Two friends, one long conversation

Mammad has a PhD in [FIELD] engineering and spends his working life somewhere inside AI and machine learning: [ONE PLAIN-ENGLISH LINE ON WHAT HE ACTUALLY BUILDS OR RESEARCHES]. He is very good at the part most people skip, which is admitting what a model does not know.

He also wants to farm. Not as a metaphor and not as a retirement plan. [WHAT HE WANTS TO GROW / WHERE / WHAT HE HAS ACTUALLY DONE SO FAR]. The two are less far apart than they look. A model and a field are both systems that will happily give you a confident answer and only tell you the truth later, once you have fed them for a season.

[ONE HUMAN LINE: where he grew up, how he and Rashad met, or the thing he will not shut up about].

On MRPODcast he is the one who wants the mechanism. He will take an argument apart to see whether the parts are real before he agrees with the conclusion, which is why the episodes take longer than planned.

Rashad was born in a country that no longer exists.

The Soviet Union felt permanent right up until the morning it wasn't. He was young, but the lesson stuck and became the way he looks at almost everything since: the systems that present themselves as solid and inevitable are usually the ones with the deepest cracks. Most people argue with the surface. He has spent his life going underneath it.

That habit has had a few different jobs. He has an M.A. in Macroeconomics, which trained him to ask what is actually driving a number instead of what the number says. He spent years as a financial controller at Nokia Networks, living in the gap between what a business reports and what is really happening. He ran a technology and operations consulting agency and then deliberately wound it down, because he wanted to build and think rather than sell hours. These days he builds software, including Taxformify.

He speaks English, Russian, Azerbaijani and Turkish, gets by in French, and is slowly losing a fight with Arabic.

On MRPODcast he is usually the one asking whether the thing everyone agrees on is actually true. He argues that value has to be earned rather than borrowed, and he will not let a comfortable answer go unexamined.