SPEAKER_00:  We are once again delighted to be joined by Justin Skysak, Chief Quant and Director of Analytics at Math Academy who is here for round two. Thank you for being here Justin.
SPEAKER_01:  It's my pleasure. Great to chat with you guys again.
SPEAKER_02:  Now we'll get to even more of our questions.
SPEAKER_00:  Yeah, let them rip. The first topic I'd like to discuss is about the Math for ML course. So many of the people studying this course have the goal of changing their careers into machine learning and I think I feel this as well, like this heavy pressure to be producing some legible output along the way to use as a portfolio or something like that. So how do you think people should manage the balance between going into the Math Academy minds and just grinding versus working on projects alongside it?
SPEAKER_01:  Yeah, yeah, I see what you're saying, right? Because when you, at the end of the day, if you want to get hired for a machine learning role or a software role, a large component comes down to having a portfolio of really cool projects that you've done. And so, yeah, so the bigger question is kind of like, right, how much time do you want to spend skilling up your foundational skills versus just using them to grapple with some project that looks impressive? Well, let me talk about the failure mode that sometimes happens when people don't do a whole lot of foundational skill work and just focus on projects and then we can kind of back into an answer of like, okay, how much foundational skill work do you need? So just at the extreme, if you just focus on projects and you don't really know a whole lot about machine learning, I've seen this happen before many times. What typically happens if somebody goes onto like, Kaggle or some others, I download some data set and then just get some off the shelf models, fitted decision tree, fit a regression model or a neural ladder, something, whatever. They get a kind of like a standard project that's been done like thousands of times before. And it's just, it's very unimpressive because it doesn't really demonstrate knowledge of anything other than how to import a class and run it. So I think the purpose of a project is to not only demonstrate that you want to go out and do things but also that you are able to do non-trivial things because you have a lot of foundational knowledge to do that. So I think, so ideally, if I'm thinking of like the ideal kind of project for a to show off in like an interview for machine learning position, it would be something where it goes beyond just importing some off the shelf library and running it with default frames or slightly tweet type parameters. Ideally there would be some kind of problem like maybe like constructing a custom loss function that's specifically fit to your scenario or by like combining several models in like an intelligent way that kind of demonstrates that you really know what's going on. And so in order to get to that point where you can do a cool project like that, that demonstrates a high level of ability, you've got to have quite a bit of foundational knowledge. I guess I just realized there's two different types of projects I guess that we're talking about. There's a project that's like a show off to employer during an interview to demonstrate ability and then there's also like a different project that's just like for you yourself to be kind of excited about learning more machine learning and these are two different kind of things. So okay, so project at the end like for like an interview level project, yeah, you'd have to have a lot of foundational knowledge built up. So that would be something that maybe you take your math for machine learning course and then you also take a full blown machine learning course that actually covers the specific algorithms. Our math for machine learning course covers the a lot of the math that is used in those algorithms but it doesn't cover actually like the back propagation algorithm it covers like the chain multi variable chain rule and like matrix operation like the math that you need to have. So yeah, so right foundation knowledge would be math for machine learning than a actual focused machine learning course proper and then you'd be in the position where you can do like really interesting things like customizations. Now that said, I think if it can definitely be a good motivational tool to work on maybe less impressive but still like fun projects along the way. So something like I guess like you're getting your feet wet a little bit with like just running some off the shelf machine learning models on some off the shelf data sets like that's I mean there's nothing there's nothing wrong with that. The only downside is like if you spend too much time doing that then you're not actually like focusing on the foundational skill and golf that is going to have you doing it a more impressive project. But if you spend like a smaller fraction of time on that and it keeps your motivation going and that fuels you to keep doing more math for machine learning machine learning course proper implementing algorithms from scratch that sort of thing that then yeah it's totally good. So I think the answer is my answer is that if we're talking about the final project that you want to like show off before an interview I'd say to get your foundational knowledge in place.
SPEAKER_00:  No, it's very useful to get because I feel like I'm in this situation as well and I think it's actually analogous to a lot of things you face in life as a 20 year old man a lot of the goals you face are very long term and the challenge is like deciding whether you're going to complete them serially like one after the other or concurrently because when you have long term goals whether it's fitness you know financial staff career if you just did them serially at least from my perspective you'd be 50 before you hit the ones that you'd deprioritised later down the line and it feels kind of the same with this machine learning stuff like if I first complete math academy then I complete you know networks from scratch building from linear aggressions upwards towards more complicated models and only after that do I actually work on you know creating a really cool project that will get me a job then it will be so long before I eventually get to that final point and it's frustrating for me as like having done the software engineering route where it feels like day one almost you can basically start creating something creative even if you don't fully understand the programming language you can create a project but actually solved a problem in quite a creative way so I guess my question is like does it have to be sort of completed serially like that to get to that end point or is there a way to make it more concurrent and is there something about machine learning that makes it very different from the software engineering approach?
SPEAKER_01:  Yeah so yeah I have several answers so I'd say it can be done somewhat and well it can be done more incremental I guess I've kind of okay we started off with the idea of a project that I kind of split this into two ideas like there's a real project and there's a trivial project but I think in reality there's a whole spectrum of projects in between and at some point it becomes good enough to get you hired in a job so I'm just thinking like you can kind of take this kind of like you're saying you can go overboard and just keep on spinning up on your fundamentals and you're working through all these textbooks and you end up acquiring more knowledge than a PhD researcher in machine learning but you haven't actually done any projects that you're just working out of textbooks or whatever and you're still like oh I just need to do like these other ten textbooks that I'll be right like that's ridiculous I agree that's also a failure mode so I think I guess maybe the real answer is like just always devote like some portion of your time to working on projects and not to a point that it's overwhelming and causing friction and your foundational scaling up but maybe like an 80-20 rule something like that 20% of the time working on some projects that eventually like your projects just get advanced enough that you can get hired for a job based on that and yeah and I guess it's also like different jobs of just different requirements and what they're respecting what they're expecting and sometimes a simpler project will be sufficient to get to get an interview to get a position sometimes they're expecting more advanced things sometimes the type of project that you do it's not even so much about how simple or complex it is it's more about how relevant it is to the company or whatever so I guess yeah I guess it's probably a good idea right to be yeah always always be kind of spend a fraction of your time contributing to the portfolio and then just keep your career feelers out and just see if anything is catching traction and and I guess you can also just make it kind of adaptive too in the sense that like okay you if you try to like go to some interviews and and they don't seem very oppressed with your your projects that's probably an indication that you may need to like skill up your foundations a little bit more because they think the projects are a little too too simple but if you are if you're getting a lot of feedback from from it to like wow this is really cool like we should have you talk to like so and so on our our data science team who does some stuff with like that's that's good science maybe that just means it's maybe just need to keep leaning into the if you don't end up getting the position there maybe just means you need to keep leaning into that project and make it make it cooler or other projects okay I feel like I answered one of your questions but not the other and I forget what the other one was yeah no that was a great
SPEAKER_00:  answer is really useful I think the other part was like what makes machine learning different
SPEAKER_01:  oh yeah to software engineering in this respect yeah yeah I think that the big difference there is just the the the body of a foundational knowledge that machine learning is sitting upon now so I got so I should I should be close it's software engineering like there is tons of nuts and bolts like everything is going down to like assembly code right but but in order to make a a cool advanced app that does something you don't have to know typically you don't have to know assembly in order to do really interesting things typically at the top level typically I mean so yeah I I know there are lots of domains where that actually is very very important but let's just say
SPEAKER_02:  you know I was actually indicating that it may be even less common than oh okay yeah yeah yeah
