EVERY SPOKEN WORD
155 min read · 30,602 words- 0:00 – 15:00
I mean, I have…
- SWStephen Wolfram
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 gonna get messed up. I mean, the one, one thing that happens in a company like mine, which is a tech company, is that, you know, I've also been pushing for another thing, which is automate everything I can. So you know, we've, we've got only 800 employees, but you know, the productivity that we manage to generate is a, a vast multiple of what you would expect from that number because over the years, you know, 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 while it's gonna take some effort to automate it, but once it's automated, you can just crank it out all the time. (wind blows)
- CWChris Williamson
I'm joined today by Stephen Wolfram. Stephen, welcome to the show.
- SWStephen Wolfram
Thank you.
- CWChris Williamson
I, uh, am particularly excited to speak to you today. Um, 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, uh, pretty good idea that it's, uh, it's gonna 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 (laughs)
- SWStephen Wolfram
I, I like to think it's interesting. I've been doing it for, for decades, so-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- SWStephen Wolfram
... it better be interesting, or I'm-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Right?
- SWStephen Wolfram
... or I'm, uh, should be embarrassed, but yes. The, the, um, 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 in actually doing the work I want to do. And so I've, I've, uh, and I would say the, the number one tool, which is not for everybody, that I've built to get, um, my work done is I built a company over the last 32 years that has, you know, 800 people in it. And it's sort of, uh, intended to be a machine for taking ideas that I have and turning them into real things. And so that, uh, but one of the things that is probably more, uh, uh, sort of generalizable is one of the ways that I tend to work is I'm, I'm, you know, on 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, uh, I tend to follow the sort of approach of, uh, 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. That's 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, uh, uh, 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, uh, you know, I've got audio-
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- SWStephen Wolfram
... I'm, uh, you know, sharing the thing that we're both talking about-
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- SWStephen Wolfram
... but, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
No face. (laughs)
- SWStephen Wolfram
... I'm not seeing the, the, uh, the people, um, uh, it- it's, um, and then, you know, I, 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. Um, 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, uh, 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.
- CWChris Williamson
I understand.
- SWStephen Wolfram
And that's, um, you know, I, I like that, uh, it's, uh, I, I also tend to, uh, maybe it's an eccentricity, but it's turned out to be pretty interesting. We've, we've publicly live-streamed a lot of these internal meetings that we've had. So in the last year, we've probably live-streamed 300 hours of these things. And that's a fascinating dynamic because, uh, 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. Uh, I just think these are interesting and, you know, why not, uh, have other people be able to sort of share the fun? But it's turned out we've ended up with, uh, you know, people join the, 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 various kinds of things, and we get real-time feedback, which is pretty interesting. And so-
- CWChris Williamson
So you're crowd- crowdsourcing some solutions, almost.
- SWStephen Wolfram
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, there, 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, here's what we're gonna do," and a week later people could respond to it, but actually this is like people are hearing what's going on-
- CWChris Williamson
Real time.
- SWStephen Wolfram
... and they're typing things, and, uh, it's, it's, it's pretty interesting. And, and I think, um, uh, you know, to me, being able to do those kinds of figuring things out, uh, sort of live and in public, it makes perhaps egotistically the things feel a little bit more meaningful to me.
- CWChris Williamson
I understand.
- SWStephen Wolfram
So-
- CWChris Williamson
So you, you can see-
- SWStephen Wolfram
... that's a, that'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.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Yeah.
- SWStephen Wolfram
Since I made them, but I know other people have, and, um, uh, 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, uh, 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. And I, I-
- CWChris Williamson
Th- 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."
- SWStephen Wolfram
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And I think that that's a nice way to describe what it is that you're doing 'cause that meeting would be going on anyway.
- 15:00 – 30:00
Yes. …
- SWStephen Wolfram
life, I tend to be a very, uh, uh, 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. I, you know, uh, uh, 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-
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- SWStephen Wolfram
... this is not, um, uh, 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, um, you know, which have the potential to turn into lots of work. Um, and, uh, you know, the, the, my, the thing I like to do is to have ideas that actually turn into something real. Um, I've, I find it very frustrating just to have ideas and not have anything happen with them. So, you know, the, it's, it's a question of how do you build a system where you can make concrete those ideas and, um, and then, um, uh, actually, um, uh, kind of, uh, 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, um, uh, you know, like I, I like to work. I, 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 exercise every day. And so like, you know, the, um, if I'm, uh, uh, you know, I set up a treadmill so that I can have a, you know, type on my computer while I'm, uh, walking on the treadmill and that works fine. I also typically do meetings. I usually try to, uh, try to get, um, meetings that I think are gonna be a b- bit frustrating scheduled for the time when I'm on the treadmill 'cause-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- SWStephen Wolfram
... because then-
- CWChris Williamson
Does anyone know? Is anyone listening?
