Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (November 23, 2022)

Foreign. Welcome to another episode in my Q and A about business, innovation and managing life. So let's see, we have a bunch of questions here, and I have some questions for you guys today, but we'll get to that in a bit. Here's a simple one from Matt. As a British native, do you participate in Thanksgiving festivities? Well, I haven't. I haven't lived in England since 1978 and so I'm heavily Americanized, even if I. I guess I'm not just not very good at picking up accents. So I still sound at least a bit British. And yeah, I'm fully Americanized. Although I have to say that when it's a holiday in the US it's a good time for me to work with people who are outside the US who have holidays at different times. Am I a turkey eating person? Not these years. We used to do that. And I have to say that it seems like nobody in my family is into turkey. Giant amounts of food, and particularly turkey. Although it was interesting as a physiological experiment. You eat a lot of turkey and you fall asleep type thing. I'm just not very into that and nor does anybody else. So not a big turkey operation. Although for some reason this year, usually where I live, there are wild turkeys that you see running around. And I haven't, now that I think about it, this year I haven't seen very many. How odd. Who knows? Hopefully they didn't all get Covid and die or something. I'm not sure if Covid makes it to birds. It certainly made it to the deer around here. I could tell back in the middle of the pandemic there was this time of a few weeks when it was clear and later that became scientifically validated. But it was very obvious that deer were sick with something. Anyway, let's see. So question here about from Paolo. Do you ever use spreadsheets or other kinds of specialist applications to manage information? Or is my main tool Mathematica, Wolfram language, et cetera? You know, I tend to use our own dog food because I think it works really well and I know how to use it well. People will send me spreadsheets. I have a tremendous habit of dragging them into a Wolfram notebook and then they'll get converted into our form and that's how I usually process them. So I don't tend to use those kinds of things. I use notebooks, Wolfram notebooks a lot to manage information and I also often put those notebooks in the cloud in our wolf from cloud. And that's a convenient Way to have something where I sort of just can have it. An array of links on a web page. I click it. It's just a web page, but it also happens to be an editable web page. And it also happens to be a web page in which you can have all sorts of different kinds of elements, as well as click to copy code and code you can just run right there and so on. I find that all very convenient. Occasionally I'll be in a situation where I end up having to wear, like, transcribe numbers from here to there. I was doing that recently for some medical test data of mine. For every year I sort of update my medical tests, I've now got about 30 years of data, which is nice. And it always seems to be in a different format every single time. And so I'm glad I haven't written an automated scraper because it would have broken. And in the end, it turns out I just have it as a Wolfram language grid. And then it has placeholders in it and just fill in the numbers there, which is fairly fast to do. And then I have a computable object that I can then do visualizations and do all kinds of other things with. I mean, I suppose that's always the big story for me, is I've got some raw data of some kind. How do I. Well, usually a couple of things I want to do. One is just a pure search for things, and the other is make the data computable and do some kind of analysis on it. And when it's pure search, well, we have pretty good text searching capabilities for files and directories and things in Wolfram language. And, you know, I've got a bunch of tools built with those. But sometimes it's just a plain search in a document, or sometimes I'll even be searching in a file system and literally just either use the operating system search mechanism or just go get a Unix shell on a Linux machine and just do the search in the most primitive possible way. Part of the issue with searching and so on is how do you make sure you don't miss things? Because it's like, okay, I. I don't know. From all the archives that I have, was there ever a piece of this? And if you miss that. So, for example, just this afternoon I discovered an unfortunate fact. So I have about a quarter million pages, maybe more now, of paper documents that I've had scanned over the years of things that I produced mostly in the 1970s and 1980s before I kind of went largely paperless and purely online. So to speak. But here's the unfortunate thing. So the quarter million, maybe it's more than that now, maybe closer to half a million pages that have been scanned. But turns out I discovered just today, because I was looking at a raw box of papers, that when there was a manila folder that had papers in it, the papers inside were scanned. But if the manila folder on the outside, even if it had something written on it that wasn't scanned, so that, of course, that manila folder with something written on it will be a way of classifying what it is that's inside. You could deduce it, sort of reverse engineer it from the actual documents. But this is a little sort of archiving mistake, I suppose, if you're actually scanning things, scan the husk as well as the content, so to speak, because that will give you additional information. All right, there are questions here about from iOS asking, do you go through periods of low motivation? If so, what do you do to get over that? Well, I suppose I'm one of these people who has a fairly. First of all, I tend to maintain a portfolio of things that I do. And so even if one of them is in a frustrating state that isn't going very well, some other thing that I'm doing is typically going better. And so there's always some stuff that I can concentrate on where I'm not super frustrated for one reason or another. I suppose I also happen to be somebody who is fortunate enough that I don't. I'm not a heavily moody, you know, up and down type person. I certainly know people who are like fantastically productive when they're up, and then they'll have a period when they're down when nothing happens. I tend to be more uniform in terms of my mood and productivity and so on. But partly that's achieved by sort of having this portfolio effect, because some of the time there'll be a project or an activity I'm doing that depends on other people. And I'm either waiting for the other people or frustrated about what's happening with other people. And then it's like, okay, let me work on something different now. And that's, that's something that's important for me now. I think that I tend to have these things where not so much in recent years, but in past years where the number of projects I was juggling at any given time was comparatively small, that I would end up with these sort of interproject gaps where I've got a big project and it's basically finished, big product version, big book. I'M writing big, whatever and I'm in this kind of, you know, this period where it's kind of like, okay, that big project is finished, now what's next? And I have to say that those interproject gaps can be both very productive and sort of. They're of a different character than when I'm sort of really locked in doing some big projects. And I've tended to try to save up different kinds of activities for the time when there's sort of an interproject gap as compared to when I'm sort of systematically able to work on things and so on. So that's, you know, I think the thing that happens to me is there are moments of lower motivation that typically have the following cause. So I'm working on a project and I get blocked somehow on that project. Can't make progress, waiting for somebody else, waiting for something to happen, have to work on something else for a little while and then I come back to that project. I hate that situation because I'm, you know, if I'm working on a project, I'm kind of on a roll. I'm kind of in all sort of wound up to do this project. That's what I'm thinking about. And you know, then I can make progress. If I get blocked and have a two week gap or something else, then the moment when I come back to it is a very frustrating moment. And if I'm lucky, I've left it in a place where I've got sort of a clean break of I finished this part of the thing and I'm coming back and I'm going to start