'm kind of tired. It comes out kind of flat and lame. And so I've kind of learnt those kinds of patterns. I would say another thing is for me at least there are times when I get really excited about some idea and that's the time I should really go chase it. And sometimes there are things where I know I'm kind of going to work on it at some point and finally its time is up, I'm ready to work on it. Minutes I kind of need to get myself excited about that topic and then I'm off and running. If it's kind of like I feel an obligation to work on this, it doesn't usually work nearly as well. You know, for me I would say that, you know, I'm a pretty much uniform in sort of in the day. I tend to work a lot. I do a lot of kind of solo work late at night. That's always a fine time. It's nice and quiet, so to speak. It's. I have long ago learned to run my life. So I don't get kind of, you know, you know, I don't get phone calls, I don't get kind of immediate interrupt, things like that. Most of my sort of external flow that isn't part of, you know, explicit meetings I'm doing comes from email. And it's kind of like, well, I can read it or not and people are not expecting kind of the five minute turnaround on that. That's something where, you know, it accumulates maybe for a day, maybe for a few days and then you process it. And that's something where I can have the opportunity to kind of just sort of have stretches of time where I can really get concentrate and think about things. And you know, usually I don't know, I think I probably have about an hour and a half, two hour, kind of immediate attention span. And then sort of in between those times I'll, yeah, I'll glance over, I'll look at my email, I might process a few pieces of email and then maybe I'll get up and walk around or whatever else and then maybe for 15 minutes and then I'll be back for another couple of hours of high concentration. I mentioned one more thing about being sort of creative and so on. I would say being creative makes you more creative in the following sense, and being productive makes you more productive. There are times when I'll do something like, as I call it, grinding email. Dealing with all sorts of complicated things that have come in an email. I have to respond to them, but I get through, I'm in some rhythm and I'm getting through. Boom, boom, boom. I'm processing 500 emails or something and I, and I get through it and I'm, I'm accelerating, I'm doing them really fast and then I'm going to work on something different. For some reason, you know, just the, the momentum that I get by having achieved boom, boom, boom. I did all these things that helps me getting into the next thing. And sometimes, you know, one of the things I suppose that is sort of deadly always is when I say, this is really easy. This is going to be so easy, it's going to take me five minutes. Yeah, usually those are the things that turn out to be hard. And for me, one of the traps I try to avoid is, oh, this is going to be easy. I've got to do it in 10 minutes. This is what I'm going to do. And then turns out it's hard and I do a shoddy job if I have to do it in 10 minutes. And really it turns out there was something difficult and it's going to take three hours to resolve it. And, you know, I prefer to set it up so I can do it well and take that three hours rather than, oh, I got to do it in 10 minutes. I'll mention one more thing about, about sort of creativity and productivity, which is I, you know, if I'm, I have to kind of believe that I'm going to do something where I'm, I'm doing it, I'm doing it, I'm going to finish it. I'm going to get to a particular point in a, in a short period of time. If I say, like, let's say I'm, I don't know, giving some talk or doing some event, doing something like that, and I'm like, okay, it's three weeks out. Let me start thinking about preparing it. That for me is utterly deadly. Even a day before, it's kind of like the, you know, so long as I'm kind of in the moment and I've kind of got, you know, so long as I do leave myself enough time for whatever, I'm going to prepare the Sort of sooner beforehand that I do it the better because I'm kind of in, you know, I've kind of, I've kind of got myself to the mental state where this is what I'm thinking about. I'm going to do this thing, I'm going to remember what I thought about, then I'm going to do whatever event it is or whatever else that there is there. So I tend to be, you know, tend to sort of save things up and not be in a situation where I'm kind of doing sort of half measures of things. I tend to be like, don't do it at all. And then kind of if this is a thing I'm really doing, then I'm doing it intensely. Let's see. The question here from D0 what do you pack when traveling? You know, what are the unusual things I would pack? You know, I have kind of a. I usually have a very sort of systematic, you know, I have a backpack, it has a computer, it has some sort of pouches of random survival stuff like, like, you know, it has various kinds of adapters for things, various kinds of things for making two pin prong plugs not fall out of outlets when, when the outlets are too loose. Things like this. It has. I will tend to have some emergency pieces of chocolate for when I'm stuck somewhere and there's just no food in sight. I'll tend to have, Let's see. I think the other things I pack are usually very generic. I mean, usually I'll pack, you know, I've long ago had my sort of little medical kind of kit of different kinds of, you know, antibiotics and this and that and the other things which I have to say I don't think I've used in a decade or more. But when you. And you know, I, I tend to have. Oh, you know, I've, I've long ago got the little, you know, thermometer that plugs into your phone. So it's a, so it's a thing that records the data and so on. And actually now I have these things I just, you know, probably