- SWStephen Wolfram
Yes, yes. I mean it's 39-
- CWChris Williamson
And can they hear you plodding away and they think that's a signal that Stephen thought this was gonna be a shit meeting.
- SWStephen Wolfram
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Like if there's anyone, if any one of Stephen's executives are listening and you hear him plodding away on the thing, that's 'cause he thought it was gonna be a boring meeting.
- SWStephen Wolfram
Yeah. (laughs) Well, it's not so much boring, it's usually frustrating. It's usually like something is going wrong.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, so you need to, you need to get a little bit of energy out.
- SWStephen Wolfram
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 how fast I walk.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- SWStephen Wolfram
And that's a, that's a much better way to manage my, uh, my frustration-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Look, yeah.
- SWStephen Wolfram
... rather than growling at people. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
Fantastic. I absolutely, I absolutely love it. Um, I think if, 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 gonna guess is close to your highest calling in life, but also something that's enjoyable as well. Um, 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, I suggest that you do because it is a, it's a real monster. Um, but-
- SWStephen Wolfram
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
It really is. Um, the particular setup that you have, which is, uh, like you say, these matrices as, as you've described them, which are kind of these systems, I guess, um, people would, uh, in more sort of common, uh, 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 that you're left-handed and you've realized-
- SWStephen Wolfram
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... that you can... you use a older style roller mouse, right, rather than a track pad.
- SWStephen Wolfram
Yeah, yeah, right.
- CWChris Williamson
Go ahead.
- SWStephen Wolfram
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 o- 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, uh, that I've... in, 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-
- CWChris Williamson
Appears in a blog post in... at the start of the year. (laughs)
- SWStephen Wolfram
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, right. I- i- 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 'cause just go look at the data and it takes me, you know, probably 15 minutes to go answer that question 'cause I've got different computers with different setups and I just can see how fast things work.
- CWChris Williamson
Compare the... can compare the two, yeah.
- SWStephen Wolfram
And that-
- CWChris Williamson
I think I'm r- right in saying that you've done a third of a million emails since 1989, and more than 100 million keystrokes.
- 30:00 – 45:00
X number of hours.…
- SWStephen Wolfram
uh, like, you know, I have a, a sleep clock that I, uh, that is, um, it's just a piece of code, Wolfram 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 as, as the time and the count up timer, and then it also sends a message.... to, uh, uh— actually, where does it send the message to? It sends a message to some system which anyway ends up with a thing that lets my, uh, assistant know kinda when I went to sleep. And then if I'm in some weird time zone, they can kinda predict, oh, he'll be up again in, in, you know, eight hours or something.
- CWChris Williamson
X number of hours.
- SWStephen Wolfram
Um, and-
- CWChris Williamson
I mean, that's... 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 2 + 2 = 4. Um-
- SWStephen Wolfram
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) 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 t- 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, uh, 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, the problem looks after itself. 'Cause I'm gonna guess, 20 years ago, you will have gone to bed in some weird time zone and missed a morning meeting.
- SWStephen Wolfram
Yes. Yes, and that's... This was the fix. And now, you know, and this fix has been, uh... I haven't had to touch this fic- 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 and you try and get it fixed.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SWStephen Wolfram
And I think I'm, I follow sort of the same principle in my personal productivity and, and life and so on-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- SWStephen Wolfram
... is, you know, there are these things that obviously kinda goofy-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SWStephen Wolfram
... 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, um, computer file system, for example. You know, I've, 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, of computer file system. And in each case, it's sort of, uh, uh, 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, God.
- SWStephen Wolfram
I, 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 and nerdiness for ages, but, but, um, I actually... The reason I wrote that post when I did was that we'd just, uh, uh, we were finishing some big new version of our Wolfram Language product. And my job was done basically, because... And it was just 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." Uh, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
Need something to do.
