347: TZ Interview - Brett Kennedy / Head of Robotics, JPL
Jason talks with Brett Kennedy, head of robotics at JPL
Justin and Jason discuss the fire that burned down Joe's house, the death of Morning Brief, what killed AppIgnite, why Justin is leaving his mountain life behind, the latest with Math Academy, why Jason thinks Money Ball is the best startup movie ever made, Justin's desire to start recording music again, and why Jason still hasn't managed to set up the MacBook Pro he got for Christmas.es go here
Notes go heJustin and Jason discuss the possibility of Jason bringing on a new developer to Math Academy, how Jason is allergic to any kind of bureaucracy, formality or scheduling, the challenge of building newsletters for certain verticals, Justin's anticipated pivot towards customized newsletters and premium memberships, what colleges Colby is applying to, how difficult it is to get into a decent computer science program these days, and the TV show The Boys.
Notes go hereJustin, Jason and Joe discuss Morning Brief, Math Academy, and ... a lot of other stuff.
Justin and Jason discuss why Justin is reinvigorated about a premium version of Morning Brief and some of the new features that are on deck, how the first few weeks of the Math Academy beta launch have been going, and thoughts on how to structure and run a startup.
Justin and Jason discuss the launch of the Math Academy online learning system and the pivot of Morning Brief.
Justin and Jason discuss Jason's trip to the Pacific Northwest and Colby's first college tour, why kids are maturing more slowly these days, the launch of Morning Brief, initial feedback from users, pricing, and thoughts on the future, the implementation of the Math Academy knowledge-graph algorithm and preparing for the upcoming commercial launch, John Carmack's article on static analysis and the relationship between code size and code quality, Jason's recent efforts to remove old and unused code from the Math Academy codebase and thoughts on how to better modularize code in a large web application, using a job service like Amazon SQS to process non-real-time tasks, how Justin injured himself gardening, why Jason is teaching his 13-year-old daughter calculus over the summer, the first legitimate math research done by a Math Academy high-school student, and billionaires in space.
Justin and Jason discuss the Morning Brief launch strategy, brand concept, and development roles, the difficulties of launching the Math Academy diagnostic in time for the summer program, why Jason had to develop an animation studio for his content team, the underrated "fast zombie" series Black Summer, the sad reality that while everyone in the media seems to have an opinion on the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis, few are familiar with the basic facts, and likewise for the UAP phenomenon.
Justin and Jason discuss why Jason isn't planning to use Twitter as a marketing channel, personalized learning and the future of education, how and why the SAT and ACT are useful for college admissions despite their flaws, the orthogonal nature of student aptitude vs. consciousness, semantic tagging and the difficulty of categorizing text, reasons behind the sudden rise in UFO coverage in the media, the downside of always playing the skeptic, the potential of crypto-social networks services like BitClout, binary vs. probabilistic thinking, the ongoing collateral damage caused by Elon Musk's tweeting, the challenge of building an efficient and accurate adaptive diagnostic math test and the prospect of adding coding exercises to Math Academy, why the Wuhan lab leak is the biggest story of our time, why the media screwed it up so badly and the dangers of gain-of-function research on human pathogens.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's two-week kidney stone ordeal, why Jason thinks Twitter is probably more distraction than it's worth, the 6 levels of automated learning systems, how Justin and Joe plan to fund Morning Brief with a custom Kickstarter-like campaign, Brandon Sanderson's lectures on writing fantasy and science fiction, Superhuman's methodology for attaining product-market fit, how Jason is still paying off technical debt incurred over two years ago, the power and promise of Math Academy's dynamic diagnostic tool, California's boneheaded attempt to kill off gifted programs, accelerated academics and standardized college-entrance exams, the 60 Minutes story on UAP's, why the gain-of-function research performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the likely origin of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the TV series Invincible and Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead.