Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (September 11, 2024)

Hello there. Welcome to another episode of Business and Innovation. Innovation and Managing Life. Q and A. And I see a whole bunch of questions saved up here. Let me see. There's one. I'm not quite sure if it fits in the rubric of this Q and A, but Ollie asks, do you think the US will ever transition to the metric system? You know, scientists, for sort of science purposes have been using metric stuff forever. In terms of know, will the road signs change to, say, kilometers? Will one buy things in kilograms rather than pounds? I doubt it. And my evidence for that is that at this point, you know, you pick up a bunch of bananas in a store or something and you're going to buy them, you never know how much they weigh. It's just, you know, you put them, you know, you put them on a machine and the machine figures out the, the weight and the price and so on, and the infrastructure of what units are being used and things like that is really not, you know, not visible. I mean, there are, there are cases where one does hear the units, like, you know, human temperatures, okay, I, somebody like me, I grew up in England, lived in the U.S. i know, you know, oh, if you have a temperature of 102 degrees Fahrenheit, I kind of know what that means, as opposed to 38.5 degrees degrees centigrade, which people in Europe would know. And I don't immediately have an intuitive sense of what that means. But I think the vast majority of places where kind of units are used, they are an intermediate stage in something else. I mean, like, for example, it's knowing the sort of reading off on the road signs, how many miles it is to such and such a place is not something one's doing so much anymore because one's just using a gps and the GPS is saying, this is the time you'll arrive at. And so it isn't so important to know it's 11 miles to that place. It's like, well, how long is it going to take me to get there? Type thing. So I think that this sort of the infrastructure of units is just less and less human visible. And so there's less and less motivation to streamline anything along those lines. If I always remember the fact that when I lived in England when I was a kid in 1970, the British currency decimalized. It used to be pounds, shillings pence, where there were 12 pennies in a shilling, 20 shillings and a pound. And it had been that way for a really, really long time. I remember when I was five or six years old saying, to some teacher, money doesn't have to work in this silly way, as they were trying to learn how to do arithmetic with mixed radix, pounds, shillings, pence and so on. And the teacher was like, it's been that way for 800 years or whatever it was. It'll never change. And then by the next year it was announced, yes, there's going to be this decimalization. And it was quite, I mean, I was 10 years old, I guess, when this decimalization thing happened in England. And it was interesting because for two years beforehand on television, they were running these little snippet programs of try to give people an intuition for what it means, what does, you know, five pence is one shilling, you know, five new pence, they'll say new pence forever. I'm sure anytime something changes, it's the new thing. But then after a while it becomes the old thing, but it's still called new, whatever it is. But then the thing that was interesting to me was you might have thought when sort of this moment of decimalization happened and people were handing in old money and getting back new money and so on, that everybody would be confused. But at least in the, in the zone of people that I was dealing with, it didn't seem like anybody was very confused. It seemed to happen. Seemed to be rather a straightforward transition. But my feeling is that transition would never have happened if it had been delayed another three or four years, because 1970 was right before electronic calculators came in. That was 1972, 1973 type time frame. And there just would have been British money calculators and people would not have worried about the fact that, oh yes, it's kind of hard to multiply by seven something in pounds, shillings pence. They would have just typed it into a calculator and all would have been fine. And there wouldn't have been any pressure to make that change to make things easier for hand calculation because there wouldn't have been hand calculation going on. So that would be my analysis of that issue. Let's see. Gosh, there's a question here from musician. What tricks or methods do you use to stay focused on developing a core innovation while not getting distracted by related features or future potentiality of the innovation, either as an individual or a team? Well, you know, for me, I usually have some core idea and I guess that my particular way of working on things involves trying to sort of pick it down to the bone of what the core idea actually is and really focus. Keep, keep in mind that core idea. Now it may turn out that the core idea as you start to build it, that you realize that core idea is unachievable, or there's another core idea that's actually a better idea and so on. But one of the things that's critical in projects, and I've realized is more difficult for a lot of people to do than I've always found it to do myself, is sort of making the decision to pivot the project a bit and not just blindly say, hey, we got our mission statement, this is our objective, come what may, we're going to go and achieve that mission statement. That to me, I mean, when I see that operate in companies and things like that, that's often a path to failure because particularly when you're doing something for the first time, you don't necessarily get exactly the right mission objective, so to speak. Maybe it has to be changed a bit. And that's something that sort of in the leadership of projects, you have to realize how to do that. It's also no good to tell people who are working on a project, oh, we don't really know what we're doing, we don't know what direction we're in. To me, projects, and this applies to projects that are research projects, projects that are development projects, even business projects. It's the clearer the objective, the more you're likely to be able to get people to really execute on that objective. I mean, the, the, the fuzzier it is, the more that people will just dissipate energy going off in random other directions. As far as sort of you have a mission, you have an objective and then you're pursuing that objective and as you're pursuing it, you're, you sometimes look to either side and you realize, gosh, there's something else we could do here. Sometimes those things are really worth doing. I mean, what I've seen in projects we've done, there are very big projects we've done where the full objective is really quite hard. It's