SPEAKER_01:  no that's all right that's all right yeah how many of the of the set of of app how many knows apply or probably not very much I don't know probably myself yeah myself so maybe yeah all right so yeah right so you there is a body of foundational knowledge there and it goes really deep but there's there's a special like it's it gets so well I guess encapsulated that you just don't really need to interface with it very much if at all um now in machine learning it gets very it's like the the there's a there's a bleed in the in the math uh foundations it bleeds out to the top level and so it's like like if you want to if you want to do some like off the shelf stuff with machine learning no problem but the minute you start wanting to customize things um and or like if the off the shelf model is not working and it's time to like tweak parameters in order to to understand like what it is that you need to do you have to really understand what's going on at a mathematical level with the models and I think I think the the the core difference from like building an app and having to tweak things about the app is just whatever you're tweaking it's just it's just better encapsulated under the hood you there's some level like you you get to pull levers and and know kind of exactly what they're doing um but in machine learning there's not a clearer label on what the lever is like I guess the the clearer label is phrased mathematically uh and if you don't understand the the map and you don't understand what the lever really has as the effect of of doing if that makes sense
SPEAKER_02:  why did you say that it would make sense if you were driven to do a project let's say while you're you're base level skills are underdeveloped that that's a good incentive that's a good thing to work on because as you're let's say skilling up your math academy and you feel more confident about adding something to your project that's got an immediate way to make use of your skills like you say it's kind of more trivial of a project it might not be something actually novel or useful in the real sense but maybe it's useful to you because it's an interest or whatever else it seems to me that that would work because it's not too far outside of your your skills and when you get stuck you kind of just keep skilling up and wait until you can make the next step and go from that
SPEAKER_01:  yeah I like I like that idea right yeah you kind of crank on a project a little bit eventually you kind of get to the point where you're not you don't feel like you're doing anything special he's focused on skilling up come back to it later fresh advice fresh knowledge like oh I can do this that cool thing do that a little bit come back yeah yeah I think that could totally work I think I think really the the only thing to to to watch out for is it is is just when like if you if you spend too much time on the project not realizing that you're stalling out when you're actually stalling out but as long as you're kind of like you have some way of like keeping yourself honest about whether the project is going in an interesting direction and you're making improvements to it and you're always like continuing to skill up on the side as long as that that needle is still moving then then I think yeah it could be a great idea to be working on a project
SPEAKER_02:  on the side and as long as it doesn't make you feel like your goal project is so far out of reach that it's actually demotivating for you because sometimes yeah with the stuff that takes a lot of base knowledge you think how is it ever going to be possible that I'm going to know how to do this yeah so yeah that's a balance to just psychologically yeah that's true and I guess that's kind of
SPEAKER_01:  different for every every person has different emotional responses to different situations like I'm just thinking about uh when I I used to teach this really advanced computer science program why not do the computer science and they would be implementing models from scratch and running it on on datasets and whenever new students came into the program I was asking them to do things when they when they were like very difficult things different students had had different reactions to it some were like oh this is really cool I have no idea how to do that I want to learn other students were like oh this looks really really challenging I'm intimidated I don't want to take the class because it's just yeah it's very so right I guess it's just a matter of like identifying Yahoo what what are you like at the at the core like looking outside yourself thinking if I were teaching myself as a student what kind of motivational techniques would I be using
SPEAKER_02:  in your experience with that since it's so closely related is there anything that that tends to go along with that kind of gumption or you could even call it agency of a certain kind and then did you perceive any way of of helping those students skill up in that area gumption as an ability is there a way to make them more excited about a challenge instead of
SPEAKER_01:  shying away from it I know it's a tough question but yeah yeah I have a partial answer so far so my partial answer is that if if a student um manages to get through several like hard tasks hard projects and they are worried about the next one then what I would always say in that situation is like okay you're worried right now but think back to every single time in the past you've been in the situation you're like I don't know if I could do this but like the project was right at the edge of your ability you were able to come through I was here to support you in it and guess what you got through it just fine and now look back at that project how is it how hard is it now oh it's super easy like oh it took you like one week beforehand and now you could knock it out in an hour like okay well the same thing is going to happen like you kind of look historically at it so yeah once somebody has built up enough successes you can kind of remind them of like hey you've been in the situation before it worked out fine don't worry about it and that I mean of course it never completely like resolves any any worry but it gets them kind of over the hump but like yeah I'm gonna take the next step because I know it's gonna work out fine I know it's gonna work out fine even if I don't feel like it's gonna work out fine right but the question is still like okay what if what if it's the the first project that somebody is doing and and they are just too intimidated by it and I think I think the answer to that is like if you haven't built up a history of overcoming challenges then it's it's important for the first challenge to be kind of scaffolded very very well to the point that it doesn't seem you kind of you kind of gradually turn the dial on the level of challenge relative to the level the the student's ability and so yeah you see you start out with something that's that's that's not as as intimidating and maybe it gives more support in it too you just kind of you try to take steps to bring down the level of worry but I mean there's it's it's it's true that it comes with threshold like that if somebody doesn't have this level of agency or consumption beyond some threshold then it just doesn't seem to work out because there's only so much you can do is there's like a teacher or in supporting student and scaffolding down the project it's it's gonna you can try to get it down to like a minuscule amount but that minuscule amount it's always going to be some step of like of student has to yeah just take that step then and some students are just unwilling to to do that but interesting so could you talk a little bit
SPEAKER_00:  about the role of mentorship maybe even in your own experience because I know you've written on twitter about Jason being a great mentor for you you know you've given this analogy describing the relationship between you two as like doing a super intense PhD with the world's most demanding and also supportive advisor and I wonder if that kind of plays into this sort of gumption thing like is there a role for mentorship in increasing like a student's gumption or the the sort of scale of the project that they'd be willing to take on? I think okay I think mentorship
SPEAKER_01:  can help with that but but I think typically the the main the main value of a the mentor and and not just the value to the part the mentee the person being mentored but also just the value to the matching problem how to how to match like really good mentors with with people who need mentoring I think that tends to favor mentees who are already in a state that they they just want to like barrel at and I think at least in my experience being a mentee and a mentor to other people it's like it um it just it works best when the mentee is basically a cannon who is gonna like just blast out the cannon and the mentor just has to like point them in the right direction it's like yeah the mentee is this crazy the this crazy like they're just sprinting full force ahead and they're just kind of like dude I'm going as fast as I can just point me in the right direction and I'm gonna keep going that way and just like tell me to watch out for whatever like snakes and sand pits or whatever are gonna like try to attack me but I'm gonna I'm gonna give it all up I think it's like it's one of those things like okay ideally um if there were more good mentors in the world then you could give like every every person a mentor like that and it'd be great and it would definitely help with the any lack of of agency but the the what what happens in practice is the people who get good mentors or the people who have the agency to seek them out and convince the mentors that like that you're gonna be worth their time so yeah that's really interesting
SPEAKER_00:  so like to broaden this sort of question slightly yeah I'm really curious like what suggestions you give to math academy students in terms of designing that ideal social learning environment because when I look back through history there's lots of examples in mathematics of these small pockets very like small regions in different countries where which produced a lot of mathematical talent one example would be the math circles set up by a comogorov after the 1940s there's also the Louis Legrand in France where half of France's field field mental lists I think attended even in one family with the name Bernoulli yeah so exactly so even if people's ambitions aren't necessarily so grand and high as to you know achieve a field's medal how should they ideally be designing that social circle around themselves in order to learn most efficiently and have the
SPEAKER_01:  most fun we'll do yeah great question yeah so what are the characteristics of a good social circle to support your learning math or just in general I think okay well I think well one first thing about that pops to mind is I mean it's kind of a cliché but like surround yourself with people who are smarter than you who are like more committed than you who are like just surround with yourself with people who are more intense than you're only at least as intense just trying to ramp because you always arise to the level of people around you or you fall to the level of people around you and it's kind of like I mean we succeed this all the time in sports like if you if you have a if you are practicing with with the team where you're not the best player on the team and you have to really prove your worth like you're gonna go out and have a great game like relative to your own abilities you're gonna go it's gonna really force you to take things seriously for I still have the competition but if you're you're practicing with a lot of people who are just not quite at your skill level and you're just the best one there like even if you have a great game relative to everybody else you're just not it's not going to be as productive for for you yourself and it's not going to be as motivated and you'll you'll just feel like you can dunk on everybody without trying and that's the worst situation to be in and a social group when you when you feel like you can dunk on everybody without trying that means you're not trying and because you're not trying you're not actually improving all you're doing is is dunking on people and not increasing your ability to to do things it's not a productive situation now it might be a little helpful to other people getting dunked on if it motivates them to to like step up to the to the plate but at the same time be like totally demotivated with the skill levels to do big so I guess okay so I guess okay criterium number one is surround yourself with the most intense most committed most knowledgeable people who are as far beyond your ability as you can without it being totally demotivating they are kind of above you in ways but you feel like you can close the gap and kind of join them and once once you get to kind of like the the the a point where you are really really solid at some particular skills within a within a field it can turn it to a thing where like you're better at things a b and c and they're better at things c d and e and maybe you're working together on things or maybe you're just kind of like trying to you hear kind of trash talking to each other a bit about like oh you couldn't even do things a and b watch me and then they're just like well check out things d and e or whatever you know like I can just kind of see this happening in a in a bathroom where it's like dude look at this integral you can solve that there like do that in my sleep and then another person's like yeah you can't even in verdimatrix man like we talked about like I guess the second part so we this this thing number one has to do with like skill level overall skill level thing number two I think the another benefit I guess what what is most the most obvious benefit is surrounding yourself and with other people who are learning things and and trying to skill up is the the social ties and it's yes it's not just about about feeling like you need to skill up to join the ranks it's also just about the social bonds that kind of keep you aligned and you can totally see like I had at a gym one of the one of the biggest factors and like you're keeping somebody coming to the gym is whether they have friends at the gym they don't have friends with the gym and they stop exercising for a week then they're at a high risk of just never coming back but you know if you have friends with the gym and then you kind of fall off the wagon or maybe you're like traveling or whatever come back after a week and your friends are like dude let's go like where you been it's time to kind of come back and then like you just it brings you back on the on the wagon it's like it's almost like if you start losing your habit and your friends in this group have their habits going strong you they can they can kind of pick you back off of their habit or they can they can give you a bit of their habit in the sense of that they're trying to like pull you back in there's a there's a gravity that's bringing you back back on the training if you fall off and yeah I can just be very very motivating if you if you feel like your personal bonds with people are increasing as your skills are increasing it's it's kind of like speaking in healthy nutrients into a yummy meal or something like that so yeah okay I'm sure there are other factors that are important in a social group but the the two that that come to my mind are the the skill difference try to like be not the best one there have areas to improve and make it so that the people you're working with are are really motivating you to to rise to the their level and also you're developing really nice social bonds with them but I don't know do you guys have any other things that you were thinking of do you guys do any like social groups for learning or career related or stuff like that
SPEAKER_02:  and I mean we do well at least on my side I do some online it's surprisingly hard to find like ever particularly overlap this kind of stuff where I'm interested in in person at least it has been for me but online we've been doing this for many years and that's been super helpful at least on my side but when you were talking about the sports it made me think and it reminded me just to reemphasize the standards point I think the high standards is so crucial and if you look at the stories of the best players in a given sport you know Tom Brady in America football or maybe Lionel Messi in soccer or your people in the book they're known for raising the quality of the players around them simply by dent of their own high standards and the the way in which they practice and engage fully with the with the sport and every practice session or just by being there they're raising a level and I think at some point like you say you can be the best in some area and your role then become partially to set the standard for others you know and I think just that general culture high standards is crucial and that's how you go to a new place and then Super Bowl or go to replace them in the World Cup or whatever it is because partially what you're doing is raising everybody up you know and of course that's a different stage in a person's life and career when they're already the best you know beyond that be grateful if you are in a place that has high standards because a lot of people they don't want that pressure yeah totally totally I remember
SPEAKER_01:  reading yeah sorry about Kobe Bryant and the Olympic team he had basketball he was like waking up at like 5 a.m. to work out like before their like official practice and like yeah I guess I think if I remember correctly yeah there's like he would be like waking up going to the gym at the same time and some other people were like going to sleep after a long night out like partying or whatever and they're like dude what are you doing he's like going to work out what are you doing yeah I'm
SPEAKER_02:  yeah I'm going to show you like everyone joined in exactly I remember a story from that where they all wanted him to go out with them at night and he goes all right I'll go out with you but in the morning we're going to be at the gym by the end no matter what time we get back and you know they go out super late and everyone else is sleeping and he's there in the gym even though he only got like two hours sleep or whatever it is you know some people they're just they're just driven and that's that's a valuable thing that's what that's how yeah the golden the olympics or that's how
SPEAKER_01:  you win no about prize or whatever it is totally I think one interesting thing that jumped out to me about that that story is like initially it seems like it seemed like the the teammates were kind of almost like annoyed or laughing like just kind of like what the heck this guy is like 5 a.m. in whatever man but then like he kept on doing it and it kept on kind of just sinking in and eventually they were like he's right he's right do we want to win this thing or no like so it's like it's yeah I guess what a takeaway like if you're the person who is who is trying to like elevate other people on your team it's like it's not just a one it done it's not like you just like do something uh some it's not one action it's just like it's a continuous uh you just go on doing your thing and and then eventually like yeah people join it and I think something
SPEAKER_02:  that's corrosive to that attitude of high standard is you'll see this in the gym sometimes somebody will be in good shape and go I hardly even go to the gym I don't even work out that much I eat whatever I want and it's like you're missing the point you're bragging about not trying very hard that's not impressive that just means you're somehow locked into some genetic gift or whatever it is the impressive thing is to try hard no matter what your baseline is you know and I think it's the same thing with learning it's like if you're not trying hard wherever you are right now maybe you're at a baseline just much more intelligent than another person it doesn't give you you know the slack to do anything else just because you're at a higher baseline I think that is corrosive to the standards it doesn't matter where you are it's about where you're putting in it
SPEAKER_01:  yeah totally that's that's really interesting because sometimes um yeah sometimes like you can get labeled like a a try hard or like oh this this person is just like like an overachiever or whatever like in a in a with a negative connotation right and that can sometimes lead you to to want to just be like oh yeah I don't try that hard don't like sometimes like you go like but it's actually the right the the better the way to get people to the rise to your standards kind of just to lean into it be like yeah I try really hard why don't why don't you like come on let's go like right yeah exactly it's interesting it's kind of it's a counterintuitive like emotional response but it makes total sense yeah because people use a lack of talent to justify
SPEAKER_02:  not trying very hard like oh you're you are able to get so much more results than me why should I try out it's like you're gonna get exactly wrong you're exactly inverting the fact that you don't have that talent is why you should try even harder you know that's the that's the key principle a guy like Tom Brady if you know American football he doesn't have natural talent and yet he's the greatest quarterback ever how did that happen yes he's tall and all these baseline things you need in the same way that like you mentioned before you need to not have a working memory deficit or something like this but you know there are other ways to to skill up in life and overcome deficits and a lot of that just has to do with high standards and and work and consistency and all the things we've talked about before about how to get the most value out of math academy or basically anything else in life you know these are the traits that are required and to encourage that in the community I think just to get back to the core of James's question at least in my experience my my awareness of this kind of thing I think that's that's a big piece of it yeah James I was just gonna ask
SPEAKER_01:  you if you add me like similar experiences or characteristics of good social groups he's been in
SPEAKER_00:  it's definitely something I've been thinking about a ton recently I've been reading this book called collaborative circles and it's about sort of these very creative groups through history where each of the members sort of credit the group for playing a huge role in the creative output that they went on to create later down the line so a good example is because it's right in my hometown of Oxford is the inklings and so it was a literary circle which contained J.R.R. Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis, a bunch of other writers and they all credit sort of the meetups that they did in this pub in the center of Oxford called the Eagle and Child Pub for you know the works that they later went on to create and it's been making me think a lot about you know since I've left my job to pursue this learning thing full-time like how should I be designing my social environment to best use the time available and it's been tough like just as Under said I think it's very difficult to find people in real life who share these sort of niche obsessions with you I find it much easier to find people online almost effortless to be honest especially through Twitter and Discord so that's the approach that I've been taking at the moment and I've had some success like me and Zonda spend a lot of time and I'm discord with people and we do Pomodoro sessions together and chat about our projects and things and that's been really useful but I do think there is something about having a group of people in real life who are sort of pursuing the same mission or have a shed set of overlapping values as you which can't be necessarily 100% replicated online even though I think that for now online is probably the best way for me yeah so it's something I've been thinking a lot about but yeah I don't know fully how to
SPEAKER_01:  do it to the best degree yeah that's that's really interesting yeah I've been I I had the same exact experience where yeah it's so much easier if you have like kind of more niche interests then yeah online it's just so much easier just to find people who you know but before I actually got on on X Twitter and and before I was talking to a bunch of like math academy students I I didn't really know anybody outside of Jason Alex and Sandy and and and that's about it who was who was really interested in the same kind of like yeah applying cognitive learning principles to math learning and mapping out the entire like I would nerd out about that to people here and there that I thought were like like they were they were very intellectually curious and other ways like yeah like just maybe super into data science or whatever but it's like it would just they think it's like what we were doing is mildly cool but but then it like they wouldn't get super super excited but yeah once I it's so weird like just once I started like this posting a few things on a Twitter it's like I suddenly had like 20 different people who I like who were like talking to I was like what how did this have I like been missing out on this for all of the past like years of life like I went through college thinking nobody was interested in the same stuff as me and it it turns out if I just like got my ass on Twitter I just posted some stuff that I would have had like so many great relationships better late than never but yeah it was just yeah phenomenal but yeah I agree James that there is a a level of it's like if you can find those people in real life too it's like that it amps up the effect even more but yeah it's like how how do you find I guess sometimes it seems like almost like an intractable problem if the interests are yeah enough because you just yeah the density of those
SPEAKER_00:  people is just not not so big I think the challenge probably is just to figure out how to design an online community in the way that you could get like all of the benefits of in real life community because I feel like that's that's kind of the thing that I'm not sure about like I don't I don't know that there's a design pattern out there that I can just easily copy to you know and sort of implement in a discord server and get the best results it's like I kind of feel like you have to do a lot of experimentation to try and work out how to arrange things so that the social environment is is really creative and people really enjoy being there and they're they're sort of propelled into doing much more ambitious things than they thought they could have but there just hasn't been that much research as far as I know into how to do that and in fact there probably isn't that much understanding of how people do it in real life either it's just a very kind of difficult problem that we wish we could solve because if we could then we'd have a lot more creative output I'm sure because the social environment is so important to people
SPEAKER_02:  so it's definitely something I want to work out I think some of that it just can't be I mean I could be wrong about that but it seems like some it just can't be replicated digitally like there's just some benefit of being in person like take a work environment people talk a lot about remote work and the benefits there's very many benefits you know obviously but one of the things that can't be replaced at least not so far is this kind of tacit implicit learning biosmosis weird kind of thing you get when you're just around other people that are working very hard and they're better than you at this thing and you're just observing what they're doing and you're absorbing all this tacit implicit knowledge there's so much of that it's just it does seem to be hard to replicate digitally with any kind of technology like you can have your your camera on all the time or whatever it is it doesn't doesn't give the same
SPEAKER_00:  for you that's right yeah hi guys James here I hope you're enjoying the podcast so far I just wanted to let you know that me and Zander have a secret discord server full of people working on various learning projects and doing Pomodoro sessions during the day the discord is private but if you message me or Zander on Twitter then we'll send over an invite link that's all back
SPEAKER_01:  to the podcast yeah you know one kind of interesting thing I guess kind of relevant to this topic is so I'm working remotely currently and I have been for the the past year a little over a year for math gathering but when I when I started out I was yeah I was in person and so I yeah I worked together with Jason for so so long I was just sitting right next to each other and having conversations and just living I lived with him and Sandy for like like a year or two during during the pandemic actually we were doing together yeah so we had like so many of those just I can't tell you how many just late night conversations that I had with Jason just about like philosophy of math academy and various things that we're trying to do and that totally helped in terms of just getting us both on the same page and like what is what is the vision for what we're doing right and yeah if I'm just trying to like just imagining how would have history replayed if I had started out from the very onset and if a fully remote and I don't know that would have been so much more difficult yeah yeah it's hard yeah it's funny because I think like if you
SPEAKER_00:  were just communicating with people asic and doing these like stand-ups a few times a week then it cuts out a lot of the time that you'd spend sort of doing idle chit chat which is actually really useful because that's the time when you're figuring out the sort of philosophy of what you're building you know which it's it's hard to justify like that in a remote work environment like let's sit on this call and just talk about philosophy for like four hours or something but that's the kind of useful kind of high level vision that you get when you're with some with people in real life that I think it's it's being like cut out of remote work I feel yeah yeah
SPEAKER_01:  yeah you know one thing that that we still do quite a bit at math caters like we actually we don't have any schedules meetings like we don't have a weekly stand-up or anything it's just kind of like just we'll just all ping Jason Jason will ping me or Alex will ping us or one some person will ping another person like hey you want to like catch up quick call quick quick call always means it's going to turn into like a one or two hour call that's but but yeah it's like it starts out it always starts out as like okay let's just sync up on some like status updates on things but it always kind of spins into like let's just keep talking about like whatever the philosophy of whatever that we're trying to do and and how are things going in your life and things like that and it's it's kind of like it's it starts out as like a a directed call with with a purpose within its spirals into like the nice is it like a couch conversation or something and yeah I guess I guess one thing that yeah that's that's just very very helpful is not cutting off the the call not not trying to scope down the call so much that you only cover what was originally intended to be covered but just letting the call go on for for a while and just talking about whatever that's that's been very very helpful to us and having
SPEAKER_02:  a remote company yeah that that same page thing I think the fact that you have to try to stay on the same page when you're remote when you like you're mentioning when you're in person if your company is five people you don't have to write any company documents you know how do we do this what do we do here what's the vision everybody already knows if you're in the same place but if you're five people and you're all remote you constantly have to write stuff and things like that and I do think it's a last thing maybe there's some innovation to be done there to help shore that out but it seems like a tough problem to solve digitally yeah anyway yeah in the in the name of
SPEAKER_00:  things that sort of get lost in the pursuit of efficiency or productivity I have this kind of wacky quote from seem to laugh and I was hoping to get your take on it it's a little bit of a tangent but he says this no I don't want to learn fast in any subject I don't want shortcuts if I don't enjoy the subject I don't want to learn it and if I enjoy it I want to prolong the pleasure I avoid what exam takers do I trade speed for depth how do you feel about this quote
