Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (September 6, 2023)

Sam foreign, Welcome to another episode of Q and A about business, innovation and managing life. I see a bunch of questions that have accumulated here, and let me try and address some of them. So I see one here from Christian asking, is writing the same as thinking? That's an old philosophical question of whether kind of language and thought how closely related they are. Maybe this is not the live stream to talk about that in great detail, but I think as a practical matter, if you can't, you know, there's a question. If you can't express it in words, can it still be a meaningful, coherent thought? And clearly we have all kinds of, you know, neuron firings in our brains that happen that we don't manage to kind of collect into things which we can express as words. Take music, take emotional responses, take dreams. There are all kinds of cases where there are things that happen in brains that aren't kind of organizable into things like words. I happen to think, in the case of physics, and this gets now deep into some other rabbit hole. When we think about the structure of space and we think about it in terms of these kind of atoms of space and so on, and it's kind of all sorts of activity and bubbling around in space. Sometimes that bubbling around is sort of organized so that we can think of it as a particle, like an electron that moves unchanged from here to there in space. I kind of think that's a little bit like words. And we have thoughts and they're bubbling around, and they're all kinds of neuron firings and so on. And sometimes we can package that thought up as this kind of thing, like a concept which we can represent with a word that we can, for example, transmit it to another brain and communicate that way. It's sort of interesting to know whether we can make communication. I mean, when the dog wags its tail, it's communicating something about emotional state. And it's not using a word, it's using some other externalization of that emotional state. But it's kind of turned all those neuron firings that represent the emotional state of the dog into this one thing about wag faster, wag slower, or whatever it is now, okay, practically, you know, is it the case that one thinks a lot about things without imagining them in words? I don't, you know, for me, I guess that the waypoints for me are always words and. Or maybe they're little pictures. You know, I'll sometimes draw little diagrams myself. And the diagrams are surprisingly meaningless, but they provide sort of a waypoint for me. In concretizing my thoughts. Now, for me also computational language, wolm language is kind of a great concretization, intermediate concretization of thoughts that has the feature that I'm not on my own doing that, my computer can then be alongside me and help me figure out what the consequences of those thoughts are. When it's a question of, well, I'm just writing it as a piece of English, then it's just like it's written, okay, I can read it back, other people can read it, but there's nothing that immediately happens. There's no button I press where it immediately turns into something. Maybe with LLMs we can go a little bit further along those lines, but with computational language, we press shift, enter and kaboom. It starts evaluating and doing things and we can see a consequence. So for me, that's a very good way of concretizing thoughts. If you say to me, just think about that. And I suppose it's interesting. It's interesting to see to what extent one has sort of self awareness of what's going on. It's like somebody will say, think about it. And I don't really know what's happening until the point where I can externalize it as words. There clearly is something happening because it might take a few seconds or whatever to come up with the next thing to say, but I don't have really an awareness of what's going on inside until I can externalize it as words and it becomes kind of a transportable thought. So for me, it's super useful to. I mean, again, I'm a person who's rather bad at just sort of, you know, I'm walking around and all I'm doing is just thinking to myself. I don't happen to be particularly good at that. For me, it's. It only really. The thinking only really works well if I can get it into concrete form. Either I'm talking to somebody else or I'm. Or I, I could imagine, I haven't done that much recently. You know, I'm talking to some recorder that. But I have to be somehow externalizing my thoughts for me to be able to sort of build them up. I'm not sure that that's true with everybody. I think some people can really think to themselves a lot. And then, you know, one can argue whether they are using words to replay things to themselves. My guess is that they are, but I don't think one can know that for sure. Let's see, Somebody says, after reviewing your Wikipedia page, you know, I Never look at my Wikipedia page. I kind of count on folks like you to update it and make it say sensible things, because I kind of have. It's like, oh, you're not supposed to edit your own Wikipedia page. Of course, everybody does, except I don't. So I leave it up to you guys to do things like, I have no idea whether the live streams that I do and have been doing thousands of hours, I have no idea whether those are listed on my Wikipedia page. They should be. Somebody should put them there if they're not already there. But anyway, with that preamble, DCI is asking, after reviewing my Wikipedia page, which I have not done, so I don't know what's on it says, I noticed you left undergraduate postgraduate study before graduation for whichever reason. My question pertains to how you found the application process and background study for being accepted into a PhD program. If you can give some background into how much studying you had completed by that point and how you demonstrated your ability to be accepted, the person says they'd be grateful. I was a weird case because I started doing science research when I was really young. And by the time I was like 15 years old, I started publishing papers in academic journals and things like that, and I sort of started working at some labs and so on. And by the time I was in college, I went. Left high school when I was 16 and went to college in England. At the time, there was sort of a loophole that you didn't have to sort of do the standardized government exams and so on. If you got a, quote, scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge scholarship, didn't have any financial consequence, really, because the government paid for everybody to go to college in those days in England. But it had, you know, you did these various exams, and if you did well, it's like, okay, you have a scholarship and then you kind of get around the sort of standard government process, so to speak, you know, in Oxford and Cambridge. I don't know if it's still true. The, you know, it's just they had their own exams. You. You did thing. And they had a nice exam. The one was my favorite, actually, was the thing they called the general paper, which was basically a bunch of essay questions. And I. Somewhere I have a copy of the one that I did. Not the answers I gave, but the questions. But it was a good. I think I probably did pretty well on that, but it was. I think one of the questions, I was just reminded of this recently was, you know, for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. You know, discuss the extent to which small changes can have large effects, which. I think I answered that question and I probably. I don't know what I said in the answer, but. But I expect it was somewhat. It was something which somebody like me at least, can engage on and really make use of sort of knowledge and things that one has from lots of different areas. So I thought it was a pretty good form of assessment, so to speak, depending on what you, you know, this is always the challenge for something like, I don't know, college admissions or something of this kind. You know, what are you assessing for? What are you trying to achieve? You know, when you hire people at a company, the objective is, at least when it's rational, so to speak, the objective is quite straightforward. Get people who are going to be productive for what the company is doing. I say when it's rational. Because you can have a situation, particularly in large companies, where sort of the hiring is sort of largely internal, political, so to speak. And it's like, well, will hiring this person make me look good? As opposed to, well, hiring this person make the company more productive? I mean, it's something you see in hiring quite often. I used to always call them mediocrity spirals, which is you get a situation where people never want to hire people who are better at what they're doing than they are. And so you end up with a spiral where people always hire people who are worse at doing what they are than they were, and it all spirals down. And then occasionally you'll get people where they're not that great, but they're really good at hiring people who are. Are better than they are. And that's always something which really helps organizations and so on. But any case, when it comes to things like, you know, college admissions, I think the default thing that's happened, which is not obviously silly, is to say you're a college. You are processing some large number of applications every year. Just get kids who look who seem like the kids we already have, who. Who have the same kind of general profile as the kids we already have. We don't know why we have those particular kinds of K, but they're the ones who our college culture has been developed around. Let's get more of those. And, you know, I don't think that's completely irrational. I think it may be it means that when you're sort of shopping for colleges, it's like, well, where am I going to fit in, so to speak? You know, it's like, well, I may be fantastic, I can do