Two friends, one long conversation

Mammad holds a PhD degree in Engineering and spends his working life at the intersection of AI/ML and subsurface energy resources. He is passionate about ethical, transparent AI and the responsible advancement of ML in impactful domains, such as healthcare, computer vision, banking and finance, clean energy, and mineral extraction.

He also wants to farm. Not as a metaphor and not as a retirement plan. He wants to build a fully self-sustaining farm that requires a closed-loop system for water, energy, food production, and soil fertility management.

He loves reading, spending time in nature, and optimizing a problem.

On No Fixed Lane 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.

He also farms, which surprises people who only know the software. There is a small acreage with more than 130 fruit trees on it: lemons, oranges, peaches, apricots, quince, pears, figs, walnuts, chestnuts, grapes, five kinds of plum, cherries both sour and sweet, and mulberries black and white. Animals are next.

On No Fixed Lane 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.