The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: What technological and/or scientific capabilities must humans achieve to be able to manipulate and reprogram matter at will? - Can you explain CRISPR? How does the gene editing technique CRISPR work? - Why are routines for sleeping, eating, exercise, etc. so helpful for mammals? When is routine harmful? - ​Is there an example where self-assembly is industrially used? - ​How harmful are plane flights in terms of radiation exposure? - I were able to create a black hole the size of a marble in my living room, would it destroy the cosmos or just make a hole in my couch? - Is it true our electrical distribution networks and neuronal networks in the brain has same configuration? - Why do some speculate there's life - Isn't it weird that our body mostly works fine in zero gravity?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Stephen, why are keyboards the default computer interface? - Why didn't someone invent the printing press earlier? It seems to have been quite financially valuable. Was it an engineering problem or a lack of entrepreneurship? - In your opinion if Physics didn't work out for Professor Feynman would he have been able to make it as a stand up Comedian - In the past or currently, how much 'science' and technology is published or publicly available... is the most 'advanced'/ useful science and tech in the published literature/ patents? Are there branches of secret science? Yes or No, are you personally or do you know a group sitting on tech that is not public facing? - Why is Turing's machine model today so dominant compared to the equivalent lambda calculus? - Would love to read an essay just about the printing of the NKS book. This is a wild saga. - ​Is it possible to identify the moment in history when scientific investigation as we know it today broke away from the study of philosophy? - When do the viewers get to hear more about the answer to the why there's something rather than nothing? - Why do you think certain cultures have had such a disproportional success in science discovery & business?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Since photons do not experience the passing of time, does that mean that all their physical properties, such as wavelength, are fixed throughout their lifespan? - Do you think that it's worth investing and attempting cryonic suspension as a way to continue living? - ​Why does time seem to speed up as we age? - How can one learn physics or math at a young age? (organizing your life, order of topics, your experience as a young physics enthusiast) - If the center of the earth is really hot lava like the sun, how come it isn't melting everything between us & it?

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 to start a mega corporation? - How do you retain the best people over the years? - ​I heard, CEOs have actually no impact in large companies. - How do you have a successful software company in this day with only 3 good ML engineers left? Just saying I've heard WRI really needs to hire more ML experts, how do you do that when good ML people don't work for less than 150k - How many people could someone lead? - After starting a business, how do you know when you should secure an attorney? It's such a large expense but seems like an unavoidable necessity. - ​Any plans to take a trip into space? - How much more should the CEO make then the median salary? - I am 17 right now. Do you think the USA is better than the UK for business and innovation? 2nd question: do you think its a good idea to start building companies in your 20s, or is it a better idea to first build (theoretical) experience and go for it later on? as in, what do you think of people in their early 20s building ML/AI startups? - Do you have any heuristics on deciding when to stop or dramatically alter a long term and expensive research project? - It is tempting to be very quantitative about measuring the output of your various projects and teams in Wolfram. tempting to try and optimize it can also leave people feeling like robots? Balance? - Have you ever made any of your employees sign employee contracts with non-compete agreements? - Are there any focused Research teams in Wolfram? Like full-time researchers on AI/ML? - ​Are there any plans to open offices in Germany? - You were very successful at a young age. How can one be confident towards older or more experienced people? - What quality should we look in people to determine if working with them will improve us? - ​Do you have ideas for intermediate-scale projects / companies (maybe 25 or less people) that you aren't working on because they aren't compatible with Wolfram's size? - ​Dear Stephen, what is your favorite chocolate? - What was your reaction to getting the MacArthur grant? Was it exciting? What did you do with the money? (Was there money attached to it back then?)

