Stephen Wolfram | The At Home CEO

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)

I'm joined today by Stephen Wolfram. Stephen, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

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)

I, I like to think it's interesting. I've been doing it for, for decades, so-

(laughs)

... it better be interesting, or I'm-

(laughs) Right?

... 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-