fantastically but guess what, you're very different in terms of your interests or your approach or whatever to students already there. And it's like, well, you know, somebody's going to say, well, that doesn't sort of fit in. I suppose the same is true to some extent in companies. I mean, it's like, you know, there are companies like ours where sort of individual thinking, independent thinking is highly valuable and highly valued. And there are other companies where independent thinking is shocking and you really just want people to all go in one direction and where, you know, different kinds of people are the people to find. But I think when it comes to. And you asked about my own case of applying to like, graduate school and so on, by the time I applied to graduate school, I published a whole bunch of papers. I was pretty known in the international physics community. It was not a replicable. I mean, there may be other people who are in that same situation, but they are few and far between. And it's sort of not immediately replicable thing. But I would say that slightly more replicable in general is if, you know, if you're interested in graduate school, having done research and published papers and so on is a good demonstration that, yes, you will be able to do the things that are involved in graduate school. Now, you know, graduate school is a complicated story. It depends a lot on the field, but there's a lot of complicated dynamics about. You know, maybe there's an advisor who has a grant and the grant is for some specific thing. This happens particularly in things like life sciences. You'll end up with a situation where the graduate student is basically the lab tech who is working on this thing and this grant under this sort of thing. And it's very much a subsidiary role to the advisor, so to speak. Other fields, as you get into the more theoretical fields and so on, maybe also the more humanities type fields. Sometimes you'll get a situation where, you know, the student is just going to do some independent project and the advisor is, is just there to make suggestions and to think, oh, this is a cool project. I'm happy to see this project be done, so to speak, rather than the student as the assistant to the advisor, so to speak. And I think one can. There are different dynamics, particularly to do with the funding of things that drive one in one direction or another. And when it's a question of applying for graduate school, you have to know what you're applying for in that sense of are you applying to be this person's assistant? In which case going and saying, I'm fantastic at doing this field that you're doing, but I want to do it a completely different way than you're doing it. That's not going to fly. On the other hand, if it's something where you can say, where you say, look, I'm going to be able to independently do research and we're going to have fun talking about it, then for some advisors, that's a win. Now, it's also a complicated thing. And I will say that if you look at people who advise PhD, theses, things like that, there's a certain sort of career arc and different personality types of people who do it and don't do it and so on. And you know, there'll be some people who are really good advisors. You can often tell that by just looking. Oh, they've had lots of students before and the students have done well. That's a good sign. And there are people who may be great at research, but they're pretty crummy advisors because either they just aren't that interested in interacting with a student or they have very fixed views and they really aren't ever going to listen to anything else. And there isn't really a. And they maybe don't communicate what they know very, very well. Also, there are situations where sort of, if you're a good student, you're going to get into competition with your advisor quite quickly. For some advisors, it's really a question of the motivation structure of the advisor. If. I mean, this happened to me once in my early life, you know, advisor who was very ambitious and where it was not actually, not really quite an advisor, but, but you know, a situation where somebody was very ambitious, but probably in the big picture, you know, I was going to run the race faster than they were and, and that caused a lot of kind of turmoil that actually at the time I was, I was quite young, so it wasn't. I didn't quite recognize this in real time, but after the fact, it's pretty obvious. But it's a case where there are people where they say, hey, there's a person who's come in and they're really doing very well and they're very impressive at doing this stuff. Isn't it cool that they're here and that you're talking to them and there are other people who are like, oh my gosh, this person's going to outrun me. Help disaster type thing. I think it also helps often when an advisor if you think you're in that situation of you're going to be able to outrun your Advisor type thing. I think that it depends a lot on the personality of the advisor. Some people are like, great, I'm around a person who seems smarter than I do. I like that. And some people are like, that's a disaster. I have to say it reminds me when I was young and things like this happened to me where know, I was a bright young lad type thing and people said to me, people I knew who were sort of around my age said, you know, one day when you're old this is going to happen to you that, you know, the bright young person is going to come along and you're going to feel sort of, oh, it's, you know, all washed up type thing. I have to say that maybe it's just my personality. I really enjoy sort of bright people, young or not. And I suppose perhaps it is a consequence of having had quite a portfolio of different things that I've done in my life that I can run into people where I say, yeah, that person's really good at this particular thing, maybe they're better than I am at that particular thing. But I don't feel like, oh, I could just close up shop, give up, because that person is definitively better than me at everything I do. And that's partly a consequence of the fact that I've done lots of different things, that one doesn't get to feel that way. And you know, and that's a good thing in terms of being able to provide better input to the bright folk who might be brighter than you are at some particular thing and so on. So anyway, I think my sort of bottom line statement about things like graduate school is if you've done research, that's a great way to show that you can do research in graduate school. But again, you have to be careful with what it is that's being looked for and whether it really is that independence or whether it's the ability to be a good assistant or whatever else. A few thoughts there. Let's see. LC comments on a piece that I just posted yesterday about a chap called Doug Lennat and his lifelong quest to build this system called Psych, which was a particular approach to kind of AI, but sort of its original idea was kind of use logic. Okay. Aristotle had this notion of things that we say can be represented in terms of logic expressions. Leibniz sort of followed up on that. Doug Lanat followed up again and said, let's see if we can turn sort of all common sense knowledge into statements of logic. He worked that for 40 years. It didn't Work out that well, frustratingly, you know, I would interact with him and it would be like, can we use this? Like, well, no, not quite, you know, one day, you know, yes. And then it's like, oh, if I give you this API, you're going to think it's the whole thing is bogus and so on. It's like, no, I just want to see what it can do. I don't want to see what it can't do, so to speak. But anyway, the question here is how should one feel about a kind of a life mission like that of I want to turn all knowledge into logic, for example, pursuing that throughout one's life. I think. It's particularly good when it works that. Let's say that whether it works or not, I think is. I don't think in my own life I've had quite a lot of very long term missions, so to speak, and they've always had little mid course corrections. I don't think that on day one setting it's like I'm going to do this precisely and saying it's going to come out. I'm going to be able to plan exactly what's going to happen. If I insisted on that plan, it's, I'm, I'm sure that it would have, you know, it would have come out badly. It's the same thing when you have a company and you say we want to make a plan for the next year, what we're going to do. And you say it's going to be this very rigid plan. Everybody's got to follow exactly this plan. Unless you're doing things that are pretty mundane and have been done many times before, it's really unrealistic to make that plan because you're kind of asking, sort of run the computation of what are we going to do and run it in advance and know how it's going to come out. And then it's kind of like almost like, well, why are we bothering to do it? Because you know how it's going to come out. I mean if it's a question of we're doing this very specific thing, you know, we're building this brick wall and we're building it higher and higher and putting more bricks on it and there's not going to be any problem when we get it to a certain height. There's going to be no weird mechanics problem or anything like that. Just going to put more and more bricks on here. Then, you know, then likely you can make a plan. But whenever there's sort of real Innovation involved very hard to make a plan. And I think when you kind of make this sort of life plan, I'm going to go in this direction and it's an innovative direction. If you are too rigid about your plan or are forced to be rigid by the fact that, oh, I got funding for this particular thing and it can only be according to this plan, it's, you know, that can end badly. So long as you're sort of able to make those mid course corrections and so long as your own sort of ego and pride doesn't say, oh, I