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: ​Is there really such a thing as INFINITY or is it just a concept? - ​Does Infinity have a magnitude? - But is infinity really a mathematical object? It has no finite quantity. ​How can something without a finite quantity be used in a calculation/computation? - What's the difference between counting numbers and counting processes? - ​Is Rulial Space likely to be finite or infinite? - ​How is it possible that infinity of integers is smaller than the infinity of floats? - Why can't mules and donkeys reproduce? What are the limits for different species of mammals breeding with one another? - is it 5 crossovers on average for everyone? - Are memes on the internet, conceptually a species? - So how is a specie determined just by visual features? Or maybe defined by breeding? - Last question can genetic traits lay dormant for centuries..? Sort of recurring changes after x generations?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: In your opinion, who is the most snubbed scientist / inventor? Mine would be Rosalind Franklin - Did you ever meet Martinus Veltman. Did you ever use his computer algebra system Schoonship? Were you associated with any of the other CAS systems like REDUCE, LAM, SHEEP, CADABRA at Cambridge? - What computer language were you using when you were doing your early particle physics research? What do you think of Fortran and REDUCE? - What is your perspective on Theranos? Did you have awareness / skepticism of the company before it collapsed? - What are tensors and where did they originate from? (I use them for machine learning but don't even know what they are!)

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: What do you think of psychological personality tests? Which type are you? - ENTJ is the CEO personality type - Is replication a necessary criterion for the validation of a scientific experiment? - So are personalities clustered or not? ​I wonder If there are datasets available - Can you explain the science behind the iron rod that bore through Phineas Gage's head - AI, Politics & Decisions please. -  ​How crazy would it be if Politics becomes like hedging where its all run by algorithms. Vote algo 1 for prosperity! Algo 3 is tough on crime! Algo 4 is more compassionate.

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Can you talk about turbulence and why its the greatest unsolved problem of classical mechanics? - ​Hello, can you talk a little bit about turbulence. Is it true turbulence can't be predicted from the underlying physical equations (Navier-Stokes)? - how about intelligent fluids that are about to take over the world? - Which self-driving technology is better: Imaging or LIDAR? - What are finite fields and why are they important?

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: Did you ever experience imposter syndrome? - ​As automation and worker reduction at the workplace continues to gather steam, would it make sense to legally reduce further the max hours worked per week to avoid mass unemployment? - ​You ultimately named your company with your last name. Why? I have mixed feelings about this - What are your thoughts on science and efficiency? Do you believe that high profiled science experiments could be done more efficiently in order to achieve a particular discovery? Is there room for imagination and creativity in (unconventional methods) in the scientific field? - How can people in school and in general have more stronger self-organization to be able to stand up to the institutionalized networks with unfortunate entry conditions? - How much of your work in your business is "exploration of opportunity" vs "management". Do you have a set ratio, or rules of thumb to regulate between the two? - Hello Stephen and everyone! One issue keeping back from innovating traditional big industries R&D is said to be the difficulty to adopt new paradigm shifts. What is your view on this? - Wolfram only makes profit out of sales of the program or does it have other sources of income? - Did you ever get takeover proposals from google, Facebook, Microsoft or others. Will you exit one day? - What other companies/groups out there we're doing consistent good independent work using a similar model to Wolfram? Any standouts? - Do Wolfram employees get motivated when they see the result of people using the Wolfram technologies? - ​Will you go beyond being an Oracle system for crypto currencies such as Cardano/Ada etc? Or will you eventually leverage your computable data to create your own cryptocurrency??

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 do you keep track of all of the information you have reviewed? From articles to journals to emails to books. - What are your thoughts, on technology/startups in Latin America (present and future)? Starting a company where there are no specific tech community, or the people might not be ready for adoption - How do you manage your family life around your busy schedule with personal and business interests? - How can you deal with school that demotivates your will to explore and learn new stuff? - How much time do you spend on technology intelligence? How are you keeping eyes on topics you may be interesting on? - I started a business by accident, and now I'm trying to find out, how to build a real business around that - How important is Law for success and or payoff, what are the doors it opens? Given Bill Gates having a much higher net worth than Steve Jobs - Who are the people under 30 that inspire you? - How to deal with the feeling that you need to understand everything that exists before you can do something original? - What do you do when you suffer credibility due to lack of paper credentials? - Dr Wolfram - do you have an ideal "ratio" where you split your time between working "IN" the business as opposed to working "ON" the business. If not a ratio - do you have rules of thumb when. - How many companies live stream meetings on a frequent and regular basis? Food for thought. - Would there be value to developing a PhD equivalent for generalists instead of specialists? - Yeah it's crazy that Wolfram research Streams everything! It's the best!