Business, Innovation and Managing Life (September 1, 2021)

live okay hi everyone welcome to another episode of business innovation and managing life um i am back in my usual environment here and let's see i think we have a whole bunch of questions that were saved up from previous times i see first one here from mikhail did i ever experience impostor syndrome hmm interesting question uh am i confident or arrogant enough for something that the answer to that is no um pretty close i would say you know there are situations i suppose where i can remember particularly when a project has just sort of broken out in the world when we just released i don't know well from alpha or probably much longer ago mathematica or things i wrote about about complexity and so on back in the 80s and so on where i would get invited to kind of very uh fancy uh sort of events that were like you know the future of science the uh the sort of the um the next great things in technology and so on and um there's certainly a few times where i'm like uh really is the thing that i've done actually in this kind of collection of the great future of science great future of technology and so on now probably it's a sign of of tremendous hubris to say that i think in uh that i can remember in those cases where while at the time it was like really is this actually that big a deal in the end it turned out it was that big a deal but i didn't know it at the time so to speak and it's kind of like uh this is in a sense whoever it was that said oh we're making this list of people that uh uh you know should come to this grand event or whatever or be in this grand list of you know most interesting you know science people of year x or whatever um it uh in the end it was like actually that wasn't such a bad choice even though uh to myself i wasn't yet at the point where i realized that the thing that i done was important in that so that way and one general feature i suppose of there's a complicated issue so you know you do things sometimes you actually understand why they're important you have some vision for what's going on you sort of understand what is there in the world and you understand why what you've done is actually something of significance importance in the world but the world as a whole doesn't understand that yet maybe it's decades away from understanding it what do you do do you just sort of say oh well um uh i've got this thing and you don't understand it yet but it's going to be really cool or do you try and tell people this is something that is really important now i have to say the spending decades saying this is really important i mean this is what people who were doing uh not not my particular situation but you know people who are doing machine learning or doing europe with neural nets or string theory these are two places where those fields wandered in the wilderness for decades before they were sort of became popular and everybody was like oh yeah you've been doing cool stuff all this time thank goodness you're still alive at the time when the field comes to life so to speak because it might not happen that way but so that's the thing where sometimes you realize what you've got is quite important and or you are pretty sure that what you've got is quite important but the world doesn't recognize it sometimes you're not really sure you know for me the things that i've done quite often i like see a definite direction and can kind of see how to take the steps towards that direction but the big you know historical significance of what what one's doing i don't immediately get that it takes maybe five years maybe more to understand what what one has done how what one's done fits into the context of what else is going on and so in a sense there's a some something of a tendency to undersell and say oh shucks it's just this thing that's the specific steps i've taken rather than here's the big picture but sometimes you do understand the big picture and if you were in the middle of things you can understand that big picture sometimes decades ahead of where people at large understand that big picture and it's sort of a complicated situation how you communicate those things i mean i'm perfectly well aware of the fact that a bunch of things i've done and built and so on i kind of view as artifacts from the future in the sense that people look at them sometimes and maybe they'll use technology we built and so on and they'll say look i can do this amazing thing and their colleagues will say well yeah that's a thing that we knew would one day be possible but we didn't think that day was now we thought that day was sometime in the distant future but you know this is an artifact that we've created that sort of been able to be wheeled in from the future so to speak now sometimes the the point at which it becomes like everybody knows that that can be done and you know this is the thing one does that might be 30 years away 50 years away i don't know and that so it's complicated then to see how you how you deal with that but um uh in the the what am i doing here situation which i think is the typical kind of imposter syndrome kind of thing i have to say i have uh the the kind of a flip side of that sort of interesting is sometimes i'll go to i get invited to all kinds of events and things like this and sometimes and some of them are very very fancy and some of them are not particularly fancy sometimes they're ones that involve students sometimes they're ones that are just about unusual unexpected subjects and i'll go there and sometimes i'm like it's sort of always a little bit funny when you go to one of these things and people are like why are you here well because i was invited and i thought it'd be interesting um but that's kind of the the other it's like uh you know how come you're interested in this seemingly obscure thing well i might have some particular reason to be interested in that and i figure it's a good way to learn what's going on in that area and somebody invited me to this thing and so i decided to go um and there i admit other situations in which i'm like the thing didn't turn out to be what i thought it was and then it's the why am i here you know i shouldn't be here so to speak um anyway a little bit on that let's see oh boy here's a a question or comment from carop as automation and worker reduction at the workplace continues to gather steam would it make sense to legally further reduce further the maximum hours worked per week to avoid mass unemployment oh boy well i'm i'm not great on the sort of fully socio-political kinds of things but um you know i have to say i kind of wonder about the situation where somebody says you can only work such and such a number of hours per week that would be terrible for me i work tons of hours per week i have no idea how many hours per week i work and somebody say how many hours per week are you paid to work well in the ceoing business for example particularly if you're a founder owner ceo it's like how many hours per week are you paid to work i don't know what even the definition of that is um so i'm not sure about the uh you know wouldn't it be a nice situation if people were working because they wanted to work so to speak um and uh because they wanted to do what they're doing uh and um i suppose the um uh you know these are uh you know there's there's no great economic theory that i know of that that sort of solves all of those problems but i think in the the question of of um you know right now is perhaps not the time to ask about mass unemployment because from what i can tell it's uh this really strange situation of lots of of um of places where of places where there's sort of shortages of people i know you know we we have a number of positions that we're trying to fill which usually we would have hundreds and hundreds of applicants for and we have almost none including one for a sort of uh operational assistant for me um so anybody out there who's interested in learning all kinds of interesting stuff um that's uh an open position as of right now but you know normally we would have hundreds of applicants for such a position and we've had very few um and i don't i don't take it personally um but uh it's just a statement about the economy today and um i i it's very confusing to me i mean it's very confusing the um uh extent to which uh you know i'm not a big fan of the whole kind of uh you know lockdown for the zoom crowd type thing that was executed i think it doesn't make that much scientific sense and it makes uh sort of socially it's kind of horrible but and that presumably connects to uh together with various stimulus economic stimulus kinds of things presumably connects to this bizarre situation today where if you say you know you might say gosh all this automation that's come in you know that must mean that um everybody's out of work but somehow there are all these positions and nobody can fill them so i don't quite know how that how that fits together but in terms of will automation kind of put everybody out of work you know automation is a story of kind of leveraging using technology to leverage what we want to do and i've tried to do various studies actually about sort of the evolution of jobs over the last 150 years or so and the thing that's interesting is there's always kind of a new thing that people end up finding that they want to do it's where whereas there's some job category i don't know agricultural workers where a lot of that got automated away in a country like the u.s um and uh uh but it's um um the the thing that um the question um is okay as agricultural work dropped off so other kinds of work grew some of the ones that one identifies growing there's things like health care and some education stuff um there's also uh sort of bureaucracy grows if you look at just the the history of jobs in the us let's say over the last 150 years kind of the the basically governmental related bureaucracy definitely is a is a big category that grows um and uh there are other categories that go up and down like construction and manufacturing and so on but what's sort of interesting is that at any given time there always seemed to be new emerging job categories i mean the uh um you know who knew that there would be job categories of that are basically about