SPEAKER_01:  I feel like it it's very easy to misinterpret I don't think that there's anything necessarily I think the way the author intended it to be taken it makes sense but I think the way most people are going to take it is not the way the author intended to be taken it reminds me of how so I think I think the way that a lot of people will take this quote is kind of that like oh so-and-so mathematician was always slow at math they were always and so because they were so slow to work out their their problems then I should not have to take the time to test or learn my multiplication tables let me just yeah take my time on these things and one one key difference in a lot of these these comparisons is that like okay whatever whatever well-known mathematician they were slow because they were working out every problem for them first principles deriving like everything and whereas like most math learners when they are slow it's because they just have no idea what's going on and then they're just like flailing around so I think if you are able to like scope if you are able to like just yeah go kind of deeply on your own where you are actually spending the whole time being productive you're deriving things from first principles you're building things from scratch you're just thinking like really really deeply about the stuff so I'm like yeah that that makes sense as something that would that would actually be productive for learning and and so if you're in the middle of some some deep thoughts about some some new math theorem that you're encountering and you're you're kind of like you're reading it and you're thinking about like oh I wonder so these things that I know about are examples that would hold here and it wouldn't hold in these cases wait what about this case would hold there it seems like it would but but then that result doesn't make sense why doesn't it and then you're just you're you're kind of getting lost in thought in this productive thought like that that makes sense but unfortunately what's what's typically going on if if if it just a typical run of the mill student is taking a long time to read a piece of instructional material or solve a problem what's typically happening is that they are spinning out of control in an unproductive way like they're just kind of reading the same thing over and over hoping that it'll just like block into their head or that somehow it'll magically resolve the confusion it's like okay we read it a couple times but like you've read it like three times it's still there's still this part that's uncertain to you okay time to move on go look at a work example like you'll see more yeah you'll see it in a different context maybe things will make more sense and that's the most optimistic scenario that a student is actually trying to work productively but is failing to do so but the least optimistic the most pessimistic but unfortunately also the the most common is that the student is just getting distracted by unrelated things like they they look at a theorem look at a work example oh youtube different to let's watch a video or like oh time to text my friend let me like go off with this person next to me and so they get through maybe um maybe like if if uh right we do like in terms of xp one xp is roughly equivalent to one minute of fully focused product of work if the student spends like an hour long class period doing work but they only get through like five or ten xp during the class period like that's that's that is always an indication that that's something else go off the rails and usually that what's what's happening is they're like just goofing around doing non-math related things so okay so I guess okay and rant over but uh to go back to the original quote it totally it makes sense but it just it's operating on this this very optimistic worldview of like what is actually happening in students brains and and there are totally students who like fit into that category but they are far outnumbered by um yeah by the by the students who are just not like working slowly typically and indicates um uh it is on some level of unproductive friction in the
SPEAKER_02:  process also think just just on the quote i think it probably depends on your goal if it's an end to you if mathematics is an end and you just are purely learning of pleasure yeah go ahead you know learn that as long as you want for pleasure you know but you're trying to do something with it if it's a means to get something else done and that's part of your goal then getting through it fast as long as you're not you know suffering miserably for years this does seem to me to be the right approach you know even if you are enjoying it along the way it's not purely an end it's also a means so it makes sense to speed through it even if it is
SPEAKER_01:  pleasure yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense actually that's a really good point uh and that the whole goal orientation yeah i've always i've i've run it to so many mathematicians who seem very against this idea of um of trying to like work through things quickly and efficiently and they're all a lot of times the the response the response is kind of like no like just let the students like enjoy and take the math in and just take pleasure in it and what the what they're coming there the the perspective they're coming from is i guess just like they've never actually felt like pressure to learn math it's always just like a very enjoyable experience and yeah they're assuming that that math's directly onto like everybody else which often right does it but it totally it makes sense by why there would be that perspective yeah and i guess i guess it's true if you do like just take so much pleasure and in math then and you you can have your goal just to be uh to take pleasure in math and yeah if you're if you're doing that in ways that happen to be productive that will happen to to to reach a high level of skill even if you're not directly optimizing it but yeah it's very exceptional in case i also think there's some risk of
SPEAKER_02:  thinking of things in the platonic idea you know like if we take weight loss or fat loss in particular it's better to lose fat at a slower rate because you lose less muscle math let's say but if you lose fat too slowly you risk being demotivated because i've been on a diet with three years and i'm still overweight it's like yeah you are doing it optimally in the sense that you're not losing muscle math but also you're getting demotivated and you're going to quit and then you're still going to be far from where you want to be so you have to balance these certain psychological aspects with this idea of doing things in you know the optimal way maybe the optimal way is it's pleasurable but also it's fast enough that you don't get demotivated along the path the ultimate goal so i think there's more than than one thing to balance there yeah that's a good point
SPEAKER_01:  right the progress making progress is motivating exactly exactly right yeah and if you're not if you're working so slowly that you're not making progress yeah that can be very demotivating
SPEAKER_02:  yeah i think that's part of the magic sauce of math academy honestly is you're always making progress like you hardly even spending time reading because everything is so fine grained that you just read for a couple of minutes then you make progress i think that makes people realize hey man i can actually do this i'm able to solve a new type of problem i couldn't solve five minutes ago and then 15 minutes after that i'm able to solve another new type of problem and i think that's part of the reason why you see so many people voluntarily paying 50 bucks a month maybe quitting their job maybe spending 20 hours a week you know extra in addition to their job doing this because it does provide that huge sense of progress for people and i think that's a big part of the secret sauce the speed that the sense of progress that visceral feeling you get so i think it's uh it's all connected to the to the pleasure i think progress is pleasurable in itself
SPEAKER_01:  yeah this reminds me about a lot of the things that i i've uh read in the literature about the topic of deliberate practice where it's like uh that yeah when you're engaging in in in deliberate practice it's it's not it's not intended to be pleasurable and oftentimes it's not flush with full at all but it is the making progress towards a goal that gives you pleasure yeah you think about like like star athletes like a coby brian in the weight room five a.m i'm sure that was not fun for him but he could tell that it is like actually making an impact on his on his game and that's fun winning games is fun being reaching a high level of skill it's fun so it's like this kind of yeah it's almost like you have to redefine what what you view as a fun and yeah pleasure it's not the activity in itself it's the the results of the activity no i think honestly
SPEAKER_02:  i think that's right i think it's a confusion of terms it's um you know you get satisfaction from having run american but while you're running it it's painful you know just in i'm curious in
SPEAKER_00:  your own case like what was your goal of studying mathematics did you ever see yourself becoming like a mathematics professor and staying in the sort of academic group or were you always planning to use mathematics in a more practical way like you're doing at math academy yeah it's a good question
SPEAKER_01:  let's see so when i started leaning into math self-study that was like sophomore year of high school so i was like what like 14 or 15 probably 15 or so and i think you know i yeah okay i remember what my train of thought here was it wasn't a particular thing uh that i was shooting for like i wasn't i wasn't learning math with the intention of like i want to learn math so that i can become a professional xyz and if it wasn't even like i want to learn a bunch of math so i can like get into a good college i actually neglected to talk about a lot of my self-stitchity and my applications i was just so head and pause i think what um the the reason why i got super into math learning was just it seems like wherever it took me it was going to be really elevating the my quality of life uh and and just allowing me to it was kind of like this it seems like basically the the the difference between me and doing cool stuff was math um and it would all it was also something that i just really found cool and i enjoyed a lot so i'm like okay well the difference between me and doing really like stuff that i think to be really cool physics just uh computational biology research uh machine learning uh whatever industry acting you know whatever it's all cool stuff i need to know math to get there and i really love math uh it's really fun for me to learn so why don't i just like start leaning into this a ton and and just get there faster uh that was my my thought process
SPEAKER_00:  i had like i know you've written on your website i think it's in your bio instead of optimizing returns in the stock market i optimize learning efficiency in students' brains i'm curious if you know it was quantitative finance or working in high frequency trading firm ever on the cards for you uh is that something you're interested in yeah it was something i thought about for for
