Stephen Wolfram | The At Home CEO

Stephen Wolfram is the founder and CEO of the software company Wolfram Research. What happens when you track every email, every keystroke, every mouse movement and every project for 30 years? Today we find out the productivity strategies, personal infrastructure and tracking analytics from the man behind Wolfram Language and Wolfram Alpha - the answer engine which powers Siri & Alexa. Extra Stuff: Wolfram Alpha - https://www.wolframalpha.com/ Follow Stephen on Twitter - https://twitter.com/stephen_wolfram Seeking The Productive Life - https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-productive-life-some-details-of-my-personal-infrastructure/ Stephen's Personal Analytics - https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/ Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Hello friends, welcome back to the Modern Wisdom Podcast. My guest today is Stephen Wolfram. Stephen is the founder and CEO of the software company Wolfram Research. He is the mind behind Wolfram Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha Answer Engine. This might sound like hyper nerd speak that you don't ever interact with, but Wolfram Alpha actually forms the basis for the answer engine behind Siri and Alexa. So his work is probably a lot closer to your life than you give it credit for. Now, just as interesting as what Stephen does is how he does it. He's tracked every email that he's sent over the last 30 years,

• 0:42Chris Williamson?

  also tracked every mouse movement, every keystroke, and has recorded all of these down using computer software that his company has built himself. His approach to personal productivity and analytics is probably without match on the planet. And I'm so excited to get to present this fascinating insight into the life of an incredibly influential figure. Hopefully you'll enjoy it as much as I did. There is some cool experiments that you can do yourself on the Wolfram Alpha website. That will be linked in the show notes below. If you enjoy this episode, please share it with a friend. It makes me incredibly happy.

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• 2:53Chris Williamson?

  But for now, please welcome the very wise Stephen Wolfram.

• 3:13Chris Williamson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined today by Stephen Wolfram. Stephen, welcome to the show.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 3:21Chris Williamson?

  I am particularly excited to speak to you today. One of your blog posts that was released earlier this year, Seeking the Productive Life, was shared around in a number of different group chats. And when that happens, when it appears in a few different spheres of awareness, I think it's usually a pretty good, pretty good idea that it's, it's going to be something interesting. So I wanted to talk to you today about your approach to productivity and personal analytics before we actually get into what it is that you do. The, the work you do is, is interesting, but the way that you do it is almost as fascinating to me, which is.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  I like to think it's interesting. I've been doing it for, for decades, so it better be interesting. Or I'm, or I'm, should be embarrassed, but yes. But yeah, you know, the main thing is that I like to do the things I like to do. And I like to not be distracted by things I don't need to be distracted by. And so I tend to build all these systems to try to automate as much as possible, to try to, you know, be as concentrated as I can and actually doing the work I want to do. And so I've, I've, you know, I would say the, the number one tool, which is not for everybody that I've built to get my work done, is I built a company over the last 32 years that has, you know, 800 people in it. Then it's sort of.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Intended to be a machine for taking ideas that I have and turning them into real things. And so that, but one of the things that is probably more sort of generalizable is one of the ways that I tend to work is I'm, you know, and any given day I'm trying to create things. I'm trying to have ideas and I'm trying to turn them into real things. And I tend to follow this sort of approach of spending a lot of my time doing what I tend to call thinking in public. Which means, you know, you're working with a team of people. And some people would imagine that, you know, when you're gonna go figure out what to do. You go off on your own, you hide away, you figure out what to do.

• 5:23Speaker 03

  This is not what I tend to do. What I tend to do is it's like I'm doing some meeting with the people who are involved. And that's the actual time when we figure out what we're gonna do. It's not something which is happening sort of behind the scenes. And I found that, you know, I have been a remote CEO for 29 years now, which is another bizarre feature. So most of my, you know, interaction with people is screen sharing plus audio. I usually avoid video. So like the experience we're having right now is unusual for me. I'm, I'm usually a, you know, I've got audio.

• 5:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  I'm, you know, sharing the thing that we're both talking about.

• 6:03Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  But I'm not seeing the, the, the people. It's, and then, you know, I, what I like to do is to try and, you know, we're trying to figure something out like today. There were several different meetings that I had about different kinds of things. And we figured out some things. And that's always, you know, it's very satisfying and, you know, one has to have a, you know, what I'm typically doing is I'm typing into one of our notebook documents. And trying to, you know, set out what it is we figured out and so on. And then notes get taken and so on. And then it gets turned into something where something real can happen from it.

• 6:41Chris Williamson?

  I understand.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  You know, I like that it's a, I also tend to, maybe it's an eccentricity, but it's turned out to be pretty interesting. We've publicly livestreamed a lot of these internal meetings that we've had. So in the last year, we've probably livestreamed 300 hours of these things. And that's a fascinating dynamic, because I originally started doing it just because I thought these meetings were interesting. They range from very intellectual stuff to very gritty stuff about software engineering. I just think these are interesting. And you know, why not have other people be able to sort of share the fun. But it's turned out, we've ended up with, you know, people join the live chat and so on. And we get a lot of sophisticated users of our products and a lot of other people who are experts in

• 7:24Speaker 03

  various kinds of things. And we get real time feedback, which is pretty interesting.

• 7:28Chris Williamson?

  So you're crowdsourcing some solutions almost?

• 7:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, there are things that have actually gone into our products that were suggested by people in the live chat. And, you know, it's a very fast process. I mean, we could go and we could say, you know, okay, we, you know, world, you know, here's what we're going to do. And a week later, people could respond to it. But actually, this is like, people are hearing what's going on.

• 7:47Chris Williamson?

  Real time.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  Typing things. And it's, it's, it's pretty interesting. And I think, you know, to me, being able to do those kinds of figuring things out, sort of live and in public, it makes perhaps egotistically, the things feel a little bit more meaningful to me.

• 8:04Chris Williamson?

  I understand.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  You know, it takes, there's a process of figuring something out. And you put a lot of effort into it. And it's kind of fun if that effort is actually archived. And I'm not, you know, I haven't, I haven't, I haven't watched any of them.

• 8:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  That I made them. But I know other people have. And, you know, and I think it's for, for me, you know, part of, you know, the things I've figured out over the last few decades about particularly about software design and language design and so on. And this is my way of kind of helping educate about those things is, you know, you can actually see this happen and you can see what the process is.

• 8:39Chris Williamson?

  There's a, there's a term that one of the guys behind the Modern Wisdom Project, George uses when he talks about evergreen content like that. So this is a discussion that I'm having with you. I've always said I would do this podcast, even if nobody tuned in, because I want to have these discussions with interesting people. However, George describes it as you at scale. And I think that that's a nice way to describe what it is that you're doing because that meeting would be going on anyway. The only difference is the only difference is the fact that now other people get to benefit. One of the things that you touched on right at the beginning there, some of the the listeners may be taken away on the whirlwind that is Wolfram and what the company does. But one of the things you touched on that

• 9:21Chris Williamson?

  I thought was really interesting was that you are a remote CEO, which means that you do the vast majority of your work at home. I think you've cited that you're in the office for hours per year as opposed to days or weeks per year. But contrasted with that, you have this quite sort of crowdsourced, very interactive working style. I think when people think about the at home CEO, if you were to say that, you kind of think of this Tony Stark kind of down in the dungeon on his own tinkering and working away, especially when you then couple it with the fact that a lot of what your company does, inasmuch as me as a good avatar for the layperson can understand, is pretty hardcore mathematics

• 10:05Chris Williamson?

  and programming. You think down in the dungeon, working on their own, and then every so often revealing something to the rest of the team. Is this a quirk of your personality? Or is this simply how you found to be the most optimal way to get stuff done?