live streaming you know that wasn't a thing or that there would be job categories about uh oh like for example just you know i always kind of find it interesting to create new job titles basically for new things we realize we want done so one that i just invented like two days ago was a group we'll probably call deployment engineering which is has to do with uh in getting software out well we have we've had for a long time we have development we have quality assurance we have release engineering which is sort of actually packaging up software so that it is shippable to places um we have uh uh things like cloud development and so on but there's this notion of deployment engineering which is okay you've got your software and now you want it to run in a container on a cloud server let's say or you want to have it be something where it isn't quite release engineering which is kind of there's this bag of bits and you're going to send them to people and it isn't it isn't devops which is we're running our own servers and we're trying to get them to do the right thing it's something in between those things it has to do with the engineering of deployable things and it's something which mixes kind of the devops thing where there's a definite server in front of you and you're trying to make software run on it and the release engineering thing where it's like we're just going to send out bags of bits to people it's somewhere in the middle of those two and it has all kinds of particular expertise that's needed and you know it's a slightly new category of of position that hasn't existed before that has been created by the sort of evolution of technology and evolution of what people want to do with technology so one of the things that i think it's sort of interesting to see is this uh this sort of evolution of different kinds of jobs that become available i mean i also think that the question of do people have both one one thing they're doing at a time or do they have uh multiple things they do and also do they have just one career in their lives or do they have multiple ones and you know one thing at our company we have a internal database we call who knows what which is kind of a a place where people fill out we have all kinds of somewhat interesting questions about sort of what people's experience in doing i don't know education or their certifications or what magazines they read all kinds of things like this the purpose of this for us internally as a company is oh we want to know is that we also have questions on there things like things you would like to learn about um those kinds of things and so when we have new roles that we're interested in filling the who knows what database is super useful to try and figure out people for whom oh that would be a really interesting role it's also useful when we just want to know things and we can find an internal expert who's who's knows about some particular obscure thing place organization uh whatever else or even for example the you know the what magazines do you read what websites do you look at it's like well you know we're thinking about having some interaction with this place and we don't really understand what kind of a thing shows up there and if we have five people in the company who say oh i look at that every every day or every week or whatever you can ask them and is is this something that would be suitable for that given that they know both that thing and something about what we as a company have so it's a very useful thing but the thing that i've noticed about who knows what is that the number of people at our company and i don't know how untypical or typical we are in this regard who have some kind of reasonably serious hobby is very large and those things that are their hobbies sometimes they'll be things that i'm sure people get paid to do sometimes they're things they just do uh for fun but you know there are these kind of multiple tracks that people seem to develop in their in their lives and i suppose you know for me for example it's like doing these live streams is not uh you know this isn't this is a hobby so to speak relative to what i normally do for a living so to speak and um i think it's sort of interesting question the extent to which going forward people will have multiple threads that they pursue i mean not just the job and the family and whatever but various different kinds of activities at various levels of hobbiness and that might include you know gig economy kinds of things that are the the extra kind of um uh you know work that gets done and so on so i i i think uh and you know i don't know how all that relates to what um um you know what will happen i have to say and perhaps this this betrays a little bit of of personal prejudice on my part any of these schemes that say you know let's require let's have the government tell people you can only work x number of hours per week or something i mean i tend to think that that's a uh you know a formula for bad things to happen and also something for which there are likely to be terrible unintended consequences i mean i i noticed just recently and i have no idea what its consequences will be this uh thing in china for for gaming companies and you know don't let kids play video games for more than x number of hours per per day during the school week type thing you know i have no idea what that what you know when you think about a rule like that what its real consequences are i mean then then every game gets tagged as well it's really educational i don't know i have no idea what that's what happens but um uh somehow i feel like that's uh then you realize oh my gosh you know there's a whole generation of kids that would have learned using video games how to do some amazingly important action thing in the world and oh gosh none of them learnt it because we stopped them playing video games i mean i i kind of think that these um uh these kind of let's just come in and manage the world that way is not a generally successful kind of activity uh i think that um uh perhaps i'm prejudiced in this partly from uh well just my observation of of the world but also a little bit from science this whole phenomenon of computational irreducibility even when you know the rules by which the system operates to know what will actually happen in the system requires irreducible amounts of computation that kind of tells you that any kind of system you set up of rules we're going to control things we're going to put in this rule we're going to put in this rule and put in this rule there will always be unintended consequences and you'll might you know you'll have to say well in the end oh we'll patch it we'll add this other rule without do this other thing but in the end the idea we'll just set up these rules these rules are brilliant they're gonna you know make everything work um and then you roll time forward and it's like oh my gosh we didn't think of this feature we didn't think of this thing that happened and i kind of think that the the more ones trying to sort of get in there and be very precise about these rules the more brittleness one's going to end up finding there i think uh you know another another question one might ask is um um these questions about oh i don't know the structure of the economy and who gets paid to do what and how that all works and the flow of money or the flow of whatever it is that is the equivalent of value in an economy or whatever you know how that should all work and you know occasionally people have these grand theories about you know if we just do this everything will work perfectly um in this kind of law of unintended consequences that seems to be not you know in history doesn't suggest that that really works um now you know are there ways that particularly as we can inject more kind of automation and ai into the whole operation of the economy are there different ways to set things up are there different ways to make decisions collectively as a society are there different ways to uh to sort of set up the flow of value around the economy i think the answer is quite possibly yes but i'm not sure what they are yet and i'm certainly extremely reluctant to say oh there's this great theory if you only do this everybody's going to be happy everything's going to work perfectly i i don't see that easily happening um and i have to say that i think um uh the um the concept i mean it is it is interesting to be talking about muscle mass unemployment just this month because that sure isn't what people see i mean i'm i'm just as a piece of a pure amusement you know as as my um i'm a person of great habit and so you know every day i'll have a turkey sandwich for lunch well as of today apparently uh there's a turkey shortage and presumably that's because of i don't know some whole chain of meat processing uh workers you know shortages and things like this i i don't think it's that the turkeys walked off the job so to speak i don't think it's that the turkeys all got covered i'm not sure if birds do um i know that uh around where i live the um uh i've been noticing there are a bunch of deer around here and one of the really odd things is that you see deer doing things that you they don't usually do being very sluggish and etc etc etc and i i i'm kind of having the suspicion that um uh just in the last few weeks that um the deer got sick hopefully they'll recover and um uh be prancing around just fine soon but anyway but that's off topic all right let's see um well there's a there's a question here from frost saying you ultimately named your company with your last name why i've mixed feelings about this so you know i sometimes thought about having this kind of club for people who've named their companies after themselves and i've sometimes wondered what is the common theme between people who've done that whether it's mike bloomberg michael dell i don't know tim o'reilly uh i don't know in the tech industry there's a um tech industry it's less common in something like law firms it's absolutely the way it's done publishing companies that used to be the way it was done uh lots of kind of just general businesses it used to be the typical way it was done was name it after yourself or it would be uh you know so and so and sons or so and so i've never seen so and so and