SPEAKER_01:  some time um you know so honestly i uh i went through a lot of uh phases where i would uh you know like how on career day in elementary school every kid like picks on career and then you've asked them the same thing the next year and then they all come in with like a different career um like i uh i just flipped between a ton of um possible like life paths and before before just i guess finding one that just kind of happened more naturally it was it was kind of it's kind of weird that like everything that i kind of tagged is like oh i'm gonna be an x there's a time that i was like okay i'm gonna be a mathematician um another time was like well actually i started as like i'm gonna be a theoretical physicist researching black holes and then it like i was getting more to math and i was like oh i'm gonna become a mathematician because i just like the tools of math and then it's like oh well i like applied the tools of math to like real life scenarios i want to be a data scientist and i even worked as a data scientist for several years but this yeah this just flipped back and forth and there was a time where it's like oh i i want to get involved in quantitative finance that seems really cool but every time i actually like put my finger on a thing that i wanted to do it was actually an indication that that's not actually what i want to do i don't know how generalizable that is it's probably not very generalizable would it be like um just me kind of jumping the gun and things and and kind of trying to tell myself what my goal is before like my feet actually are moving in that direction but yeah what what ended up happening for me was just um i i just ended up doing things that i really enjoyed like getting involved in math education actually the way i got to um yeah this whole um like quantitative education and learning research was i there was a moment in time where i actually felt like i was at a fork in the road and it was like okay well i can either choose to go down the road of math education where there's not a whole lot of interesting quantitative stuff and uh and just do a bunch of tutoring dude teaching just see where that takes me or i can like lean more into data science and uh doing financial analyses for for banks and and then doing like uh uh digital marketing analysis whatever um and i i ended up just deciding to to go into into math education because that's where my just it felt closer to my heart um i i didn't really enjoy the uh the specific domains in which i was applying data science at the time but yeah i had no idea that i would be i kind of hoped like eventually like okay i'm going to go in this direction math education worst connect worst case scenario i'll be doing stuff that i that i find like fun and interesting best case scenario maybe like things connect back up in the future uh and then it turns out that's exactly what happened a lot faster than i thought it would
SPEAKER_02:  would happen um yeah well the world is better for it i mean it makes me think how many more cool things we can have if some of the smartest people alive weren't trying to figure out you know when the buy and sell stocks and derivatives i mean and not that there's anything wrong with it per se but it's such a waste of uh maybe it maybe it isn't a waste i guess i guess if you're making money in doing something good with it but it just seems like a like a black hole
SPEAKER_01:  of cognitive output yeah i i know what you mean it's like you get a lot of the a lot of the like the the most mathematically capable minds in the world and then you just like throw them into a ring where there's like beating each other up and and i mean okay i want to have like yeah it does like provide like liquidity to the markets which is super nice but uh but it also feels like there's i've seen this happen with quite a few people that uh i kind of i saw it in college or maybe after and i was like wow they are like really mathematically intense and and intense about like approving the lives of people and then like fast forward like four years later they're working at like some some trading firm and i'm like i think that's cool but it's
SPEAKER_02:  i'm a little disappointed yeah so i remember reading that michael louis you wrote liars poker that book about his experience working in in the investment banks in the york in the eighties he said he wrote the book so that people wouldn't do that so the people who really wanted to be something else you know marine biologist or whatever something else that would actually benefit the world you just realized that there's nothing in this it's just vacuous it's just empty you know and he said people didn't take that lesson but i do think it's it's a common
SPEAKER_01:  problem i one thing i just came to my mind is i i think one reason why uh that is such a common path for mathematically skilled people is that it's it's such an obvious application of math yeah um it's like okay you learn a bunch of math and like okay you maybe you want to make a lot of money in the future uh and get to do a lot of cool math uh okay well if you want to do a lot of cool math in the future what are what are the path what are the most obvious paths for that well what is mathematician other one is like theoretical physics like just academic in general and then in industry i guess there's like um yeah quantitative finance and there's also data science um but uh and then i guess like if you throw onto the mix like okay i want to also make like a lot of money then that kind of like shuts down that academic path you're funneled into industry and then you end up uh yeah it's it's just the right the the the finance becomes such such a such an easy easy path and i think so for somebody who is like really interested in finance for like just that is the thing that like gets them up in the morning and they're like dude all these strategies the options the derivatives like whatever like if that's like what gets them really excited then like the great go for it but there's there's a lot of people who try to go in that direction just because it's like they see the dollar signs and they and it seems like an application of math and they they go in that direction just because they're kind of following the crowd in that direction when in reality there's so many different areas where you can you have to play math and quantitative software in the world but the thing the catch the catch is that it's not very obvious
SPEAKER_02:  all all the time right yeah just so at least now with with machine learning there is more of an obvious idea that is both lucrative and very mathematically intensive so if if you are of that that's a better better path in terms of actual progress for the world if you believe that
SPEAKER_00:  AI progress is just good obviously yeah totally interesting so do you think there's a way in which to sort of go hunting for these sort of hidden applications math or you just kind of have to
SPEAKER_01:  stumble into it um i think i think what like zander was saying but like with the machine learning kind of coming to forefront and AI data science like there's there's a lot of industries um wherein it's becoming more clear cut how do you use quantitative analyses to to create improvements and there's companies built around these these things like for for instance like the first thing that comes to mind is like drug discovery protein design stuff like that like it's a lot of machine learning um going on in that field so somebody who's in computational biology like there's some easy on ramp there um but it sounds like the core of your question is kind of um if you don't find yourself like just totally like being pulled towards any of those existing paths like what do you do um and what what i did was basically just like say screw it jump headfirst into what i enjoyed doing and then just hope that things work out in the end i'm a little hesitant to recommend that as a general strategy because i don't want to be on the hook for people who do the same thing and like and uh homeless and like a massive debt and yeah you end up only not just in spong don't like it but i think it's one of those things like if you have a field in mind that you just have so much conviction towards and you cannot be persuaded not to like not to go for it then you just you just got to go for it um and you you end up well okay since this is a new field uh like whatever you're going to since there's not like these obvious existing companies who are doing what you want to do and there's nobody that you're just like oh i obviously want to join them um then you kind of have to go the startup route and the startup route is like it's just like how people say about acting like if you can be convinced not to be an actor then don't be an actor but if if you're not going to listen to that advice then go into it with full force and and and it has to become kind of your your life and i think that the same thing happens with um if you want to pursue um quantitative uh mathematical pursuits in some area where that's that's very uncommon you just have to kind of yeah kind of comes down to i think a decision of like you're either all in or or don't do it uh because you're gonna it's it's that the easy path is not there the easy path of joining some some company who's already kind of doing what you find interesting is not there so if you're gonna do this you have to you're gonna have to see it through but i i think um one part that was really helpful was to to run into Jason and Sandy um so early on so when i when i kind of made this this jump uh into math education i i kind of lucked out by finding the right people to run into uh who are interested in this the same thing and i think i think that's a necessary ingredient um personally i don't i don't know if like if i had had to met them would i have tried to like start my own company doing something similar probably not honestly and and so you have to kind of jump into it in full force but you can also run into the right people who are doing something that you're you're interested in and that can kind of provide a more like easier path for you to kind of join into an existing movement so i think okay so i i think all right if you if you want to do math and you are looking at the available opportunities for math and all the companies that are already doing things then and and you're you're not really into any of that and you have this area that you're really interested in um then the options are yeah either you have to go start your own thing or you have to find a group of people who are who are doing that sort of thing but they're not like a come like a well known company or it's just the seed of an idea or it's well like just an rnd stage and yeah so i i guess the problem comes down to running into interesting people who have your niche interest which kind of comes back to what we were talking about earlier um so yeah how do you run into those people and i guess i guess like um to find a group online would would probably be the easiest way um so i i don't know how replicable what i did to define math academy is i mean i just i didn't even so i i moved from uh from indiana out to los angeles um with this idea like okay first of all i needed to uh find a a bigger city to do math education stuff because tutoring just doesn't really work well in a small town uh use the the the payment rates are just so low you can't it's just so hard to make a any sort of living doing tutoring in a small town you move to a big city then you can actually make enough money tutoring um and and it just happened to be that i moved into the right neighborhood i moved to pass a dina and that's right next to caltech and caltech's really advanced mathematically so there's lots of very serious mathematically people living around the area so it makes sense that it was like kind of ground zero for uh for some serious um math education okay okay i guess okay i'm backing it to the actual answer to the i think my actual answer is that if you um yeah if you want to go do something that it's not a clear career path but but you know that there's some kind of ground zero for this thing or there's some area like um like i i guess um like uh like a silicon valley type of area or i guess like boston is becoming a big like biotech hub or something like you just kind of like go over there get yourself over there in person like talk to the people and and hope you run into into people that way and then you kind of join join up and doing some some cool thing um yeah i guess that's that's fine fine ground zero but of course yeah it's how how do you know where ground zero is it's hard to it's hard to do it sometimes i think i think i hazard that