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I've done different things at different times in my life. This is a really good way to get stuff done, although it probably depends on my personality that it works. I mean, so for example, when I was first, well, after I started the company for about 10 years, I kind of put myself on sort of pseudo sabbatical, working on a basic science project. And that project I did in a completely reclusive mode. I wasn't talking to anybody. I was just, it was me. I happened to be in a high up room rather than down in the basement. But other than that, it was pretty much caged and working on my own. And I was, you know, I, my schedule was sort of shifted around. So I was working typically from I would, I would do stuff with the company in the afternoons and then

• 11:09Speaker 03

  I would go off and, and start working on my basic science project. Sort of, I'd go off and do things I, during the time when I did the basic science project, I had some kids and, you know, I was doing things with the kids for a while. And then I would go and starting at like eight or nine in the evening, work until six in the morning, doing basic science, basically on my own. And it was a, you know, that was a definitely a tenacity testing process to go do that for a decade, basically. And, you know, I got it finished. I produced this book called New Kind of Science, which has had all kinds of consequences in the world. But it was, you know, it was definitely

• 11:49Speaker 03

  a pretty intense way to work. So I changed the way I worked after that and decided that I would try doing this much more, you know, with with my internal group, kind of this thinking in public type mode. And it's great. Now, it depends on the fact that you have people that you're working with where there's sort of, I don't know whether it's good chemistry, but where people kind of know what to expect. And, you know, it's probably, it's probably, I don't know, one could probably figure it out. I should know the analytics of this from my, from my live streams, but I'm guessing there's probably 150 people who sort of make an appearance in some live stream or another. So that's kind of the, out of maybe 800 people in the company. So that's probably the, you know, that's the set of people where they kind of are in the

• 12:33Speaker 03

  right flow to be able to be involved in these kinds of live stream type meetings.

• 12:38Chris Williamson?

  It's, it's interesting that you say that they need to know what to expect from you and kind of you do vice versa. If you were, I think a lot of people, I've just come off a podcast with Robert Greene and we're talking about inter-office politics and people having to wear masks and all sorts of things like that. Most people's jobs are a combination of the solo warrior, perhaps, cubicle work, typical knowledge work, emails backwards and forwards, and then some meetings, some collaborative meetings. And for the meetings, a lot of people have to play the role of whatever it is, the boss, the subordinate, the this, the that, the other. I imagine if you were having to play a role to 150 people over a live

• 13:19Chris Williamson?

  stream for hours and hours every day, it would be exhausting. So I completely understand what you mean, that you're able to have sort of brain to mouth to screen with as little friction as possible. And I think that actually probably quite nicely leads us on to your approach to productivity overall, because having done As sophisticated an assessment as I can of the most sophisticated approach to productivity that I've seen. Lack of friction kind of appears to be one of the, one of the things that, that's a meta narrative about it. So would you

• 13:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's right.

• 13:56Chris Williamson?

  Would you be able to just explain your, your approach to your personal infrastructure?

• 14:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, okay. So, but I mean, just to say one more thing about, about what you were just referring to, because I think it's interesting. I mean, the, the fact is, you know, my company is sort of constructed to be a direct communication kind of place. So, you know, we've, another feature that makes the remote CEOing thing less weird or even more weird is that, you know, I set this example, you know, nearly thirty years ago of being a remote CEO. So that means that the majority of people who work at my company work remotely.

• 14:31Chris Williamson?

  I was good. Are they all at home as well? Or in their own office or whatever?

• 14:34Speaker 03

  All, all kinds of random places. I don't even know where they are. I mean, occasionally there'll be some interesting things. Somebody will say, well, there's a, you know, there's a volcano erupting that you can see.

• 14:43Chris Williamson?

  Next to a shark or something like that.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. And it's, it's some, and then you find out where they are, which I don't typically pay that much attention to.

• 14:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  And, you know, but I think that's a, the, the fact that one can develop a company culture where people are able to actually say what they think. And, you know, on these live streams, they're very unvarnished. And so people will be, you know, saying sometimes people will get quite passionate about things and, you know,

• 15:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but they do.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  They'll attack me and tell me I'm a total idiot and so on. And it's, it's some, but this is the way that I like to work because I found, you know, it turns out, you can have the whole sort of posturing of, that often happens in many kinds of business settings, but it's like a big waste of time. And so long as you can, the, yeah, right. I mean, so. So long as you can handle directness, directness is much more efficient. And and also it helps people, I think, from a management point of view, you know, knowing where they stand, you know, if you say it's good, they actually Believe you. think you mean it's good. And because you'll say it's bad if it's bad.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  But, you know, in in terms of my my personal mode of of of doing things, I I mean, you know, one thing is the question of what projects I do, because that's sort of the starting point of how one is productive. I mean, I've been lucky enough that I've basically been able to build a technology stack for for three decades. And much of what I do is something that will fit into that technology stack. There are things that, you know, fortunately, it's a broad range of things. It's a broad range of kinds of different intellectual areas and so on. But when I imagine, oh, I'll do something, you know, completely different. I'll I'll, you know, write a play or something. Okay, if I did that, I have no idea, you know, that would be a big Need a new system.

• 16:34Speaker 03

  I have no idea what to do with it. So, you know, first step is kind of having a, you know, there's a set of things I like to do, and I've sort of built these matrices into which to put the individual things that I try to do, like, you know, I try and build these sort of computational intelligence systems, where I got this big kind of thing to put that into. I like doing a kind of historical, writing about historical biography and things like that. I have another kind of matrix into which I can put things like that. And I try to avoid doing things which are kind of, which don't fit into any matrix I have, because I know that the kind of cost of of getting something out, if it isn't in some some sort of matrix, is is really high. So I, you know, that's that's sort of one step.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  I understand. In terms of the in terms of kind of my my, you know, sort of daily life, I tend to be a very, you know, it's very scheduled, it has very, it's very kind of structured. And I've built, you know, all these systems for sort of prioritizing, you know, in a sense, I'm I I cheat, because I have a whole company that's that's dealing with things like prioritizing what I do. So this is not, but, you know, we've had to build these systems for, I would say, the the number one meta system is, I have all these ideas all the time, like I've had several ideas today, which which will turn into, you know, which have the potential to turn into lots of work.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  And you know, the thing I like to do is to have ideas that actually turn into something real. I find it very frustrating just to have ideas and not have anything happen with them. So, you know, it's a question of how do you build a system where you can make concrete those ideas and then actually kind of, you know, have the right project management and the right kind of flows to make that happen. But, you know, in terms of my own, you know, like I like to work. I, you know, the work I do is what I choose to do. And so I like to be doing that as much as I can. So like I also, you know, I like to get

• 18:39Speaker 03

  exercise every day. And so like, you know, the, if I'm, you know, I set up a treadmill so that I can have a, you know, type on my computer while I'm walking on the treadmill and that works fine. I also typically do meetings. I usually try to, try to get some meetings that I think are going to be a bit frustrating scheduled for the time when I'm on the treadmill.

• 19:00Chris Williamson?

  Does anyone know? Is anyone listening?

• 19:03Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 19:04Chris Williamson?

  Can they hear you like plodding away and they think that's a signal that Stephen thought this was going to be a shit meeting. But if there's anyone, if anyone of Stephen's executives are listening and you hear him plodding away on the thing, that's because he thought it was going to be a boring meeting.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  Well, it's not so much boring. It's usually frustrating. It's usually like something is going wrong.

• 19:21Chris Williamson?

  You need to, you need to get a little bit of energy out.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, right. Because it's like, like, you know, why aren't we managing to do this? What's going on? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then it's like, okay, I can increase by half a mile an hour.

• 19:33Chris Williamson?

  [laughing]

• 19:34Speaker 03

  That's a, that's a much better way to manage my, my frustration than it would be to rattle at people.

• 19:41Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. I absolutely, I absolutely love it. I think if you were, if you were a layperson and you were to think, well, I'm the sort of person who likes to work. I want to maximize my ability to do the work that I like to do. Not only does it feel like what I'm going to guess is close to your highest calling in life, but also something that's enjoyable as well.

• 20:02Chris Williamson?