made this plan, this is what I'm doing, I will make no corrections. It's a good thing. I think the other thing that can happen is people can have these kind of large scale visions. I've seen this too often. They have these large scale visions. The visions are really not bad, but there are little blocks that obstructions and these obstructions loom too big for them. So they give up on the vision. And it's a shame because I think that maintaining some version of the vision is worth doing usually, I mean, sometimes you might say, look, that vision was just a bad idea. Hasn't really happened to me much. Can I think of an example? I don't think it's really. Well, okay, it happened to me once. I was mid-1980s, I had this vision idea start this research center concentrating on this kind of science that I developed around complexity and complex systems and so on. Like went to all kinds of trouble, set this thing up, you know, went, you know, all those kinds of things and then realized, look, I didn't really understand what was involved in running this, this is not a very good idea and kind of cut it off at that point, but at least my involvement in it. But the. Yeah. So I think this question now, you know, there are people who have some particular idea and they're pursuing that idea and nobody else believes in it. You know, you have to kind of have a certain situation in the world to be able to execute on that. And for example, I've certainly worked on plenty of things in my life where probably nobody else in the world believed in them when I started working on them. But you know, I've done those things when I had kind of a, a cocoon or something that was able to support me independent of the fact that I was doing things that nobody else believed in. You know, I had was a, you know, fancy professor or whatever I was, had a company that was making a living for itself even without the, you know, the crazy stuff that I was doing and could afford the crazy stuff I was doing. And I think that if you go out sort of in a situation where you really don't have the resources, you don't have sort of the cocoon and you're going out and doing your sort of vision thing, that can be a bit. That can be challenging. You know, I think many kinds of interesting visions can be done perfectly well as a hobby. I have certainly done that many times in my life. Usually the hobbies for me turn into sort of real things after not too long. But, you know, I think it's a question of, of one's own kind of commitment and tenacity. If one says, I really want to study this, this weird thing about something about mathematics or something, and I don't have a job doing that. But, you know, it's like to take the time you were otherwise going to watch television and do math instead, and then turns out you'll get somewhere. And I think that's a very reasonable thing to do. And I think there are plenty of people who do that for a long time. And it's very satisfying and fulfilling. And then sometimes there's kind of like a waypoint you get to where you say, now I'm going to present it to the world. Sometimes the world doesn't appreciate it. I've certainly been there plenty of times. And if your main motivation for doing it is, I'm going to do it because I want the world to appreciate it, you'll probably be unhappy. If your main motivation for doing it was because, like, I want to understand it myself, then if the world doesn't understand it, doesn't appreciate it, well, it's a pity for the world. But you still got to understand it yourself and you still feel happy about it. That's, that's my point of view about that. Let's see, Synthonic says they're finishing their PhD. There's so many industries and groups and so on, many more than one knows they know for sure. How can I find the one in the ocean? Well, you know, if you've done a PhD, hopefully you've learned something about doing research. My basic response would be, do research on that ocean. It's, you know, it depends on the field, just how big the, the ocean is. But, you know, maybe there are a hundred, maybe there are a thousand groups that are relevant. It's like, do research. You know, obviously some of them will be running job ads and things like this. Some of them, you know, you can have certain criteria and you start figuring out what satisfies these criteria. The more you know about these groups, the better off you will be in applying there and knowing that you're a fit or not a fit or whatever else and getting some sense of whether if you go there you're going to be bored in a week or is that going to be a great place. So I think that that's, that's my main comment is kind of, you know, do research. You know, I remember I, yeah, I'm reminded of how shocking that that statement seemed to be. I was giving a talk to a number of years ago now to a large group of humanities PhDs, people who are just about to get humanities PhDs. And they were like, well, what are we going to do? What jobs are there? And I was like, well there are lots and you can start listing off industries and things and say, well, how can we figure out which one is fit? And I was like, look, you just spent how many years learning to do research in particular in that case in the humanities and kind of, and it's like, do research, it will be a win. Actually, I really should have some follow up and find out whether people followed that advice. Eli was asking a very practical question. I noticed that on Friday, Jonathan Gorard and I did a live stream about science together. Was it planned or did we just randomly decide to do it? Well, unfortunately, the nature of my life is things end up getting planned and I have definite slots of time. So that was a definite slot of time that the question of what topic we were going to explore. There's a whole collection of topics we'd like to explore and that was just the one that bubbled to the top. And we had a good time and I think we made quite a bit of progress. And you know, the terrible thing is we can spend two hours on a live stream and generate, you know, two months of work to do a sort of background homework. And that's, well, it's, it's, it's, it's invigorating in many ways. Let's see, let me go back to some of these other questions here. Let's see. M. Rudo asks, how do you determine whether a decision should be decided short term or long term? Not quite sure what that means, but sometimes you can delay making a decision for a while. And I tend to say that there are certain kinds of things that I describe as self answering questions. Like somebody says I'm going to do great working on this project, doing this thing, you should kind of anoint me as the king of the project whatever, whatever and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it's like, well, just start doing it. It's going to be a self answering question. You're either going to get into it, it's going to be great, or it's going to be horrible and it's a big flop. It's not going to work. It's a self answering question. You could go at the beginning and say, hey, we're going to figure this out, but it's not worth it. And there are other times when it's like, okay, I could make some elaborate plan for some trip I'm going to do or whatever else, but it's the wrong thing to plan it a long time in advance because I'm going to just know more about what's going on closer to the time. It's not worth making a sort of really long term plan. Long term plans are hard. It's hard to predict what's going to happen. It's kind of the story of my computational irreducibility phenomenon. It's kind of like you just don't know what's going to come up. But I think as one gets more experienced, it becomes easier to make somewhat longer term plans. But it's, you know, I mean, people will say, you know, when it comes to running businesses and things, they'll say, why did you do that? You should have known this or that was going to happen. Maybe, maybe not. It's hard to know often. You know, certainly things I've done in business and in other areas where it seemed like a good idea at the time, but I just didn't realize something that was going to come later. And sometimes it's a good thing if you can kind of avoid making that decision because you're not, you know, if you make that decision, you're polarizing yourself into one outcome or another and you may have picked the wrong outcome. And so if you can kind of dilly dally for a while, you know, don't, don't make the decision to, you know, do that particular deal, hire that particular person, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, just kind of string it along for a while. Because it might become a self answering question or because other things externally might clarify it. Let's see. Paolo asks, how do you allocate your time across strategy, product development, operations? How did I do that in the early stages of orphan research? How has that evolved as the company has grown? So there are different sizes of company. So if you're like a 10 person operation, you, the CEO know every single person, and you're going to interact with every single person. By the time the company is 50 people or more, there's going to be some structure in there. If there isn't some structure, the thing's not going to work. By the time it's 500 people, there are going to be people who work at the company you've never met, and you might not even by the time you're heading for a thousand people, there'll be people whose names you don't know. And personally, I'm the kind of CEO who likes to know the names of everybody and likes to have some idea what everybody's doing. But I'm not sure that's a necessary thing. And as a company scales up, that's just not a realistic thing to have happen. I would say that in the early stages of our company, the sort of direct personal management of you should do this, or the direct personal mentoring of people doing things was a larger percentage of my time than it is today. By the time you have a big management