working on the next part. But I have to say that that process of restarting a project when I was all ramped up for it and then lost that, and now I'm sort of rebuilding it. That's bad. And I have a bad habit of procrastinating a bit for a couple of days sometimes when it's a question of restarting that project. And I suppose for me, working with other people almost as babysitters, but not quite in kind of getting me to sort of reread what I've already done. If it's a document I'm writing or sort of re engage in the thing, it helps me to do that. And it helps me when other people are enthusiastic about the project or seem even interested in it. I mean, I think one of the things I learned long ago in meetings and things, you know, I've been doing virtual meetings for 30 years now because I've been a remote CEO for, what is it now, 31 years. And one of the things I learned this was an early learning from about video meetings back 20 years ago or something. Now is the one thing that is just sort of disastrous. Or maybe this has changed now, I don't know. But back in those days, I always felt this way, that if you have a meeting where people are on video and half the people in the meeting are profoundly not paying attention, it kind of kills the mood of the meeting. I have to say, I don't do very many video meetings at all. And maybe for some reason. Well, I don't know what it is, but I've noticed that effect a little bit less in modern sort of zoom times than I did back in the past. Maybe cameras have gotten better, people look better, I don't know. On camera, I'm not sure what it is, but that effect seems a little less pronounced than it was in the past, where it just felt like as soon as there were people who were not paying attention, it was kind of like, oh, this, you know, why, why am I even here doing this meeting type thing? So. But, you know, in cases where I can be working with people who are actually excited about the project, whatever it is, that certainly is a way of getting myself out of the kind of, oh, I'm in this frustrating restarting of a project type of phase. You know, let me ask you guys a question or let me. Let me riff on an issue. So here's the thing I'm trying to figure out. I'm trying to figure out should I travel or not. And let me tell you a little bit of the history. So back. Oh, I don't know. If you go back 30 years, I would actually, if you go back, I've just been. Because I've been doing sort of historical project. I've just been looking at things that I was doing in the early 1980s when I was in my early 20s and a kind of a young. Well, I was. I'd done my first company. I was sort of a young, I would say hotshot, academic plus consultant plus whatever type person before I started my current company in 1986. But, you know, I was looking at my date books, calendars from those days and I traveled a lot then, much more than I remembered having traveled. And it's sort of interesting to me that I can remember most of the trips I were. I can remember at least something about most of the trips are in my calendars from the 1980s. And I'm not sure that I can tell you what consequence many of those trips had? What did I get? What did I get out of that trip? What was the result in the world from that trip? And so on. Well then in the 1990s, 1991 was when version 2 of Mathematica came out and I did a huge tour of the US and Europe, 25 cities each continent, so to speak, and gave a lot of talks and met a lot of people. And then I disappeared for basically 10 years and I did no events, no traveling at all. I was working on my big science project, New Kind of Science. I was playing remote CEO. I really didn't travel at all. And I remember actually, I know the first time, I suppose I had traveled on the order of a couple of times a year I would go to a couple of events at our company headquarters. And actually maybe one additional thing, one user conference type thing. I think I remember because my second child just been born and I really couldn't go to some event in Finland, I think it was. And so that was the first time I did a video conference. That must have been 1997. And I sort of learned that, yeah, this video conferencing thing, it kind of works. And that was to do talks and to participate in conferences that way. And so anyway, 1990s, I traveled basically not at all. Then at the Beginning of the 2000s, 2002 and 2003, my new kind of science book was finished and I did another sort of grand tour visiting that was just places in the US and I don't know, 30 places or something. And you know, it was a sort of a fairly high budget, high intensity operation of a few weeks, you know, charter a plane, fly around to lots of different places and that was it type thing. And that was around 2002, 2003. Then for pretty much a decade I again did rather little traveling and I kind of, I set up a video conferencing studio in my basement. That was kind of a high end thing. And for a long time when people would, I get all these invitations for, to go and give talks and such like, and I would, the, I'd, you know, I, I would just say, okay, no, I can do a video conference now in the, in the early 2000s, that was sort of a very much a novelty item. And people are like, oh, that's cool, you know, that's a, that's a thing, you know, let's do that. And then after that became less of a novelty item, people were like, oh well, you know, why don't you wait until some year when you can come in person. It's like, okay, fine, probably will never happen, but might happen then, let's see when actually the very same child whose birth caused me to do that first video conference was much older. She was like, hey, traveling is fun. You get all these invitations, you turn them all down. Why don't you give me the invitations and I'll pick the ones that seem fun and you go to them and take me along type thing. And so I started doing that and we went to places all over the world and that was kind of fun and interesting and you know, typically were very high intensity trips where, you know, I would just do lots of talks and meetings and all that kind of thing and you know, that, that all seem to work fairly well. And then my children grew up, so to speak. And so they were not, not in this we want to travel type mode. They'd been doing the. The two children of relevance were sort of doing online high school for a number of years there. So that was a convenient thing if you want to travel sort of around the world. That's something that works with that, so to speak. So I traveled for a while in a, you know, go to a place often somewhat outlying places around the world, do sort of very high intensity trip where, visit, you know, give some talks, visit some companies, visit some schools, visit different kinds of places, maybe make a, if there is a tourist thing to see, make sort of a perfunctory trip to the tourist thing. But that's not my main interest. Occasionally see other things like museums and so on particularly, or other kinds of places and things of sort of unusual interest and so on. But then, so meanwhile, okay, so after that period of time that was probably. When was that? That was 2010ish. I suppose a little bit beyond that. Then I sort of had a tale of going to a bunch of business conferences sort of separate from that. And I think this is, I'm rambling horribly because I haven't really organized my thoughts properly about this. But I went to all kinds of business conferences and one criterion is if you get invited to give a fancy talk there go. If you don't, don't go. That's sort of okay up to a point, except there's a lot of work to do, the fancy talk and sometimes the, you know, it wasn't clear that I got more out of going as a result of giving the fancy talk than I would have done by just meeting some people there. Well, so then I went to a bunch of business conferences. I'm a fairly meticulous keeper of trip reports. And so I have, you know, detailed information about who did I meet in each place and so on. And you know, the purpose of going to business conferences is to do business, so to speak. And so there's a sort of an important question of so what was the follow on to those kinds of things. Now I think my own sort of business development team maybe was less effective than it might have been at being able to follow up from sort of high level interactions that I had. But I have to say that my sort of, the results from all those kind of, you know, a lot of those business conferences, the results were unconvincing. As I look at them now, often what happens is you'll go to a conference and you'll go. Conferences have this