Episode Notes

Notes go hereJustin, Jason and Joe discuss Morning Brief, Math Academy, and ... a lot of other stuff.

Episode Notes

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.

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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.

Justin and Jason discuss the radically accelerated computer-science course sequence that Jason created for his Math Academy students, why PHP is like the C of the web, the character Scotty Jackson is creating for Morning Brief, Justin's foray into crypto trading, thoughts on the future of NFT's, the story of how Jason was finally able to buy the domain mathacademy.com and why the .com TLD still rules the day, the hypothesis that the laws of physics are evolving, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Young Sheldon, and the Ken Burns documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, Jason's upcoming interview on Donn Felker's podcast, why starting a podcast is an inefficient content development strategy for startups, how the Math Academy system's adaptive algorithms will create a personalized and optimal learning plan for each student, and how Jason is implementing a free-response evaluator for math problems.

Justin and Justin discuss how and why Jason is reviving his long-abandoned blog and Twitter account and how he's planning on building an audience for the launch of Math Academy, the First1000 newsletter, and some of the strategies utilized by the companies that have been profiled, the PDF Zero to Users, whether deferred tuition offered at boot camps like Lambda School is a good idea and the upside of buying and selling equity in individuals, the possibility of rebranding and relaunching the podcast, how the pandemic killed MV Code Club and the status of Jason's crypto-trading project, the massive content development project that is Math Academy, why Justin is obsessed with the thumbnail creation service he's building for Morning Brief, how to alter a large and highly active table in MySQL, how bad the series Travellers is and how good The Sinner is, and the upcoming TV sci-fi series Foundation.

Justin and Jason talk about their return after a 9-month hiatus, getting vaccinated and getting back into shape, Chris Schwarz's novel The Cache and the character inspired by Jason's son Colby, the origin and surprising spread of the luck surface area, why Justin has stopped working on TaskFlow, is saying goodbye to Nugget and his new foray into developing Roblox Games, how Jason's daughter is growing a following for her animated stories and fiction writing, the monster project that is Math Academy, and Justin's new project with Joe Stech called Morning Brief.