Business, Innovation and Managing Life (January 15, 2025)

The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa

Questions include: How would you think about approaching a business from a science and research background vs. an entrepreneur? - Do you ever analyze your organization and its projects from the perspective of its "bottleneck(s)" and tackling those deliberately? - Do you ever delay some of the important decisions? - How do you manage to context switch between all these meetings and focused deep work sessions? - ​​How do you best learn science, from your experience? Do you learn and internalize the structure (reach a big picture view) right away or do you focus on just gleaning "local facts" and doing problems? - ​​If you could decide how to invest $10B for science and technology development, what would you do? Build a bigger particle accelerator, a bigger space telescope, an artificial superintelligence, etc.? - "What am I actually good at? It's kind of this start from something complicated, drill down, find the fundamentals and then do the engineering to kind of build it back up again." Can you share with us examples of this, what topic you explored and what were the steps? Knowing how Stephen operates would be a really great lesson for all. - What do you think about literature? About fiction books. What are some of your favorite books? What are some you would recommend? Do you think it is important to read fiction? - What do you think is easier, running a business or pursuing active science research? - What do you say about David Deutsch's "The Mathematicians' Misconception"? I would really like to know your thoughts. - Are there any interesting things about Version 14.2 you can share? - How would you approach teaching math? - Which do you like better: creative meetings or more technical language design? Extra question: What livestream series is your favorite? - Audiobooks allowed me to read every book I've ever wanted, multiple times, including lots of fiction. - Music is great for one's mind... including whistling and singing. - Are you more of a watch the movie adaption vs. read the book sort of person? - Would you be willing to talk a little about Jonathan Gorard and his work? - ​​How would you think about creating a fact-checking apparatus for the future of information media? - I'd love to see another live collaboration with Jonathan. I understood almost nothing from the last one but it was amazing. - What do you think about AI's role in mathematical proofs in 2025?