- SWStephen Wolfram
Right. So I, I tap out this blog post. And then I found that, um, uh, you know, one of the things that happens, I, 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. Um, my team has noticed recently that I have this terrible tendency of converging to always write 13,000-word blog posts (both laugh) and they actually have plots that show-
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, God.
- SWStephen Wolfram
... how long it takes and the fact that it, it tends to converge to that number. I'm... Now that I know that, I'm gonna work really hard on, on, on beating that.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, you've got the observation selection bias here. They ruined it.
- SWStephen Wolfram
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think-
- CWChris Williamson
13,000, 13,001 for all of the future ones.
- SWStephen Wolfram
Yeah. No, no, no, no, no. It should, they should be shorter. They, they-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- SWStephen Wolfram
You know, but 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-
- CWChris Williamson
Write it down.
- SWStephen Wolfram
It's a single writing process and it's not, I'm not going back and revising it and refactoring it and so on. Um, and it's, uh... You know, for me, it's actually... I hadn't really understood. I... Maybe, mm, five or ten years ago, I started writing a lot of blog post-type things, and, uh, it's, uh... You know, there's a lot of stuff I think about, and I, I was talking earlier about these kinda matrices to put things into. You know, back in the day, there were things that I was thinking about, but I had no place to kind of, uh, 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 they'll be a th- 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, um, uh... You know, that's all very nice and I enjoy doing the research, but it feels a lot more useless upward, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Doesn't produce anything. 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-
- SWStephen Wolfram
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... 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 (laughs) Language approach I'm gonna guess you have, um, 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 Tiago Forte's episode which was a guide to digital productivity touching on many of the things, albeit at a slightly lower, uh, degree of sophistication that, that you, you do yourself. Um, one thing I wanted to touch onto before we actually get into the nitty-gritty of Wolfram itself, you have a, um... 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, the mouse pad and the resting thing, but you also do, um, a outside laptop setup-
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Yeah, yeah, right, right.…
- CWChris Williamson
point of attention, and you being like, "Yeah, excuse me," you just move the dog out of the way, "Excuse me, mate, just remind what that strap around your neck's made of, please, that's carrying your, uh"-
- SWStephen Wolfram
Yeah, yeah, right, right.
- CWChris Williamson
... "that's carrying your laptop." (laughs)
- SWStephen Wolfram
Right. Yeah, I think the, the, uh, you know, in, in the, 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, um, uh, to my surprise, it's perfectly straightforward to type on a, you know, if you've got this thing in front of you-
- CWChris Williamson
Stable.
- SWStephen Wolfram
I didn't know it would be straightforward to do that. Um, now, you know, what I've found is I kind of have a hierarchy. In, if, 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 alwa- or standing at my desk is gonna be the al- is, is always gonna be the winner. Um, you know, treadmill is a little bit less effective in terms of, you know, how fast I can type for a long period-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SWStephen Wolfram
... and walking outside is, 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, um, 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 post-
- CWChris Williamson
How cool.
- SWStephen Wolfram
... or something when I'm just purely typing. And I, 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SWStephen Wolfram
But when I'm kind of still just getting warmed up and I haven't quite, you know, got into the fr- in- into the swing of it, then I have to be sitting at my desk, or it doesn't really, I, I end up, uh...
- CWChris Williamson
There's a lot of cognitive effort to do that. I mean, just avoiding walking into things, I'm gonna guess you must have to curate the routes that you actually walk to ensure-
- SWStephen Wolfram
Yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... there's no obstacles (laughs) -
- SWStephen Wolfram
I do.
- CWChris Williamson
... and stuff.
- SWStephen Wolfram
Yes, I do.
- CWChris Williamson
So, bef- before we move on to, I'm, uh, 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 you 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-
- SWStephen Wolfram
That's an interesting question.
- CWChris Williamson
... close to capacity?
- SWStephen Wolfram
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 'cause 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, a lifetime challenge is how do you end up doing new stuff? Because, you know, someone like me, I built a bunch of sys- you know, things, I, you know, have got people who, who, uh, depend on the things I do, it's like we've got a lot of this, 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 kinda 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 gonna put 100% 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SWStephen Wolfram
So it's, uh, it's, um, uh-Yeah, I mean, it- it's an interesting question. I mean, I- I think that, um, um, there are probably, um, um, y- you know, one- one question t- that breaks into two pieces. One is are there things that I'm doing that I shouldn't be doing?