structure and you have kind of people managing people, and people have become quite experienced and quite accustomed to the company culture, there's a lot less need for the CEO to be directly in there, kind of mentoring people and so on. In terms of straight operations, I've not really been a serious operations person, and I've had been fortunate enough to have people running operations. You know, whether that's transaction processing systems or whether that's facilities management or whether that's technical infrastructure, those kinds of things. You know, I've been, I've been fortunate enough to have people running those things who've done a good job. And, you know, it's only very occasionally I have to dive in and, and see what's happening there. So I haven't really spent much of my time. You know, it's kind of funny. I remember a person who worked at the company many, many, many years, sort of, and I ended up doing as, as a director of operations, actually. And, you know, I, I rarely ended up interacting with her. And my attitude was, and I, I said this, you know, if I don't have to hear about things, I'm a happy person because it means everything's running smoothly. And I don't, you know, I'm, I'm. I can spend my efforts somewhere else now when, if things aren't running smoothly, then you have to go in and try and fix it. But for me, that happened to be those, those kinds of areas, which in a sense are areas where our company is Very much like every other company, it doesn't require sort of custom thinking about those kinds of things. I mean, I suppose me, for me personally, I'm a kind of custom thinking kind of guy. And you know, it's when, when you have to figure it out from scratch in an original way. That's where I really feel good about spending my time and so on, and feel I need to spend my time in terms of. I, I spent lots of time doing product development, product strategy. I, I haven't, I haven't written code for. I've written lots of code, but I write code every day, but I haven't written production code that goes into the sort of core of our system for a long, long time. I did that at the very beginning. I spent probably much of my time doing that at the very beginning. At the very beginning I was writing a lot of actual internal code and I was writing documentation. I wrote sort of all of our documentation. And I did that partly as a way to define our products. As I did that probably for the first 10 years or more, writing sort of all the documentation, maybe 15 years. And then eventually it just got too big to handle and it was big limiting factor on what we could do at the company and other people started writing it and I started kind of reading it and approving it type thing. And so in terms of product strategy and product kind of functionality design and so on, I have sort of gradually gotten to the point where there are lots of people who are really good at doing those kinds of things. And I'm like more or less just an editor and an overall direction setter rather than the person who's in there writing all the words, figuring out all the details. Now, you know, that took a long time to develop. It took a long time to kind of bring people up to the point where they could do that, get it to the point where they're going to figure things out that are, I hope, sort of as good as what I would figure out and where I was kind of in this state of. Well, I look at it and say, yeah, that's the right thing. I'm just like an editor, so to speak. I mean, we do a lot of design reviews that we live stream and so, you know, I was just doing one right before this, this live stream about a particular piece of functionality in Wolfram language. And it's, it's like, yeah, the, the, the, the team that was working on this had got it to a very good point. They got it to a point where one could really address there were some issues, but they had exposed enough of what had to be thought about that one could just hit those issues which were a little bit non trivial. And I could use what expertise I have to try and move those in the right direction. I hope so. Now, in terms of sort of the. There are other kinds of functions like sales, like marketing, like, you know, presenting products and things. I made a decision at the very beginning of our company that I was not going to get involved in individual sales situations. And that's in a sense it's a crazy decision for a company like ours because I probably pretty good at selling our stuff because I understand it pretty well and so on. But I made the decision if that's what I was doing. I was going to spend all my time doing it. I just didn't want to do it. It wasn't a calculation I wanted to do. It wasn't worth it to me to do that even though it might make our more successful and bigger. And so I haven't done it and I kind of restrict myself. And even now when somebody says, oh, could you do this presentation and just tell us sort of basically how Wolfram language works? It's like, I really don't want to do that. I really, you know, there are plenty of other people to do it. It's not a great use of my time. It's honestly, I've been saying the same thing for more than three decades, more or less. It's gradually evolved over time. In fact, one of the things that's always sort of a problem for that I tend to over evolve it because I just can't stand saying the same thing again and again and again. And sometimes it really is just a question of just repeat the same thing. Just repeat the same thing. People don't understand it yet. You've just got to repeat it. And you know, I think there might come a time in my life where I feel like I've just had to say the same thing for 50 years. And it's kind of like that's a bit, it's a bit disappointing that that's what one's doing. And so for me, I tend to sort of perhaps over evolve and want to say different things and not just repeat things I should otherwise be saying. But that, that's so, you know, as, as the company evolves, more is delegatable. It's more a question of using one's experience and expertise to kind of steer the ship in the right direction rather than being in the engine room kind of, you know, putting coal into the boilers or whatever, it's kind of, it makes sense to do that because, you know, the more experience one has, the more one has a chance to kind of steer the whole ship in the right direction, so to speak. And that's something that requires and makes use of experience and such like. And that's, that's been kind of more the direction that, that I've been going in. Although I have to say I'm a pretty hands on CEO and you know, I, I do dive into lots of details and, and another very big thing about the CEOing business is knowing when it's a detail that's important and knowing when it's a detail that isn't important. And you know, one tries to get that right. If one dives into every detail, including the ones that aren't important, it's like one's, one's drowning in all the details. One never even gets to see the big strategic issues. And on the other hand, if you miss a bunch of details, well, some of those details can kind of blow up in your face and cause a lot of trouble. And you know, that happens with some frequency because just there are a lot of details and you'll sometimes make the wrong judgment call about that was a detail that didn't matter. You'll think, and actually it turns out that for whatever reason, it does end up mattering later on. It's the same thing with product design that there are things where you say, well, it could do that this way, it could do it that way, whatever, we'll, we'll just pick one and then it turns out later, well, that was really a big deal and thank goodness you picked the right one or whatever. Let's see, there's a question here from Anastasia. If you could create and design a school, how would you structure the curriculum? Would it be different for elementary, middle and high schools or college? You know, my oldest son is interested in education and is interested in creating schools and so on. And he'd probably have a much more informed and sensible answer to that question than I do. But I will say a few things. I mean, I, I do, do I find education interesting? It's a funny thing. It's changed in my life. When I was younger, even when I was a professor type, I really wasn't interested in education, I'm sorry to say. And as I got older, I've just found it more and more interesting. And doing things like these live streams I find lots of fun and fulfilling for me at least. And that's sort of an education type Thing we do these summer schools and high school summer research programs for high school students. And I do every week I do some sessions for. For kids that I find interesting. I always learn a lot from them, and I just find them an interesting thing to do. So I have a small amount of experience with education, but I'm not sure that I have a global picture. I would say one of the things that I've talked about a bunch before is teach computational thinking. The way to do that is use the computational language which we've built. I could sugarcoat that, so to speak. And I could say, well, you should just use something where you can do computational thinking and you can kind of get to talking about things in the world and things one cares about and so on in computational terms. But, you know, if I'm calling a spade a spade, there is only one game in town to do that, and that's the thing I just spent 40 years building, namely Wolfram language and the way that it allows one to kind of talk about things in the world, whether they're images or movies or. Or music acts or cities or whatever, in computational terms, and allows one to sort of immediately engage with things that one might be interested in the world in computational form. And teaching computational thinking, teaching how to think about things in this kind of formalized way that is computational is a tremendously valuable thing. It's going to be sort of the determining thing in people's success in lots and lots of careers. It's sort of interesting to me because it is strangely a kind of. It's something that in some ways is. Is more liberal arts than it is stem, because it's. It sort of rests on kind of how to. How to sort of think about lots of different things in the world, which is much more of a kind of liberal arts play than it is something that is kind of a very specific. Let's build these technical tools. Let's understand the mechanics of how to do these particular technical things. I think also that one of the things about computational thinking is, well, there's thinking in that term, and it really does require actual thinking. You actually have to figure things out. It's kind of like philosophy in that respect. It's kind of like you can only get a very short distance by just thinking about philosophy, by just quoting, you know, will do it the same way it's been done before. That doesn't really get you very far in that kind of area. Whereas if you're doing something like, I don't know, math or something, you can say, well, I'm going to do this integral the same way everybody else has done it, and that way I win, so to speak. So, you know, I tend to think that in that sort of teaching, thinking is a really good idea. Teaching computational thinking is a heavily leveraged way of teaching thinking. Both the computational part kind of helps formalize how you think about thinking, so to speak. We were talking earlier about sort of thinking about things without words, sort of the computational thinking thing. Eventually people will say the idea of trying to think about things sort of without this computational language is like trying to think without words. It's the thing that concretizes what you're thinking about. So I think that's a part of it. But it's also just like the general idea of thinking about things. Thinking is different from kind of mechanically doing. It's different from. It's kind of like there are. There are lots of kinds of things in the world where there's sort of a formula for how you do it. There's like, well, if you want to know how to do this particular sort of. I don't know what, you know, if you want to know, I don't know how to do this. I regret that I never really learned, you know, want to know how to draw a picture of a such and such. There are sort of these tricks for. Oh, I'm reminded. I don't know why I reminded this one, but I haven't done this in a long, long time. Flying little planes, you know, if you want to turn the plane without the thing, you know, going down or going up, it's like, just fix your eye on the horizon and, you know, keep it in a particular place on the, you know, relative to the windshield, and just keep it there. That's sort of a trick that for succeeding in being able to do this thing where otherwise you'd be like, how am I going to do this? Can I sense whether the plane's going up or down or whatever else? And I think in. In an awful lot of areas, there's kind of almost these kind of trick methods, you know, if you're going to write sort of a. An eloquent sounding essay, there are sort of tricks for how you can put things into it to make it sound better and so on. And there's. There's an awful lot of, kind of how you can learn. You know, you go to MBA school and you learn these things that are kind of the. The. The sort of the standard method, in a sense, for saying, this is how we're going to run A company or something like this. And to me, those are thinking less, in some sense paths. And, you know, it's like learning. Learning skills that don't require you to think, you just require you to sort of reflexively act. Something is plenty important in lots of things one might do. But this thing that I think is a key point of general education is the learn to think point. And I think that the. It's one of the things, you know, how do you. How do you teach people to think? And what level of, sort of, you know, what level of thinking is realistically achievable at different ages and stages? I think one of my son's points is that if you teach things like philosophy to things like high school kids, it has the interesting feature that everybody has an opinion, everybody can have a valid opinion. It may be well thought out, it may not be well thought out, but if you give some ethical dilemma, people will have a reaction and they can kind of start working through it. If you're teaching something like math, some people will say, well, yes, I, you know, I can get the answer right. And somebody will, and some people won't. And then a teacher has to tell you that's the right answer or that's not the right answer. It's not kind of a. It's not kind of a thing where you can have a valid opinion, even if you're not the teacher, so to speak. One of the nice things about computation and computational thinking is that it's you and the computer in there. And in a sense, you say something and the computer is going to respond, and the computer's kind of going to give you a reality check on whether what you're doing made sense or not. You know, I think this is going to play out in an interesting way with LLM based education and tutoring and so on, of kind of watching the LLM interact with the student and so on. But, you know, in terms of what can be taught when, you know, I think it's always. I think kids certainly up through middle school stage are just full of questions. And it's sort of disappointing that often one has to say in education, well, we're not going to address that question because we're only doing this very specific thing. I think it's great if one can encourage kids to ask questions and learn how to answer. Particularly in the modern times of the web and all sorts of sort of computational tools and things. We built even that. It's like you got the wherewithal to answer these questions. It's like, learn how to answer them. You wonder about this or that. Well, let's try and figure out how to answer that question. And I think that's a thing where sort of not inhibiting that by saying, no, no, we're going to go through this very specific direction. Now having said that, I think it's also learning facts is really worthwhile. There's a certain tendency to say let's just airy fairy, learn thinking principles and so on. Let's not bother learning facts. Turns out thinking is always anchored on facts. And you know, the more facts about, the more different areas you can learn, the more successful you're going to be at thinking about different kinds of things. And I think that's a thing, you know, I don't know, I'm a little bit, you know, this sort of the rote learning of facts and so on. There's a point at which that becomes horrifying. But there's also a point at which it really is worth knowing some facts. You know, if you really have no idea about the date when anything happened, for example, in history, you're just sort of free floating. Whereas if you remember, you know, 1642, the year Galileo died, Newton was born, a convenient anchor year that I've tended to remember in history of science. It's, you know, that you start putting in these anchored facts that maybe you kind of almost wrote learned at some point. But they're useful to build things on if you just didn't know them and all you knew is some kind of mushy what happened a long time ago. It's much harder to build anything on top of that. I think also there are kind of meta things to learn, like just learning to do things precisely. Learning to do things well is a thing. Some people, they just naturally do it. Some people, it's worth kind of sort of, you know, saying, yeah, you know, being able to say, did you do that precisely? Did you do that in a nice clean exact way or not? Did you think it through properly or not? You know, these are things where it's useful to, to have the experience of doing things well. I think one of the things that goes horribly wrong in my opinion with a bunch of education is people are like, let's just run so fast that you'll never be able to do it perfectly. You know, even if you put an incredible amount of effort into it, you're always only going to get a 75% on the test type thing. I think that, I don't think that's a good thing. There are occupations where getting 75% is what you're going to do. You know, if you're a. I don't know, if you're a trader, you know, doing some kind of trading market trading kind of thing, and you get it right 75% of the time, you're a huge winner. And there are other cases where, you know, if you're doing, if you're a mathematician and you're trying to prove theorems and you get it right 75% of the time, you know, that's kind of not a win. If you're a surgeon, a pilot or whatever else, there are plenty of occupations where it's like you've actually got to get it right. And I think the thing that, you know, can happen in education is that sort of, there's a, there's a drive to, to partly as a matter of the sort of the assessment process make people run so fast they can't do it perfectly. That's a shame, in my opinion. And then people get used to the idea, oh, yeah, you know, that they're doing a job, you know, maybe they're working for our company or something. And it's like that you, you get the feeling that they say, well, look, I would have at least got a B in this class. And it's like, but this is no good. We can't ship this as a product. It just doesn't work, you know. Yeah, you've got, you know, good effort. It sort of almost got there, but it didn't actually make it. And that's a thing, that's sort of a bad meta learning from, from education. I think also there's the question in modern education of how busy should people be. And you know, I think in the more sort of the fancier, the more elite kind of schools you get to, the busier people kids tend to get. And I think that's not necessarily a good thing. Do you manage to stuff more kind of more knowledge education into that amount of time, more education about different