children maybe that would be a thing of modern times um but uh uh the um i think um the thing that um uh well first of all okay the thing that seems to be in common is people who actually want to take responsibility and sort of uh for their companies as opposed to just i'm doing this thing and well i happen to be its founder ceo but it's really a thing that's not sort of something that i'm really taking responsibility for now the other dynamic is that when they're venture capitalists institutional investors of various kinds you know they i suspect hate companies named after people because if you're an investor and you say well this company is a decent idea and this person is running it well they're okay but you know in a couple of years well maybe the company will outgrow them and we want to oust them and it's like okay the company is called you know smith and company and we're ousting smith that's an awkward situation and so it's often better to have kind of an anodyne name for a company where it's like well it could be run by smith it could be run by jones you know that's kind of a detail but as investors we can just swap out smith and jones as as we choose i think in terms of my company the reason that i ended up naming it putting my name on it several reasons first thing was that i had had the experience of seeing companies that named themselves according to what they thought they were doing and that turned out to be a disaster i mean in a sense we are kind of living part of that issue because we have our flagship product mathematica which as a name was a good starter name but now it's a name that we have deeply outgrown in the sense that you know people who use mathematica for mathy kinds of things might be i don't know 10 of its users they're very enthusiastic they're very good users they're ones we really we really like but it's only 10 percent probably and so but then there are other people where you present them with a product and they say oh it's called mathematica oh we don't do math here we just do machine learning we just do data science we just do something else which mathematica or wolfram language does great but the name kind of locks one in to a certain view of what's going on and i didn't want to do that with our company i'd had the experience of one particular company that i had been a consultant for and actually have been involved in suggesting the name was some company thinking machines corporation which was originally supposed to be a parallel computers ai this is in the 1980s ai kind of company but it kind of evolved to being more of a super computer-ish company and that name was a was quite quite a a millstone i would say for that company and so things like that made me not want to give a name that was too much oh this is exactly what we do now i suppose i in a sense you know i dodged that bullet for the company i didn't dodge that bullet for our product name but in terms of do you name the company after yourself for example i have to say there is one feature particularly when i started our company i was i was fairly young i was like 25 26 um 26 i think um and uh uh well in these days it's not so uncommon to have young sort of founders of companies and so on but there's a certain feature of you know you say oh there's this company how are you involved with that company you know what's your role in it and sometimes when you talk to people who say i was involved in this famous company and you say well what was your role in that famous company and sometimes they'll say well i was you know i uh kind of was doing some very you know i i happened to be the person uh you know arranging the offices or something for that company or some such other thing and it's a not really related to the direct mission of the company unless that was the business it was in um and uh you know to know whether how involved somebody was or somebody else might say well actually i was the founder whatever that means well if their name is on the company you kind of know that that was for real so to speak because otherwise it's kind of hard to uh you know that's hard to explain oh well um the you know i'm smith but the company was named jones and um uh really i was involved very deeply in it but it was named smith and i i think that the um so you know that's another feature um i would say that people there's a certain tendency of people saying i want to talk to the person in charge okay well if your name is on the company eventually they'll say i want to talk to the person whose name is on the company i would say that's not a tremendously important effect particularly when the company is of decent size you know that's not something where people expect that um i think that another thing is oh well you know every important customer um you know has to talk to the person whose name is on the company that doesn't happen that way i don't think those downsides are really a big thing the other issue is okay so you know if your name's on the company you're kind of on the hook you can't um uh you know your your personal brand so to speak is connected to the company and if you you know if if something terrible happens and you're kind of declared an axe murderer or something then that's bad for the uh you know for the brand of the company um i i guess i i like to think that um i do sensible enough things that that's not really um an issue in my case but i can see in other people's case it's like you're not quite as free to do goofy things because those goofy things might uh sort of um bounce back to to harm not just you but also the company and it's sort of easier to to um if if there isn't that extra entanglement but i think the the most relevant thing is how much responsibility do you want to take for the thing you are creating and uh and to what extent do you want to be free to have the company do something different and to what extent do you want to burn you know for example if you're planning a company where you think the lifespan of it will be five years let's say maybe even 10. you know and you're going to build it up it's going to be a company that does this you're eventually going to sell it to somebody else and it'll get absorbed into some larger thing it doesn't so much matter and maybe you're better off giving it a name that just says our company does this rather than and also if you personally don't think you're signing up for kind of the long term then you know it's a good way to not uh as soon as you've named a company after yourself you're kind of stuck with it um and the other thing can happen is people can do things like they sell the company and then they've sold their name and then there's a whole complicated you know mess as as they try and say well i'm gonna do something different now and then their old company will come attack them for you know oh you're but you're using your name and i think there's a general principle and trademark uh kinds of things that if it's your name you can use it to uh as the name of a company although that meant that i don't know back in the day there were oh i think there was a thing with the bell telephone company back when that was the dominant uh telecom company in the in the us where there was some person whose last name was belle who was starting a small phone company somewhere in i don't know texas or something and it's like can they do that or is that you know because it is after all their name and i don't know exactly how that resolved but um uh you know so i would say if you're really interested in doing things for the long term and you are um uh prepared to sort of take responsibility for it then use your name otherwise don't um would be my my basic thoughts on that let's see um well uh hmm okay a question from riff what are my thoughts on science and efficiency do you believe that high-profile science experiments could be done more efficiently in order to achieve a particular discovery is there room for imagination and creativity in unconventional methods and scientific field so most of what i do is theoretical science and the answer there is the the sort of the mainstream giant industrial process of producing scientific research is actually pretty inefficient and almost negative for sort of the most innovative biggest jumps you know the giant industrial machine of scientific research is well optimized for incremental progress which is most of what happens in science and it's not that incremental progress isn't worth having it is incremental progress gradually makes progress and gets you places but if you are doing something where there's sort of a big jump that gets made that the the existence of that giant industrial process is typically a negative because people will say how can you make that big jump everybody knows science progresses through this big industrial process there's something wrong with making that jump and certainly uh you know i've made the had the good fortune to be in a position to make a few jumps in science which i have done very much well i would say that the things i've done are very connected to mainstream in terms of using its methods techniques people uh even sometimes a few institutions but the actual daily progress of what's been done is probably very different from that and the kind of and even for example the communication of oh we've got these big things to communicate well writing this incremental paper in some journal that should report just a little piece of progress here or there that's a terrible way to communicate kind of a big jump of progress because if people see well there's this paper and it's reporting this incremental thing and the paper can say i'm telling you something really important but it's still a paper embedded in some journal along with a lot of other papers that are reporting incremental progress so i think that that's a difficult thing there now in terms of of more experimental science of you know how do you make serious progress on things i have to say i think there's tremendous room for more energetic strategy in those directions and it's always interesting to see people who have been entrepreneurs who end up uh becoming large funders of science particularly in medical areas and so on have this tremendous habit of saying you know let's use kind of entrepreneurial methods