a five, ten year project. But at six months you realize, gosh, there's this off ramp, there's this thing we can do based on the technology stack we're building or whatever else, where it's like, gosh, we can just do this right now and achieve something from the build out we've already done without having to go all the way for the five year project or whatever. And that's a really useful thing to be able to recognize and in some cases to be able to pivot and say, hey, let's take a significant part of the effort that we were putting into this mega year project and put it into this waypoint that we can deliver. Now that's a very sensible thing to be able to do and something that is worth allowing yourself the opportunity to do that rather than just saying we've got an objective, we've just got to go all the way towards that objective. Now one of the things that happens with people working on projects, there'll be the leader, the person who originally imagined the project, they have some direction in mind. There's a question of how much should they look to either side and try and chase those little different rabbit holes and so on, how much should they stay on target? And then there's the question of the other people who are working on it. How much should they stay on target? And I have to say, I think it's a tricky thing, it's quite personality dependent. But there are definitely people where it's like if they're going off track, they're wasting time. There are other people where sometimes they will explore little pictures, piece a little ways off the track and come back with something wonderful. But my tendency when running projects is to say, look, the thing you're supposed to be doing is the thing that I told you to do more or less, and the thing that's part of our main plan, you have a better idea, that's wonderful, kind of work on it in time that is not part of the project time and come back and show me what you've done. And occasionally I'll say, wow, that's amazing. Thank you for doing that. And we're going to pivot the project to be more in that direction. But the assumption has to be that the main project time is going into the thing that it was agreed one was going to do. And that a change of that direction comes from the leadership of the project, not from a person working in the trenches. Because what can often happen is the person working in the trenches, and particularly this happens if it doesn't know the person very well, person isn't particularly tightly managed and so on is they say they really, honestly they don't really understand the big objective, but they know something from something else they've done in the past that's a different direction. And they just go off and start doing that different direction. And what you realize is that the different thing they did just doesn't fit the main project and you're going to throw it away. So that, that's my, you know, I guess that's what I would say in terms of the oh my gosh. You know, let's think about the project that's three ahead of the one we're currently thinking about, that it's worth having those things in mind. I always think that, you know, you do what you do and you spend some percentage of your time planning the future of what you will do. And for me, I don't know, I don't really have a quantitative measure, but my impression is it's a few percent of the time I'm kind of planning for the more distant future and trying to sort of accumulate knowledge and information and ideas for more distant kinds of things. Most of the time I'm executing on the things that I'm doing sort of here and now. But you know, when you have a project and you start, I've got this whole big objective and you say, well let me imagine what would happen. Let's say I managed to do this, what would we do next? And so on, that's worth thinking about a little bit. It's not worth thinking about too much because my experiences, particularly when you're doing project, that's never been done before, when you finished it, when you built the tower of that project, the places you can see are not places you expected to be able to see. It's very hard to anticipate what it's going to feel like, what capabilities you're really going to have once you've done that project. I mean, it's kind of like you imagine how some piece of software is going to work, then you have to build it, then when you start using it, you realize, oh wow, there's this cool thing I can do. But that wasn't something that I anticipated when I originally imagined the project that was going to be done. Let's see. Giraffe asks, do you have any thoughts why people always seem to underestimate the amount of time a specific project takes? Everyone knows a project always takes roughly double the time, but never plan around that knowledge. Okay, I'll tell you a story about the ancient history of our company. This is probably bit more than 30 years ago now. Person who is actually still working at the company but, but was came in and was going to do project management and had experience doing large scale project management for large construction projects where you know, they were hundreds of millions of dollars and you couldn't, you know, mistakes in like cost estimation, things like that would be sort of disastrous. And he said to me that I'll learn to predict how long it's going to take to do a project. I said, I don't believe you. You can never figure that out. I said, just wait, it'll take a few years, but I'll be able to predict how long it would take to do a project. And he was right. He was able to predict how long it was going to take to do a project. But now the big question was, did he tell that only to management or do you tell that also to the people who are doing the project? And so we have a very open company and it's kind of like, you know, let's make sure everybody kind of knows everybody's on the same page about what we're doing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Let's tell people what the predicted time for this project is. 18 months, you know, whatever it is, 15 months, whatever the time is. Okay, so we started doing that. It was a disaster because what ended up happening is people said, oh, this project's going to take 15 months. That means I can, I don't have to do anything for the next three months. I'll wait because the project is going to take 15 months. So it was a self fulfilling kind of anti prophecy telling people how long, you know, the predicted time to do a project would be. So we just stopped doing that and we stopped even trying to do make the predictions because we didn't really want a situation where somebody knew the prediction and, you know, wasn't telling other people. Now I think that. So that was one of my experiences in yes, you can learn to predict, but it's not clear you want to know the prediction. I mean, I have to say