throwing them in my kind of kit of these stick on temperature patches for, you know, oh, I've got a fever, you know, just measure it and have it go to an app. Again, not things I use very often at all, but things where I've kind of long ago kind of put them in a little pouch and they're things that, you know, I'll, I'll always take with me because, because I have them in that pouch and that they're sitting in my, in my semi packed suitcase and you know, that's kind of. And then I won't forget it. Now I have to say I also, I do have a checklist of things to take on trips. And I, you know, whenever I'm like, oh yeah, I remember what I need to take and I don't follow the checklist, I forget something. And you know, it depends on what I'm doing. If it's, you know, long haul flight without this or that, I'll take some sort of fancy headphones so I can, I mean, often I will actually end up, you know, listening to white noise because it's a way of blocking out any other sounds. But you know, there's, there's a checklist of things and I'm, I'm of course forgetting what's on the checklist, but. Oh, you know, there are things like. Oh yeah, I mean, some things I, I always take kind of little small envelopes because when I get things like business cards and so on, I like to put them in little envelopes and write the day when I got them so that I can keep track of things. I usually have plastic envelopes where I kind of keep random stuff that I get on the trip and you know, then can file it away when I get get home, those kinds of things. And well, lots of, lots of kinds of chargers and adapters and that type of stuff. Let's see. Rab is asking a very interesting question which I'm not sure I know a good answer to. They're asking, is there a distinction between continental versus analytic Anglo American type philosophy in computer science? Interesting question. So I mean, there's this kind of very, this sort of analytic philosophy tends to be kind of really trying to make precise distinctions about things and sort of almost turn philosophy into logic type thing. Whereas continental philosophy tends to be much more about the kind of the narrative story of things. So a question for, I mean, computer science and computational language and things like that I would say is much more in the analytic philosophy tradition than the continental philosophy tradition. I would say that kind of the attempt to understand, I mean, I suppose kind of the. When it comes to sort of the human connection, that's a little bit more the continental philosophy kind of area, I suppose, of more the kind of the ux, the kind of the thing which people don't study but they should about kind of the design of computer systems and kind of the thinking about how one designs computer systems, that feels a bit more like the kind of the narrative stories of philosophy. Rather than the kind of more logical type aspects of philosophy. But it's an interesting question. I'm not sure I have a great answer to that. Let's see. Etoria asks, how do you cultivate peace of mind? Oh, boy. Well, I mean, I think part of it, I would say, is there's always a lot of stuff going on. Some things are going well, some things aren't going so well. For me, having a portfolio of different things going on, whether they're business things, family things, science things, writing things, whatever else. It is useful to me to have this whole portfolio going on because when something goes wrong in one area, it's like, it isn't, you know, it's not a, oh, my gosh, that's the only thing that's happening and it's really bad. There's kind of a lot of counterbalancing, sort of other aspects of the sort of portfolio of life kind of going on. And that helps me, I think. I think I'm generally in a, oh, something bad is happening. Well, it's always useful for me and different people are different in this regard to say, okay, what's the worst thing that could happen? Let's just try and figure out if the worst thing that could happen happens. How do I remediate that? You know, what. What can I do about that? Sometimes one has the tendency, people have the tendency to say, I just don't want to think about the worst thing that could happen because that's, you know, it's too scary to think about the worst thing that could happen. For me, maybe a feature of my psychology is such that it's the. It's better to just sort of think about the worst thing that could happen. And, you know, how do you. How do you deal with that rather than, let's avoid that thing and don't even think about it. I think another thing for me personally, and again, psychologists differ a lot on this. It's. For me, doing something is better than not doing something. So if there's some issue and it's like, oh, there's this thing and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, for me, if I jump into action and I do something, even if it's like, I make a plan, I write a bunch of stuff down, even if there's no actual external action that happens, it's still very helpful to me rather than. I mean, for me, I suppose it's being at the mercy of fate and just sort of seeing what happens and I don't really have any control over it. That's much more stressful for me than saying, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't. But so long as I feel like I'm taking the lead and taking action, that for me is very helpful in sort of cultivating peace of mind. You know, I, I don't tend to be a, you know, I have to say, I'm, I'm, I'm probably pretty bad. You know, I, I don't have any kind of gaps where I'm like, like just meditating or thinking, you know, or just, you know, chillaxing or whatever. That's not the way I work. I, I tend to be. The things I do are things I like to do and I'm like, boom, boom, boom. I'm just doing more and more things. I don't tend to have sort of the, the, the relaxation moment, so to speak. I don't find that particularly necessary