to try and make forward progress here let's make plans let's get people together let's do this let's do that and quite often they have good results and sometimes you look at what's otherwise being done it's this giant kind of random walk forwards as opposed to let's try and have a strategic plan let's ask the question you know let's for example in many fields there are things where people have concluded it's impossible i remember cloning was one of those things mammalian cloning was one of those things where people for years had just said it's impossible yeah it works with amphibians it works with other things but for mammals it's impossible okay why'd you say that but you know and i would ask people this and they would say well it's never been done well it's kind of crazy okay why is it impossible well turns out in the end it wasn't impossible but the the field gets this idea it's impossible so the question is how do you break through the it's impossible thing and sometimes you just have to have a person who creates what i suppose one might call from the from the kind of steve jobs tech industry uh kind of way of describing it a reality distortion field look people it's not impossible you know here's a few ideas for how this might be done let's go just try and climb that mountain and you know the first step in climbing the mountain is realizing there's a mountain there to be climbed and if you're saying well you know it's just not a thing it's doesn't it's not it's just impossible there's no nothing there you know you're never gonna get to the top of the mountain if you didn't identify that there was a mountain there to begin with so i think that that's something which tends to require a kind of leadership that is not so common in kind of giant industrialized science so to speak because the the kind of leadership that says let's go do this incredible impossible thing is something that tends to not play particularly well with the larger institutional structure of of science as it is right now now you know and it also doesn't play that well with the funding structure of science as it is right now because often you know when one's dealing with government funding and things it's partly a sort of popularity contest of there are all these people who are saying who should get more funding and there are people who've gotten funding before and things like this and it's like let's just continue passing this around the club type thing and if there's something that is really innovative i mean even the structure of saying let's get five people to look at this and let's make sure that they all say it's okay that's kind of an almost guaranteed way to sort of not end up with something that's kind of highly highly innovative so i think the you know the the question of how do you inject strategy and leadership and there are some efforts to do that you know in the us government for example there are different funding agencies that like darpa is one that tries to sort of do the innovator but it has a rather particular type of innovative that involves blocks of money of a certain size you know physical building physical hardware kinds of things and so on it's not a it doesn't fit all possible uh pieces of progress in science but it's sort of an interesting experiment or not so much experiment anymore after all these decades but an interesting uh way of thinking we're going to have some kind of high risk piece of the portfolio but in lots of science that doesn't really apply um and i i tend to think that uh it would be great if there was more ability to sort of have more innovation happen in science and sometimes when there's private funding for science that sort of doesn't go through government channels there's more possibility to just say oh there's a person who's interested in i don't know extraterrestrial intelligence finding out whether um uh what are they called now uaps unidentified aerial phenomena or something um are a real thing these kinds of things when there's a question which has been sort of uh pushed out of mainstream science because it doesn't fit the sort of the machine there it's it's kind of like if some private person wants to just say i'm going to put a bunch of money into this that can be a useful thing sometimes that doesn't play particularly well because the people who can receive that money are people who are part of the mainstream industrial science kind of world and it tends to be the case that they're so used to doing the things that are part of that mainstream process that even though somebody says hey we really want to you know let you guys do the thing you've always wanted to do and look at this really wacky idea um there'll be a tendency to sort of revert back to well let's not do quite that idea let's do the thing that's close to the mainstream direction and that uh that's sort of a disappointing piece to the the whole thing um it's a question here from ori how can people in school in general have stronger self organization to i'm thinking that might be self-confidence to be able to stand up to the institutionalized networks with unfortunate entry conditions yeah this is a complicated thing i mean you know in any place where this is one of the features of sort of modern times that i think gets progressively worse in some ways that is you know there was a time when i don't know you applied to some fancy school of some kind and it was a sort of personalized process of oh you know you know do you go there do not go there etc etc etc whereas now there's a certain tendency to say let's just put in place these kind of anonymized testing type requirements or these kind of very uh sort of uh um i don't know the very cut-and-dried kind of criteria oh you need to do this oh you need to do that to be eligible for this and you get a score above this then this can work and otherwise it can't and and so on and so on and so on and i think that uh well one thing people sometimes believe about those things um is that it sort of helps people who didn't come from you know the best possible background that gave them the best possible opportunity to be able to kind of jump into the uh the sort of the the best educational track and things like that i have to say i you know maybe i would be attacked for saying but i think in the us that's horribly failed i mean by the time you know the the you know you might say oh let's just do the raw sat and i think that there was a time when people were doing that but at this point it's like let's do sat prep let's do all these things that kind of build a tower that if you already have access to all of those resources well yes you can build that tower and if you don't you're you know you have a significant disadvantage i will say that when i was growing up in england um there was a an exam called the 11 plus which was the thing that people did when they were about 11 years old and that determined there were sort of two tracks for government uh funded uh secondary education grammar schools and comprehensive schools at least that was what they were called when i was a kid in the 1960s and i i think maybe i'm wrong but i think that that system actually worked quite well in the sense that there were all kinds of people i knew who didn't come from you know the fancy all possible resources backgrounds who did this you know 11 plus exam and went to you know schools that were very academically oriented and end up ended up doing very well and going into sort of the top university uh trajectories and all that kind of thing and i think unfortunately at some point in england uh for some reason that that i i don't know the political history of all of this the 11 plus exam was scrapped and this idea of multiple tracks of sort of education was was removed now was that was it sort of ultimately fair you know there was surely people who would have benefited well i don't know i mean that's the question would there be people who would have benefited from the sort of more academic schools who were incorrectly sort of sent in a different direction by that exam i don't know i think if you ask about some of the exams in the u.s and you say what is it measuring and you know i think the goal of something like sat is probably to measure if you went to college x based on this this score that you got would you succeed there you know that might be a criterion that it might be trying to measure but unfortunately it's been so gamed at this point it's not clear what it measures with respect to that but in any case the um although you know there are pieces of that even that gaming process that measures something because it's like are you prepared to go through all this trouble of doing all this sat prep to be able to you know do well in this example can you just not be bothered and well i just can't be bothered might be oh i go to this college i can't be bothered to do the classes maybe that's because the classes aren't a good fit for you it's not clear but you know as a practical matter we make the following comment at any given time there are always much more self-selected for example educational tracks even corporate tracks that exist and they are newer they are not as famous but they're good and i think the challenge for people who say oh my gosh i'm being locked out of this other thing because i didn't go to the exact right school and get the exact right test score and all this kind of thing i think the thing to do is look for the things that are good and emerging and somewhat self-selected now what tends to happen with those things and i've seen this with a bunch of educational institutions for example is it starts off this is the kind of the unknown oh there's this cool thing you know people hear about it and at that time it's very self-selecting it's very much like anybody who wants to go there who puts the effort in to apply and uh is is going to wind up uh you know being able to go there and then that set of people who self-select to go to whatever institutional educational thing it is those people and by the way the same thing happens with companies there are companies where it's like you know in the early days of tech company x it was not super difficult to get hired at this company if you were a person who was prepared to actually go to the trouble of