kinds of things? Maybe. But if you filled up every moment of the day with programmed material, so to speak, it doesn't really allow people to develop, you know, their own sort of identity and thinking about things. And I think that's a big shame. You know, I was lucky. I went to sort of the fancy elite schools in England a long time ago when probably, you know, things were much looser, goosier, so to speak. And I had plenty of time to work on lots of things that I just wanted to work on, of physics or whatever else it was at the time, computers and so on. And you know, now maybe I, you know, I, I guess I did pretty well at sort of the schoolwork things I did. So. And you know, maybe I was able to compress that time more than other people were, I'm not sure. But maybe it was that I wasn't doing all of the kind of sporty things that people were doing because I wasn't into that. And so I had more time to do physics instead of sports type thing or whatever else it was. But in any case, I think that that's a sort of a misfeature that sometimes in terms of what one teaches at different stages in life, I think like teaching computational language, I think the 11 year olds and up can get it. I think it's somewhat challenging in the younger folk. Why? I don't have any idea. There are certainly theories from Piaget onwards of sort of these inexorable stages that people go through. I think we might learn a bunch about those stages from studying LLMs and things like this. You know, what was the baby LLM able to do versus what was the LLM that had sort of been educated up to this point and then educated from that point able to do? You know, it could be that there's sort of an inexorable set of layers of knowledge that you have to get and that that happens over the course of years in the case of young humans, so to speak. But I think there are things where it's sometimes a mistake and there's again a mistake that sometimes gets made in modern education is to kind of run faster than you, than you should and say, let's get the, you know, the nine year old to learn calculus because we can type thing. And often the way you end up doing that is too often it's while you learn the tricks of calculus so that you can perform as a sort of a calculus, you know, show animal, so to speak, but it never really engages properly and sometimes that, you know, really defeats itself when, when kids get shown things very early and then they really never, they never really engage, it's very joyless and then they're like, well, I'm not interested in that later on. Whereas if you waited a few years and they were exposed to it only later, when they really can engage properly with it, then they would be like, wow, this is really cool and interesting. You know, I think another feature of education, certainly I've talked about this before, at least with respect to myself, is when you're actually interested in what you're learning, you're going to learn it much better. Now that interest can come intrinsically just because I'm interested in that stuff, or it can come because the teacher is engaging and really can find ways to sort of bring the subject matter to life in ways that, that resonate with, with particular students and so on. And I think that is where sort of skill and teaching comes in now. I know when it comes to different things you could do at different ages, okay, so things like sort of explanations about science and the world and so on and sort of early thinking about things, you can do that with elementary school kids, no problem if you give certain kinds of explanations. I happen to have had this experience and it's an interesting one of what kind of science explanations can you give to the elementary school kids versus the high school kids versus the grown ups and so on. And you know, like, for example, trying to explain something about our physics project and the structure of space time. You know, you can kind of do that at different levels, but it sounds, the explanation sounds fairly different. It's a good exercise to try to do it. But I think the, and if you get the level wrong, then people just won't engage properly. I think in terms of, you know, one of the things that I've noticed, okay, among kids in education and so on is do the kids actually say anything? You know, you're, you're having, you're trying to talk about something and you kind of like, you know, what does it take to get kids to engage and actually say something? Ask questions, you know, offer opinions, those kinds of things. And I think in many situations it's a very forced thing about, like you're just going to call on somebody, say so and so what's the answer? And they'll either sit there silently for a minute and eventually say something or they'll answer more quickly. But you know, I've noticed that both. Some kids are more kind of able to engage and have those conversations and others are much quieter. And I don't think it's always a question of who's shy, who's not. I actually noticed one big correlation. There's a, a terrible correlation in a sense in, in groups of kids, the homeschool kids, they'll engage almost always. And you know, some of the other ones will too. But there's a, there's a, a high sort of, there's a great enhancement of engagement among homeschool kids. And you know, I think that's because they're used to actually having sort of conversations with adults and things like this. And whereas in other cases it's like, well, you're a kid in, in a class with 25 other kids, 20 other kids or whatever. And you know, it's better just to hide and, and you know, it's a very stylized interaction and you know, the teacher is sort of out in front or whatever and, and is, is not a person that you can really engage with. And I think that's, that's a shame. I think it's a better if there's more ability for kids to engage. And I guess that's a thing that one would like to be able to foster I think in these educational settings. And part of doing that is probably to be having discussions that are at the right level where the kids can actually have opinions and where, you know, I think in my own efforts and you know, I'm just an amateur at these kinds of things, but I've always found it, you know, kids always know stuff that I don't know, whether it's about the latest social media fads or whether it's about some other kind of popular culture thing or whatever else it is. And I think it's always very helpful to me at least. And I learn stuff by asking him a bunch of questions. And that way it's not just a one way kind of transmission of information. And that's the same with these things. Like if you're discussing, I don't know, ethics or something, some kid will raise some hypothetical that I guarantee one will never have thought of and it's then they're contributing something rather than just being a one way transmission of information. Anyway, a few thoughts along those lines. I think that my own feeling is there is great value in learning things broadly learning to think, learning as much how to formulate questions as how to answer a question you've been given. I think that this, I mean another feature is learning to explain yourself is very useful. It helps you crystallize your thoughts and it's also a useful skill in its own right. And you know, it's a funny thing because I see people who are really good at expository writing and they don't have particularly fancy educations and I see people who have very fancy educations who are pretty terrible at it. And it's, I don't completely know whether it's a, I, I think it's a teachable thing. I don't think it's something we're born with or not. You know, it's, it's not like, you know, there's some sort of physical attributes that we might be able, you know, jump higher or whatever else. And like, if. If you're, you know, that the. You can probably train yourself to some extent, but. But there are. There are going to be limitations, I think. You know, exposition is something which I think you can learn a certain amount about. It's perhaps an interesting topic of how do you learn to explain yourself? And even the very first level of that is, well, what would you say? I see people who've written something and it's like, this is totally incomprehensible. Just explain it to me. And they say, oh, well, yes, I can explain. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, well, that's a really good explanation. Just write it down. And for some reason, as they were writing, they were like, very kind of. I don't know, they were uptight. They were trying to structure it in some particular way, and the thing came out completely incomprehensible. But yet when they're at that moment trying to explain themselves, they do better. I have to say, I find in doing these live streams that I often end up coming up with better explanations talking to you all than I think I've written in the past. I don't know what the dynamic of that is. I don't know whether it's just the way one's brain is running when one's actually in the middle of talking about something or something else, but it seems to work that way. And I think in terms of exposition, when you get a little bit more advanced at it, there are things like, how could somebody misunderstand what I'm writing? That's another sort of question to always be asking. I think the first step is, can I actually. Could anybody understand this? Imagine I'm saying this to somebody. Are they going to understand it? Or are they going to look at me blankly and not know what I'm talking about? And then the next question might be to ask if they got it, did they get the right thing? Or did I make it a little bit unclear so that they didn't get the right thing? Now, you know, there are other more advanced things in exposition. Thing I'm writing right now actually has this particular issue in spades. They're just a lot of complicated concepts, and they all have to fit together in sort of a jigsaw puzzle. And there's the question, what do you