for myself, I'm always an optimist, I think, and if I wasn't an optimist, I probably wouldn't do most of the projects I've done if I knew they were going to take as long as they were going to take. They were going to be as hard as they were going to be that, you know, I would just not do them. I would say this is too hard. Now the fact is, if I really were to assess this carefully, I would realize that some projects, at least my original conception of them, I got them done more quickly than I expected. But maybe then the project expanded because I realized, oh, I can do more in whatever time is available or whatever, however I'm allocating resources to that. So, but you know, this question of, of how do you estimate how long something's going to take? I have to say I've had lots of experiences with lots of different people over the course of time. And like one person who has worked at the company a very, very long time was. Would sort of annoy me by saying, this is probably 30 years ago or more. Would annoy me by saying, you know, I would say, hey, we're going to do this thing, and it should be easy. And he'd say, this thing is going to take two months, okay? And I would be like, you can't be serious. You know, it's easy. You can do it in two weeks, whatever. He said, this thing is going to take two months. And he was right. But he delivered, and it would always arrive, you know, the time he said it would arrive, it would arrive, give or take. Then there were other people who would come in, you know, the young enthusiasts would come in and say, I'm going to do this. I'm going to get this done. I remember one project, I'm kind of one project where it was like, in a week, we're going to build this whole giant thing. And I'm like, you cannot be serious. This is going to take a year or more to build. It's like, we're going to build it in a week. Of course it failed. So I think it's a funny thing when you're building products, at least in a company like ours, we don't have a good sense of time, budgets, all those kinds of things. We're just building things and we're trying to get them to the point where they're valuable in the world. We can start selling them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But we're not saying, hey, we know this project, which has never been done before, which certainly we've never done before, the world has probably never done before. We're going to say, okay, this project is going to take three and a half months, and it's going to involve four people and all that precision. It's not realistic. And it's something where in building products, it's kind of like we just build it until it's done to a certain level of quality. I think that it's a different story when we're doing services, projects, consulting projects and so on, where the deal is, somebody wants to spend X amount of money for X amount of time. And our job there is to do the things we're going to do for that amount of money in that amount of time. It's a different rhythm of work. And it's one where, for example, in our company, there's many years that I would not have us have a consulting organization because I thought the rhythm of work was so different. And I Thought it would kind of mess up what we were doing on the product side, and what we were doing on the product side would mess up what we were doing on the consulting side. In the end, we built Wolm Solutions about how long, 15 years ago or some. Now that as a quite separate organization. In many ways, that really takes the technology we have and the expertise we have, but its rhythm of work is different from the rhythm of work of the product company. And that seems to work quite well. I think this question about, should you take account of the fact that things always take longer than you expect? I think if you do that, you wind up in a pessimism spiral that isn't really that productive. I mean, if it's a question of, oh my gosh, I'm going to leave it until the night before and am I going to get it done in time? Well, that's probably not a good strategy. And I don't know. I found an awful lot of things that I do. I end up. I like to view myself as a rational procrastinator. There are things where it's like, well, I could get it done now, but no, I'm going to procrastinate getting it done. And I find that that's often actually a useful thing to do because, for example, good example, you're producing marketing material for a product. Okay, you can do that. But if you don't really know what the product is and you don't really know how smooth it's going to be, how well polished it's going to be, how well it's really going to work, what it's really going to feel like to use, you're kind of spinning your wheels. I mean, when you first conceive of the product, it's worth having a, hey, this is how I would market it if we built it. But then you build it, at least in my experience, and then you see what it's like, what it feels like, and then you understand your reaction to it, and then you figure out how you're going to present it, rather than sort of trying to spin a lot of wheels on the interim, saying, well, I think it's going to go this way, I think it's going to go that way and, and do it. It's the same thing. You know, I find with preparing. Oh, I don't know, like, I'm. I'm very bad about preparing talks that I give. I usually don't prepare them at all because I found that actually I give better talks when they're not prepared than when I'm like reading off a script type thing. But that's a case where the more I know about the audience, the better chance I have to give a good talk. And so it's actually a better strategy for me. I gain more by seeing the audience than I do by spending the extra half hour or something offline beforehand thinking about what I'm going to do. So it's another, I mean, as I say, a piece of rational procrastination. But I think that some of these things you kind of don't want to say, at least for me, oh, I've got all this time. Those are the times when I prepare a terrible talk or where I do do other things like that is where I. Where I sort of do do all these things in advance. And I don't really know what my target is because that's something that I can only know closer to the time. Let's see, Lots of questions here. Kian is asking one. I'm. I'm not sure that asking, what country do you think is the best to live in? How would you compare the ideal of living in Europe? The ideal drinking nice wine and good food to the ideal of working in the US and creating a business which solves some need. I think this is one of these deeply personal things. I mean, I think that, you know, different people at different times in their life have different sets of priorities and objectives. And the only thing that can be tricky is kind of knowing from the outside what it's like to be in a particular place or whatever. I