SPEAKER_02:  though when people are talking about things that have luck components of them is to think that they're inherently improbable so like if i'm doing something that requires that kind of serendipity that you had that makes it very unlikely that it will happen and if you know hopefully i'm one of the lucky ones right but also there's this sense where if you stay in the game long enough and if you're doing the right things and if you're trying as hard as you can and you're keeping it over mind all these things and you're being a good person so that people want to help you out these are always i don't mean this in a woo woo way i mean it really in a connected in a way that makes sense in the physical world these are ways to increase your own luck because you're you're multiplying opportunity by going to the right place by meeting more people by being good to them helping them out where possible those kinds of things you're multiplying your opportunity and just in that very direct way you're increasing the probability that you will have what people would call a lucky encounter you know that's a lucky encounter but it's not luck to move right next to caltech i mean that is not that's not lucky in any sense unless you didn't realize you were doing that i guess maybe it's lucky then but you know and it's the same with people moving to lassan it was to be an actor or moving to new york to be in finance or whatever it is silicon valleys and extremely common line moving over there if you want to be in the startup world that kind of thing i mean these are extremely common ways to do it and yeah most people won't succeed but it's not because they fail to do the luck part it's they fail to do the surrounding parts of being worthy of the opportunities when they came your way or or seizing the right ones maybe and again not to say that everybody can succeed in a luck-based thing but i do think you know people should be discouraged from that kind of thing yeah that's a really good point yeah there are
SPEAKER_01:  actions that you can take to increase your luck and you can compound those actions over and over and over until it becomes just like a statistically likely event that you you find your group of people yeah right yeah yeah i'm thinking like yeah when i moved out to to l like that this decision to to move to a bigger city was that was it's not just luck right that was an actual like okay there's a problem in a small town like lack of opportunity got to move to a bigger place all of it like living in Pasadena was it was kind of a a lucky choice for me as opposed to somewhere else um though i guess like i i did like the environment there where where it was like it just felt like there were i kind of related to the the neighborhood i was not thinking at the time like this is where i'll find a group of really interesting people it was more just like this is what i'm enjoying but i guess that is highly correlated with the finding the group of people right yeah um but one yeah one thing that i was doing over there it's like i was going out and just doing a ton of stuff um working with a bunch of tutoring agencies uh i got involved with math academy school program actually and the way i learned about math academy was because some other i was tutoring some other kid and their their parent was just well connected with people in Pasadena and was like hey you might like you might look into this math program that they've got going on in the school uh and and yeah so that that put on my radar and that's so i i even sandy uh actually and i was like hey i got this really bright tutoring student who seems like they be a good fit for math academy who do you be willing to to meet with them to just like talk through like what math academy is and at this point like math academy was just this in school program um and on profit um we didn't even have like automated software anything um just some basic software that would like teacher couldn't select questions and have them graded um so i we all met at a coffee shop me sandy and uh the kid and his parents and had a chat and just at the end i was like like hey sandy dude if you're ever in need of like any help TAing from math academy like let me know and then she was like you know actually we would benefit from from having a uh a TA and then so i i got involved actually uh right i had some i did some like group tutoring sessions for math academy students then i also ended up uh tutoring Jason's son Colby and so through that i'd often chat with Jason and then just you know sitting on the couch and it was it was like so normally like after tutoring session you kind of like talked to the parent like hey session went well with Jason that's kind of turned into like it started out like that and then we'd sit down on the couch and then like an hour would pass and we're not even talking about anything remotely related to to like a tutoring anymore talking about math education and whatever and and then eventually yeah just got to a point where um i i ended up creating videos for for math academy i thought because uh yeah that Jason was was was wanting like to have some some way for for kids who are who missed class or or whatever over the summer to to use the math academy system kind of spin up on the topics and proud for the upcoming year so i was creating a bunch of videos and like one thing that another then summer of 2019 that's that's when um uh Jason was like hey like we need to make some we need to automate this system and you've done tons of work in data science seems like this is a problem with your alley like why don't you why don't we just talk through it like take a see if see if you can help me um get this thing on the rails and and then that's when things started like taking off uh so it was the sequence so it's it's like these just continually like looking like okay what are what are various things that i could move towards like okay do this do that do that it's um and eventually you kind of land at the right in the right spot i guess i think that's
SPEAKER_02:  basically a perfect example i mean what a fantastic story first of all and these luck stories like i think that's a perfect example of what it's not like you're walking down the street in Indiana somebody handed you a piece of paper said do you know mathematics we need your help it's like you had done all these previous steps you were going on getting all these tutoring opportunities and following up on the parent mentioning this and that it's like there's so many steps along the way you know you're mentioning this at the coffee shop and it's like all these things multiply your chances of having a lucky opportunity you know and i think just because we were talking about communities that's why i'm kind of harping on this a bit i just think it's for people to learn from that experience and and those kinds of experiences it's being in the game long and outfits providing help where you can you know don't reach out to people and say hey i'll help you i don't have any skills but i'll help you if you want it's like no you're offering real value already you already had these skills you know it's those kinds of things be in the game long enough have the have the ability and and seek the opportunities and maybe your luck will increase so i think that's beautiful that's awesome yeah yeah i i like what you you mentioned about like
SPEAKER_01:  yeah lean into the skills that you do have to get you in the game because it's yeah right step one is just getting in the game you don't have to play the position that you're meant to play in the end uh right right from the beginning step one is just like get yourself on the playing field with whatever skills you have and yeah for me initially that was like it wasn't even coding stuff it was it was just making tutoring and i'm making math videos like but yeah one thing led to another yeah get in the arena and then things things take off yeah that's pretty much my comment i mean
SPEAKER_02:  even satin Adela i don't think he started out as like a CEO candidate he was just some in microsoft employee you know and now he's the CEO after a long enough time and that happens a lot so you don't even worry if it's exactly what you want to be doing as long as it's close enough and you can accelerate from there anyway not to hard-body to even more but i just think it's so valuable from a life perspective of how i could get into more of these lucky opportunities
SPEAKER_00:  yeah yeah that was really nice it was really nice to hit the adjusted sort of already sorry i had a lot of time but what did you mind if i ask like one or two more questions sure sure yeah um yeah so like one thing that we didn't manage to get to last time is that the sort of more productivity side because uh very curious like how you manage your time especially working on math academy alongside writing the book uh and also all of the great Twitter posts as well without getting caught up in scrolling or just yeah other sort of things
SPEAKER_01:  getting distracted today yeah i'll i'll say that it is pretty overwhelming it's not that i have discovered some like secret productivity hack where you can like just like get your desk for like eight or nine hours a day and have a relaxed rest of the evening and no um it's very exhausting um i uh kind of push myself to the limit in terms of like just the output that i'm capable of doing and honestly i i take that too far sometimes and that like i'll get like exhaustion sick and like it'll be like i'll have like uh cold and fever like symptoms and and just from working too hard and then like okay i need to get some sleep and and then like once i get some sleep and just take a little little rest and i'll go away um so yeah i so i yeah i just want to start off saying that that the level of output is i don't i don't know that it's sustainable through through uh comfortable comfortable means um but i would say that um the enemy of of productivity and just getting stuff out the door is yeah like James was suggesting this the scrolling on things that are not moving the needle and so i think one one trick that i use to try to uh to to keep myself from falling into this um unproductive scrolling on unrelated things is i'll cycle between various things during during day so maybe i'll spend like an hour doing one thing and then an hour doing another thing hour doing a separate thing maybe cycle back to the first thing uh these are all things that need to get done uh so maybe it'll be like okay spend half an hour writing something and then work on coding up something and then go back to writing i kind of like switch between different sorts of tasks uh better like writing versus coding versus uh being on a call with somebody versus whatever it keeps it's like the the variety i think i think the thing that kind of can can cause you to want to start scrolling because you could get a little bored of the task at hand and it's bored not because the task is is necessarily boring but just because you've been doing the same thing for like over an hour and so if you just you just change the particular thing that you're doing then that can kind of hold your interest a little longer um yeah i i think so