say first? Because they really all have to be there to fit the jigsaw puzzle together. And so it's a tricky thing. That's a bit of fancy Footwork. And you have to kind of sort of give a little bit of a nod to the other things that are in the jigsaw puzzle early on, because otherwise people are confused because otherwise they say, I can't see how this jigsaw puzzle fits together. How does this. How could this possibly work? Because I've only seen these three things or something. How could it possibly work? And so it's very useful then to kind of give a nod to the other parts of the jigsaw puzzle. So people have this kind of cognitive frame of kind of there is more to the jigsaw puzzle. And I'm going to get to that later, but. I know. But now I'm going to just look at these particular pieces. You know, it's a thing. For example, the very title of my big book, A New Kind of Science, is part of that story in the sense that that title, which people might say, oh my gosh, what a big title. You're claiming so much type thing. But if you are trying to explain something, it's very important to make it clear whether it's a big title or a little title. If it said some detailed things about the way that small programs do this or that, it would be like, well, there's going to be a detail. I don't have to be ready in my mind for a big idea. I'm just. I'm expecting that what I'm going to get is something where I can pin it onto things I already know with. With very little distance. Whereas if you say this is a big idea, people are then primed to kind of be ready for a big idea, so to speak. If you say, here's the thing, kaboom. And you don't kind of be a give a preamble about whether, well, this is kind of a detail. You don't really have to understand this part. It's not going to be that important. Versus this is the big idea, the main kahuna, so to speak. The. The. Then it's. It's important to kind of signal that type of thing. I mean, it's also one of the things as a feature of sort of expository writing, technical writing in general. It's like the thing people sometimes will do is that's the big thing. And it's going to be. They managed to grind it down to just one sentence, and that sentence is somewhere embedded in a 200 sentence clump, and nobody's ever going to notice it because it isn't signaled. I mean, you have to sort of say, it's coming, the big sentence is coming. The big idea that we're going to talk about is coming. And then people are sort of primed and when they get to that sentence and it says God is dead or whatever the sentence is, then they're, they're kind of, it's like, okay, it, you know, I, I now was expecting something big and now I'm going to think about it in that kind of way. Anyway, a few thoughts about that. Let's see. Paula asks of my various livestream series, do I have a favorite and other types I would be interested in? You know, I try to do ones that I think I will find interesting, other people will find interesting. I keep on thinking about other things I might do. One that I'd like to do more of is interviews with other people. The problem is that those are just logistically complicated because it's kind of like it's then not a one body problem of just I have to be here at the time, but it's like, oh, there's a, you know, I got to arrange it with another person. And then to do a good interview, you have to prepare. I mean, even, even when I'm doing an interview with somebody I know quite well and have known for quite a while, it's, if you don't sort of prepare, it ends up, you kind of just don't, you don't explore the right directions. And, and so that's a time consuming thing and I, and I tend not to have the time to, to, to prep those things, but I would like to do that. You know, I suppose there are some live streams that I feel like I should do and that are more kind of detailed and educational. I'm probably going to do some live streams soon about sort of math and actually showing math on, you know, on with computational language and so on. I think there's a kind of a math exposition day coming up in one of these, you know, it's, it's pet gerbil day or something. Every, everything has a day and there's one for something about math exposition. I was kind of going to use that as an excuse to try that out, you know, at the outset. I think that's kind of harder work for me. You know, these kinds of live streams where I'm just trying to talk and answer questions and things are, in a sense they, they don't feel like such hard work. But I don't know, I'm going to have to see how those work out. But I'm interested in suggestions for people for different kinds of topics I could address. I sometimes feel like, oh, my gosh, I must by now have answered every possible question in this kind of domain. But no, every week there are more interesting questions that people ask. I'd kind of like to slant the kind of Q and A about science and technology for kids and others that I've been doing. I'm thinking about ways to sort of slant that in particular directions because I feel like there are big areas that we just never get to talk about, and it would be fun to kind of prompt things so that those are talked about. And again, I'm interested in suggestions from people about this. Let's see. Okay. Synthonic asks, would you suggest working for a startup that's building on an idea from a renowned research institution or working directly at that institution? Gosh, you know, the rhythm of work is different. And. But there is a little bit of, you know, some universities, for example, have kind of pieces that feel pretty entrepreneurial. Some companies have pieces that feel pretty much like universities. I think the question is kind of, what's the value system of the group that you will be in? Is the value system we're going to publish papers and feel academically famous, or is the value system we're going to ship products? And even at universities, the value system can be, we're going to make the software and it's like shipping a product. And even at companies, the value system can be, we want to get papers and we want to publish them in cool places and so on. So I think that's sort of the first level of decision is which of those is better. And then there's a question of sort of what's your motivation structure in terms of if you do the thought experiment, you're part of a team that does this thing that's really a big deal in the world. But you just get to tell people, oh, I was part of that team. There's no kind of your name in lights type thing associated with what was done. That's one model. The other model is it's not nearly as big a deal in the world, but you wrote the paper and you can hold it up and say, that's me here. And I think different people, different stages of life and different, you know, feel very differently about these things. And that's again, a kind of a decision point of which of those is the important thing for you. I think that another sort of determiner of those things is you write an academic paper. If you're lucky, a few people will read it. If you build a product That's a successful product. Lots of people will use it. You know, it's a funny thing because it's like you realize you built a product. Certainly happened to me a whole bunch. Even the most ironic thing, you built a product and like Wolfram language, for example, and it's been used to build some big production system in the world. And then you're interacting with that system and you're like, you feel like saying to the, you know, the, the clerk who's, who's, you know, doing something with you, with the system. You feel like saying, that's my software in there. You know, why are you kind of presenting this to me? Like, I don't know what's going on and, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But you don't get to do that. It's not useful, it's not. Not realistic. So it's kind of like you get this interesting feeling. There's something I built that's inside that, deep inside there. And it's kind of an interesting feeling. And then there's the. The other side of it is, well, I had this idea that led to this thing in science, for example, and people are using that idea now. And maybe they're using that idea and it's like, oh, they cite your paper if they're doing academic stuff or whatever else, or maybe it's just they use your idea and your idea is sort of somewhere in that stack and you could say, that's my idea, if anybody cares. Or you can just feel to yourself it's cool that idea got used. And it's. Again, it's a sort of psychology test for oneself, of thinking how does one feel about these different kinds of things? And that sort of informs to some extent what one should do, I think. So that's. Now, you know, there's also the question of probability of success. You can go to some startup and they can be just. They can have this great idea, but they can just go splat because it wasn't well executed. You can go to a university and they can be like, oh, well, we lost funding, we're giving up on that idea. Or, you know, other kinds of things can happen where, oh, all sorts of terrible things can happen. So, you know, it's sort of an assessment there of what has the likelihood of even, you know, getting the thing out into the world. Ah, memes. Comments. I think this is related to, to my comment about planes and, and where to look, that apparently when you learn to ride a motorbike, it's the same Same type of thing. You look where you're trying to go. Interesting. I have to admit it's not part of my corpus of knowledge. I wonder whether that's true of bicycles as well. I think, I don't know whether. Whether at least when you first learn to ride it, whether, whether that's sort of. I'm sure there are tricks in learning to ride a bicycle. I'm sure in modern times, if you look at the. I mean, I'm trying to remember when my kids learned to ride bicycles. Was there any kind of, you know, trick way to learn or like another one is parallel parking a car. You