understanding what it what the company did and why you might fit in and so on and so on and so on then the company grows and has 100 000 employees and then there's a hr department with all kinds of very precise criteria that are being used but the point is it would have been a great place to work when it was tiny and it and great opportunities there and and so similarly in the educational sector there are these places and you know one could one could start naming some of them where at any given time there's sort of an emerging place where it's like oh this new college that got started and it's not yet very famous but it's you know you look at it and it's like is it good is it not good well maybe it's actually pretty good or this you know summer program i could i could tout our summer school for example and high school summer camp as examples of this those are things where you know we get one of the things i i you know we get a lot of applicants but the the people who really want to go and who are really any kind of reasonable fit typically they'll end up going and and it's not the case you know we're not going to look at test scores and this and that and the other because it's you know we're at a different stage if we had you know 500 000 applicants we would have no choice but to do something where we're you know looking at test scores and doing things very quantitatively and so on but i would say my main advice is to try and find those sort of educational places and corporate places which are sort of emerging and where they haven't gotten to the point where everybody knows it and everybody wants to go to the same place and you know everybody's just going to be picked by by numbers so to speak um i think that uh there's also well when it comes to to jobs and so on uh that is a place where sort of you know making a connection to a person to be able to uh you know be able to sort of have people understand because you know if there's if person x knows person y who is you know who is involved with the company then if you want to know about person x the company has a normalization on person y and so they can find out something about person x let me give an example of how that works let's take recommendation letters okay so when my company was very young uh we were sort of you know in a sort of pseudo-academic way we'd like get recommendation letters for people it was useless because unless we had a repeated you know trade route where we're getting letters from the same person over and over again so we can normalize them and we can know this is what um uh you know this is what this letter means there's really no information in that letter because it's like well a person who's a friend of mine actually who's a well-known uh professor you know years ago you know he wrote a couple of letters for people who we were considering hiring he's a nice fellow and he you know wrote these very glowing letters and you know we made they had an effect on on our sort of early stage hiring and it just the people were absolutely the wrong people to hire and it's like you know you realize it was just a person a nice person who wants to find the positive in things and writes a glowing letter it really had no information for us now on the other hand if it was the case that there was a person who worked at our company knew what the stick with our company was and knew this person who was applying to our company or had some connection to them then that's a place where it's much easier to be able to tell with normalization is this actually a person who's going to make sense for us i would say that that well that recommendation letter story i told you that was almost a better case of recommendation because i knew the person who was writing them although i didn't know his kind of recommendation letter practices but in most cases there it's like a person i've never no know nothing about is you know professor writing a recommendation letter for this person it's like there is no normalization i have no idea um and and so that's a you know the kind of networking thing with companies that's one of the reasons why that's a worthwhile thing is because that allows if you know somebody who is involved with the company who can kind of present you in a way that sort of fits into what the company understands that's a good thing i would say that uh the way um you know i don't know uh in um for things like college applications um less so graduate school i i you know i don't write many recommendation letters for people but i sometimes do for people who have worked with us and done really interesting things and so on i mean basically my criterion for writing these letters is if i think i can write a letter that people will actually read i'll write it if i don't i really won't um and you know i kind of because i've done enough marketing writing in my in my life i kind of enjoy the challenge of writing kind of a a you know and really the issue as well for uh it's like why this person will fit into the the program that you have if in fact i think they will but one of the things i learned was i done this for uh you know i was starting to do it for people applying to college and i had terrible success rate it's like these people were just not getting the you know the things but i didn't know you know the whole spectrum of what their whole sort of which colleges they would fit in that you know little quadrant of test scores and this and that and the other that these these colleges end up end up having but what i then i i ended up asking a person who had um actually run admissions for a large school in in the us um and uh i i showed her some samples of letters and she was like these are great letters for graduate school or jobs or something like that but they're terrible for college because people are going to spend you know i forget what the time was you know um you know uh 50 seconds or something reading this letter and it's got to be three paragraphs and it's got to have this structure and um you know the letter will turn into some kind of you know grade parameter somewhere in some giant uh sort of uh machine that um that tries to figure these things out and so i i kind of i'm not sure how worthwhile uh these letters are at all and you know i it will be interesting to know exactly what sort of numbers are assigned to to letters that one writes but it's a different different kind of thing but i think uh so my my main advice is find uh you know find the emerging places or find the places where don't just go and crowd into the places that everybody knows you know those places maybe oh i don't know 20 years ago those if you look at places like in the ranking of colleges which is by the way a terrible thing i mean the fact that colleges are ranked one two three four five you know in u.s news and world report or something is one of the worst things to happen to higher education probably in terms of students ever because you know these colleges are all very different and it's kind of like they are you know if you want to find what college to go to the best exercises go figure out what actual classes you would do in your first year at the school and you know what professors would teach them and you know do you like it do you not like it and they'll be very different and also things about you know what kinds of students go there and so on they'll be very different things for different colleges they're really not it's really not like you know grade a peaches or something where you can any i don't even know if it's true there either that you know any grade a and i'm making it up with i don't know what the food grading is for peaches but you know any grade a peach is like any other grade a peach i don't think that's true with colleges at all they all have different personalities and characteristics at least the the sort of name brand ones do and and and perhaps the others do as well but there's a at some level there's more of a there are these textbooks there are these classes this is what you're going to get um and by the time you're at that level it isn't mattering uh you know what the i mean for the more name-brand places there is a difference um in uh in what's being delivered which people sometimes don't recognize and uh often don't recognize and they just think oh there's this ranking but the thing that's interesting to look at is which are the schools that were that climbed the ranking over the last let's say 20 years and which of the schools that are right now ranked down at i don't know some much lower number but they seem to be sort of climbing the rankings those might be ones to look at um although i'm not necessarily endorsing the rankings in general but i think it's also these smaller places these programs that are just like it's a new and interesting program et cetera et cetera et cetera those are the things to do to enter kind of to and many of those things are kind of fast tracks to uh sort of the the best possible place you can get to they're just people haven't crowded into them yet um they haven't been discovered yet in 10 years they will have been discovered and they'll be industrial like the other places but they haven't yet and there's always that opportunity let's see it's a question from joe how much of my work in in our business is exploration of opportunity versus management do i have a set ratio rules of thumb to regulate between the two um i'm pretty lucky in that i have built an organization where it has enough structure that the traditional quotes management is not something that i probably spend that much time on it depends what you mean by that um i okay so you know i have a pretty structured life and i'm doing kind of product strategy designing products things like that i spend whole probably two-thirds of my sort of day job time doing those kinds of things sometimes the sort of general i would say i spend more of my time on strategy than on management i mean management is is things like oh there's this set of people there's this set of things to do how do we plug these things together i do spend some time on that maybe it's a consequence of the fact that i've been doing this stuff for a really long time that most of those decisions are not super hard to make i mean in other words it's like uh and and