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- SWStephen Wolfram
And the other is, the things that I am doing, can I do them more efficiently? And, um-
- CWChris Williamson
It's a good way to frame it.
- SWStephen Wolfram
Right. And so, you know, the, um ... And, you know, in the things I'm doing that I shouldn't be doing, uh, it's, uh, you know, that- 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-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- SWStephen Wolfram
... will keep running okay. But there is also a certain chance-
- 1:00:00 – 1:10:51
And you want to…
- SWStephen Wolfram
yeah, right.
- CWChris Williamson
And 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.
- SWStephen Wolfram
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SWStephen Wolfram
Probably too many people get taught some aspects of it, but, um, uh, you know, when it comes to computational language, 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, for, you know, from a sort of big picture point of view, in a sense, what one is doing by creating what, 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 a, one of the, the really important things I think is that it provides 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, um, uh, that- that's, uh, you know, that's a big piece of sort of the, the intellectual effort. And I suspect that, you know, when it comes to, I don't know, um, making the, uh, the sleep time o'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, um, uh, 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, um, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
There's a mode of, a mode of, of, uh, thinking that you have, uh, internalized that is your work, which sounds really weird 'cause I, uh, 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, uh, 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, a lifestyle, a productivity, a work cadence out of that and all of these other solutions.
- SWStephen Wolfram
See, I, I would think so one of the, one of the directions is creating computational contracts, so people, um, you know, blockchain people talk about spot contracts and so on. So the generalized version of that is computational contracts. That is, you know, I'm sure in your work life it's full of contracts of one kind or another.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- SWStephen Wolfram
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-
- CWChris Williamson
Good point.
- SWStephen Wolfram
... uh, et cetera. But, um, you know, what, uh, 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, 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 another.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Yeah.
- SWStephen Wolfram
But, you know, when, when contracts are being executed automatically by machines and things, it's, uh, it's really, you can't really do that, and that's where, you know, if you can express sort of a human, uh, 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, uh, that's an interesting thing that, that makes, uh, makes a, a... You know, you've talked about friction. That's a, 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.'"
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- SWStephen Wolfram
It's just automatic, you know. It's, it's you have some contract that says, I don't know, what, you know, based on the number of the, you know... If you're promoting something, maybe, you know, you have some PR firm or something, based on the number of media mentions they'll get, you know, some, uh, you know, uh, uh, commission-
- CWChris Williamson
Amount.
- SWStephen Wolfram
... some such other thing. And, and, but then what does that mean computationally? Well, that means computationally you have a program that says it's gonna go search the web, it's gonna have these criteria for deciding if it's a mention of this thing, and then there's just gonna be some formula in there, and maybe it's gonna 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, $100 or something-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- SWStephen Wolfram
... or, or they don't. And, um, it kinda makes the world a, uh, a, you know, a more efficient place. And it's-
- CWChris Williamson
There's gonna be solicitors everywhere all over the globe just tearing their hair out at the sounds of this, Steven. You're terrifi- you're terrifying everybody in law at the moment here.
- SWStephen Wolfram
You know what? It- it's- it's gonna be the other way. It's like the paperless office, right? When everybody said the paperless office, it's gonna be, you know, nobody's gonna 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 it's too much friction to have a contract, but you know, it's like, uh, 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 know from, because we've interacted with a lot of law firms and so on, that, you know, the- the sort of big, more sophisticated ones 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."
- CWChris Williamson
Ah. 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.
- SWStephen Wolfram
Yeah. Yeah. Right.
- CWChris Williamson
Fascinating.
- SWStephen Wolfram
Yeah. Th- this is... Tha- that's the, um... Anyway, this is the, this is the kind of thing I- I think about for a living, so to speak. And, um, you know, the- the, uh, these- these questions about personal productivity are the- are the way that I manage 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 I... It's a project of 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, 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. 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, 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 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, uh, it's, um, you know, then- then I should be able to build this practical thing. And, um I get you. Well, it needs, it needs to, it needs to at least be, uh, 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, uh, which for the listeners who want to find out a little bit more about, uh, your philosophy on that. But Stephen, I- I'm, uh, aware that you are an incredibly busy man and I do want to let you go- Yes. I blame you.
Episode duration: 1:11:38
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