The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business and innovation as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions include: How did Champaign become the base of operations of the company? - Why haven't you lived in Champaign for "three decades"? - Is it a doable thing to work at a university and run a startup at the same time? - Hi Stephen, at pre-revenue stage, should a company aim for reaching revenue faster at the expense of cash or for saving cash in order to survive little longer at the expense of time/market opportunity - How do you deal with employees who may be very talented and productive, but may find it hard to fit in with the rest of the team? I wonder if it's even possible for large companies to be agile - How do you plan a roadmap for your company? Does it just happen naturally or is there some deep thought that goes into what you want to make happen? - What's your experience with management paradigms like SCRUM and agile? Can you recommend a 'general strategy'? - Would you please elaborate on the distributed nature of your company? - Should there be a limit on the maximum number of people on a project or in a meeting? - Is there a suitable time period which one must devote to reading about previous innovations/developments related to the theme of a project, before actually jumping onto the implementation? - Is it possible or practical to avoid mid-managers while scaling up the company by creating sub-founders who work just like the founder at the founding stage of the company - What are the most tiresome things in your job as a CEO? - How do you stay so intense and focused after all these years when you could've retired much much earlier?

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: When an electron moves from one energy level to another and it releases a photon, is the direction of the photon random? - Can you please explain inertial and non-inertial reference frames? What are their implications? - Why do humans have an appendix even though it is unnecessary? - Why do we have folds in our ears? - Save icon-Floppy discussion.

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: When did Neural Networks (and more generally these more black box type algos) overtake more traditional optimization approaches such as nonlinear programming and why do you think this happened? - Are memories stored in the brain? - Bell Labs is the company that developed C and Unix right? - Did you ever use LISP?

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: Why does Occam's razor work? - Stephen, do you know how to cook? - How would you explain the goal of your physics project to a 5 year old? - Yuval recently indicated that the next pandemic (crisis) will be an attack on the internet. What do you think? - What did you think about that strange shaped asteroid passing the solar system, which caused speculation it was an interstellar voyager? - Going back to the original thoughts of the "net" but based on new but now almost existing tech/Software? The important part of the attack on the Iranian Uranium system was that it was done through the electric grid and not the "internetgrid". Explaining how that is relevant and possible would be enlightening to many. That can be made a mainly physics answer. - In the Wikipedia article for Outmuamua they say "it did exhibit non‑gravitational acceleration" - what does that mean?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business and innovation as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions include: Can you give us some insights into how you scaled up Wolfram, and what important issues / questions you had to tackle or what significant lessons you learned? - Are there cultural biases that you have had to overcome for breaking any prior limits in the possibilities of your activities? - How did you find your first employees? Did you have to go to a lot of places to find them? - Partner vs employee is a really interesting distinction to discuss - employees complete tasks, partners identify tasks worth investing in? - How do you deal with individuals who are strongly convicted that they are knowledgeable on a matter but actually have no idea what they are talking about? - Jim Cramer talked on Lex about political games Steve Jobs and his people played, a kind of high level thing. What does that really mean? - In the beginning, how many of your decisions about the company were gut instinct/market research/customer feedback/something else? - ​Is it possible to earn money doing free software? What is "Open Source" good for from your perspective? - How do you assess people to figure out their niche?

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: Why is there a size limit for a planetary body in the universe? Is the size of Jupiter the largest that is possible? - What happens to the electrons before the sun fusion occurs? - Why does it take up to 100,000 years for a photon to go from the core to the surface of the sun while only 8 minutes to reach earth? - How does one solve more-than-one electron systems? - When an atom absorbs a photon and then the same atom emit a photon... is that the same photon? - Is it true that the speed of light as we know it is an accepted assumption and the "one way" speed of light could not be calculated because the time measuring instruments can never be synced due to relativity? so we can only measure the speed of light beaming and returning from an object and assuming that the speed in both ways is the same? - So what happen to materials as metals if you cool them down in cooling fluids, for example we have Helium in a container with the metal and we cool it down to a fluid. - Dirac talk a lot about the constants of nature and our inability to explain them. Have we come any further in explaining them since his passing? - What about the triple/critical point? (i forget the name, but its the temp and pressure where a substance exists as gas & liquid & solid) - How would you suggest getting a child interested in diving deep into science and tech? Not just web programming but something real. What if the kid's parents aren't very interested themselves? Can the kid be 'saved' so to speak?

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: I am interested in the evolution of mechanics from Newton through d'Alembert to Lagrange. Could you elaborate on this? Why was it the Europeans that created the modern mathematical framework and not the Chinese? They obviously had a head start. Why don't we use Chinese characters instead use the Latin alphabet? Pascal's Triangle was known in China before Europe—Sounds a little bit like computer graphics programming competitions in the early 90s (was quite popular in Scandinavia). Math competitions in logic might have been a similar thing—for example in Poland, but who knows. There's an obvious problem with peer reviewed academic research. Is there anything in the way science was developed in the past that we can learn from? Were we better at peer reviewing science?

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 sociology a real science? Can it predict something? - Should we use Inductive reasoning in science? - What is a number? - Would computer processing speed increase if we had a compendium of mathematical proofs? - What's the worst computer bug you have ever had? What was the simplest computer bug that you couldn't figure out? - How quickly is technology advancing at the moment? Is science reliable in the grand scheme of things? - How is it possible to overcome this sort of self doubt?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business and innovation as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions include: Why did you choose to partner up with Ethereum and Cardano? What do you think of Cryptocurrencies in general? - Have you ever meet Stephen Wozniak? - How do Wolfram Research determine the prices of its products? Any tips for pricing products? - Cryptocurrency is living a top of the demand that ransomeware generates - What are the biggest obstacles to using smart contracts in day-to-day transactions? - Who taught you first about how to run a software company? Did your family taught you this, or some professor from your university? What they taught you? Who was the first person to buy your software? - Is it more difficult to start a new company and make it big or to enter a big company and climb the hierarchy? - If I may ask, how important do you think advanced education (i.e. a PhD) is in starting a company? Do you think it is necessary if you're interested in a high-tech industry (quantum computers, synthetic biology, etc.)? - Did you write your first piece of software in assembly language on a 386? - How do you organize your ideas, projects, notes, etc.? Pen & paper, or electronic-based? - When is it the right time to put the books down, bite the bullet and start a company around your idea? It always seems like we don't know enough to start. - How much knowledge/ understanding of economics and finance is needed to start a company, in particular in tech/ science? - Couldn't they fork off an experimental company, to try the experimental billion dollar making way, without risking much of the millions of income? - How did you find the best partners for your company? Did you find it among your friends from university?

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: If you couldn't be a human, what animal would you want to be and why? - What technology is necessary for us humans to be able to provide an evolutionary "update" to any of our sensory organs? - Are there any implication of standardizing the identification of chemical signatures of odours? - Is the fact that L-glucose and D-glucose taste the same mean that taste is not sensitive to chirality? - Can the spectrometry for smell and taste be based on a saline scale? - Do the neurons in the brain form a spatial manifold? Are the connections mostly local or non local? - What happens with people with diabetes?