you know with i tend to dwell on the things that are really hard that have to do with product design and so on and uh these things where it's like should we get this person to do this how should we structure this group et cetera et cetera et cetera i'm sure i can spend an infinite amount of time thinking about that perhaps it's just because i've gotten pretty experienced that i don't end up spending that much time on those things i mean it helps two things help we have a terrific team of people at the company who in many cases have been working with me for a long time and it's kind of rather easy to work with them and say how should we do this what should we do with that and fit things together um and plus i've just been doing it a long time and so some things where i might agonize is this going to work is that not going to work you know often like like right now we're doing some reorganization of some groups at the company and so you know i'm doing various discussions about that and it's like we think about it we think about it and then you know in five minutes ten minutes whatever it is it's like uh you know we'll be talking about it and people say oh yeah that's a good idea let's put this person in this place and you know do this with that and and so on and we kind of we know enough we're experienced enough to know that's probably going to work it's a good idea we didn't have that idea initially we had to brainstorm it a bit to get to that idea but um you know that idea is going to work and we're not like agonizing of thinking about this and that for a long time now now actually implementing some of these things so there's a different issue with management which is management you know companies are made of people and people always do crazy things i mean i've been managing people what is it now for well how long probably 44 years maybe a little bit longer than that one way or another including sort of well i used to i used to manage too much stuff when i was a kid too but so i've been doing a long time and you know you might have thought after all these years you've seen every possible crazy pathological thing of people doing things that are don't make any sense for them don't make any sense for the company etc etc etc i saw a few of those just in the last week actually that i had never seen before just new different weird sort of weird kinds of situations and there's a certain thing that you end up doing you know it's it's really worthwhile to understand people as much as you can and there's a certain function that you end up doing which is what i would call talking people off ledges i mean basically things will happen and people will be like oh my gosh i can't handle this this is terrible you know i'm i'm doing all these things and and i don't you know i'm not doing what i want to be doing i'm doing this i'm doing that this is you know the the the sky is falling in et cetera et cetera et cetera and uh you know there is a certain you know i i suppose a small amount of my time these days thankfully uh it's varied a bit over time is spent you know trying to have people think better about the things that they're trying to do and how what they're doing fits in and also understand you know for them in the role that they're in the sky seems like it's falling in okay why is that is that because they're in the wrong role is that because other things that set up around them are just making the sky fall in is this just you know what is it what's actually happening and to try and get people to the point where they realize you know sometimes people will get in this sort of situation where they're just really really convinced about something you know they're really really sure that they're failing at their job or whatever else so they're really sure about this or that and and looked at from the outside you can plainly see this is not the case and so then the question is how do you actually communicate that and it can take sometimes a while i mean you can have conversations that last hours sometimes and you know in the end i mean i've had a great many successes over the years of things where things sort of got out of whack and it was like oh my gosh this is terrible and you sort of talk it through and eventually people are like oh okay that's fine and and then everything's fine for for 20 years you know it's um it's not one of these things there are also cases where you'll find a situation with people and i'm afraid this is another sort of principle about management that i've noticed by the time you end up doing repeating you know somebody has a sort of a a a complicated meltdownish thing and it happens once and you know they some ledge they ended up going out on that ledge you talk them back off that ledge and then it's all plain sailing after that that's okay if there's a ledge situation every two months it will never work eventually they'll jump off the ledge or they'll you know things will fail it doesn't you know by the time it's that kind of squeaky it never works even though you say to yourself sometimes i say to myself oh it's a great person they're in this great thing and well yes these things keep on going wrong but uh or or another thing like that is people where there's just a lot of strife around them in the organization i mean you know where where people are you know having fights with each other and etc not physical but but uh some version of you know email fights with each other or whatever else and there are people who are just rather hot-headed and they'll get very you know vigorous in their arguments and that's fine uh at least in our in our organization we've we have both the um uh the loud and the not loud uh folk and i think people have managed to find ways to sort of interact with each other but you know that's okay but it's when it's really what amounts to sort of political strife within the organization uh when that happens uh and people are the source of that and people are like um you can pretty much guarantee that that will fail eventually it might take six months it might take a year but it will eventually fail at least in our kind of organization i mean there are other organizations where the sort of the whole management structure is based on internal politics where i'm sure it's different um let's see oh boy um oh i'm uh well satirist comments on one issue keeping back innovation in traditional big indices in their r d is the difficulty of adopting sort of new paradigms what's my view i don't think that's quite the thing you know a company a big company particularly is built as a machine for doing some particular commercial activity and it's got all these pieces of machinery in it that all move in that direction and it's built all these checks and balances and controls and all this kind of thing to help it commercially be successful in that particular direction so then something else comes along that changes the business model and you say hey this you know company um you know there's this thing over here that's really cool and that's going to be the future why don't you go chase it well many companies and i've seen this even in my own company at different times many companies will just be thank you very much we've got this machine it works well it's it's managed by people who know how to manage it it's uh sort of it has low risk it's being successful we'll just stick to our machine if you say well there's this thing over here that's really really good to chase they're like we can't chase that we just don't have the apparatus to chase it we have a machine that's been built for this special purpose purpose so to speak now you know how do you get around that it's difficult you know in my company uh episodically we have kind of a special projects group in fact i think i'm about to recreate our special projects group and what happens to special projects why does the special projects group not last it's a good answer the special projects group doesn't last because the special projects they do become general projects in the sense that oh i don't know something like our wolf and alpha product started in a special projects group but after it grew up it became a mainstream product and so the people who are in that special projects group mostly just went into doing that mainstream product in fact i've had a very hard time maintaining a pure special projects group where people recycle through special projects rather than their project was successful now it's becoming a mainstream thing so then they get you know into that sort of industrial machine that's doing that mainstream thing rather than recycling back onto the next special project doesn't help that each special project is a project unto itself with rather different characteristics and so the people who might be suitable for special project number one are different from the people for number two and number three and so on but right now i have a bunch of new sort of innovative projects that are just starting and i think i think actually in the next couple of days i'm going to realize i got to bite the bullets and restart our special projects group the good news is all of the internal email aliases and and um uh you know categorizations in our hr system and so on they're all there from the previous time we had a special projects group they've just um uh kind of atrophied because we haven't had one for a few years um but in any case i think that that's you know managing special projects is a complicated thing some big companies have sort of an innovation group that essentially does that and they manage them with more or less success i mean one of the frustrations with innovation groups at big companies is they bring in a project they work with some outside organization everything goes great but then you think oh you know we're being you know we're integrated with the innovation group big company x you say that's great that means we're integrated with big company x o contraire the innovation group then has the problem of selling those innovations to the main part of the company and that can be super difficult and certainly there are there are historical examples xerox park being a good example where fantastic things happened in the innovation organization but they just couldn't be fed to the main organization