or useful. But again, people, people are different. Etoria asked, you have research assistants, so do you work on projects on your own? Yes, I have all sorts of research assistants. I tend to, the best thing usually is when I have people who work with me on certain projects, but there are particular projects where they're really the great person to work on it. But those projects don't happen that often. And so, you know, for example, with people who work at the company and things and sometimes work on projects with me, often they'll have a, a project that they're normally doing. And if it turns out there's some intense, you know, one month period when it's kind of like there's this project that's the ideal project for them working directly with me, then, then I kind of, you know, try and wrangle things so that, yes, they can work with me during that time. But I do have some folks who kind of, usually there's sort of an ebb and flow of research that I'm doing. So they're sort of a baseline set of things that are relevant to research that are kind of almost the housekeeping and early gestation of projects and so on. And then there are the things which get into a very intense phase. I mean, I'm always a little bit shocked that I suppose when I do these projects and I'm really doing them, it's like, you know, I'm ancient compared to most of the people I'm working with. And it's like I seem to be sort of injecting, you know, they're complaining. You're actually, they don't complain too much, but they're, they're kind of like I'm. I feel like I'm injecting ridiculous intensity and energy into these things and, and then, you know, after, for some period of time, and then some of these people are like, phew, that, that's over. It's not as intense anymore. But I guess that for me, I'm sort of injecting that intensity all the time into the things that I'm doing. And that sort of the searchlight hits a particular person and topic for a comparatively short amount of time, typically. But yes, that's, I mean, that's the. I've been lucky enough over the years to have a lot of very talented research assistants. I found one of the things that I've done with science recently, which I think has worked rather well is, you know, there's always this question of, okay, you do a piece of work and you're kind of people are working with you on it, and it's like kind of, you know, who's doing what and who's going to get what out of it and so on. And my, you know, academics who, like, oh, I've got some students in the lab and they're going to do a bunch of stuff and we're going to write a paper and I'm going to put my name on the paper type thing. And I don't ever do that. I haven't written an academic paper in decades, and it's not what I do. And the thing that I do is I say, look, I'm going to write my thing. And the folks who worked with me, I incredibly encourage them. If you've got things you figured out as part of doing this, absolutely, write about them yourselves and write papers, write whatever makes sense. And a bunch of people have done that. And that's worked out really well. And it feels much better that way because I write things the way I write things. I'm not, you know, if somebody was like, well, I don't know, you know, should we change this paragraph to this? It's like, I don't have time to do that. I, you know, for me, the optimization is. It's hard to get the time to write things and I just want to barrel through and write them and not have that sort of, that sort of complexity. And likewise for other folks who've been working with me, they don't want me kind of, you know, breathing down their neck all the time saying, well, wait a minute, I think you could explain that more clearly. You know, why don't you change this piece? Because the thing they're going to produce may be just. Just great and not necessarily any better because it's in my style, so to speak. So, you know, I tend to do the thing, you know, I'll write something and then I absolutely, in the. I'm lucky enough to have a pretty big pool of people that I can check stuff with. And that's like, please read this. And, you know, when the folks who work with me on putting together, you know, when I write things, it's like I have somebody who helps in dealing with editing, which means, you know, we do document quality assurance, proofreading. It's like there are all these different details about, you know, is this picture right? Is the click to copy code that's behind it? Does it work? Has it been put into the test suite? Is it going to, you know, continue to work? All those kinds of things? And then I tend to break these pieces that I write up into little parts and then say, please go ask this person and make sure they actually read it and tell us is it correct or not, and so on. And that's very useful and really helps in catching things where either I make some specific technical mistake or I just didn't understand that. Doesn't happen so often, actually, that last one. But I always worry about that. MAA asks, how important do you think your culture of direct communication has been to the success of our company? You know, companies have different internal cultures, and just like CEOs have different personalities. And I think there are many ways companies can succeed, in many ways, companies can fail as well. The particular path that we've chosen is one that probably is something of a reflection of my personality, because companies usually do reflect their founding CEOs and so on to a great extent. And when they try and kind of pivot away from that, it often doesn't work very well. And, you know, I think that for me, directness, internal directness has been. I mean, it's great because it lets. Well, it lets stupid stuff where we went off track. It makes that happen less often. And it makes stuff where we really didn't figure out what we were talking about and where we were. You