another thing is kind of piggybacking off of off of existing work that's another trick that i do uh so a lot of times uh when i when i post something on on twitter it's it's often based on a it's either like a a conversation that i had recently or a thought that just popped into my mind where i can just put it to paper really quickly i don't have to grind a whole bunch or there might be some area where like i responded to somebody's question and then uh for that question like i didn't get a lot of traction and i could just take that shape it up into a interesting post uh or maybe there's like a there is another thing that has happened sometimes like there's a segment of the math cap way that i took out and i posted it and as a like coherent little snippet and i said people reacted to that and then based on their reactions like i um i i found like some more things to say about it don't post those follow-ups or maybe like i'll take a a section uh that that is written kind of in a more formal style and then i'll be like okay i'm gonna i'm gonna kind of uh style transfer that into a more like motivational post uh like whereas like instead of like instead of just several paragraphs of text i'll be like okay i'm gonna essentially say a similar thing but i'm gonna write it in in terms of like instead of going paragraph paragraph like one punchy sentence enter enter one punchy sentence enter like a kind of like yeah more of a yeah conversational um or yeah more of like a if you have like a personal trainer kind of talking to you about fitness or something like that that's something that i like to do a lot i'll take something that's like originally like kind of academic um sort of language or and then i'll just kind of like take the core message and then like transfer it into a kind of how would a personal trainer be speaking now initially i think that wasn't something that i started off doing because it kind of felt like well i already said one thing like why do i have to say it again like won't that be boring but but actually like you you deliver the the same kind of message in different ways it kind of reaches out to different people you know like how there's the whole like oh pop music is based on the same like four chords or an over again but like it's you depending on how you fill out the the rest of the song and the flavors that you you add to it like you can get just the totally different song even if it's the the same core thing underneath and and and life would be boring if there were just one pop song and that was all that that came on like it is a nice variety um and it i've often like in order to really for the message like various messages to sink in with people that they have to hear it in a bunch of different ways a bunch of different phrases a bunch of different contexts um so yeah i guess yeah that'd be recycling material in a way that's not stale i guess this is one of the the big packs
SPEAKER_00:  it seems like a uh quite a good way of using twitter to put out posts with some massive jobs and then later turn the meter for fully fledged posts um yeah it's very useful uh on the topic of like
SPEAKER_02:  external things to the math academy because we're putting on projects and one thing i want to ask about is do you have any plans of making kind of a separate algorithm for term kind of definition stuff it seems to me like the definitions and remembering the names of things and those kinds of things may have a different schedule i know it's an extremely detailed question but i think some people feel like they need to have a little bit of external support maybe with their own spacer petition system i i saw adi matu shack mentioned that in his notes about remembering terms or names of things those kinds of things so i'm wondering your thoughts there if it's something
SPEAKER_01:  you've considered yeah i think it's i mean it's something to think about in the future um it is true that remembering a particular term or definition is is a is more fine-grained than remembering uh like a more overall topic and so it kind of makes sense that like various components of a topic maybe on different spaced repetition schedules um now here here's the here's the thing though um it seems like the spaced repetition schedule for a topic is is typically a good approximation of the spaced repetition schedule for a a definition or a term used in that topic um and so because i mean you think of like in a topic what is a spaced repetition on a topic well it's it's solving it's solving problems in that topic and in order to solve the problems you need to recall the definition or or theorem so provided that you are doing the recall properly and not just looking up the definition or theorem but you're actually trying to recall from memory then the repetition schedule of the topic should should be uh approximately aligned with the repetition schedules of the component information um now one thing that i've that i've heard a lot from people actually is is that they start out initially and they feel like they're they're kind of forgetting some stuff they they do a topic they do some problems like it's the first repetition it's their lesson and then the review comes later and by the time the review hits they've they've forgotten the theorem uh or the definition or the whatever procedure and they need to uh spin backup on it and and um and if i spin backup on it i mean they just need to look at the lesson again for a reference and then they're like oh right that's how it goes because it's not like they've forgotten the whole thing but they've they're not able to retrieve it from memory right away right away and right right and so but then but then like they're just like okay well i'm just gonna trust the system eventually i'm gonna retain this information and then like maybe a month pass a month of consistent usage day after day and they get to a point where it's like a magical transition where they're like wait i can remember this stuff now what happened how why why why wasn't i able to remember it at the beginning and i'm able to remember it now um and so i actually i i think what's going on uh i've heard this from a number of people and i think you can actually describe that in terms of the space repetition mechanics and that the first time you see something um it's your memory is decaying so fast that if you are uh if you are a little late to the next repetition then that's gonna like your memory made decay a lot in that period like uh yeah if we're like a day late in your in your next repetition we're like we're trying to approximate your space repetition schedule um and and if if our approximation is a little bit off or if you just don't do your tasks in the system the next day you take a day off well there's just a number of like things that can can cause some jitter in uh when you're actually doing the repetition versus when was the actual optimal time to do it uh yeah so your your memory can can kind of can kind of fade so rapidly in that intervening period that you kind of have to just you'll you may fail the initial retrieval when you when you try to do the the the next review and you have to like just take a look at the reference material to get you over the the the retrieval but then as you know now that what once you do that then your your memory uh decay is slower now uh and so you do that a couple times your memory decay keeps getting slower and eventually like maybe after like a a month of this space repetition your memory is now decaying very slowly so if we are a little bit off and when we're giving you the next repetition or you you take uh several days maybe you're out for a week or whatever you come back the next week like it's not as big a deal your memory doesn't decay as as much in that time period it's less susceptible to to to jitter and uh and your memory is more more stable and so that's kind of when you feel it really locking into place uh this this is to some extent speculation i haven't actually run any like empirical experiments on this but it seems like it's a pretty good explanation of what's what's going on yeah and then just on that particular
SPEAKER_02:  space repetition point that does match my experience with space repetition in general i i think i even email pewter walsney actor about this many years ago i was basically saying i can't seems to require the memory to settle in before i really have access to it in as easy of a way as i do for some items i've had for years you know so and and he seemed to agree that sometimes you just need that initial repetition or two how the memory becomes solidified and and gets stronger like you say a little bit less variable and uh susceptible to to that quick drop off but yeah i have so many more uh somehow we've gone another two hours and i still have at least four hours worth of questions
SPEAKER_01:  as i've had i mean i know james has to has to go but if if you wanted to just stay on i'm i'm
SPEAKER_02:  happy to chat with you i mean we we could do that or what we could do if and i know where we don't want to jump the gun here but would you be open to a part three maybe not soon but maybe in a couple of weeks would you be open to something like that oh yeah yeah totally totally that sounds awesome that would be awesome that way james could be here as well and i because i know he has a
SPEAKER_00:  bunch of questions as well so yeah i'll be happy i'm sorry for calling it early like it's getting so dark i have to run to the shops to get food on the whole stuff i'm sorry guys yeah no worries
SPEAKER_01:  we gotta make sure dane james doesn't uh start to get you yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
SPEAKER_00:  i won't be able to get my ex-piers today i know i think i'm in so i know it's necessary right i
SPEAKER_01:  then no more no more part three like yeah all right gonna take care of the future here make sure james gets us good yeah i do happy to uh several weeks yeah i can um thank you after with uh some some date suggestions awesome that'll be perfect yeah all right thank you so much for your
SPEAKER_00:  time again just it's it's a pleasure to talk to you it's it's always like super fun yeah straight
SPEAKER_01:  we're talking about the v2 yeah awesome all right thanks for listening
None:  thank you I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide.
SPEAKER_03:  I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide.
None:  I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide.
SPEAKER_01:  I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide.
None:  I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I will have a quick slide. It's not that slowly dropping because I want to close the slide.
SPEAKER_03:  We have one quick slide that's going to be to me.
SPEAKER_01:  Yeah. You just need to be making that comment.
None:  Yeah. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. Yeah. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide. She's going to be going ahead to talk to you about the last slide. Oh. Hi, sorry. Hi. Uh-huh. She's going to be going ahead and talk to you about the next slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk to you about the next slide.
SPEAKER_04:  me check out my phone for you.
None:  All right.