  You would make it as easy as possible to do as much of that as possible, as as high a velocity as possible with as little waste. And reading through the blog post, which will be linked in the show notes below for the listeners who want to check it out. And I suggest that you do because it is a it's a real monster. But it really is. The particular setup that you have, which is, like you say, these matrices, as you've described them, which are kind of these systems, I guess, people would in more sort of common, common terminology, where you have a desk which moves from sitting to standing very easily at the touch of a button. You've optimized the ergonomics. I think I'm right in saying

• 20:44Chris Williamson?

  that you're left handed and you've realized that you can you use a older style roller mouse, right? Rather than a track pad.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  Right. Usually when I'm at my desk, yes, because I found that that's somewhat faster. I mean, you know, the point is because I record all this personal analytics about myself, most of it, you know, for the last 30 years, I've recorded tons of things like, well, obviously all the emails I send and receive. And then probably for the last 20 years, I think I've recorded every keystroke I type. And I record kind of an image of the screen that I've that I've in front of me and things like this. And most of the time, I don't look at any of this. Right? Most of the time, it just goes, it just

• 21:20Chris Williamson?

  Appears in a blog post in at the start of the year.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, right. Well, right. It's, you know, and occasionally I'll look at it. But you know, something like, is it faster for me to use a left handed mouse or a track pad? I can answer that question because just go look at the data and it takes me, you know, probably 15 minutes to go answer that question because I've got different computers with different setups. And I just can see how fast things work.

• 21:41Chris Williamson?

  Can compare the two. Yeah, I think I'm right in saying that you've done a third of a million emails since 1989 and more than 100 million keystrokes.

• 21:52Speaker 03

  No, no, no, much more than that. I've done, um, let's see, I get a thing that shows me every month. So I've sent uh eight hundred and fifty thousand emails.

• 22:01Chris Williamson?

  Ah, this blog post from two thousand twelve.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  Yes, right, right. Yes, yes, yes.

• 22:06Chris Williamson?

  You've really stepped it up. You've done half a million in the last, in the last.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, that's right. It's, it's, no, in fact, the, the number of emails that I've, uh, that I receive has gone up. The number that I send has gone up.

• 22:17Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  Um, it's, uh, yeah, I mean, that's another, you know, another feature of at least my life is you need to learn to make decisions quickly. Otherwise you just go totally bonkers. So, you know, I'm getting hundreds of emails every day and, you know, uh, it's great when one of them is spam. It's pretty rare that it's spam because that's just a quick delete. Um, but, you know, most of the time they're emails that I sort of should get in some sense. And a lot of the time they're things which are some kind of a decision like, do we do this? Do we do that? Whatever. And, you know, one of the things I've tried to train myself to do is just make these decisions quickly. And it, you know, uh, experience helps a lot. I mean, one of the challenges in, um, in the business that I'm in, so to speak, is what do you delegate?

• 23:02Speaker 03

  This is what you just do yourself. And, you know, there's things where I just know pretty much what to do. It's going to take me 10 minutes to do it. I could delegate it, but it's going to take somebody a week to try and figure out what to do. And there's a chance that they won't do the right thing. And so what I tend to do, my solution to this is that I'll tend to do this kind of, uh, thinking in public. Uh, way of, of, you know, doing it. I'll say, yes, I'll do this, but you're going to watch what I do. And so that way you learn, you know, how to do it for the next time.

• 23:31Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  Um, and, uh, you know, that, that works pretty well. And it's, it's something, um, uh, also for me, you know, in, in, uh, you know, running a software company or something, you might think that the CEO of a software company of our size would never like, look at the underlying, you know, silver code or whatever else. But the fact is, you know, from time to time, it's just easier for me to just look at it. And it also, you know, the dynamic. With the team, for example, tends to be, you know, you might think, oh, my gosh, that's totally traumatic to have the CEO go look at something that some junior person was supposed to work on.

• 24:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  And, you know, and I suppose sometimes it is traumatic if something really stupid was done, but that's the rare case.

• 24:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  It's usually it was actually hard and the main thing that is communicated is the CEO cares about what this junior person does and isn't totally clueless about what's involved in doing it. And that's a, you know, that's a positive message, so to speak. And I think this, this, you know, this theory that you should, I mean, I, I tend to delegate whatever I can delegate. That's one of my sort of principles of, of, of leading a productive life is delegate what I can delegate, but don't delegate too much. And there are cases where one sort of instinctively delegates things. I mean, I've, over the last decade, I think I've learnt more about this, you know, there are cases where it's like, oh, this is a trivial thing. This is something about some, you know, random network issue, whatever, let me just delegate

• 24:57Speaker 03

  that. And turns out that's just a bad idea because given the experience I have and so on, I can solve it in 10 minutes.

• 25:05Chris Williamson?

  Are there any metrics that you use for that or is it just experience? You said you've stepped it up recently.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just experience. And I think, you know, one of the things that's complicated is because, you know, I've been in like the software business and so on for a disgusting number of decades now, you know, I just know a lot of stuff and it's, it's, you know, and it's, and I've gotten better at problem solving and debugging things and so on over the years. And there's not really a substitute for an extra few decades of debugging experience.

• 25:31Chris Williamson?

  I couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't agree more. So to draw a little bit of an analogy between two industries that I probably guessed you never thought would, would be analogous. I run club nights, so I'm a club promoter, running nightclubs, late night industry and stuff like that. One of the things that's interesting, myself and my business partner are the two M Ds of that company and there's a couple of other partners, but there isn't a person in that company who hasn't started out as a flyer boy at the bottom. And it means that I understand the craft of every single layer all the way up. And because the company is inherently quite flat, even now, it's 800 members of staff for us, a lot of them part time, and a lot of them a lot less technical than yours.

• 26:13Chris Williamson?

  But because it's very flat and because our ascension through it required us to learn every step of the way and then model what we did and then distill that back down to the guys that are below us. If push comes to shove and I get asked a question about pretty much anything, the likely it is that I've either got a similar experience or the very experience that that person's talking about. And I think to any business owners or entrepreneurs in waiting that are listening, I think earning your craft and getting the bread and butter of your actual business understood to a high, high fidelity is a skill that's, that's super, super useful.

• 26:58Chris Williamson?

  And when you think about CEO, you think about this, especially remote CEO. If you're not the guy that's in the basement that's working and tinkering, you're the guy that rocks up in the boardroom like on his private helicopter once every whatever for like the AGM, like picks up his, picks up his dividend and then goes back to the Seychelles or something like that. I don't think either of, there's not much romance in, in, in that person. It's cool, it's cool to have a CEO, I think personally, to have one that gets stuck in like yourself.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  You know, my, my principle about companies, I've told this to many entrepreneurs is, you know, on day one, the CEO has to do everything. And gradually you understand more and more of what the company is doing. And then you can gradually, you know, hire people to whom you can delegate those things. But, you know, I know in the history of my company, everything, every area that I didn't really understand, didn't get done very well. And that's partly, it's for two reasons. One, because I wasn't there, you know, I think it's partly a question of how the motivation of people, it's like, oh, the CEO doesn't care about this, we're not going to put so much effort into it. And it's partly just, it's harder for me to kind of assess it and clean it up and so on. So I think it's a, it's a really, it's a very good principle that one should, you know, understand, you know, every aspect of,

• 28:12Speaker 03

  I mean, I have a pretty complicated company, but I try and understand, you know, every aspect of what we do. And I also know very well that if there's some part I don't understand, that's the part that's going to get messed up. I mean, the one thing that happens in a company like mine, which is a tech company, is that I've also been pushing for another thing, which is automate everything I can. So we've got only 800 employees, but the productivity that we manage to generate is a vast multiple of what you would expect from that number. Because over the years, any process that I've seen where I can say, why do we have 20 people working on this for six months? This is something that can be automated. And well, it's going to take some effort to automate it. But once it's automated, you just crank it out all the time.