think that in terms of there's a certain sort of ethos of how things work that can be different in different countries, different parts of countries and so on. And, you know, there's a question of whether. Oh, I don't know, there are things between things, like, do you want to be a big fish in a small pond or do you want to be in a big pond where lots of exciting things are happening, but you're a small fish? That's a pretty personal decision. And it's a decision that I think sort of can vary at different times in one's life. I mean, I think that in terms of. Of sort of the, you know, what counts as, as quality of life. I mean, there are places in the world where just the mechanics of living is easier and where you can sort of, you know, money will just get you the things you need. And there are places where it's more personal work to sort of just, you know, lead your life. And there are places where, I mean, there's just so many different variables. And I think for myself, you know, I grew up in England. I moved to the US when I went to graduate school, when I was 18 years old or something. And at the time I was. Well, I had all sorts of aphorisms which I'm not sure I would necessarily still live by, but I always used to say in England that England was a good country to be old in and a bad country to be young in. And part of the reason I said that was that at the time, England was a place where there was sort of a lot of respect for the old and not much for the young whippersnappers, so to speak. And one of the sad things is, I think over the course of time that I haven't lived in England 45 years or something now, but that has no longer. It's no longer the case. So, you know, now that I'm old, I'm not in the preferred group that I thought I would be in, you know, 45 years ago or something. So. And I. I always used to, you know, I wasn't a. Oh, I don't know. I. I think when I moved to the U.S. i moved to the U.S. because I was interested in physics and those kinds of things, and the US was sort of the happening place for physics. And. And it was. And it was, you know, I got exposed to all the leading edge stuff and was able to contribute to a bunch of it and so on. And I think that would have been more challenging in England. I'm not sure it would have been impossible in modern time times with the web and so on. It would have been more possible. You know, after I lived in the US two or three years, I thought about going back to England. I had my Ph.D. and I was, you know, looking around for where to go, and I had a bunch of opportunities to go different places. And I was talking to people and people like, why would you come back to England? You know, this is a, you know, it's a ghost town, so to speak, in terms of what was happening at that time in physics there. And although I at the time probably still would have felt in some ways more comfortable in England than in the US it was. I was, you know, that kind of put me off quickly. I mean, I always used to say I like the British countryside. I like certain aspects of the British situation. Although I have to say that the culture, you know, British versus American culture are similar enough that, I mean, I think it wasn't like it was a big adaptation, although there were certain Aspects of American culture that at least coming from a British, you know, upbringing were kind of, I don't know, I felt were kind of, let's say there was a certain sort of depth of things that existed in the old world that didn't always exist in the new world. But I kind of decided that wasn't the important thing and it wasn't even clear that it was actually true, so. And it also is a thing which depends a lot on the kind of microclimate you find yourself in of particular people and organizations and so on. But in terms of starting businesses, I really started doing business after I lived in the us. We have a company in the uk, for example, but I'm not in. I know all the accounting terms. I know for American companies it's revenue, whereas in the UK it will be called turnover, I think. But I barely know those UK accounting terms because most of the business I've done is in the us And I certainly know that the expectations of companies in the UK and the US are a bit different. I mean, I remember when our company was very, very young, I was interviewing people in the UK, maybe it was when we were starting our UK company actually, and some very young fellow, 23 years old, something like that, doing an interview, and he asked me, I'd say, other questions and he asked me about our retirement plans. And it's like, wait a minute, this is a very young person, at least in the US setting. That would not have been a thing you would have heard. And it was something, a difference, an old world kind of difference, maybe unfair to pick out on that one particular example, but that was, I think, kind of sort of characteristic of slightly different kinds of thinking. Whereas in the US it would be like, you know, I want to take a risk, I want to do this exciting thing, you know, if I do this, is there an upside type thing rather than what's my kind of long term sort of life picture and so on. And I think that the general feeling of just the general feeling of risk taking felt a lot different in the US than in the uk. I mean, I would say that in, I mean, I've not been. My very first company back in, in the beginning of the 1980s, was a venture capital funded company and that was all American venture capital. And I wouldn't have even known where there would be British venture capital. But my impression is that the sort of investment climates and the valuations of companies and the enthusiasm for the new and so on has always been a bit different between the new world and the old World, which translates into literally, you know, a company, if you move it from one place to another or you get funding in one place to. There's a factor of two or three difference in what happens there. But I myself haven't been in that particular world for a long time, so I don't know the comparison there. Let's see. Another question from Kian. Do you think contemporary books are worse than the classics? Do you think contemporary films are worse than old ones? What do you think about art being made in general today? Look, one of the things that's always confusing about the classics versus the new is, is the classics you know about are the ones that survived. And you know, I've quite often done historical projects looking at things from the 1800s and so on and looking at lots and lots of books from that period of time. And there was a lot of garbage books. There are a lot of really silly books. Of course, you've never heard of them now because they disappeared in the intervening, you know, 100 and something years. So you only know about the ones that survived. So there's kind of a great