SPEAKER_02:  All right, I'd like to be joined again by Justin Skysack from Matakademy. Justin, what have you been up to this week?
SPEAKER_03:  Thanks. Great to talk to you guys again. Yeah, I would have had enough of this. It's mainly been just working on the machine learning course, working on these coding projects for the course. We've got our normal lesson topics that you do by hand, but we're also going to have coding problems. It's a multi-step problem, so we've got some kind of bigger, more applied problem context that pulls a bunch of these lower level skills together. You might come into the multi-step knowing having done maybe some stuff with neural nets by hand, maybe working out one iteration in a very simple case of a back prop and a forward propagation and doing problems about different structures of neural nets. But in the multi-step, that's where all these skills get pulled together. You actually code up a neural net and we break it up for you. But the prompt is not just like, hey, build neural net. It's like, build this component of the neural net. Great, now build this other component. Now link those two components together and you do that for like eight or ten questions. By the end of it, you've built a neural net, you've run it successfully, maybe you've even ran it on some parameter setting that illustrates a kind of shortcoming of the simple vanilla thing that you built and then we have you build a more complicated, sophisticated workaround and that demonstrates the improvement. So yeah, it's sort of been working on just scoping out a bunch of these problems and kind of guiding the person who's doing most of the heavy lifting and building them.
SPEAKER_01:  How hard is it to come up with a variation? Because obviously you need a bunch of questions that cover the same thing. If somebody gets something wrong, you want to be able to vary it, still have the same underlying concept.
SPEAKER_03:  Yeah, it's actually, so most of the variation is going to come from the underlying like lessons, the by hand problems. That's where we really need the repetition to ensure that you're like acquiring these component skills that you're super solid on them. When it comes to the project, it's not as much variation that's needed. You just need more, just a different project. So maybe one project is building a simple fee for a neural net, maybe another one is building a convolutional neural net, maybe another one is using instead of gradient descent for training it, you use neural evolution or something like that. It's kind of like, I think the way to think about it is like, okay, if you're in a machine learning class, you would be doing some math, hopefully you would be doing some math problems on the subject matter. And those math problems would be kind of like more scoped down and they'd be almost like solving equations or just working out various parts of algorithms. And you do it a bunch of times with different numbers. And it's kind of like you are the computer in a simple case going through different data sets, different processes. And so it's almost like just working out algebra problems or calculus problems, you can just kind of rapid fire those. But you wouldn't really say like, okay, build me a neural net today and then build me another one tomorrow in the same way. So it'd be more of like, okay, just build me a neural net. Okay, great, you build a neural net. Now let's make it more sophisticated. So it kind of blends the whole, it's like a crossover into going from this kind of repetition focused learning into this kind of project based learning. And I know I've talked about project based learning before, like, oh my goodness, everybody is doing project based learning and nobody's learning anything from it. But that failure mode is only when students don't have the component skills in place, which unfortunately seems to be most of the time in most cases of project based learning always in my experience. But if you get that right, if you get those component skills in place, then yeah, the projects are great. And yeah, so that's the reason.
SPEAKER_01:  So actually just so we can, because I really want to get to this stuff. So can you talk about how you go about learning a new thing? Because you have all this knowledge about how to learn optimally and how to embed that in a system like math academy or some other similar kind of system. But that assumes all kinds of things, you know, for instance, math academy, as we talked about before, it has the graph, the dependencies and so much content and everything is extremely fine grained and layered in and all the rest. And so when you're learning something new that doesn't have math academy, which is everything except math, that's already in there. Obviously there's no other tool like it. What do you do? How do you make the most of these learning principles in this context where you have to be the one to take all the existing content, whether read from a book or an online course or whatever, put it in the right order for you to learn optimally?