• 28:57Chris Williamson?

  Scalability, right?

• 28:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. And that's been, look, that's been the story of what we've built. As a company, that's the products we've built and so on. Help other people do that too. But the customer number one for these things is ourselves.

• 29:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  And I also make a point, I build a lot of systems. Sometimes I build them myself. Sometimes I'll prototype and get other people to finish them. That are for my own personal sort of productivity of doing all these things of, I don't know. Like, for example, I have a simple system that monitors the history of my inbox. How many pending emails do I have? How many unread emails and so on? Now, you might think, well, it's just a snapshot you can get by seeing how many emails you have. But for me, it's very useful to see that time flow of to see this week it's been growing. Oh, then there's a big cliff because I actually did a bunch of work.

• 29:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  Processing these things and so on. I mean, that's a whole other dynamic.

• 29:58Chris Williamson?

  I wanted to, I did want to get on to your very special travel clock. But before I get to that, there's one thing that I noticed in the article that you talked about your personal infrastructure. You use a term that says any flat surface on your desk being a potential stagnation point for accumulating piles of stuff. And that is such a universal truth. And anyone who's listening, unless you're a neat freak, look at your desk. And if there's spare, like, flat space, there's stuff on it. Like, I'm looking at mine now. I'm looking around you and there's like a set of AirPods, like a diffuser that I've not used in months. There's like a coaster, like an external hard drive.

• 30:42Chris Williamson?

  So your actual physical infrastructure in terms of the way that you have your desk set up is to minimize that as well, right?

• 30:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, right. No, I have, you know, one of my little hacks there is I have a, you know, I have a fancy old wooden desk that I've used for, for decades. It's some, but it has these pullouts that I had put in at the front. So, you know, there's the surface of the desk, which really just has keyboard and, you know, the monitors and things like that. And I admit it has a pile of books on it right now, which it probably shouldn't have.

• 31:10Chris Williamson?

  Seem, come on.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  The, it's some, well, the problem with it, you know, this is a problem. I'm, I happen to be working on some historical thing I was doing the last couple of days. And the problem with historical, you know, research is it tends to involve physical books. And you kind of have to put them somewhere. They're either on the floor or they're on your desk. So, these ones are on my desk. The good news about these books is, once this piece is finished, which it will be in the next day or so, those books will go back, get re-shelved. Um, but, uh, you know, but what I do to, to try and sort of minimize stagnation, desk stagnation, so to speak, is I just have these pullouts in front of the desk. And so, you know, if I need to actually, well, eat my lunch, or, um, you know, sign a document, or, or look

• 31:54Speaker 03

  at a book, actually, you know, just pull them out at the front of the desk and, uh, do that. But I can't leave them pulled out, because then I couldn't.

• 32:02Chris Williamson?

  Get in the way.

• 32:03Speaker 03

  Right. And so, so it kind of forces me to, you know, after I'm done with it, you know, clear it off, push it back in.

• 32:09Chris Williamson?

  I totally get it.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  Um, it's, uh, it's, it's a, it's a nice, um, it's a, it's a little hack.

• 32:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  I mean, I, you know, I've, I've gradually accumulated a lot of these kind of little hacks over time. Um, I mean, another one that I tend to, which you alluded to is kind of, um, uh, like, you know, I have a, a sleep clock that I, that is, um, it's just a piece of code, well, from language code, that just puts up an interface that, you know, I press a button that says, I'm going to sleep now. It starts a count up timer that I can see, and it has the time and the count up timer, and then it also sends a message to, uh, uh, actually, where does it send a message to? It sends a message to some system, which anyway, ends up with a thing that lets my, uh, assistant know kind of when I went to sleep. And then if I'm in some weird time zone, they can kind of predict,

• 32:59Speaker 03

  oh, we'll be up again in, in, you know, eight hours or something.

• 33:02Chris Williamson?

  I mean, that, so it's just for me to hear that you have, obviously, I'm gonna guess, compared with some of the stuff that you guys do, that will be, that piece of code will be like two plus two equals four.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 33:16Chris Williamson?

  But the fact that you're able to create, you think, I have this particular productivity problem in my life. I also have either the personal capacity or the capacity within my company to fix this problem. It must be a little bit like being a kid in a playground sometimes for you, where you're like, oh, I like this. This is a small problem that I've encountered. And what have we been talking about so far? That when you do come up against things, we model the issue, create a solution, and then just scale. And the problem looks after itself. Because I'm going to guess 20 years ago, you will have gone to bed in some weird time zone and missed a morning meeting.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. And that's this was the fix. And now, you know, and this fix has been I haven't had to touch this fixture fix in ages. And that's the, yeah, I mean, that's the, you know, I think this is, look, maybe it's something that I get from being involved in the software industry is that there are bugs in software. And one of the things, if you're a software CEO, is when you notice a bug, you report it, you try and get it fixed. And I think I'm I follow sort of the same principle in my personal productivity and life and so on. Yeah, is there are these things that are obviously kind of goofy. And like, take the time to think about it. See if you can come up with a solution. And then, you know, execute it if possible, build a system that will keep keep doing that. I mean, you know, the same thing. It's like, I don't know, like my computer file system,

• 34:40Speaker 03

  for example, you know, I've gone through, I think, four generations, I think I worked out, maybe it's five, I forget, in the last 40 years, I've gone through some number of generations of computer file system. And in each case, it's sort of, it's optimized for the way that I'm working at that time. And people, people are remarkably bad at organizing their file systems. I discovered I, I even discovered that after I wrote this post. I mean, you know, I should, I should explain that I'd been meaning to write a post about personal productivity nerdiness for ages. But, but I actually, the reason I wrote that post when I did was that we just, we were finishing some big new version of our of language product. And my job was done, basically, because and it was just

• 35:23Speaker 03

  a matter of squashing the last bugs. And then the thing would get shipped out. And of course, you know, it's supposed to take only a week, two weeks to do that. But it was taking a lot longer. And I was like, I've got to find myself something else to do.

• 35:35Chris Williamson?

  Need something to do.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  Right. So I tap out this blog post. And I found that, you know, one of the things that happens, I'm a reasonably fast writer, and I, I really, I like writing stuff. And it helps me to think things through to actually write it. My team has noticed recently that I have this terrible tendency of converging to always write thirteen thousand word blog posts.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  And they actually have plots that show how long it takes and the fact that it it tends to converge to that number. Now that I know that.

• 36:04Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you've got the observation selection bias here. They've ruined it. Thirteen thousand, thirteen thousand and one for all of the future ones.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, it should. They should be shorter. They, you know, what what tends to happen there, it's one of these things where it's sort of again, a personal optimization. You can write shorter or, you know, it's actually faster to write a longer piece sometimes than to write a shorter one. Because I'm tend to, you know, I write them in one, it's just one, it's a single writing process. And it's not, I'm not going back and revising it and refactoring it and so on. And it's, you know, for me, it's actually, I hadn't really understood. I maybe five or 10 years ago, I started writing a lot of blog post type things. And it's a, you know, there's a lot of stuff I think about. And I was talking earlier about these kind of matrices to put things into.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  You know, back in the day, there were things that I was thinking about, but I had no place to kind of, you know, no place to put these things. Like, for example, I'm quite interested in history and philosophy and things like that. And now, you know, if I get an idea about one of these things, I'll end up writing some blog post about it. And people will find these blog posts hopefully interesting or whatever, but there'll be a, something will come out of the work that I did. It's not something where I'll just say, well, yes, I'll go do that research. And, you know, that's all very nice and I enjoy doing the research, but it feels a lot more.

• 37:26Chris Williamson?

  It doesn't produce anything.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  Upward, right.