sort of the stuff that survived. The same thing with antique furniture and so on. The stuff that people didn't throw out is the good stuff. And so that gets reflected in. Oh, that's really nice. And it was a survivor, so to speak. So I think there's the question of whether there are things that are being produced today, whether the fraction of things that will survive today is comparable to the fraction it was in the past. My guess is that it is comparable. My guess is that it's a small percentage and that there's still a small percentage of good stuff. And there always was a small percentage of good stuff and there was always a large percentage of bad stuff or stuff that just wasn't that interesting wasn't going to survive. So I tend to think that's the case now, identifying the new stuff that's going to survive, so to speak, or going to be worth surviving. Well, that's more on you, so to speak, than in the case of the quotes classics, where just the process of natural selection has selected things. And I mean, it's certainly the case that even among the classics, so to speak, there are waves that might last 50 years, 100 years more of things that become popular, not popular, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But you're already leveraging kind of the natural selection of the world, so to speak, on those kinds of things. Let's see, Nicola is asking that they're impressed by My archive information would like to know about the mechanics of how you operate that the tools you use talk about how you add to the archive on a day to day basis and the general setup. Well, so there are things that flow in day to day, my email, all sorts of automated systems that record things like what websites I go to, record screen captures of my computer screens and so on record nowadays lots of transcripts of meetings and recordings of meetings and so on and transcripts of things like this. Those things all go into, well, gosh, they go into files on a server and they get indexed and I've had this thing I call my metasearcher which just searches everything and so I'll type in some name or something and I will get back a whole collection of. I mean just like a search engine, except that because it's a very structured collection, it'll come back in a very structured way. So for example there'll be email which is structured by year. And I can see, it's very useful for me to be able to see when I type in, let's say, the name of a thing or person or whatever else. I immediately get the sense oh, I was really interested in that in 2010 or oh, I last interacted with this person in 2004 or something like this and or in 1993 or something because I can immediately see that because I have the immediately the counts on the left hand side of my screen, the, the window, my counts of the number of email messages or something with that person at that time. So email is very nicely organized by date. So then I have a bunch of other pieces, I mean same nowadays with, with websites, visitor transcripts and so on. Those are again sort of organized by, by date. Then there are scans of documents I have about nowadays must be nearly half a million pages pretty much. Well all of my paper documents, all of my non scratch paper paper documents, the scratch paper stuff which I've kept and occasionally I've gone through and it's really kind of interesting, it's kind of shocking because you can really see this idea originated at this moment, so to speak, on this piece of paper. And it's kind of fun to see that. But that's had the problem that mostly much of that stuff is handwritten and we're not quite at the point of being able to do good optical character recognition for handwriting. It's very close even with some of my bad sloppy handwriting, it's very close to the point where we'll be able to do that. But mostly what I'm Dealing with is things that were either born digital, like email or have been scanned carefully. And as I say, I think I have about half a million pages now of scanned documents, which actually somewhat. There's probably, oh, I don't know how many, maybe a third of a million pages of my own documents, mostly from before 1984, which was kind of the pivot year for when I pretty much switched to being all electronic. Before that time there was some electronics, some there was you know, less and less electronic as you go further back. But I have to say I've got documents from my parents that I've scanned some of. And that's kind of when it really gets shocking is not only do you have your own stuff, but you also have past generations of material. But in any case, so for me, sort of the center of all of that is this meta searcher which just lets me search for anything. And so far that's always just been keyword text search. We are just starting to do sort of serious experiments with vector databases in version 14.1 of orphan language. We have nice vector database capabilities. So we're able to start doing semantic searches against that data. First place where I'm really trying to do that is, is sort of an embarrassing place in some ways, which is I write a lot and I often want to put in links in what I write to other things I've written, but I don't remember always the things that I've written. And even the worst case is when I'm writing something and I have this terrible deja vu that I've written something similar before but I don't know where it is. And I can't do keyword searches because they're often concept type things. And I'm hoping with a vector database, and maybe I'll even do that in real time as I write, have something that brings up related things I've written before that might be a thing that would just make me freeze and not be able to write anything. But that's an experiment that I want to try. So in terms of other archive material, I would say that by far the dominant pieces are all these things, the emails, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. At this point, the amount of like paper material that comes in has dwindled to pretty much nothing. I mean, it used to be the case I would go to an event and I would pick up lots of business cards. At this point I think I'm about the only old sort of fuddy duddy who has business cards. And everybody else is And I've even switched now to just having a QR code on my phone that goes to a webpage that contains links and email addresses and things like this. And you know, I found that the best thing to do is just, you know, somebody says I want to contact you is just hold up my phone, put up that QR code. I don't tend to use the bump your phone type thing because I don't really, I'm not set up to have, you know, there's contact stuff that I'm not going to give to every single person that I run into. So it's better to have something where I have this QR code that goes to a page and that page that is sort of a custom page that