know, it's like, what's really going on? What's the point? Let's just directly get to the point, so to speak, rather than having some kind of thing where, oh, yeah, I wrote this report to some level of management and it all looks good. And when you say, well, what's really Going on. Turns out it's all nonsense. But you know, the reports were filed and it all looked fine and everybody checked the boxes and so on. But actually you realize when you really think about it that it's all nonsense and you know. Yes, I think that the sort of keep thinking and be direct about what you're thinking and display the fact that you're thinking, so to speak, and, and you know, be able to have, I mean people are always telling me that they think I don't know what I'm talking about, about X and Y. And I think that's good and I think that's, you know, it gets a little bit old if you know, every time they say you don't know what you're talking about and then it turns out they're wrong and I'm right. That gets old after a while. But you know, the, you know, when, when it's, it's always to me I find it sort of very healthy to be sort of challenged about. Is that really right? Do we know what we're talking about, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? I think it's. Des asks in retrospect, or maybe just comments in retrospect. College is most important for opportunities to sit down with a few like minded people and just openly talk. I think it's great for people to be in a situation where they can do that. I think it's worth remembering that in most colleges they're big enough that there probably are some people somewhere where you can find sort of like minded people and have those conversations. Even though you may look at some college and conclude that you look at it in aggregate and you say, oh, this college has this and this and this attribute, but you realize that you can kind of get out of it something that's the corner that you care about and that's the thing that's often the most important. David asks what are the most important insights and fundamental questions for planning and establishing a career? Well, I mean, knowing yourself is a good thing. Knowing what you actually want to do is a good thing. It's often difficult, you know, not getting yourself into something where you're doing it out of some sense of obligation or well, you know, I was always good at that in school, so I better go on doing it or. Well, people tell me I always should be profession X just because they know about profession X but you're not really into it. I think that sort of knowing yourself well enough to know what it is that will actually be satisfying to you and having enough self Awareness of what you're likely to be good at is a large part of the challenge. I think that there are a lot of things people will do. Things like they'll say, oh, I went to college, I really have to earn X amount of money in my first job. But there isn't a job that I really want to do that lets me earn X amount. What do you do? Well, you know, it's a shame if you have to take the job that lets you earn X amount but you don't really want to do it now. Sometimes you have to because you have various kinds of obligations and there's really sort of no way out. That's a shame when that happens. But if it's a question of I've got to make this money for my self esteem and you know I'm going to feel like I'm a failure if I'm not making, you know, X amount of money as my first job out of college. That's, you know, that's a, that's a bad way to think about it. I think, you know, it's kind of like it's just do the thing you want to do and don't do the thing where you feel like you're getting the kind of the self esteem from, you know, being paid more or going to the company that has, you know, where you think people will think it's cooler that you're working there or whatever else. I mean, I think, you know, my own feeling is if you can know yourself well enough to know what it is that really is satisfying to you, it's great if you can just do that and if you can do that with, in a kind of strong willed enough way that you're not really just saying well I got to do the thing that I think the world is going to reflect, you know, is going to think is the best thing to do. It's like, well, what do you actually want to do? That's an important thing now in terms of planning long careers. You know, the world changes over the course of a career and it is something where there are certainly careers where, you know, going into, I don't know, sort of a certain style of programming right now is probably not a great idea. Going into a certain style of thing that is about to get automated. It's kind of like not probably the best idea. I think that it is really cool if you can get in early in some field that's just bubbling up, just starting to take off now. That's a tricky estimate because there are things where it Might be that it's just bubbling up, but it takes another 50 years to really bubble, and then that's too long for a career. And it's like when I was a kid, I was interested in space, for example, and thank goodness, at age 10 or something, I didn't lock in to say, I'm going to spend my life doing things with spacecraft. And I've ended up working on space in the sense of fundamental physics, but not space in the sense of sending spacecraft into it. And it's just as well, because that was in the mid to late 1960s. And, you know, now there's a vibrant, energetic, you know, growing space industry and all that kind of thing. But for a long time, it was a pretty minority kind of activity doing those kinds of things. And I would have been waiting a long time for the thing to have really become energetic too long for a career. And I think that the, you know, betting on, you know, being an early person in the pack, so to speak, working on Thing X is pretty cool. And what you usually find when you see sort