• 37:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think one of the things, again, to try and identify some of the larger themes that we're touching on here is that there's a lot of latent potential if you don't have the right system to allow whatever it is that you're doing to emerge. Because if you didn't have the system that was sufficiently low friction for you to write the blog post, you know, whatever your, for instance, whatever your capture for articles or for tasks or for for brain dumps and then your review system, David Allen's getting things done or a two minute rule or whatever version of. The Wolfram language approach, I'm going to guess you have.

• 38:06Chris Williamson?

  If you don't have that, there is so much latent potential just sitting behind you. And I think one of the things I'm working very hard on at the moment, and listeners will have heard Thiago Forte's episode, which was a guide to digital productivity, touching on many of the things, albeit a slightly lower degree of sophistication that you do yourself. One thing I wanted to touch on to before we actually get into the nitty gritty of Wolfram itself, you have a, you've mentioned about your treadmill desk, which I think is fantastic. And everyone needs to have a look at the way that it's set up with the mouse pad and the resting thing, but you also do a outside laptop setup where you're able to actually get some vitamin D and get out in the air.

• 38:49Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 38:50Chris Williamson?

  So one of the things I wanted to ask was firstly, how do you find that affects your productivity? Because I'm going to guess that you will be tracking that as well. And then secondly, overall, your motivation to work, that must come and go, and that must actually in itself be difficult to track. It's difficult to track where your headspace is at. And are you able to explain to the listeners how being out and about, whether that refuels you, whether that actually tends to take away from your work, or how that kind of all plays in?

• 39:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, look, this whole question about being instantly on and able to be productive quickly, over the years or decades, I've gotten incredibly much better at that. So for example, after I spent that 10 years sort of being kind of reclusive and so on, I would try to set up meetings, but I wouldn't have them like back to back and things like this. And I would find out, I get into some meeting about some topic and it would be like the first 10 minutes, I'd have to be telling jokes because my brain wasn't set for the actual topic. And gradually over the years, I taught myself to basically be able to, I have meetings scheduled back to back. And after I finish one, I'm going into the next one, I'm looking at the agenda and then

• 40:09Speaker 03

  I'm on and I'm able to launch into it. Now, I also know that I have certain memory decay times. So for example, I know if there's some meeting that has complicated stuff we figured out and we didn't get it finished, I know I have about three days to get the follow on. And then I have, in three days, I'll still have the complete mental state. Uh remembered. If it's more than that, I'm gonna have to go look at the notes and things like this to be able to figure out what was happening. And you know, I think that's for me in terms of productivity, the ability to just go into some meeting and immediately be, yes, I, you know, I'm, I'm on, I'm understanding what's going on. Now, you know, in terms of a personal motivation, you know, I think by most people's standards, I'm a very, you know, even tempered kind of, um,

• 40:54Speaker 03

  however, you know, I consider myself a procrastinator. Um, I think others would probably not. But you know, there'll be things where, um, I would say that I do a rational procrastination to some extent in the following sense, that there are things like, I don't know, there'll be, like, I'm gonna give a talk somewhere, let's say, and there's the question of how long in advance do I prepare something, right? And the answer is I leave it until the absolutely last minute. Um, and why do I do that? Because for example, if I'm giving a talk somewhere and, uh, uh, you know, the more I know about the environment in which I'm giving the talk, if I've seen the audience, things like this, the more likely I am to be able to, uh, sort of do a relevant job than if I'm sitting, you know,

• 41:39Speaker 03

  two days earlier trying to prepare what I'm doing. So, so there's sort of forms of procrastination like that, that, um, I tend to, and I, you know, sometimes I will break my own rule and end up preparing something further in advance. Or another, another case is, is, um, uh, product releases. And the question is, you're working very hard to do a product release and it's like, when do you write the marketing materials for the product release? Now, sometimes, sometimes I like to write them before you even start building the product. Cause then I know what, you know, why anybody would be expected to care about this. But often, it's like you have to wait until the thing is done, basically. Because otherwise, you, you just, you know, there's, you can waste a lot of cycles, um, you know, inventing things which, oh, well, actually it turns out, once you've done it, you understood something different and so on.

• 42:24Speaker 03

  But I think in terms of this, um, you know, Personal motivation, uh, look, the, the number one, the zeroth feature of my personal motivation is the things I do are things I really like to do. Now, you know, when you build, I do big projects, you know, I do projects that last decades. And, you know, it is not the case that every micro piece inside every project is as fascinating as every other one. But, but somehow, you know, I find the, you know, I can sort of, I, I managed to average that out. You know, I think different people are tend to be at different times in their lives, actually, optimized for different lengths of projects. Like I find, you know, at our company, for example, you know, there are people who are like optimized for the 15 minute project.

• 43:06Speaker 03

  And those people, you know, if they're in technical support, for example, it's fantastic. They'll, you know, they'll come in, some issue will come in, they'll solve it in 15 minutes. Everybody will be happy, on they go. And there are other people who are optimized for, you know, the three month project. And if you feed the three month project person the 15 minute project, they'll spend the first week, you know, preparing the structure that they need to do the project. And it's all a big disaster.

• 43:31Chris Williamson?

  You could have done, you could have done it halfway before lunch. Yeah, exactly.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  So, I mean, I think, you know, I, I, it, it's one of these things where, you know, you have to be picking projects which are sort of optimized for your, uh, you know, for, for, I mean, I, I wouldn't claim that every single thing that I do every single day, like this morning, I was working on some stuff that it was like, eh, it's kind of, uh, you know, it's not, I don't consider it the most thrilling, but yet, you know, the end kind of justifies the effort spent on it. And I find that, you know, almost anything done sufficiently well is interesting. Um, and, you know, people are always saying, oh, this is such a boring area. I can't, you know, I can't study then, whether it's in science or in technology development. You know, this is just so boring. And, and it's, it's like, no, if you actually try and think about it,

• 44:18Speaker 03

  and you try and really understand what's going on, it will be interesting. And, uh, you know, that's, that's also a, a piece of self motivation that, that I use because it's what my experience has been. Um, and, you know, sometimes when you do things where you think, oh, this is kind of boring. I'm just going to skate over the top of it. Um, then it is boring.

• 44:36Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 44:36Speaker 03

  But when you actually dive in, you really try to understand what's going on. Turns out it's actually pretty interesting and, and pretty intellectually challenging or, or whatever else.

• 44:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 44:45Speaker 03

  But in terms of, in terms of walking outside, you know, I, I am, um, My wife had been saying for probably twenty years that, you know, it was a good, walking outside was, outside was a good thing. I was like, I ignore that, you know, it doesn't, it's who cares.

• 45:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  But I finally realized through some analytics that I did, to be fair.

• 45:05Chris Williamson?

  Of course, of course.

• 45:06Speaker 03

  That it was, that it was having, that when it happened that I was, you know, spending time outside, it happened that my resting heart rate was lower.

• 45:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  And that was a good sign that that was worthwhile. And I found, you know, I, there was the challenge. I had been thinking about this for like twenty years. How can I be just walking around and, you know, typing on a, on a computer? And I had thought back, oh, sometime in the nineties, I was thinking, oh, I'd use augmented reality. And I was trying to figure out how I could use a one-handed cord keyboard type thing. And so I had all kinds of fancy stuff.

• 45:39Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  And the technology wasn't really there for that. And then it was about, oh, a little bit more than a year ago, I was at some very, some fancy tech event. And actually an event, the, the scenario was just really kind of funny. It was an event that put on by Jeff Bezos. And he was, he had a photo op that involved him walking with this robotic dog. Okay. So I was, so I happened to be right, right there, you know, I think I'd just been talking to him and, and it was, you know, there he was with the photo op and the robotic dog. And the robotic dog wasn't that exciting. But what was really interesting to me was there was a guy just outside the frame with a photo op who had this walking desk and a laptop who was controlling the robotic dog.

• 46:23Chris Williamson?

  Ah.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  And that, that for me was the, the, you know, that was the winning piece of technology in this picture. And so I hadn't really internalized this idea that you could really have a walking desk where you just put a laptop on a thing with a bunch of straps that look like, you know, somebody who's selling popcorn or something.

