Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (November 23, 2022)

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: As a British native, do you participate in Thanksgiving festivities? - Do you ever use spreadsheets or any other type of specialist app to manage information? Or is your main tool Mathematica? - Do you go through periods of low motivation? If so, what do you do to get over that? - Should I travel? - Pi Day at SXSW was pretty special! - I've been to one of your talks. The first time was around 1990 at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Wolfram is the reason why I purchased a NeXTSTEP computer, because it included a copy of Mathematica. - I think a lot of people are deep in mainstream university discourse and it is good to have talks to open up and stimulate curious people to break out of the stream if they want. - Well, "they" say nothing beats person-to-person contact, as opposed to video conferencing. Then again, maybe "they" just like to travel to exotic places (disclaimer: I hate travel)! - If you have to think about it (doing more in-person talks/traveling)... the answer is no. Unless you absolutely love it, there is no value in it. - How about meeting people that don't go to universities but are really engaged in and doing hobby projects in computer and mathy stuff? - Have you ever been to Idaho? - Doesn't have to be a big and public place. Just talking back and forth, having a conversation. Big talks are not needed. - What's the goal? To interact and make friends or lay the seeds of the Wolfram universe? - Have you thought about making a video streaming and conferencing platform that integrates with your notebooks and computational language? Or do Google and Zoom do that well enough? - You could periodically host "Wolfcon." Only folks interested would be likely to show up. - As far as virtual interaction, I like Q&A streams, but also CA and physics streams. - If I were you, I would make appearances conditional with a personal request based on your curiosity. Example: "I'll come to Paris, and in return I want you to pre-arrange a three-hour private tour with a senior curator at the Louvre for me and my wife." - Wouldn't a conference on the Physics Project, in collaboration with a major university, help further disseminate it within the academic community? - You should do a talk with Gerard 't Hooft. - How come you were not on the Apple keynote when the Intel-based Macs were announced during the Mathematica demo?