sort of cycle of, you know, at the beginning that's kind of like, you know, somebody's put a bunch of energy into them. And the very first one, nobody knows about it yet, so nobody comes by the second one, maybe that's sort of the peak. And you know, lots of people come and it's all exciting. Maybe it keeps going up for a while and then eventually, you know, the conference gets sold to a conference aggregator or something and then it's all sort of downhill from there. And so there are times when it's like, okay, there's this thing that is going to be good for a couple of years and they're not so good. And you know, how do you pick when it's good and so on. I, another thing that I've tended to do is when there are like professional society type conferences, I take the point of view. You know, I live near Boston and every five, 10 years one of these professional societies will have a conference in Boston. So it's like, okay, I'll go, you know, I'll go, go check it out when it's, when I can just drive there and it's all easy. And the other years when it's, you know, traveling around the country or the world, it's like I, you know, I'm not going to interact with that. And, and that's, that's again, it's, it's probably, that's probably a, A, a reasonable point of view there. But the thing that I'm trying to figure out is I'm, I, I have lots of invitations to lots of places. I have lots of, there are lots of conferences I could go to. Should I actually go or not? And should I give talks or not? Should I just do virtual things? What's the sort of value in these kinds of things. And it's always complicated because if you give a talk to 500 people, it's, you know, it's a fine event. There are lots of people there who might hear what you have to say. But when with an audience that big, you have very little personal interaction at all. I mean, maybe people come up to you afterwards and you have a conversation with those people and that's a smaller group of 10, 15 people or something. And you know, quite often very interesting people will come up to you afterwards together with people that you would be happy to not be interacting with. But, you know, it's, that's one kind of dynamic. You know, you've reached 500 people or whatever, but you don't have much, you know, personal interaction with anybody versus the much smaller group where you'll have much more opportunity to have sort of personal interaction, but where the statistics are against you, so to speak. And I think there's sort of a, for me, there's also a sort of a trade off of, you know, I suppose it's, you know, for, for many of the things that I'm trying to achieve by doing traveling and going to events and so on, it's, it's really okay. Meet new people. You know, whether it's because they're interesting or whether it's because we can do business with them. That's, that's sort of an objective, whether I'm just going to learn something from them. But I'm, I'm very much, I'm very torn because. Well, actually back in 2019, before the pandemic and so on, I pretty much decided I was done with all business traveling. I was just not going to go to any more business conferences. I was just done with that because I just didn't see that the payback was sufficient. And you know, at our company we have plenty of people who are, you know, in sales, business development, etc. Who, you know, the conferences are the right thing for them. They're not really the right thing for me. That was my, my conclusion and the, and then, well, then obviously the pandemic happened and nobody noticed that I wasn't traveling because nobody was traveling. Another thing that happened is I started working on our visits project and that means that the, the range of, of types of venues in which I can, you know, where I get invited to give talks and things has vastly expanded to, you know, in addition to sort of computation, technology, future type things, there's also all of the sort of physics, mathematics, theoretical science type stuff, philosophy, et, Cetera, et cetera, et cetera, a big range of new kinds of things that sort of, I have, I think, lots of stuff to say about and where I'm interested. I have a framework into which to fit interactions that I have with people about those kinds of things. So anyway, it's the. Yeah, okay, there's. This is interesting. Okay. People are giving some feedback here about talks I've been to. This is very interesting and useful to me. Okay. ASDA is commenting. PI day at south by Southwest was pretty special. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. That was the, you know, on March 14, 3 14. Right? That's, you know, because PI is 3.14159, et cetera. On PI day of the century was 31415. You know, March 14, 2015. We happened to coincide with the south by Southwest Conference. It was also at a time when south by Southwest was, I felt, at one of its sort of peak, you know, at a kind of a peak, peak performance. And, you know, my test of that is I would. Would go to south by Southwest and I wander around there and I would keep on running into people I, I knew and people who I had, you know, it was a, it was a great sort of meeting point, but it happened to coincide with this PI day of the century. And so, okay, this is a, this is one of these funny stories. So a person who. Senior personnel company, now slightly more junior then, who organized events at that time. I made some comment about, you know, doing something at south by Southwest for, For PI day of the century. And I said, let's get a big pie. And so unfortunately, this was one of those CEO is misunderstood moments because the result was she was calling around all kinds of bakeries around Austin, Texas to find a big, you know, apple pie or something like that. And it's. There's some meeting where it's like, no, not that kind of pie. I mean, a, you know, a Greek letter PI type thing. Anyway, we. We organized a little event to sort of celebrate the, the actual second of, you know, 3.14159, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera of that corresponded to. To PI day. And that was, that was, that was kind of fun. And we, we still have the, the wolfie costume that was got for that PI day. And that was a nice event. And there are these sort of unique events that sometimes come up, and we've done a number of online ones, for example, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the lecture that Moses Schoenfinkel gave about combinators that was sort of the first example of universal computation. That was a. In December, 12-7-19. Well, the original lecture was December 7, 1920 and we did that in 2020. But yeah, that was fun. And that's always a sort of a, you know, when one has one of those unique things that's that one has to sort of think. To think it's. Realize it's going to happen and then, and then do something about it. Okay, Stumpy is saying they've been to one of my talks around 1990, University of Colorado in Boulder. The reason they purchased a Next Step computer because it included a copy of Mathematica. Yeah, well, that was, that was Steve Jobs's calculation of making this deal with us to bundle Mathematica with the next computer was that people would buy computers just for the sake of not having to buy the software. And it worked out really well for both sides. It was a good deal. And yeah, that was probably on my 1991 Mathematica version 2 tour. That was where I invented the term technical computing, which I think I did at least, which got kind of purloined by others, but I think that was the original use. Parker is commenting that a lot of people are deep in mainstream university discourse and it's good to have talks to open up and stimulate curious people. You know, I'll tell you one of the problems with that is there are universities, some of the bigger research universities, where they are so siloed. There aren't general purpose talks really except kind of pure entertainment type talks at universities that for one reason or another are a little less siloed. Perhaps they are actually the ones, for example, in the Midwest that have the much more, you know, we're going to bring in speakers because, you know, otherwise, because that's a way of kind of exposing ourselves because we're not sitting in New York City or in Boston or something like that. But there's a big swirl of people coming through. So they sometimes have more of a mechanism for having sort of the big general talk. But in many places, you know, it was kind of interesting when we organized well back 20 years ago now, and I'm sure it's gotten worse since then. We were kind of organizing these talks about new kind of science and we'd say to some university, hey, you know, we can come and do this and say, well, which departments are interested? And list them off. And it's like we don't know what to do with this. This is like, you know, there's a physics thing and there's a math thing and so on. And so in some places people did a good job really organizing those things and advertising them to all the appropriate places. And we got a really good collection of people and other places not so good. I think the thing that I noticed at that time is kind of interesting was we, you know, we got typically the university administration to. And sometimes we helped with some names and so on to organize, you know, lunches and dinners with groups of faculty members and students and things like that. And I heard from a whole bunch of university administrators, university presidents and so on, as well as from individual professors. Wow, that was a remarkable kind of lunch where I've never seen people from all those different departments actually interact like that. And in fact, people would. Would come to those lunches and say, oh yeah, and there'd be somebody, you know, go around the table and ask people what they were doing and somebody would say, oh yeah, we've been in the Same University for 25 years, we've never met before type thing. So yes, there's a high degree of siloing that seems to happen at least. You know, I got a sort of data point 20 years ago about that. And yes, you know, the university administrators in that case 20 years ago were often really happy to see sort of more interaction. And they were saying to us, you know, can we do something at our university to kind of make this happen every week type thing. And it's like, well, yes, there are kind of these emerging areas of science, but usually those things got sort of drowned in giant bureaucracy and so on and nothing really ever happened. But yeah, so it's a good thing, but it's not an easy thing to achieve. So somebody saying I should visit Norway. I have been. When was I lost in Norway? I have been to Norway on one of those tours that I did years ago. The. Let's see, There's a question here about comments from Paul talking about nothing beats person to person contact. Yeah, I mean, you know, look, I have been lucky enough in my life to meet lots and lots of interesting people. And I made quite an effort to kind of keep up with people and maintain a sort of large network of people. And that's been a very worthwhile thing in my life. You know, I have to say I have sort of some mechanisms for doing that. I mean, in some years in the past I were like sending out Christmas card type things. But I have to say that a much better mechanism is I write a fair amount and I write lots of posts about things and have a long list of people. And when I think somebody in that list is going to be interested in a particular post, I'll send them a copy. I'll send them a link together with some note. And I found that's a very useful way to stay in touch with people and a useful way because. Because what you find is, what I find at least is, you know, I'll know people for years and you know, then there'll come a moment when there's something where there's really a sort of direct interaction. It's really worth having because there's some project, there's some connection that wants to be made, whatever else. And, but, you know, it's important to kind of have that sort of. And I, I find it, I don't know, I like it, having this sort of continued connection so you kind of know each other and then when the, when the, when, when the dramatic oh, let's work together on this thing moment comes up, you actually know each other well enough to know that that makes sense or doesn't make sense or whatever. So, you know, I, I've tended to, to do that. Now I, I will say that, you know, what I also have done forever is I maintain a list of if I'm in place X, who should I see then? And that includes, you know, utterly obscure places around the world where, you know, I may never go there my life, but if I happen to be there, I don't want to forget. Oh yeah, there's this person I know who lives in this, in this obscure place. Absolutely. I should see them. And also, realistically, that's a, it's a, you know, I, I'm. If I'm going to go to some place, I'm, I'm really interested in interacting with the locals, so to speak, not just, you know, going to the conference hotel or the tourist hotel and, and hanging out there. That's, that's, you know, one can do that anywhere, so to speak. There's a. Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that I'm, I'm sort of trying to figure out is there's sort of many different kinds of interactions somebody like me can have. I can go and give a talk at the university. I can go and meet with something I like doing, meet with some group of students and just, you know, talk to them and ask them about things. I find that very interesting. You know, if you go to different countries around the world, one of the things I've noticed is, well, research universities are kind of similar all over the world. If you go, the lower you go in the education sequence, so to speak, the less similar you'll find things are. And it gets sort of interestingly different at the high school level and things like that. You also find companies, some aspects of companies are the same, or at least superficially the same all over the place, but, but other aspects are really not the same. And when you dig even a slight bit below the surface, they're very much not the same in different places. And that's always interesting to see and to get intuition for me at least to get intuition for in terms of sort of what happens in other parts of the world. The. OO is commenting. If you have to think about it, doing more in person talks, the answer is no. Unless you absolutely love it, there's no value in it. Well, that's the point of view. I mean, I do know that, you know, I make quite an effort to lead sort of a productive life and a lot of things that I work on, projects I work on kind of need uninterrupted blocks of time. And I was talking before about the frustration of having a project I'm working on and then I grind to a halt for a little while and then I try and restart it. And that's very difficult. And when I go on a trip, I find it pretty difficult usually to sort of continue working on the project that I was working on. It certainly helps that the technical infrastructure is mostly there to do it. If I happen to be working on something like a history project that involves actual physical books and things like this, that's always awkward, but the physical infrastructure is there. But typically if I'm going on a trip, it's because I have, you know, morning to night packed, you know, meetings or activities or whatever on that trip. And so I, I won't get a chance to, to do, you know, to do my project. And for me, at least on any given day, there's a certain kind of floor of activity that comes from sort of corporate email and, and other sort of being a CEO activities, so to speak. And so I don't get, you know, if I'm on some intense trip, I really do have to take an hour or two and just process sort of the recent sort of corporate email type stuff. And so between that and whatever I'm doing on the trip, I will not get my project done. So there'll be just sort of a gap in the project. Now if I can time that moment to be the time when, oh, I'm in the center project gap between two projects, fantastic. But that's really hard to do, because you typically have to set up some fancy trip you're doing some considerable time in advance. Although I have to say, one of the features of modern times seems to be that some kinds of things have a shorter lead time than they used to have. I mean, it used to be the case that people would routinely be saying, will you give a talk a year and a half from now? And it's like, well, I don't know. I have no idea what I'll be doing a year and a half from now. You know, And a few times in my life, I've had situations where, for example, when I started building Mathematica and Wolf and language in 1986, I had been working on a bunch of science stuff before that. And there was a big sort of tale of, you know, talk invitations and this, that and the other. And I just eventually said, I'm sorry, I'm working on a different project. I'm not doing this right now. And. And that was. But. But many of those have been sort of, you know, started to be set up a year and a half in advance when I really didn't know what I was going to be doing. But it seems like now a lot more of the time, one's