know, kind of like it. It's like you can just, you know, there are all these heuristics, you know, wait until it's. This is lined up with that and then turn the wheel in this way, or you can just kind of feel like you know how to do it, or you can have a car where you just press a button and the thing will. Will park itself. But, you know, I think that in modern times, in modern education, there's more and more of this kind of learn when you, you know, cut over, when you know, when, when this is lined up with that, when you're parallel parking a car. And the fact that I don't know what to even say, there is kind of a. A sign that I learned these things before those, those tricks. Let's see, Etore is asking, I think in reference to things I was talking about expository writing, is it better to say this is going to be difficult or don't worry, it's not complicated. Being accurate is better if you say this is going to be a complicated discussion. It's much better to signal that than to give people kind of like, oh, don't worry, it's all going to be easy. People do much better if they are primed correctly than if you kind of mislead them, so to speak, and try to get them to. It's going to be easy. It's going to be fine. And I think, and I think, you know, I'm sure the same is true in a lot of different settings of if you kind of know what to expect, it's easier to deal with what comes along than if you are misinformed about what to expect, so to speak. I think, I mean, the one thing. Okay, I'll give you an example of a mistake I once made long, long, long ago with SMP, kind of forerunner of Wolfram language. Back in 1979 to early 1980s, I wrote documentation. I wrote A page that was called common errors when using SMP or something like that, Common mistakes or something. What a disaster. Because it was very nice, pithy page that listed off, hey, you should do this rather than that. Okay. People who read that page, they could never remember which one of the was the thing you were supposed to do, whether it was this or the that. It's kind of like when you learn something wrong and then you kind of learn it and you kind of learn both the wrong and the right, and then you're very confused about what's wrong and what's right. And I think that was, that was sort of a disaster of, of exposition was don't tell them what's wrong. Don't tell them. You know, you might say the furthest you can go is, you might think that X, but it isn't true. But don't sort of say kind of, here's the thing you might do wrong and here's the right version. I'm not sure that I'm making that distinction as clearly as I should, and perhaps I'm making exactly the mistake that I'm saying one shouldn't make. But anyway, I think that was an example of a bad direction in terms of signaling about what one was talking about. Okay, maybe last question here from William. Do you have any advice for people that want to be independent researchers? I think, well, one point is every field has a certain value system for things that are going to be valid in that field. If you want to buck that trend, it's a huge amount of work. You know, if you say, I'm going to do math, but I'm not going to present myself, like math papers usually present themselves. And I'm not saying that the way math papers usually present themselves is the best way to do it. But if you're going to plug into the math world, if you're going to do a bunch of independent research, you're going to plug into the math world, you have to present yourself in sort of the API that the math world expects. And if you don't, if you say, well, I'm going to just write this chatty thing that's different from the way it's done with theorems of proofs. I've done this many times, but it's a lot of work to build up to the point where you can do that just in terms of your interface to the world. So if you're going to plug into an existing sort of system, you've kind of got to got to be something that's plug compatible. For that system, that's one point to make another point. And that goes along with, you know, if you're going to write something that you think is an academic paper, it's got to, it's got to walk and talk like an academic paper. If you're going to do something different, that's all well and good, but then it's got to be a thing where people can recognize, oh, yes, this is a website that explains things or oh, this is something else. And it's so, you know, that's one thing to say. Another thing to say is, well, how are you going to make a living, so to speak, if you're an independent researcher? Well, again, it's, you know, the easiest way to do it is don't have anybody pay you to do the research, just do it as a hobby. I mean, that's in some sense there's a sort of a trade off between the tenacity, the personal push that you need to be able to do that and be able to take your not working time and spend it on your hobby of doing independent research. That takes some push. It also takes some push to be able to convince people that, yes, they should fund your independent research. I think different people, different personalities, one of those is easier than the other. For myself, I've usually found it a lot easier to say, I'm just going to do this research sort of as a hobby than go and say, I'm going to go and I'm going to convince this funding place that should fund my research, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, you know, it's a very interesting question, sort of how research should be funded, how it works, how it should work, and so on. The vast majority of research funding is very kind of streamed, it's very, kind of very determined. It's very, you know, the National Science foundation, you know, you're a sort of a random independent researcher. You're not going to get funded there. That's a thing where there's a complicated clique and complicated social dynamics and sort of complicated value systems that are very aligned with what's been done before. It's just not going to happen as an independent researcher. And, you know, unless you're an independent researcher who's, who's been in the clique before, made a big reputation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And even then I think it's challenging. And then you say, well, what about all these places that are, you know, philanthropic foundations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? Well, most Places have some kind of rubric, some kind of, you know, because they've done this before. And often the people to whom that funding is delegated need some, need some path, they need some track to be on. It's not just, well, just do the right thing. So it's really hard to find, kind of, sort of if you, if you're going to make a living doing the research, it's really hard to find a way to do that. And you know, unless it fits into something that's already been done. You know, I've often wondered, is there a way to tokenize, you know, some grand blockchain scheme or something that allows you to sort of take things like research, which are clearly very valuable in the world on a long term basis and kind of say, let's accelerate that value and let's get it to the point where we can kind of, you know, where we can make a living doing that now when it's going to benefit the world a lot in 100 years. I haven't figured out how to do that. Maybe there's a way to do it, but I haven't figured out what it is. And so given that, I tend to think that usually the best path and in many ways the most, both convincing to oneself and convincing to other people's path is just do it as a hobby. And yeah, you don't have as much time. But one of the things that's funny, I used to be an academic professor type, 35 years, 36 years ago now and before. And you know, people say to me now I have many friends who went on in that business and they sort of say to me, you know, how can you do science? You're running a company and you're doing all these other kinds of things. And it's like, well, I just sort of, sort of obstinate enough that I carve out the time that I need to do that stuff. And it's like, you know, don't you guys, I might say, if I didn't know more, don't you guys who are working at some university, can't you just do this all the time? And they say, well, no, we have to teach classes, we're on committees, we've got administrative things we have to do, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's a job as well. And the research gets sort of slotted in along with other things. And so similarly, if you're doing some completely different job, I mean, you might be, you know, driving a truck or you might be doing something you know, in a bank or you might be, whatever else. It doesn't mean that you, you know, I think, you know, it's in. In most of sort of the developed world, at least, people don't end up working sort of, you know, all of their waking hours just to make ends meet. Most of the. Some people end up doing that, but. But, you know, many people do not. And as soon as you're not doing that, you've got extra time. And if you think research is the priority, as opposed to watching the sports game or following the soap opera or going to a bar or whatever else, if you think research is the priority, then do it. And if that is what is fulfilling to you, then you will come out ahead. And you know that that's been a decision I've made in my life of doing some of those kinds of things instead of doing other things, which I've decided I'm not that interested in. So, you know, I do the research instead. And I think that's a. That's a good way to. To operate the. Okay. Tori also comments that this look at where you want to go is also true for surfing, another activity that I have never also not engaged in. You guys are learning about all the things I don't know about here. All right, I need to go to some other things, but thank you for a lot of interesting questions and was fun for me. I hope that was interesting for you all. So until the next time, bye for now.