of early entrance into a new field, what I've noticed is about half the people, if you look at early entrance into something and you then look another 25 years later, about half the people who were early entrants are still there 25 years later. And half have gone on to other things. So in other words, half those people, this was the thing that happened to come along at that point in their life, that was the thing that resonates with them. They get into it and they kind of ride it for 25 years or more or their whole career. And half the people are like, kind of, you could say disparagingly, but it's unfair to be disparaging about it. Shiny object chasers, so to speak. There's this cool new thing right now. I'm going to get into this. There's another cool new thing later. I'm going to get into that. I mean, it has to be said, there are, you know, there are definitely people where there is an art to getting into new things like that, sort of making a contribution, then getting on to the next thing. Different from, oh, there's this one thing that really resonates with me. And aren't I lucky that at the age of 35, the world evolved to a point where that thing was on offer and I could jump into doing it and I could spend the rest of my career being really excited doing that particular kind of thing. But I think another thing about planning careers and so on is what does that career consist of, like, for example, you look at some kinds of things and you realize that the junior people in that career are running around doing the work. The senior people are all basically selling things. They're not really doing the work, they're selling the work. Now, people may like that, people may not like that, but it's worth understanding what is the kind of arc of the career. And you know, what, what do you, you know, if you win in that career, what do you get when you win, so to speak? You know, what is it like to be at the, at sort of the top of that career? And is that a place where you want to be? Or does it involve doing things that you don't want to do? Like, for example, there are people who say, you know, I'm going to be a, a techie person and you know, if in this career path, if I do really well, I'll be a management person of tech. And then they realize, well, actually, I don't like managing people. I don't really like doing that at all. I like just doing tech, for example. And then, you know, it's kind of like that's, that's. So you have to kind of reset a little bit the thinking about the career path because the thing that you were aiming for, the, the thing that you weren't doing when you were at the beginning of that career, but you get into later, maybe that, that thing isn't, in fact, the thing that you thought was, you know, isn't what you wanted. And if you, if you're kind of caught unawares of, oh, I didn't realize that this thing worked that way. Like, like, for example, people going into something like research in academia, you know, they say, well, I really like doing all those physics problems in college, and therefore I should do research in physics. Well, not really, because at the higher levels, research is a story of kind of strategy, starting from nothing, making something out of it. It's not so much a story of doing what you do in the college physics thing of, here's a problem, go solve it. And so people will end up being, oh my gosh, I'm supposed to do research. I just can't get myself started. I don't know what to do. You know, just give me the exercise and I'll do it. And that's, you know, a very different thing from what's actually involved in research where it's like you're starting off from a blank piece of paper or these days, a blank screen, and it's like, just build something Here. And that's, you know, very different kinds of activities or similarly same kind of thing happens with people saying, you know, I'm going to ascend to the point where I'm running my own company type thing. And the descend to the point, however you look at it. And then you realize, oh gosh, there are things I have to do if I'm the person in charge and some of those things I can't stand doing and it's bad to have that in mind. And then you get there and you realize there isn't much you want. I mean, this happens in a more extreme way sometimes with people who say, I'm going to work my whole life and then I'm going to retire and then I'm going to do what I really want to do. I have to say, in most cases, I have not seen that go well because among other things, people get to the point they retire and they say, oh, I'm going to just have fun hanging out and whatever. And they're like, oh my gosh, I had no idea how boring it was to not have something I intensely want to do every day. And it's like big anti climax. You've worked for decades to get to the point when you can retire. And then it's like, well, I'm really bored now. I feel like I need to go back to work type thing. So it's like, understand what it is that is the end point and do you actually like the end point and understand what's involved? There are fields where you get into it, you get to the higher levels of it and it becomes very political, becomes very kind of people interacting and having to sort of convince people of things and so on. Maybe you're not into that, but at lower levels you don't see that. But. So that's always a thing worth paying attention to. Okay, Kat is asking, do you find yourself still learning new things today? Is there a point in life where learning slows? What are ways to combat that? I absolutely learn new things every day. Every day. I mean, it would be a disappointing day for me if I didn't learn something new. And I learned something new by figuring something out for myself, by somebody asking me a question where I realize, oh my gosh, I didn't know the answer to that, where I will read something that teaches me something new, where I'm trying to solve