gets updated probably once a year or so contains links to things that are likely to be things that are useful given what I'm likely to be talking to people about. So that's been a way to do that. But it isn't the case anymore that I come back from every event with a pile of business cards that get scanned. And as I say, the amount of paper material that I get in the mail and so on has dwindled to practically nothing. And so as I say, the main sources are these electronic ones. Now there are other things that I capture in archives, like every keystroke I type and step I take and heartbeat and all those kinds of things. Those are not as readily searchable and those are things which usually when I want to know something, I'll pull that out and be able to get that material. I mean, many of those things I have sort of a daily digest that I send back to myself. Like for example, yesterday was, I think, a 78,000 keystroke day. So that was pretty good for me. And I was busily working on something and I see that in the mail that gets sent back to me and the next morning that's a summary of what was there before. One of the points about having that mail sent back to one, one point is it's kind of nice as a way of sort of self regulation, of seeing what one had done and oh, what is one's resting heart rate. How many steps did one take? All those kinds of things. That's all interesting to see and kind of a useful self regulation thing. Another reason it's useful is so you get a sense of whether the systems that you are using were working. Because sometimes there'll be things that come back where it's like, I don't know, I have, you know, motion sensors in this house and it's kind of like gets a map. I don't know really what the point of this is, but you know, when we built this house, I don't know, 20 some years, 20 something years ago. And you know, it's like let's instrument the whole thing and so, you know, you can get kind of a map. And as my, as I could looked at it over the course of many years, I could see as my children got older, different parts of the house were used more and less and so on. But in any case, I'm not sure that that's particularly useful. But I regularly see the email from that and I can see that, you know, there are parts of the report that are missing. And then it's like, oh, that thing isn't working anymore or that thing has some alarm state that it's continuously in and you know, one should fix that. And so it's useful to have that feedback every day because these systems do fail. I mean, with any one of these kind of automated sort of information gathering systems will fail. And if you don't notice that it's failed, you might end up losing lots of data or it might be a big mess to recover it and so on. So a few thoughts about that. I mean, I have to say having the sort of enhanced memory of being able to pull up kind of things by keyword is tremendously valuable to me. And it's just amazing how, you know, how often. Probably, probably on average, once a day, but we peak to particular times. I'm searching for things and they are in my scanned archives, which means they're from pre1984, probably sometimes later, but you know, and it's stuff that's actually still useful to me for one reason or another. And I find that the sort of continuity of history that one gets and the kind of, you know, one lives one's life. But the question is what sort of came out of that? And being able to sort of look back to those things and kind of make use of that memory beyond one's own human memory, I found really, really valuable. Elsie is asking, speaking of the setup, how do you deal with pen and paper, notably for preliminary thinking that may be visual or diagrammatic. And how does that fit into my sort of digital and quantified setup? Yeah, I haven't solved that particularly well. I'm a little embarrassed by that. I use pieces of paper for things and I just, I have. Okay. Behind my desk. I can't show you right here, but because it's isn't I, the. I have, I have these drawers. And one of the little innovations from many, many years ago now is all these drawers, even when they're closed, they have like a mailbox slot at the top of the drawer. So the drawer doesn't. Doesn't the, the top of the, the, the sort of, the, the front of the drawer, so to speak, doesn't go up to where it goes into the cabinet, so to speak. So every one of these drawers, you can take a piece of paper and just sort of post it through the slot. And so I have these different drawers and they're all for different kinds of things. And whenever I kind of like write something on a piece of paper or whatever, or maybe there's some physical thing that came in the mail or whatever, I'll post it in the appropriate slot and after that drawer fills up, I'll go and it'll get put in some box, it'll get scanned, whatever else. So that's one of my important mechanisms for keeping stuff off my desk, so to speak, is, you know, and I know how to find things in the sort of buffer of the drawers behind my desk type thing. And when it comes to me sort of thinking of ideas, yes, I do write things on pieces of paper. I make incomprehensible sketches that will probably be quite useless to anybody other than me. I found that it's a useful aid to thinking about things. I have tried various times to make that sort of fully digital, and I haven't really succeeded even now, although I think if I was doing it more, I might put more effort and make it succeed. In fact, so much have I not succeeded that I have, you know, a document camera on my desk that I use for. Well, used for various purposes, but I have used that to just write on a piece of paper. And when I'm sharing it with other people in real time, I just have the document camera looking at the piece of paper that I'm writing on. So the other thing I use the document camera for is when we're doing software development and somebody's showing me something that's working on a phone, for example. Yes, I could in principle share the phone screen through zoom or something like that, but at least in the past, it's always been convenient to just get out the physical phone, stick it under the document camera, let people be able to see where my finger is pressing, and be able to do things that way. But I have, you know, I've used this thing called Remarkable, which is a kind of E ink type thing. And I've used iPads and so on as a way of having sort of pure electronic sketching of things. I think maybe I was sort of messed myself up because years and years ago I was really keen to have a, A, a tablet with a, a, with the stylus and so on. And I probably had that 25 years ago at least, maybe more. And the problem was it really didn't work very well and it just wasn't that high resolution. And the thing that really drove me crazy was that the thing mapped itself onto my whole screen. It