getting things that are like a month or two out rather than that far in advance. But even that for me, it's like, well, this next few days I'm trying to finish some particular project. If I get the project done by the end of the weekend, which is conceivable, optimistic, but conceivable, then that will mean that certain things next week I could do, and otherwise I don't want to do them because I want to keep going on this project. So it's, you know, that's one of the challenges there. And I have to say, though, a few times on some trips to quotes, random places around the world, I did set those up at rather short notice, and they were fine. I mean, it took more effort and it took contacting all these people, oh, I'm going to be in this. This place. I. I will say that that one of the things that was for a while, particularly when I was traveling with my children, you know, for a while, I was always using some kind of anchor event, you know, give this talk in India, whatever else, you know, okay, then we're going to go to India and go to a bunch of other places or whatever it is. And then after a while we realized, just pick a place. There's always stuff for me to do in that place and then decide, you know, and then figure out what there is to do in that place. And I have to say that ended up working out just fine. And often the anchor events were horribly anticlimactic relative to everything else that was set up, so to speak. And it didn't really matter when they just went away completely. And that meant that the lead times could sometimes be smaller because it's like we're going to be in this place, you know, visit these people, whatever. Oh, they're not there then, okay, well, so, so be it. And you know, but if we set it up three months in advance, they still might not be there and, or they might disappear at the, you know, a day before or something. So it doesn't seem to, you know, that that, that improves that, so to speak. But I think, you know, for me, I mean, another thing that is interesting to me is getting sort of intuition about business and life in other parts of the world is. Is just interesting to me. Although. Yeah, I think. Anyway, so I think. Somebody is. Is talking about St. Petersburg. I was lost in St. Petersburg. When was I last there? I did a trip to. Must have been. Oh gosh, it was an anchor event which was a Wolfram Technology conference in probably in St. Petersburg actually. When was that? Maybe 10 years ago. A little bit less than 10 years ago. Tis a nice city. Have I ever been to Luxembourg? Somebody else? No. Oh yes, I believe I have, but only just drive through. I've never, never really visited there. The. Yeah, RBS is commenting. How about meeting people who don't go to universities but really engaged doing projects. You know, university is just a convenient place because they tend to have big, big auditoriums because that's the business they're in, so to speak. I've also, you know, that can also happen at some, you know, government lab or some other place like that. But those are typically the places that have kind of the obvious big auditoriums and you know, you set up an event that is a public event at a university and you know, people are encouraged to come. And in fact, universities tend to like that because they like to engage with the local community and to have events that cause people in the local community to come and, and figure out that, yeah, this university that's taking up all that space in their town is actually doing something useful. I think now, you know, again, that in the. In distant past you could kind of reach people in a local area by doing, you know, a little radio, you know, announcement on a radio program or something like this. I'm sure that's not a thing anymore. And I'm not quite sure how you reach. You know, it's not even. Things have been. Become more fragmented. I mean, there are obviously some online advertising kinds of things one could do. But it's not so obvious how you tell people, oh, I'm going to be. You know, if they're. If there are people who are following one anyway, then, yes, if one puts out this big list of all these places I'm going to go to, then then. Or any particular place one's going to go, then then there's a good chance people will notice it. But if it's people who are like, oh, yeah, you know, if they. If they notice it, they're like, oh, yeah, I'm curious about that. Let me go and check that out. It's a little harder, I think, in modern times to reach such people. That's. Parker's asking, have I ever been to Idaho? I think the answer to that might actually be no, I'm not sure. I've been to, you know, at times in my life, I've been a user of charter planes. And sometimes, you know, when the range of the plane is such that, you know, you do that great circle route, and there's a. You got to stop somewhere. And so there's definitely some, you know, in terms of an obscure airport somewhere in some places. I have been to a decent share of those, but that's a different. That's a different thing. You know, I have to say that the. That's another complicated trade off with traveling is kind of, you know what. And I think in. In I had a period of time when I. When I really said, if it's worth me traveling, it's worth spending the money to make the travel be as sort of quick and undisruptive as possible. And that was actually a pretty good mechanism during sort of one of the decades when I really didn't travel much because it really meant that there were times when I would do some trip, and it was really a worthwhile trip, and it was expensive, and it was easy, and it was sort of worth it. And then actually, as a result of my children telling me, you know, that there was a shocking waste of money to travel that way, and commercial planes were more interesting anyway, I sort of restarted doing that and discovered that, in fact, in the time I had not been doing that, travel had gotten a lot easier in many ways. And also sort of, you know, wi fi on planes and so on had come into existence. And so all of that. All of that was much easier. And I think so yeah, so that's. But you know, one of the things with traveling and visiting places is this. If you go to a, let's say, more obscure place, the likelihood of having good engagement with lots of people is much higher. If you go and do an event in New York City, it's super difficult to get more than a tiny audience. Sometimes that audience will have some really interesting people in it, but it typically won't be that large. And whereas you'll go to some other place and you get a much larger audience, it'll also have interesting people in it. Maybe they won't be people that are as much in the swirl as the people who are in New York City, but. And so it's a sort of a trade off. You can be in a, you know, a bigger fish in a smaller pond, or you can sort of go to the big ponds and end up being a pretty small fish there. And I think that's a thing where, as I've thought about sort of doing events in different places, there are places that are extremely unattractive to do them because it's kind of like you go to New York, for example, New York City, and it's like, well, you can go to Columbia and NYU and this place and that place and maybe one or two of these big talk series and so on, but each one is a separate micro population in this. And, and it doesn't feel statistically very, very significant, so to speak. Even though sometimes, you know, one of the things I'm. I'm always struck by when I do do things in New York, you know, you'll give some, some talk in some lecture series and afterwards, you know, quotes, random people will come up to you. It'll be a stream of people where, you know, you know their name. It's, it's like a, you know, that person happens to live in New York and happened to come to this thing and. Which is sort of a different weighting of, of. Of kind of how things work. But it, it. Yeah, I mean, RBS is commenting as far as future talks. Don't have a big public place, just talking back and forth, having a conversation. Yeah, I mean, look, I enjoy doing that. I mean, I was. When was I did this site. You know, typically when I'll go to universities for one of the pieces of what I'll do is, you know, maybe some big talk. And again, I'm not sure I'm going to do this again at all, but I've done a certain number of these. I do sort of a big talk and I Do some, you know, invite students to come to some kind of Q and A type thing? Invite some professors to come to sort of a, some kind of lunch ish. Maybe with or without the food type type thing. And, and then sometimes, you know, another