and it's a challenging thing and for many companies the industrial machine that deals with a product line is such that basically it has machinery that makes sense if that product line is making a billion dollars a year but as soon as you say well let's throw it at this embryonic product line that's going to make five million dollars a year it's like well it's got these layers of bureaucracy and this and that and the other and a five million dollar a year thing is guaranteed to be totally unprofitable so it's hard for it to kind of uh grow because you can't get through that stage because you've got all this machinery that you're trying to use that you're going to apply to this thing that's much too small to have it applied and so it can never get it can never break through the period when it's going to sort of use machinery but not really need the machinery so that's one of the challenges for big companies and and often what happens in the reality of the modern world is it's much more efficient for big companies to just sort of wait for smaller companies to innovate and do things and then just buy the company and just sort of try to integrate it how that integration works that's another huge challenge and often that integration is is surprisingly disappointing and i certainly know many people who've had companies that they've sold to large tech companies and usually the story is rather unhappy usually the story is um and often those acquisitions if the small company has been successful in doing something you know pragmatically those acquisitions are often essentially buying mailing lists more so than they are buying technology and know-how and so on although that that differs in different cases um let's see uh luis asks does our company make profit out of sales of of software does it have other sources of revenue interesting question um the we actually have a fairly diverse collection of things but they're all around the same technology basically um the we sell just straight prepackaged software we sell site licenses which are a slightly different kind of thing because they tend to be very long-term you know they tend to take a long time to sell and then they tend to be renewed year after year forever and ever and they're a little bit of a different character of thing they're more of a they're a little bit more of a partnership with the organization than they are just as straight bias off the shelf and and use it um we also end up getting used in a bunch of oem situations where we are where our system is embedded within some larger system you know whether that's siri or whether it's some other kind of product or whatever else that's a different yet a different kind of business relationship we also have a consulting organization where it's kind of uh we have actually two two consulting organizations one for basically building uh things where they're well specified directly around our products and the other is a solutions team that is dealing with things where customer has some bigger sort of strategically defined objective and it's a question of actually filling that out with a whole strategic plan and and then building the actual software around it um the uh those are our those are i would say our main sources of revenue i mean there's some smaller pieces from other kinds well and some of the things we also have consumer type things like things like wolfman alpha pro which is you know a few dollars a month kind of thing versus uh large-scale software licensing which is which is very different amounts of money um i would say that we are continually looking at how can we kind of um sort of innovate in the way that we you know the fundamental thing we want to do is get our technology used by as many people as possible because we think it's good for the world and it's satisfying and uh just generally a good thing but also make the money to be able to go on developing the technology in a kind of unfettered way where we can really innovate as well as possible and we've been lucky enough to be you know a private company that's been profitable every year for 33 years now um and uh but you know we tend to plow most of those profits back into uh doing more technology development more innovation and so on um and that's been something that sort of i've been uh sort of really a personal decision to do that and and but that's what we've been doing all this time and i think the uh the question of what's the best way to build an ecosystem where you can do sort of unfettered innovation and where you deliver your products to as many people as possible what's the right place to do that and for example there's the whole issue of you know what's free what's not free what's kind of uh sort of open source what's not i have to say just today in fact just a couple of hours ago i was super annoyed to see uh yet another supposedly open source thing saying oh actually we're going to charge people for this and it's like come on guys you know don't make the claim of being you know sort of opener than thou and freer than thou and then a few years later just say well actually we're going to charge people a lot of money to use this thing this is a cheat and it's something that i have to say i get sort of annoyed by because people it happens less nowadays but people saying oh your software isn't open source you know that's terrible you should be consider yourselves devil's iconic type thing and it's like no you know we're trying to be very straightforward and transparent about what we're doing how this works you know you have a thing you pay this for it you don't pay for it depending on what you're doing it's very straightforward and there's no kind of you know it's free it's free it's free it's wonderful we're so good and then oh whoops actually this thing you've been using and that's now integrated into your uh into your company actually we're gonna come and and you know charge you a bunch of money for that i think it's a cheat and um i think that uh uh i you know i'm i'm sort of disappointed that you hear as much kind of um uh uh sort of ideological it's so wonderful these things are so free until they're not um you know it's it's disappointing that people make that sort of uh it's happening decreasingly i would say that peaked maybe three four years ago and it's sort of decaying partly because of these cheats being pulled um and uh it's it's something where um i sort of pride ourselves on the fact that we've been really consistent in what we do for over the course of well 33 years or so now of you know these are the mechanisms this is what you know if you use this thing you pay this you don't pay this this is how it works it's not a kind of bait and switch type situation but um it's something where i'm always interested in is there another way that is that i think is sustainable to sort of factor things differently in terms of how do we build this this system that allows us to um uh to create things get as many people to use them as possible and uh be able to continue innovating somebody stefan asks here um do we get takeover proposals from from big companies of course we do and um uh and have done for years and years and years and years and years and years and years but it's like look i do what i do because i like to do it and i think we i hope we are sort of doing things that are good for the world and that we can feel fulfilled sort of delivering to the world and the best way i know to do that is the way we're doing it right now and uh it's just like um uh you know the optimization of oh let's just you know sell the company to big company x and you know we can make a bunch of money from doing that and then it'll sort of gradually get ground up by the by the borg so to speak um and it's not to say i mean you know that there are big companies big in the tech industry that do lots of good things um and that's it's just a different model you know we have done the very bizarre thing of doing very intense innovation for 35 years and that's very very very unusual and it's been possible because we've kind of set up the ecosystem around what we're doing to be one where that can be done and it's something where i personally have found that process very fulfilling i think a lot of people work at our company who also find that process fulfilling and you know that's kind of the thing that i hope for for you know ever to come so to speak um we'll be able to do with our company and we we actually work with lots of big tech companies and they license lots of stuff from us and so on and while it is uh you know saying oh we'll just sell you the company is you know we could make much more money that way i think it is better for everybody including big tech companies to do these deals where we are um uh we're licensing technology where we're saying we're gonna go on innovating you know if you take a company that has been quite innovative and you buy it and you put it inside the big industrial machine you will end up with something typically that isn't very innovative anymore we're actually we've got a better deal on offer so to speak which is sort of license our stuff be able to use it and we'll keep innovating we'll keep providing that sort of engine that is what you get by licensing our stuff and that's kind of the model that we that we have for that um and i need to go very soon here but um uh it's a question about what other companies are out doing uh consistent good independent work using a similar model to ours oh boy i mean one of the things in the tech industry is that the vast majority of companies have lots of investors and that creates a dynamic that we have not had of sort of a desire for certain kinds of results that are not about sort of producing the best stuff they're more about uh delivering financial results and and so that tends to to make that not work as well um there's certainly companies that i think are doing all sorts of interesting things um but in terms of companies that have been able to stay kind of private and innovative as as we have i mean they're also companies that are private that are in the tech industry that are actually rather uninnovative and where they did one thing and they're kind of just it's it's like they're it's not an exciting business but it's a lucrative business