wasn't like I've got one sort of sheet of paper that I'm drawing on. It was. The thing was just like a mouse dealing with my whole screen. And that wasn't terribly useful to me. So. So I kind of got burnt out from that technology. Nowadays, the, the technology I probably should use is either an iPad or E Ink system or something. And I probably should have an organized way to save those pictures and I don't. And it's a hole in my, in my whole kind of setup. As it happens, as a project I'm about to really get started on, which is going to involve drawing random diagrams. Actually they're Feynman diagrams for physics type things, which are just not something that is easy to do with. You know, I don't want to be dragging things around on the screen. It's much easier just to draw it. And so I may finally have to get my act together on having these kind of freeform sketches done in some other form, or I'm just using the document camera with a piece of paper. I mean, I have to say that one of the things that I've again not been managing, not managed to find to make sure I'll say a few more things about pieces of paper. So I maintain a to do list on piece of paper that I hand write. And I actually have found that very useful because I have a whole sort of code for myself about how I cross things out. When I've done things, I have a vigorous crossing out, which means it's really done. And I have this sort of crosshatch thing which means it's kind of passed off to somebody else. And it's probably done, but I don't really know. Kind of, you know, it might still come back, so to speak. But here's what I find. I have, you know, usually a pad of paper and it'll be the whole pad and it'll just be the top, top sheet will have the thing written on it. And you know, I'll go through over the course of a couple of weeks or something and I will have mostly gone through the to do list. I find it very satisfying to cross things off on the to do list. And then when it's almost all done, I will literally, in a very, very low tech way, copy over, handwritten the things that aren't yet done to another to do list. And I've just found this whole process kind of forces me in a way that when I have online to do lists in a notebook or whatever else, I just don't end up having the same connection to them as I do with this, this crazy antiquated, you know, handwritten to do list type thing. Now, you know, probably for the things where there's a huge list of things to do, it probably wouldn't work. I mean I, at any given time Maybe there are 15 things on the to do list. And I also find it useful to have things that are off in the corner in little boxes and, and things like this. And you know, I, anyway, I found that psychologically and practically useful. Another thing along the same lines is I always have when I'm out and about, I always have one folded piece of paper in my pocket and a pen. And I have tried making that fully electronic in all situations and it's never worked. And I find that in all kinds of different situations I'm just like, well, let me make a note of that. It's very kind of. It's not something where, oh, you're in some sort of semi social setting and you're getting out your phone and you're typing on your phone and you're texting as if type thing. And there's just so many situations where it's convenient just get out the piece of paper and write on it or draw some little picture or whatever else. And occasionally you're getting out a piece of paper to show somebody else something. I usually unfold the paper and use the inside of it to do that. But then what I find is when I've gone on some trip or something like this, I'll come back and my piece of paper that was in my pocket, I'll take it out. And as part of my sort of personal discipline of writing a trip report, I'll just go through what's on that piece of paper and I'll usually cross off the things on the piece of paper as I go through them and then they're kind of done. And I've taken that sort of material that I collected on this trip and I've, I'VE sort of put it in some form where it will be searchable and all that kind of thing. But it seems very low tech. But I have to say I've been trying to replace that for. Well, I've been doing that now for, oh, gosh, I think that might be even 50 years of the piece of paper in my pocket type strategy. And I would say it has worked rather well. And this whole process of you have a definite piece of paper, you came back, you are done with the trip, you're going to put everything from the trip. If there were other materials, you're going to put them in a plastic envelope. It's going to get put, you know, it's going to get archived, it's going to get scanned. Okay. The little piece of paper that was in your pocket before you put it away, you go through the items that were on it and you put them in a trip report. Let's see. Elsie is asking, how do you deal with memorabilia, both physical and digital? That's a reasonable question. People give me all kinds of weird and interesting things, and I put them in a particular drawer and it just goes in a particular place. I don't have a huge amount of that stuff. Some things that are more a sheet of paper or something, those will just go in the archive boxes and get scanned. Actually, as it happens, even actually today, I was considering the question of what photographs we have or don't have of the various physical objects people have given me over the years. And so I haven't fully solved that one. And really, for me, I probably should solve it because each one of those things, I probably remember where I got that thing and nobody else would ever know. And so it's probably a thing where it's useful for me. Just go through once and for all. Here's a photograph of this, et cetera. I'll tell you a thing actually from today, just to give you a sense. I happen to be working with a person who helps me organize stuff today. In fact, I have to go do that in a few minutes. I have a library with maybe 10,000 books, and I've kept pretty good records of what books I have, but I've kept them in a database. And this database is totally antiquated at this point. It's a total pain to deal with. And I realized, just like yesterday or something, thing which I'm kind of embarrassed for not having realized earlier, which is in my metasearcher, I don't have it. Search my library database, which is completely crazy, I have it. Search you know, I have, for example, papers that I photocopied years ago are in, are in file cabinets. And we scanned a long time ago the front page of every such paper. So I have. So that allows me to do searches against those, because those were OCR'd. But of the books that I have, they're in this database, but I don't have that immediately in the metasearcher, so that I can just type in. If I type in somebody's name or something, I'll pull, pull up