thing I like to do is visit like labs and things like that. I have to say that can sometimes be, I will admit, a little bit deadly because it's like. But I find it, you know, I, I really like seeing when I'm, when I'm, you know, talking about physics, chemistry, whatever else it is. You know, it's like I want to see the actual lab, I want to see the actual equipment. The reason I say it can be deadly is because you, I don't know who else visits these labs, but you end up sometimes getting treated to this sort of giant lecture about what happens in this lab. And it's like, look, I know this stuff more or less. I just want to see the actual device. And that's the thing. And really if I want to read your papers, I'll go online and read your papers. So, you know, maybe that's me being kind of selfish. Although I have to say, I think insofar as there's useful feedback I can ever give, it's usually as a result of seeing something I haven't seen before. Like you actually see the, the experiment, so to speak. But that's something I kind of like to do. But it's something that is a little bit hard to choreograph because otherwise you wind up with. At least I found that I've wound up in these, in these situations where it can be a very, you know, not, not a high, high bandwidth interaction, so to speak. But, you know, the challenge for, you know, small groups are great, I have fun. I find them more interesting in many ways. But, you know, it's always a question of if you have the opportunity to reach more people. And you know, in a sense, I, I think I have some interesting things to talk about. And the, you know, one of the things that I've discovered is that it's complicated to plant those seeds and you have to sow them pretty widely to get, you know, the one person who, you know, happens to read the book you wrote or go to the talk you, you, you did when they were in high school. And then they grow up and then they become big contributors to something that is aligned in that direction. You know, it's hard to know which seeds are going to grow and where to sow those seeds. You know, there are things where I feel Like I can say the seeds just, you know, particularly on the more business side of things, where the seeds just didn't grow and that isn't as effective. Well, so I'm not sure that I. I had. I had hoped that by explaining to you guys my dilemma that I would. Would help resolve it, but I'm not sure that I have. And, you know, it really ranges from, you know, go to sort of more exotic places around the world where it's very different, where I'm encountering very different sort of people and so on than I do in sort of my everyday. Go to events in the Boston area type thing. Type of thing. That's one sort of thing. Just do a few of those every year versus the possibility of doing some kind of grand tour. That's a highly orchestrated thing and visiting lots of places. But where, you know, it starts to be, if it's, you know, if it's Monday, we must be in such and such a place. You know, somebody asked if I visited Luxembourg, and I have to say I was on a trip with two of my kids quite a few years ago now, and we were driving from where was it? Probably from the Berlin area to the Amsterdam area, or maybe it was from. Oh, gosh, I don't even remember what the exact route was. I do remember maybe on that trip stopping at the Leibniz archive in Hanover and checking out some of old Gottfried Leibniz's documents and so on, which was quite interesting. But on that trip, my two kids, their daughter and one of my daughters, one of my sons, one of my sons, who's a very clued individual in many ways, but sort of one of these unforgettable stories was of poor situational awareness, was him saying, we're driving along, saying, what country are we in now? And I think that was the time when we were driving through. Through Belgium at least, and maybe a piece of Luxembourg. All right, that's a bad. You know, it feels like bad situational awareness when you have to say, you know, what country am I in right now? Yeah. Parker asks, what's the goal? Well, that's a really good question. I mean, part of it is to seed ideas. Part of it is to do business and sell product. Part of it is to meet new people, and part of it is for me to kind of broaden my horizons. I think that for me, a lot of what I do is about sort of having ideas and so on and meeting people, hearing about things, you know, seeing that random experiment somewhere that causes me to actually understand how this Kind of quantum computer works or something like that is, you know, that's really worthwhile to me. But I would say, you know, it's also the case. Yeah, right. So those are, those are the goals. And because there are multiple goals there, that's why it's difficult to see. I mean, if my only goal was sell products, that's a much better defined. Or make deals that's a much better defined kind of set of targets. Or if my only goal was kind of spread science ideas, again, a much clearer set of targets. But it's unfortunately it's a combination of things which includes a lot of, you know, I like meeting people and learning about interesting things and so on. And that's, you know, it's just something that I think contributes in the end to the things that I'm able to do. But I also just straight like doing it. And so there's this combination of objectives which is indeed part of the reasons why it's hard to disentangle what one should do. And. Yeah, so question here from yosef. Have I thought about making video streaming and conferencing platform that integrates with our notebooks and computational language or do things like Zoom do well enough. We've actually interacted with a bunch of companies that are interested in this and including the obvious big ones. And there is some potential value in sort of having notebooks along with kind of the Zoom session. But I have to say most of the time it's like just watch somebody's notebook that's doing its thing. And you know, we were interested for a while. We actually have some technology for streaming notebooks to people where somebody is typing in a notebook and other people get a copy of that notebook that's local to their desktop. So they can take anything that was in that notebook and immediately copy it and use it and do computations on it themselves. And I thought that was a good technology, but I have to say it's had less interest than I thought it might have. But I think that's kind of a pretty good workflow of somebody is talking about something. Maybe it's a lecture, a class, maybe it's some collaboration type thing. Somebody is producing this notebook and everybody else has kind of streamed copies of from which they can immediately copy out any piece of input or output or whatever. The memes are suggesting. You could periodically host Wolfcon. That's a nice name by the way. Only folks who are interested would be likely to show up. Yeah, I mean, of course the question is how do we define that? Because you Know, we have a technology conference that we've been doing for most 33 years now. That conference is really oriented again, it's oriented to sort of an update on our technology stack and not really a science conference. We've done science conferences in the past. I don't know what I mean. To give you guys an exercise. Okay, so let's say we were going to do a conference about sort of things around our physics project and so on. Question is to design that conference. First of all, where would it be if it's a physical conference? And then what's the point of it? That is, is it people who have worked on, who've been following up on the project, working on things, presenting what they've done, interacting with other people? I mean, I think one of the things that I've noticed we had some conferences about nks new kind of science, particularly in the early. In the probably five years or so right after the book came out and what I found myself doing at those conferences, I was like, what's happening here? What is my role here? For example, Do I even need to be here? Am I being useful here other than giving some kind of keynote talk? And what I realized was the most useful role that I had was to know a little bit about what all these different people were doing and to be able to say to people, by the way, the thing you're working on is similar to what this other person over here is working on. Maybe you should talk to them. And I think that was a sort of that, that connecting function was very useful. I mean, in my life, ceoing our company, I find myself doing that quite a bit as well, because I have a fairly global view of what the