• 46:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:39Speaker 03

  And, and you could actually type on this. And I, you know, I should have realized this twenty years earlier because it's really, it's a trivial solution. It's, you know, there's no.

• 46:48Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. It's a baby carrier. It's a baby carrier turned around to the front with a laptop on it. It's the, it's similar to the story, which actually a, an audience member, I used this in a podcast a couple of weeks ago. And one of the listeners messaged me and said that it's wrong, but it's the only useful example that I've got. And it's when the Americans wanted to try and develop a space pen that would write upside down in zero gravity and the Russians just use a pencil. It's like one of those things where you think sometimes the simplest solution, I find it so hilarious to think about you around Jeff Bezos and this robotic dog, which is obviously supposed to be like the focus, the focal point of attention. And you've been like, yeah, excuse me, just move the dog out of the way. Excuse me, mate. Just remind me what that strap around your neck's made of, please. It's carrying your, uh, it's

• 47:33Chris Williamson?

  carrying your laptop.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  I think the, you know, in, in the photo op, it looks like an autonomous dog, but the most interesting thing was the guy controlling it. I mean, it was, it was, you know, it turns out, it turns out to my surprise, it's perfectly straightforward to type on a, you know, if you've got this thing in front of you, I didn't know it would be straightforward to do that. Now, you know, what I found is I kind of have a hierarchy. In, if I'm writing something which is really all about writing, and I'm really trying to type the maximum number of words per, per minute, so to speak, then sitting at my desk is always, standing at my desk is going to be the, is always going to be the winner. You know, treadmill is a little bit less effective in terms of, you know, how fast I can type for a long period.

• 48:21Speaker 03

  And walking outside is again, a little bit less effective. But I, you know, the typical scenario for me, when I'm walking outside, I'm usually using screen sharing on, and I'm in some meeting and I'll be typing a certain amount of stuff, but I won't be, it's not like when I'm writing some blog posts, when I'm just purely typing. And I find, I mean, you know, what I tend to find is when I'm, if I'm really in gear, writing a blog post, then I can do it when I'm walking on a treadmill and even sometimes when I'm outside. But when I'm kind of still just getting warmed up. And I haven't quite, you know, got into the, into the swing of it, then I have to be sitting at my desk or it doesn't really, I, I end up.

• 49:00Chris Williamson?

  A lot of cognitive effort to do that. I mean, just avoiding walking into things. I'm going to guess you must have to curate the routes that you actually walk to ensure there's no obstacles and stuff.

• 49:09Speaker 03

  Yes, I do.

• 49:10Chris Williamson?

  So before we move on to, I'm conscious of time and I know you're a very busy man, before we move on to a couple of cool things that I want to do with Wolfram Alpha and an explanation about Mathematica as well. Um, final question I wanted to ask about your productivity. Do you think that there's much more left in the system for you? Like, do you think that there's more that you can squeeze out of the lemon of, of sort of your life and your daily routine at the moment? Or do you think you're working close to capacity?

• 49:37Speaker 03

  That's an interesting question. I mean, I think, hmm, um, you know, well, it's interesting because I think about what the next projects I want to do are. And I'm actually a little frustrated because there are a couple of really big projects that I've been wanting to do for like 10 years or more. And I really want to get the time to do them. And so for me, it's important to figure out, can I, you know, squeeze the other stuff to the point where I can get these done. And one of the challenges, sort of a, a, a lifetime challenge is how do you end up doing new stuff? Because, you know, as someone like me, I built a bunch of, you know, things I, you know, I've got

• 50:16Speaker 03

  people who, who depend on the things I do. It's like, we've got a lot of, there's a lot of stuff that's just flowing forwards. And so I think one of the, one of the sort of personal challenges and the, the attitude challenges is can one do new stuff in the light of that? Because it's very easy to say, well, I've got all this stuff. I could spend all my time just, you know, maintaining and turning the crank on things I've already built. Um, and things, you know, things I've already done, sort of, uh, products we've built, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But for whatever reason, I find it, you know, I kind of have a, a great urge to go do new stuff as well. And you have to be just a little bit irresponsible to be able to do that. You have to decide, you know, I'm not going to put

• 50:56Speaker 03

  a hundred percent time into this thing. I'm going to try and push it, squash it a little bit so that I have time left over to go do new things. So it's a, it's some.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question. I mean, I think that there are probably,

• 51:18Speaker 03

  you know, one question that breaks into two pieces. One is, are there things that I'm doing that I shouldn't be doing? And the other is, the things that I am doing, can I do them more efficiently? It's a good way to frame it. Right. And so, you know, the, and, you know, in the things I'm doing that I shouldn't be doing, it's, you know, that's a complicated thing because, you know, you say, okay, there's some meeting that I'll be doing that's reviewing something or other, okay? I can like not do that. And then there is a decent chance that that project will keep running okay. But there is also a certain chance that it will go off the rails. And so that's a, you know, so you have to kind of try and figure out. And some, actually, I did a big refactoring recently

• 52:03Speaker 03

  of, of project review meetings of figuring out, you know, how to aggregate different pieces so that it's one meeting that's an hour every week or two. That used to be three different meetings and so on. So, I mean, there's, this, but in terms of the, yeah, so I, it's a good question. I have to think about that question. I don't, you know, if I knew, to be honest, I'm, I'm unembarrassed in answering this question in the following sense, that if I could say to you immediately, oh, there's this obvious inefficiency, I would be a bit embarrassed. Yeah. Because, you know, it's Why is it not sorted already? Yeah, right. But so, so that's, but so, you know, I think

• 52:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. I, I mean, there's, there's, as I work on two new big projects, they will have a slightly different rhythm than projects I have previously done. And so they will have their own kind of, it will take, you know, I know that when I work on, when I start doing some different kind of project, There's a certain amount of turbulence at the beginning as things aren't well understood. And you know, gradually I understand what the systems are and get into the swing of it. And then it then it can flow nicely.

• 53:14Chris Williamson?

  I have to say, for someone who works in what to most people would feel like a very transactional, well-controlled, hermetically sealed environment that is code and maths. The way that you speak about the overall philosophy is a lot more the way that an artist or a musician would speak about it, to do with the sensations and the the understanding, the experience-based conception of what is going to happen, which is emerging from all of this past experience that you've had. I think there's a lot to be said, as we've touched on already, that just spending time under tension, as you'd refer to it in the gym, of of just getting to grips with the

• 53:55Chris Williamson?

  bread and butter and then beginning to slowly add more and more on and expand that domain of competence is is something that's very useful for a lot of people. So, final thing, Wolfram Alpha is an answer engine, not a search engine. Would you be able to, would you be able to explain to the listeners who don't understand what an answer engine is, what what that means, please?

• 54:20Speaker 03

  Well, we we usually like to use the term computational knowledge engine. That's our fancier term for it.

• 54:25Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 54:25Speaker 03

  But you know, what it is, is a thing where you ask it a question in natural language and it will try and compute the answer to that question. So you might ask it, I don't know, and you know, you can use it. It it provides computational knowledge for Siri and for Alexa. So you.

• 54:41Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, it's the it's the basis, it's the basis of Siri and Alexa, right? Like one of the.

• 54:46Speaker 03

  Well, the knowledge components, yes, yes. So it's it's the thing that's answering, it's not the thing that's saying, play this song. It's the thing that's answering the question, you know, what's the population of such and such a place? Or, you know, if you type in a good party trick with Wolfram Alpha, is type in a first name and it'll give you the the mostly US data, or that has some other countries as well. It'll give you the number of people with that name who've been born every year in the last hundred years. Okay. So, but then what it has to do, because it's actually computing things, is it knows the mortality curves for for people. And so it can figure out, you know, what is the distribution of people alive today who have, you know, first name Chris, for example.