all the emails I've exchanged with them. But if I have five of their books, it wouldn't pull it up. So we're about to fix that. But then I realized I have a bunch of other books that have never been put in the database. And I realized that in modern times, and this just kind of silly for not realizing this earlier. In modern times, you can just take a photograph of the shelf and just OCR all the titles off all the spines. And it's just like storing kind of a scan of a. Of a document. And what's more than that is once you have a picture of the shelf, it tells you immediately sort of where the book is on the shelf. I mean, I had an incredibly elaborate scheme 23 years ago involving measuring the colors of spines of books and doing simulations of what's in a shelf. All that stuff is totally silly now, and that never really got executed properly. There's a funny story to tell about that. Maybe I'll tell that story. This is. This is a organization gone crazy. It's a story my wife tends to tell about me on occasion. We were moving, oh, what was it, 23 years ago? 22. 23 years ago now. And I had thousands of books. And I thought, I'm going to invent this very clever scheme for knowing where all my books are. And I had these categories, and I thought, wouldn't it be cool if I could make these categories be browsable by date so, you know, put the books in the order they were published? Okay, so not alphabetical by author, but, you know, sequential by date. Now the problem with doing it sequential by date is that the date of a book is not visible on the outside of the book. The author name is. So if you're alphabetizing by author, there's a good chance you can just look at the outside of the book and look at the spines of the books and alphabetize them. But if you're doing it so it's more interestingly browsable based on date, you can't do that. So how do you know where to put a book back in a shelf? Okay, I had this bright idea. We knew the dimensions of the book and we could measure in those days with the colorimeter, the color of the spine, get the size of the book, the color of the spine and put that all into what's now Wolfram language, their Mathematica and have it be. Have a list of books and have basically a simulated image of the shelf. And so you want to know where to put a book away. You just look at the, you know, you type an ISBN, the ISBN number or something into, into something and it would show you in the simulated picture would show you where to put the book away. Okay, Overly elaborate, so elaborate that it sort of toppled over, but it toppled over in the worst possible way, which was we're moving one place to another, thousands of books. So very elaborate scheme for putting books in boxes and keeping them in order and so on and so on and so on. And of course, the moment when the things were actually being moved and packed up and so on, somebody in I don't know exactly who or how was like, these boxes have tons of empty space. We can pack a lot more books in these boxes. Let's pack all the extra books in the boxes. Not knowing that the reason that they were done the way they were done was so that they would all maintain their order. And so they arrive at the other end and I don't know how many it was 6,000 books or something at the time, completely scrambled. And it was kind of interesting to see. You know, we ended up with big piles of books in the main sort of library room that we have. And it took a week to resort those things after that moment. And it was one of these cases of over elaborate schemes that ended up sort of toppling over of their own weight, so to speak. Reminded me of the big piles of books we ended up with. And it's always a thing when you invent these organizational schemes. I've always found there are things that I invent and there are ones that are rugged, robust, you're going to keep on using them, you're going to keep on doing them. And there are ones where either it requires too much human effort or the whole thing is too fragile and it just isn't going to work. And even though it sounds like a good idea at the time, it's actually a bad idea in the end. I mean, it's like when you file things away and you have this very clever idea in your head of I'm going to get these categories and I'm going to have this very abstract category that's I don't know, things about kind of, I don't know, sort of future machine learning in the direction of mathematics, let's say I just made that up and I have something in mind about them. Mathematics and machine learning, what it be or something. And then I start putting papers in that section. But then it turns out that a few years go by and I have no idea how I would have categorized. I remember something, but I have no idea what category it would be in because those categories are very abstract and I don't, I don't think in the same categories anymore. The only way I found that works for that is I keep folders of projects that I am planning to do, maybe 50 of them. And things where I anchor the thing by the project that I think I'm going to do with it that works reasonably well. And I probably need to go and Weasel was commenting, I saw kids on an iPad with a pencil doing math homework digitally and it works great. Yes, it does work great. I mean my. I have four children, I believe two of them use those things. Now one of them is a mathematician, so that's kind of. A. One of them is a college student so that maybe that's. Those are the two who use sort of the, the tablet thing a lot. And it does seem to work well for those in those particular settings. And yes, I think it's really honestly again a thing about organizing oneself is there's an investment to make in getting used to some particular kind of system. And the question is at some point it's worth just diving in, setting it all up, getting used to it and then using it. And I just haven't had quite enough push to go fully electronic for hand drawn kinds of things. But I'm hoping to do that in that case. But again, I would say that there are things like the example of the bookshelf plan that was just way too fragile and was just going to sort of crash and burn. And there are things where, you know, there are, there are sort of systems that I have where maybe I'll try it for a few days and I realize I'm not really going to do this properly and so I give up on it. Whereas there are other systems where I sort of invented it, you know, 30 years ago and I'm still doing it every day and it works just fine because it's sort of robust enough to keep working. All right, I better go. And as a matter of fact, just for once I get to do some personal organizing stuff which has been somewhat long overdue, so I get to actually live out some of the things I'm talking about here. Anyway, thanks for joining me and look forward to talking to you another time. Bye for now.