The At Home CEO - Stephen Wolfram - #080

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends. Welcome back to the Modern Wisdom Podcast. My guest today is Stephen Wolfram. Stephen is the founder and CEO of the software company Wolfram Research. He is the mind behind Wolfram Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine. This might sound like hyper nerd speak that you don't ever interact with, but Wolfram Alpha actually forms the basis for the answer engine behind Siri and Alexa. So his work is probably a lot closer to your life than you give it credit for. Now, just as interesting as what Stephen does is how he does it. He's tracked every email that he sent over the last 30 years, also tracked every mouse movement, every keystroke and has recorded all of these down using computer software that his company has built himself. His approach to personal productivity and analytics is probably without match on the planet. And I'm so excited to get to present this fascinating insight into the life of an incredibly influential figure. Hopefully you'll enjoy it as much as I did. There is some cool experiments that you can do yourself on the Wolfram Alpha website. That will be linked in the show notes below. If you enjoy this episode, please share it with a friend. It makes me incredibly happy. But for now, please welcome the very wise Stephen Wolfram.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined today by Stephen Wolfram. Stephen, welcome to the show.

**Stephen Wolfram** (1:51)
Thank you.

**Chris Williamson** (1:52)
I am particularly excited to speak to you today. 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 idea that it's going to 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 work you do is interesting, but the way that you do it is almost as fascinating to me, which is a compliment.

**Stephen Wolfram** (2:30)
I like to think it's interesting. I've been doing it for decades, so it better be interesting or I should be embarrassed. But yes, 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 be as concentrated as I can in actually doing the work I want to do. And so I would say the number one tool, which is not for everybody, that I've built to get my work done is I built a company over the last 32 years that has 800 people in it. Then it's sort of intended to be a machine for taking ideas that I have and turning them into real things. And so that, but one of the things that is probably more sort of generalizable is one of the ways that I tend to work, because I'm, you know, in 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 I tend to follow the sort of approach of 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 going to go figure out what to do, you go off on your own, you hide away, you figure out what to do. This is 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 going to 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, 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 usually a, you know, I've got audio. I'm, you know, sharing the thing that we're both talking about. But I'm not seeing the people.
And then, you know, what I like to do is to try and, you know, we're trying to figure something out. Like today, there were several different meetings that I had about different kinds of things, and we figured out some things. And that's always, you know, it's very satisfying. And, you know, one has to have a, you know, what I'm typically doing is I'm typing into one of our notebook documents and trying to, you know, set out what it is we figured out and so on. And then notes get taken and so on. And then it gets turned into something where something real can happen from it.