• 55:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  Right? So then, a good party trick. Is you type in somebody's name and it'll give this distribution, it'll say most common age of a person with that name. And just because of the way statistics works, there's a pretty good chance that the person you're talking to has that name.

• 55:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 55:44Speaker 03

  Is of that age.

• 55:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 55:45Speaker 03

  So that's a, that's some.

• 55:46Chris Williamson?

  That's fascinating.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  I mean, so, so, you know, and, and what we're doing in Wolfmalfur is we've been for the last few decades, we've been accumulating kind of knowledge about the world in computable form. So, you know, you can say, where's the International Space Station? Okay, so that's something you actually have to compute. You can't just, uh, that's not just because it moves all the time. And you have to be working out, you know, what its orbit is and so on, and then computing the answer to that question. So what we're, what we've really, the, the thing we've done is, is mostly translating human natural language, the kinds of questions people ask into a computational language, and then using the knowledge that we've built up in our knowledge base to be able to answer those questions.

• 56:30Speaker 03

  I mean, kind of the goal in the end is there's a bunch of systematic knowledge that our civilization has, has built up. You know, my goal, which to be fair, I've had since I was probably about 12 years old, is kind of to accumulate that knowledge in computational form and have it be the case that any question that can be answered on the basis of knowledge that's known in our civilization, we should be able to automate answering that question. That's kind of the, the goal. And, and we've been able to do that in more and more domains. And that's some, so that, that's, that's the story of Wolfmalfur. And, you know, I use it like, um, oh, I'll use it probably today, I'll go type in sunburn and it'll tell me because it knows where I am and it knows the UV index data and so on.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  And it knows, you know, I can look up for my skin type, it'll tell me, you know, it's whatever it is, 35 minutes to, to sunburn if I don't put on sunscreen or a hat or whatever else.

• 57:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 57:22Speaker 03

  And that's, actually, I've been doing QA of that particular function now for probably eight or nine years. And I can say that the only times I've gotten sunburned are the times when I thought I was smarter than it was.

• 57:33Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it's the same as when you try and go, you don't listen to Google Maps and you think, no, no, no, no, this way home's always quicker. And it knows that there's the traffic, the traffic jam there. And sure enough, you sat in the traffic kicking yourself for not listening to Google Maps earlier on. So yeah, to any of the listeners who want to go and play some of these games, wolframalpha, at wolframalpha.com and just type in, where is the International Space Station? Or type in someone's first name? Are there any other cool things before we go?

• 58:02Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh, there are lots of, lots of things. I mean, there are lots of kind of, people always enjoy these estimate type things of, you know, how many, you know, how many soccer balls fit in a 747 or something? These kinds of things. Or one that I was trying to figure out, actually took two steps to do this was, if you took all the water in all the oceans on earth, and you rolled it all up into a ball, how big would that ball be? And it's, which is relevant, because I was trying to understand something about the origin of water on the earth.

• 58:30Chris Williamson?

  Of course it was relevant.

• 58:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, I mean, this is, you know, the, I mean, just to, to fill in for a second, the, the, the main sort of intellectual thread of what, what I've tried to do for a long time is this thing we call Wolfram Language, which is an attempt to make kind of a full-scale computational language, which means, you know, you have programming languages where you're kind of telling, step at a time, you're telling a computer what to do. The goal of sort of our kind of computational language effort is to have a language to represent things in the world computationally. So in a, in a standard programming language, you might have something that says, this is the value of a variable, something like this. But in, in our language, in a sort of full computational language, you know, the

• 59:14Speaker 03

  town of Newcastle is an entity, and you can compute things about it. So I can say, what's the geodistance from Newcastle to Boston or something? So it's being able to have a language for expressing things in the world in a way that you can compute from them. And that's, I mean, I think it's a, I've been working on this now, well, kind of for forty years actually altogether, but I've only, I steadily understand, you know, that this is an important thing because, well, it's the thing that people use, they use our products in, well, lots of R and D and education kinds of settings, our products are really widely

• 59:53Speaker 03

  used to figure out new, you know, to figure out new things, but, but there are, what's interesting about this process, so just to tell a sort of historical tale, you know, there was a time when people, like four hundred years ago or so, people were doing math and they did math by writing everything out in words. So there wasn't a plus sign, there wasn't a times sign, that was only invented four hundred years ago.

• 1:00:18Chris Williamson?

  You know that.

• 1:00:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so, once that had been invented, then things like algebra got invented and calculus got invented and so on. But while you were still kind of writing out all your math in words, that was very hard to invent. There wasn't a good way to kind of express mathematical ideas in a kind of language that was convenient for people. Well, we're in the same situation with computational ideas, and that's kind of what we've been trying to solve, is to create a computational language that allows one to sort of express computational ideas in a way that both computers can read and humans can read. And this has been a pretty successful thing, and we're kind of seeing, you know, all these

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  different fields, you can call, you know, computational X, where X is, you know, archaeology, zoology, whatever else. All these fields, they need kind of a computational language to express the computational ideas that come up in these fields, and that's kind of what I built.

• 1:01:16Chris Williamson?

  I think that you've touched on something there, which the listeners may be thinking sounds a little bit esoteric, but when you actually think about it, the fact that the democratization of knowledge as it is, kind of in the way that Wikipedia, I suppose, works in that you want to find Something out and then Wikipedia gives it back to you. But the thing that you want to find out has to be searched for in an incredibly specific way in the right language for the correct thing that is that you want it to do, and it will feed out a very narrow range of results based on what it is that you want. But obviously with Wolfram Language, taking natural language, converting that into computer code that then feeds back out something legible by a human who has no

• 1:02:01Chris Williamson?

  no training, no special understanding of this, and then gives them the answer that they wanted, or potentially an answer that they didn't even know that they wanted, but is the one that they wanted.

• 1:02:13Chris Williamson?

  And then I think, am I right in saying that you're looking to even step this up even further? And allow laypeople to create computer programs. I want a program that will do this for me.

• 1:02:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, right.

• 1:02:25Chris Williamson?

  You want to then be able to create natural language to compute a program to understand it, to then create a computer program to then do what the person wanted.

• 1:02:34Speaker 03

  Well, here's the, here's the issue. The issue is that natural language is really good if you have a quick question you're asking. If you're trying to say, let me define how this really complicated thing works. That's not something where natural language is not particularly good at that. That's where computational language is really good. The trick is to have people be able to think in this computational language, and that's what happened. You know, when mathematical notation was invented and so on, people started being able to think in mathematical notation. They started being able to, to actually, you know, think through the math that everybody's taught these days, you know. After 400 years, everybody gets taught this stuff. Probably too many people get taught some aspects of it, but um, you know, when it comes to computational language,

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  you know, we're just at the very beginning of people learning this and learning it, you know, early in their lives and, you know, when they're 10 or 11 years old or whatever. And, um, you know, once they learn it, then they get to take the sort of computational thinking that they might be doing and put it in some concrete form that both they can read and a computer can also go execute. And that's a, you know, for, you know, from a sort of big picture point of view, in a sense, what one is doing by creating what I've been trying to do in creating this computational language, it's giving people a language in which to think computationally, which also happens to be a language that computers can execute. But it's one of the really important things, I think, is that it provides

• 1:04:03Speaker 03

  a way to kind of formulate your thoughts computationally. And that's something, you know, when we talk about making, you know, personal productivity and so on, a lot of, I suspect, I can't necessarily trace all the, all the connections, but a lot of what I end up doing in trying to sort of formulate how I want to set up systems and so on, is informed by the fact that, you know, I've spent a large part of my life sort of inventing this computational language to try and take sort of general thinking about things and make it computational. And once you've made it computational, you have it in a sort of more streamlined, concrete form, so that, for example, you can automate it and get a computer to do it. And that's kind of the, that's, you know, that's a big piece of sort of the, the intellectual effort.