company is doing. And you know, when there's this piece over here in this effectively silo, I can connect it with this other piece over there. And that's something I think was I was able to do with some effectiveness for the science. Now what gets tricky there is that after a while, I have no idea what people are doing with ideas that I've started, tools that I built, things like this. If somebody says to me, hey, what do people do with Wolfram language? People sometimes will ask me that question. It's like, I don't know. There are millions of people doing all kinds of things. You know, I can tell you the anecdotal things that I heard which were really cool. But there's a zillion other things. And sometimes I'll Hear, you know, 25 years later, somebody will say, by the way, did you Know that this big piece of technology or this big discovery was made using your tools. It's like, okay, that's nice. Glad to hear it. Very cool. But you know, that was 25 years later. So it's what tends to happen with things that one. One starts is. And it should happen is that they expand beyond what any one person can really keep track of. And it's also, you know, it is, I think my main utility to the world, so to speak, perhaps is. Is making stuff that perhaps other people can use. And it isn't so much keeping track of all the people who use it. That's not, you know, that that's not the place where, where either. You know, even though I might find it interesting, it's not the place where I can be most productive. So, you know, even that function of connecting, you know, people here and people there, doing this or that thing, that's. That gets very challenging when these areas get big and when lots of people are working on them. And. And I also think, well that. So that. So that's another issue the RBS is commenting on on have more science oriented and physics oriented streams. Yeah. With our Wolfram Institute, we are planning more of those. And in fact I've just been a bit submerged in this absurdly this project that I've been doing about the second law of thermodynamics that as I think I mentioned in previous streams, I actually started 50 years ago in 1972 when I was 12 years old. And it's kind of crazy that 50 years later I'm finally finishing this project, but I feel like I better actually finish it this time. And I started working on it in I think, August and I'm like, I thought I was going to be done by now, but it's still got quite a tail. And in fact what I'm doing right now, sort of an interesting methodological thing. So I did a bunch of stuff about the science of it, which I think is fairly interesting. But then I'm making some claims about how this field kind of went astray maybe 130 years ago now. And I feel like, hey, I better do my homework and make sure I actually know what people did at that time and what people have done since. Although most of the work was really, really concentrated at that time. And you know, and things got locked in at that time. People came to believe things that they believed ever since and that the textbooks parrot over and over again and which I think just aren't quite right. And. But then what I felt that I need to do is go back and say, why did people say this 130 years ago and 150 years ago now, actually? And without knowing that, I don't feel sort of confident that I can say, hey, I know something better. And so it's just turned out to be the history of this particular area of science, which appears to have never been written in any systematic way, is just much more complicated and ridiculous and crazy and messy than I'd ever imagined. I knew some pieces of it, but I didn't know how complicated it was. And I didn't know the extent to which there were these different strands where there's some people doing fancy math type stuff, there's some people making grand claims about the future of the universe, and there's people, there's these different sort of strands and they all interweave and people kind of say, well, I can make these grand claims about the universe because there was other people over here doing this mathy stuff, but they didn't really check into what they did. And it's like, well, actually the mathy stuff is a lot more specific than you think it is. It doesn't allow you to make some of those grand claims. And then the people doing the mathy stuff are like, well, we've got these kind of things that we're treating as axiomatic. And well, it's really obvious they're true because look at those people over there who are making grand claims based on this and saying that they're, you know, the foundations of what they're doing are these sort of obvious things that we can treat axiomatically. So it's a big mess. And I've been sort of disentangling it and it's just been taking forever because it's like, I think I understand this. Oh, let me go look at what somebody wrote in 1854 or something. Wait a minute, what were they doing then? You know, they, they understood this other thing. I didn't think anybody understood until 20 years later. And you know, and then why did people not follow up on that? Why did they go off in this other direction? Why did these people who seem to be very well positioned to sort of make these connections, not. And then there are sort of these out of band things that happen. And I'm sort of segueing to history of science, but they're these. You have to know a certain amount about people and their lives because you discover things about how people had. Oh, one example that, you know, where, where people's sort of independent sort of Personal convictions were kind of intersecting with the science they were doing and causing them to not really want to say this because that will be incompatible with some beliefs that they had, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Unless you know that there's that kind of, you know, gorilla out there in the shadows, so to speak. It's very hard to understand why these people would say what they say or people, you know, they're, they're off, you know, zooming forward and then suddenly they're, they're, they volunteer, you know, for the army in some war in the 1800s and they get wounded and they're sort of off for a long time type thing. And it just, just a lot of, A lot of complicated stuff that's hard to understand and it's been taking me forever. But that, that's some sort of. Will be back to more, I hope I'll be back to more kind of live streams about physics and so on. Most of what I'm doing right now, I'm pretty much doing on my own. I, I record these video workloads. I'm sure that. I'm afraid that they may not be very exciting to watch. They're, they're interesting. If you want to know why did I say this or that thing. I mean, the ones I've been doing very recently are just, oh, my gosh, it's probably, they're probably horrifying because they're basically going through endless source documents and trying to piece together, you know, the pieces of what did this person say and that person say? And what did it mean? And what does this notation, I don't understand mean and all those kinds of things. The. Yeah, right. Well, Stephen is commenting here. If, if I, you, I make appearances. Conditional with a personal request based on your curiosity. Yes, I, I, I have to say I, I do do that. I mean, in other words, it's like, if it's a come to this place, it's like, look, you know, here are the things. Here are the kinds of things that I'm going to want to do there. Here's the, you know, here are the things that, and, and, and usually it's a, Everybody is, is, is happy with that. You know, it requires that there is enough organizational capability and sort of seniority of the organizer, so to speak, in the local place to be able to make some of these things happen. But yeah, it tends to be, you know, that's kind of a. Yes, that's part of the kind of the approach that we use. And so Paul is commenting wouldn't a conference on the physics project in collaboration with a big university help disseminate ideas within the academic community? I don't know. I think, you know, we are. Actually there's a conference coming up. Well, at least one, maybe more than one, but next year in collaboration with universities. I think at least it's organized by university people, at least about things related to the physics project. I don't think there's anything magic about, you know, I think it's, it's really a question of one has to define what's going to happen there. I mean, is it going to be. And also another thing to say is there's an argument that one is better off having physics projects sort of, kind of appear within existing sort of