some problem and that requires me to learn something new. I learn new things all the time. It's a, it's a. And you know, one of the things that Happens is that the, you know, you learn new things. I try to learn new things sort of wherever I go, you know, I run into somebody who does some particular kind of thing, I'll ask them about it. Even if it's not something I'm immediately interested in. I kind of like, that's a new thing. I'm storing that away. One day that will come out to be useful. And sometimes, you know, I learn things. You know, somebody will ask me some question and I'll realize, gosh, I don't know the answer, and I'll try and figure it out, and then I'll learn something new from that. And, you know, it would be too easy to just sort of gloss over that question and sort of say, oh, yeah, well, roughly this, that, and the other. But I like to actually dive in and see, can I actually answer this question, even though it might be, you know, if I was less confident, perhaps I might feel embarrassed. Oh, I should be able to answer this question, but I can't type thing. And so, yeah, now, other times when in life, when learning slows down, touch wood. I haven't hit that yet. You know, I'm pretty ancient, but so far, so good. I feel like actually, if anything, I'm learning faster than I've learned in the past because I kind of know more and I have a bigger matrix of things to fit what I'm now learning into. I would say that the idea that kind of learning stops when you finished in college or something is a disastrous idea, is a crazy idea, at least for me. And I think that one of the things about someone was just asking about careers. One of the things about kind of continually learning is that you're used to continually learning. You're always resetting yourself. You're always learning about new things. And so as the world changes, you're well positioned to deal with a changing world. If you lock in and say, this is what I know about. I learned it when I was 20 years old and that's what I'm doing for the rest of my life. You know, the world changes, and that may not be a good, good thing to, you know, you may not have. Have learned the winning thing that is going to carry you for the whole of your career at age 20. Let's see. Jamie comments, asks, how helpful is it to have routines? I find it a helpful method to make less decisions about my day and put my focus elsewhere. Yeah, I absolutely find that myself. I mean, I'm a. I eat the same thing for breakfast every day. I have the same Sort of. I have many routines and anything that I can put into a routine is something that is brain power that I don't have to sort of exert elsewhere and things. Sometimes there'll be a routine and I kind of need to make sure I actually did the thing in the routine. And it helps me. I have both automated methods for reminding myself and so on. But yes it really that which I can sort of put on autopilot and make routine gives me the extra sort of time and mental energy and mental sort of space to be able to concentrate on new things. Now, you know, one of the things that is somebody's asking here, what is your breakfast? Okay, I, this is where I, I get into the terrible sort of embarrassment of personal detail. I, you know, first of all, I don't, you know, I'm on a very late schedule so I'm usually getting up at 10:30, 11am that that kind of time. And I have, usually I have a sheet of kind of some kind of cracker type thing and a piece of cheese and a one piece of dark chocolate and a, a small amount of orange juice and a bunch of sort of diluted with carbonated water. That's my breakfast. And that usually holds me for a few hours. And at some point in the very distant past, like 15 years ago, I sort of thought through and tried to optimize that breakfast and that was what I came up with. And that's the very boring really but it. And I think one's body kind of gets used to that's what I'm going to get at this time of day. And you kind of, I don't know, seems to, seems to work and then probably by, let's see, like four hours later, roughly, I'll have, you know, a turkey sandwich and an apple and yeah another couple of pieces of chocolate. I always have these very small pieces of chocolate. And I found that my longtime trick is you have this little sheets of tiny little pieces of chocolate. And I always break off little tiny pieces of chocolate to eat. And so I'm like breaking the thing into. I don't know how many I should count. Never done that. I should count how many little pieces I break it into. But I would guess it's maybe 30 or something. And each one is kind of like, oh, I like the taste of that. And it gives me kind of this impression of consuming something rather than just take the whole lump of chocolate and stick it in my mouth and eat that. Which I think is probably a less good solution. But yes, I think for me, even in times where I think, oh, I'm just leading my life, doing as a sort of something of a free spirit. When I go back and look at the personal analytics of what I've done, it is outrageously, kind of systematic and routine of, you know, the same things at the same time. I'm getting hungry at the same time. I'm sure, you know, I said roughly when I, you know, have lunch. I'm sure if I actually look it up, it's. It's the same time, give or take, every day. And, you know, because that's just a rhythm that one gets into. Well, I think I should. With that, I should probably wrap up for today here. And I know I skipped a number of very interesting questions and I look forward to coming back to them another time, but right now, talking of routine, I have to go off and do some day job activities. I think, actually we have a live stream coming up at the top of the hour. That's part of my day job designing functionality and technology of Wolfram language, so. Well, thanks for all those questions and see you another time. Bye for now.