• 1:04:47Speaker 03

  And I suspect that, you know, when it comes to, I don't know, making the, the sleep time a clock or something, there are, you know, yes, that's very easy to do in the, in the language that we have. And, you know, but, and it's also, but it's also something where probably certain aspects, I, I, you know, it's always a little bit hard to introspect and understand this, but certain aspects of how that works are probably because I thought about it in a sort of a computational way of this is how it, you know, this is how to structure it. And it's not just like, oh, well, I'd like to know kind of when I, you know, how long it was, you know, how long I've been asleep type thing. It's kind of, there's a little, probably a little bit more to it, which is a little bit hard to introspect and, and see through, but I think that's the.

• 1:05:30Chris Williamson?

  There's a mode of, a mode of, of thinking that you have internalized that is your work, which sounds really weird, because I, as a layperson, again, I don't, I don't code, I, I don't understand how to code. But I would have thought that the transfer from screen to real world would have been really limited. But what it actually appears is that you want to define things as clearly as possible, have a number of variables that you can control, and then have as little friction and then bugs in the system. And then you've created a, a lifestyle, a productivity, a work cadence out of that, and all of these other solutions.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  See, I would think so. One of the directions is creating computational contracts. So people, blockchain people, talk about spot contracts and so on. So the generalized version of that is computational contracts. That is, I'm sure in your work life, it's full of contracts of one kind or another. Yeah. And those contracts are written down in legalese. They're written in sort of a version of English that is a little bit closer to code. Because you're trying to be a little bit precise about, you know, this is what we mean exactly. Good point. Et cetera. But, you know, what we will achieve with this sort of computational language direction, you will be able to write contracts in code. And that means that the importance of that is, you know, sometimes the contracts as they're currently done, you know, you actually want some wiggle room in some place or other.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  But, you know, when contracts are being executed automatically by machines and things, it's really, you can't really do that. And that's where, you know, if you can express sort of a human, what you want to have happen, and you can express it in computational language, turn it into a computational contract, have it automatically executable, then that's an interesting thing that makes, you know, you've talked about friction, that's a great friction reducer, is to be able to say, no, it doesn't need a person in the middle of, you know, saying, this is how this should work. Yeah. It's just automatic, you know, it's, you have some contract that says, I don't know what, you know, based on the number of, you know, if you're promoting something, maybe, you know,

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  you have some PR firm or something, based on the number of media mentions, they'll get, you know, some, you know, commission, some such other thing. And, but then, what does that mean computationally? Well, that means computationally, you have a program that says, it's going to go search the web, it's going to have these criteria for deciding if it's a mention of this thing, and then there's just going to be some formula in there, and maybe it's going to use some machine learning classifier to decide if it was a positive sentiment mention or a negative sentiment mention. But in the end of it, it's just a piece of code, and nobody gets to, you know, nobody has to go figure anything out, it's just, you know, the code runs, somebody gets paid, you know. A hundred dollars or something, or they don't.

• 1:08:21Speaker 03

  And it kind of makes the world a, you know, a more efficient place.

• 1:08:25Chris Williamson?

  There's going to be solicitors everywhere, all over the globe, just tearing their hair out at the sounds of this. Stephen, you're terrifying everybody in law at the moment here.

• 1:08:34Speaker 03

  You know what? It's going to be the other way. It's like the paperless office, right? When everybody said the paperless office, it's going to be, you know, nobody's going to have anything printed out and so on, at least for a while, at least for a few decades, there was a lot more paper around because what will happen in this case with computational contracts is there'll be a lot more contracts in the world. And because there'll be a lot of things where there was no point in having, you know, right now is too much friction to have a contract. But, you know, it's like, you know, many things that people do, there'll be a little contract that says, and things will happen automatically based on that or whatever else. And, you know, a lot of the, I mean, I know from, because we've interacted with a lot of law firms and so on, that, you know, that the sort of big, more sophisticated ones

• 1:09:17Speaker 03

  are like, we want to get involved in this. We want to be writing computational contracts. And we want to be the ones creating the intellectual property that is all those weird clauses that get added, you know, that's like, well, you know, we'll sell you all these clauses that will take care of, you know, what happens if it rains when you're doing some event or something.

• 1:09:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, of course, because you're going to have to have someone who understands the law to interpret it into the programming language. And that particular, in the same way as I want to make, I want to process a document, I need a word processing piece of software, you also require this recipe almost.

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, that's the, anyway, this is the, this is the kind of thing I think about for a living, so to speak. And, you know, the, these, these questions about personal productivity are the, are the way that I managed to get to think about stuff like that. And, and maybe, you know, one of the things that I've learnt, because I've been interested in, you know, mentioned personal analytics and so on, and I, I've tended to store sort of everything I've, I've done. And then the real question is, can you put together your personal history? Because there's, you know, I've got, you know, millions of emails and so on. It's like, what is the arc of history that that corresponds to, so to speak? In other words, you can look at each individual one, and I wouldn't say it's a project of

• 1:10:36Speaker 03

  mine actually right now is to try and make more automation to finding these kinds of arcs of history from individual documents and so on. But the thing that is always interesting for me to understand, I think it's something that is, uh, is an interesting introspection for people, is when you've done something, can you figure out how you actually got to be able to do that thing? And so, for example, a lot of the stuff that I end up doing that ends up being not the typical thing that everybody else does, uh, you know, there's, there's usually some whole chain of things. And for example, this whole, you know, spending a lot of my life developing this computational language, um, is probably the reason that I end up getting to do a bunch of personal productivity things, and I haven't quite joined all those dots.

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  Sometimes doing this history and understanding, like, like, for example, the Wolfram Alpha project, um, I had thought about doing that project when I was a kid. I thought this project is too hard, and I thought, among other things, to be able to sort of, uh, you know, ingest knowledge about the world and so on, and be able to answer questions, you're gonna need a complete AI, you're gonna need a brain-like thing. And so that was, you know, I came back to it every so often, but I kept on saying, making a brain-like thing is really hard. Then I did a bunch of basic science that I won't, I mean, that's, has all kinds of implications, but there's a, there's a thing called the principle of computational equivalence that comes out from that. And one of the implications of that is, you know, it's a piece of basic science and sort

• 1:12:02Speaker 03

  of philosophy of science, but one of the implications is there's no kind of bright line between intelligence and mere computation. And so that sort of philosophical point made me realize, gosh, if I'm taking that seriously, then this thing that I now call Wolfram Alpha, that I've sort of wondered, could it be built? Well, if I take my own theory seriously, then yes, it could be built. And so, so then I started building it. But it took, you know, in a sense, a very circuitous route, because it takes understanding this quite philosophical thing to realize that, yes, actually, you know, if I know what I'm talking about, about that philosophical thing... Then it's, you know, then, then I should be able to build this practical thing.

• 1:12:43Chris Williamson?

  I get you. Well, it needs, it needs to, it needs to at least be able to exist in concept before it can exist in reality, right? Most things get constrained by reality. People's dreams tend to be bigger than their achievements. And the same thing goes for, for most stuff. But yeah, if you can, if you've got the backup that you, as you've alluded to there, and I will link to some of the blog posts which have been illuminating to me, which for the listeners who want to find out a little bit more about your philosophy on that. But Stephen, I'm aware that you are an incredibly busy man, and I do want to let you go.

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  Yes, I'm late.

• 1:13:17Chris Williamson?

  Before, before, you see, we've got you in trouble and there's going to be emails pinging all over and your assistants, it'll have been automated at least.

• 1:13:23Speaker 03

  Yes, it has been. I've been, I've been getting pings and I know I'm supposed to start a live streamed design review meeting. So go see the, the, the beginning of that will be late.

• 1:13:32Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. Um, final thing, where can people find you online if they want to find out more?

• 1:13:37Speaker 03

  StephenWolfen.com.

• 1:13:40Chris Williamson?

  There we go. That's all that we need. Stephen, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

• 1:13:45Speaker 03

  No, interesting stuff. Thanks a lot.

• 1:13:58Speaker 04

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