institutional structures of physics, mathematics, computer science, whatever, than in having its own separate bubble. I mean, in a sense, there are fields like computer science, for example, which in its early history was kind of a piece of either mathematics or electrical engineering, depending on where you were or what you were thinking about, about it. And, you know, to the great loss, probably, for example, mathematics sort of computer science budded off from mathematics, was sort of rejected by mathematics, and it made its own separate thing. And perhaps that's what should happen to the kind of paradigms that we've developed and perhaps it will naturally happen that way. But I think there's at least, you know, some, There's a. There's a lot of value right now to sort of connecting the things we're doing to, to existing areas of physics and figuring out how does that, you know, area of mathematical physics plug into the things that we figured out about physics and so on. But, yeah, you know, it's a. I, I have to say, for example, we have our winter school coming up about the physics project, which I, I think I should advertise still, although I know we got a huge number of applicants, which is great, very good applicants from mostly the academic community. And I view that as sort of a, a good sign that, you know, the word is getting out that, that things are becoming more and more known and active in that area and that that's. So I think, I'm not sure, you know, it's very hard to know. I mean, it's a. The, you know, what amounts to kind of the marketing of ideas is a complicated matter and it is not. It's. It's challenging sometimes because when things are original enough, there isn't an existing infrastructure. If you try and connect them to the existing infrastructure, you, it's challenging to do and you often have to distort those ideas, that paradigm to have it fit into the existing infrastructure. So it's promotable. I mean, I saw this happen with the field of complexity research that I was much involved in, kind of, I suppose, initiating in the early to mid-1980s that there were places where there was a big sort of thing about complexity and economics in social science and wherever else. And you could sort of attach things to that freight train. But once attached, they weren't what you started with. They were something very specific which usually ended up with use computers to do this kind of thing rather than use the kind of actual scientific ideas about sort of how complex behavior arises from simple rules and things like that. That to me are the sort of core basic science of that area. They ended up being more things that were more sort of applied use of computers type. Type thing. And they really, you know, the good news was you got them attached to a sort of an existing institutional structure that could pull the thing forward and get people involved. The bad news is the thing wasn't the same anymore once you did that. And it was very watered down relative to the much more original thing that it started off from. So it's challenging to connect those. Those things. Let's see. A comment from Philip about talking to Gerhard at hooft. I haven't talked to him in a while. We've exchanged email and he's been in some talks I've given, but I don't think I've actually had a chat with him in a while. I think he's a good physicist. I'm not sure how useful a conversation would be at this moment. It might be very useful. I don't know. I think Gerhard has had a very definite view about. He's been interested in applying cellular automata to quantum mechanics, but his way of doing that is very different. And I think. I don't think it's quite the right thing. I think it's a kind of a limit of what we can call generational states in our physics project, although not specifically with cellular automata, but with these more general hypergraph rewriting systems. But I think I've been pushing Gerhard for years to understand some of the core intuition that you get from studying kind of the computational universe and understanding things like the Rule 30 phenomenon and so on. And I think his way of thinking about mathematical physics, which he's very good at, by the way, arguably sort of best in the world at, is just somewhat different from that paradigm and that intuition. And without that intuition, it's pretty hard to get to a bunch of the things that we've done in our physics project. For example. Example. Well, okay, maybe one more question and then I should wrap up here and. Oh, there's a question here from Kefalas. How come I wasn't at the Apple Keynote when Intel Macs were announced during this demo of Mathematica? That was Teo Gray, longtime person I've worked with, who was the on stage person there. He was the person who'd been sort of beavering away for some time trying to. Actually this was when Apple sort of moved from being based on the Motorola 68,000 chip family to being based on intel chips before they pivoted again to their own ARM based chipset. But this was, I don't know, maybe how long ago, 20 years ago, maybe something of that time when Steve Jobs had said to us, can you do this port of this very complicated piece of software, although I think pretty decently software engineered piece of software to these, you know, to this new platform? Because that'll be a good way to demo to people that really a complex piece of software can be ported and runs efficiently. And so Teo and some other people on our team were out in California doing that until, you know, and I think until sort of hours before the actual keynote. And that wasn't, that's not quite my, that's not quite my scene, so to speak. And I was, I think that was a good moment for, I think Teo had a lot of fun and we achieved something useful for us and for Apple, which I think was good all around. And it was, it's one of those things where, where some of these sort of, sort of dramatic things that we as a company sometimes get involved in. There's somewhere I feel like there's value in me doing it myself and I kind of want to do it myself. That wasn't one of them. Because porting millions of lines of code is not something, it's not something I'm skilled at anymore. And I wouldn't have been the right person for that. I think I'm pretty good at debugging things though. And certainly within our company, one of the things that I've learned is when we have these really long running bugs that are important in some way or another and it's been months and it's like nobody can fix this. I have now started to have a very systematic program of meetings where I'll come in and try and fix it and I have very good success rate. You know, I think it's sort of a sort of A. In some ways it's a selection effect of some kind because once we've set up one of those meetings, the people who are working on that bug end up working harder on it. And so they've typically crispened it up to the point where it's much easier for me to swoop in and figure out what's going on. But it also helps that I've had lots of experience in lots of different kinds of systems and so on. I have thought it might be fun to livestream some of these bug investigations, but they. They can be quite, you know, it's a little horrifying sometimes. It's like we're deep in some piece of infrastructure and, you know, having to figure out, you know, why is some server doing some weird thing. And I think it might be a little bit too, I don't know, a little bit. Little bit too deep in the weeds for. Things. Okay, there's an interesting question at the end here from Xerox, which I maybe should come to another time. Is it worth moving to the US from the uk, Europe, to pursue a career in science, mathematics or engineering if one wants to change the world? That was an issue that I faced back in 1978, and at the time that was my conclusion. But times do change, and it's an interesting topic and I'm happy to talk about another time. All right, well, thank you all for particularly your input on my still unresolved conundrum of to travel or not to travel. And. And thanks for telling me what I would tell myself, which is you have to understand what the objective is if you want to know what the answer to the question is. And I was a little embarrassed to be able to have to say, it's like when people say, what's the reason for that? And you say there are five reasons, that's usually not a good sign. But it is the case that there's sort of a multifaceted problem. All right, well, thanks. Thanks for joining me and see you another time. And if you're in the us, happy Thanksgiving and talk to you another time. Bye for now.