so to speak i think we're we're a pretty unusual case i'd be interested i i'm sure i'd i'd have um uh i'm sure i'd enjoy the ceos of whatever companies have similar models and there's certainly some that are sort of partially similar and and i do enjoy um those those ceos uh okay couple of uh more and then i should wrap up here um from ic do our employees get motivated when they see the result of people using our technologies i think so some do some do more than others um it's uh you know it's funny because i um you know people are motivated in different ways some people just like really making the best thing they can make some people like seeing that what they've made has an effect i would say that um you know i i'd like to think so i think it's sort of good all around and um i i think in the aggregate yes absolutely i mean in in um but i would say that i mean i kind of feel like for both our employees and you know their families and people that have friends and so on i think it's uh i think it's really nice for people to be able to to say this thing that i worked so hard on really has this effect in the world um and even in cases where people are like oh my gosh you know they've been working so hard for months on this thing and then it comes out and everybody and their friends can you know see this is the thing this person was working so hard on i think that's pretty nice and i think that dynamic um does really work that way i would say something that i noticed years ago you know we have a technology conference uh with our users and so on and i think our employees get a real kick out of being particularly when it's in person with our users and you know they'll give a talk about the things they've been working really hard on and there'll be a whole bunch of people who come up afterwards and they're all asking all these questions they're all very enthusiastic that's a very nice positive piece of feedback and i would say that that sometimes in the long distance past we would like there'd be academic conferences about things related to things we were doing r d on and our uh r d employees would submit papers and so on and that was a just a horrible very different process of oh you know your paper doesn't refer to so-and-so who's on the program committee so we're not going to have your paper type thing and it's like very demotivating and so at some point i sort of said let's just not do this you know we are getting fantastic feedback from people who are users of our technology who are very engaged with what we're doing and can give really useful feedback on things and they're just very positive about things and that is something that makes our employees feel good about the things they're doing as as they should and that's what we should concentrate on rather than trying to say get the academics to give us uh you know i mean not not that there are plenty of users of ours who are academics and uh i'm saying kind of the this sort of official academic conference of field x y z um that has just a different different rhythm to it um all right there's a question from melon burst this will be the last one i'll do today about um uh our cryptocurrency efforts uh commenting will we go beyond making an oracle system um and will we leverage our own computable data to create our own cryptocurrency so the thing that is sort of i think very interesting direction with cryptocurrencies or blockchain in general is the whole notion of computational contracts and the notion of turning what would otherwise be a legal contract about things in the world into something computational we do indeed have lots of computable data and we also have a language which does goes a long way towards being able to actually write a contract in our language so to speak including you know the machine learning classifier that decides whether this or that is a good thing or you know is is the right grade of of of this of this thing or whatever else by by some image process you know and vision machine vision or some such other thing whatever it is we we have really good raw material to make essentially computational contracts for things and so that i think is is one of our interesting uh opportunities we've been working with lots of blockchains most of the top blockchains um on integrating those blockchains into wolfram language that has a lot of value because our language is used by r d people which means that those blockchains get used by r d people our language is also used a lot by quant finance people which means those people can then interact with these blockchains so that's a really useful thing and there's a whole sort of educational ecosystem around our language so that's really useful but that's a at a much more pragmatic level in terms of integrating with with blockchains and cryptocurrencies i think in terms of so that sort of basic level integrated into the language and be able to let users of our language do things people who use those blockchains be able to use our language to sort of build things including particularly computational contracts now in terms of the operation of blockchains themselves i hadn't thought that we had much to contribute to that um until things happened with our physics project and i realized that there is a possibility that some of the things that we developed in our physics project will allow one to have sort of another generation of distributed blockchain and that's something that we've been thinking about what i realized is to really understand how that works i need a theory of economics and so i've been kind of held up on that by a basic science question of let me understand how economics actually works what value really is in economics and then uh that plays into this rather different rethinking of how one might build a kind of distributed blockchain but that's something for the future i would say more recently uh the whole world of nfts which is kind of a first story of computational contracts is i think there's a lot of opportunity there a lot of very interesting things that can be done we are in the process of standing up a little spin-off company that has to do with delivering nfts at a more consumer level um it's a something a little different from what we usually do although what you realize very quickly is oh you're you're minting nfts to your live minting nfts to represent accomplishments in people's lives and so on well that becomes more real if you can actually guarantee that the accomplishment happened and that means you have to have all sorts of uh all sorts of kind of things about the world and data feeds and machine learning and all these kinds of things and then you have to start worrying about what are the computational contracts look like about what happens to the nft if the nft is a certification kind of thing you know what happens to that when it's sold on a secondary market what is the actual contract and so on and so very quickly what we're realizing is that what started as a cute little consumer idea is turning into something which makes pretty deep use of our technology stack and a bunch of the things that we do with computable data and our computational language and all those kinds of things but that's a a coming attraction that we're actually right now people if people are interested they should let us know we are trying to put together the kind of initial uh management team and so on for that um uh for that effort and it's going to be sort of a mixture of consumer kinds of things uh some with a lot of ux and some kind of algorithmic thinking uh that is kind of new style algorithmic thinking that uh well it's inventing new things which is kind of what we what we end up doing um and i suppose the the thing that for us about doing a project like this is there is a way to do this project that is purely oh i don't know i could say unkindly fluffy consumer type thing as in it's just very simple you know level layer but you know what will happen as we do this is we'll actually solve the hard problems and um uh we'll do our best to solve the hard problems and that's something that will end up in meshing with our whole technology stack and possibly even with science that we've done and so on and so on and so on there's a remarkable habit of discovering that the hammers we have actually do do things for the nails that we uh choose to to pursue and that's partly because those nails that look more attractive to us are ones that we understand better because of the hammers we've built so to speak it's also the case that uh given sort of any particular nail there is often sort of a to do it really well requires sort of pushing the frontiers of what's possible in the sort of science and technology and uh we are in a position to do that and so we do whereas other people who are not able to do that will say well we can do something without having to solve those hard problems so let's do that something and and sometimes from a pure commercial you know make a quick buck point of view it's a better thing to do that don't solve the hard problems approach for us it's much more interesting to actually solve the hard problems and much more satisfying i think in the even at a purely financial level in the end it builds a much stronger kind of thing in the long term although the long term may be very long term and it might be that you'll be like oh if we'd only built the simple thing somebody would have bought it from us for a zillion dollars but you know we're we're laboring building this very very complicated long-term thing i just find that more satisfying and sort of a personal choice to do that even though that might not be the best sort of pure business proposition so that's um that's probably all i all i have time for here today but um thank you for a lot of interesting questions and um um it's uh you guys get me to talk about things that i don't usually talk about and um for me that's really interesting because when i talk about them i start to think them through and understand them and that's that's really useful for me so well thanks very much and uh see you again another time

Channel: Wolfram

Views: 2,133

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: 2r0-QejJeRc

Length: 93min 35sec (5615 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021