SPEAKER_03:  Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So honestly, I don't really do a whole lot of that kind of learning anymore. It's mostly just kind of focusing on production personally. You kind of like reach the edge of known things and you're kind of just in some particular direction and some sub domain and then you're focusing on trying to produce more knowledge, more technology, more tools, whatever. So you kind of turn into almost like a researcher who's kind of at the edge and yes, it's not very efficient, but it's kind of like a different game. Personally, when I was more focused on acquiring known existing knowledge bases, like learning math and learning a bunch of physics and computer science and that sort of stuff, what I did for math was just kind of latching onto MIT OpenCourseWare and various textbooks used there. Yeah, it was painful. Yeah, it doesn't have, when you piece together from these online resources, even something that is fairly cohesive, like MIT OpenCourseWare, it doesn't have space review, it doesn't have mastery learning in a sense. It's not broken up into things that you demonstrate knowledge of and then move on to correct because you're kind of left to your own devices to structure that however you want. That was back when I was in high school and I didn't really know a whole lot about the science of learning. I said, yeah, I made a lot of suboptimal decisions and I experienced a lot of pain from that. I think I always harp on like, I can't just read the textbook and take notes, you have to actually solve problems. But my first approach to learning math, I definitely fell into that failure mode where I would read some stuff, take some notes and then think I understood it. I was like, oh, I can totally speed run this stuff. And then I speed ran some of it and then just got to a point where nothing was really making sense as way out of my depth. And I was like, wait, why can't I do this now? What's different from what I'm doing now versus math class? I was like, well, okay, math class, we actually do homework. I need to do homework. So yeah, I guess if I had to go about nowadays, say somebody was like, hey, Justin, you need to learn undergraduate biology. You're going to have a final exam in one year, overhaul of undergraduate biology. And if you fail it, then we're going to ship you off to Antarctica or stuff. I got to know if it was like a life or death situation, like that. How would I go about it? I guess, I think step one is like just try to find a curriculum that is really good. I think a curriculum like what do you got experts who are piecing together a curriculum for you? Reduce as much friction as possible from the learning experience. So it's like, I don't think you'd want to go out and just try to discover all this knowledge on your own because you've got centuries of knowledge to discover. You can't really just sit down, go from philosophers thinking to biology and meditating on it to maybe doing some key experiments with mental. You kind of have to go faster than that. And that's what the curriculum is meant to do. So I guess step one is finding a good curriculum. What's a good curriculum for biology? I don't know. I actually looked, that was actually something I was interested in last year just saying, is there like what kind of adaptive learning solutions are there for biology? I didn't really find anything that was impressive.
SPEAKER_02:  But yeah, I found something kind of cool for biology. It was called smart biology. I just followed them on Twitter because their course is purely visually based. So they have all of these really beautiful gifts and images of molecules in the cell and the diffusion of different things within the cell. I don't know if biology really is the right terminology. But it looked really incredible. It kind of gave you a sense for the scale of the different organelles inside the cell and all the different parts. It was something that I think you struggled to get from just a normal texture.
SPEAKER_03:  I was really impressed by it. Were there assessment questions in it too? Did it test you on the stuff? Or is it more like a three blue and brown video where it's passing them at a high level?
SPEAKER_02:  I'm not really sure. I never went into it super deeply. I just saved it. It sort of ends my list of things to check out. Never.
SPEAKER_03:  Never. I have to take a look at that. That's really cool.
SPEAKER_01:  Although at this moment I just doubt that there are any systems like math academy or biology or anything else. I've looked for these things. I just think math academy is the end of the list. It's not that I want to be able to say that. I would love it if there were tools like this for every subject. I think it would be amazing. I've tried to experiment because I think it is totally plausible to me that with a sufficiently advanced L.O.M. you could produce a kind of prerequisite or graph like thing. Not now, not today. It's not possible. It doesn't know how to make it fine grade enough. But it does seem plausible to me that you could take roughly any knowledge as long as it's not. Like totally new knowledge that's not in the system, so to say. It's plausible to me that it could create a kind of fine-grained curriculum in the way that math academy does. That would be so exciting because you'd be able to learn so much more across your life because you wouldn't be trying to piece everything together. This relates to, this is going to take a minute, but I think it's important to point out, this relates to me to this tension in free learning, this self-directed curiosity-focused learning. There's this tension where it's all driven by the next thing you're curious about, which is nice and it does power you through and it makes you not get bored and all this. But it also has these problems where, like you say, if you're going through a curriculum, there's so much friction that's reduced. If it's a well thought out thing, even reading a textbook, you know, a very good textbook has had so many hours, just countless hours of effort put into it by an unbelievable number of people who wrote it and checked it and edited it over and over and over and over again to make it as good as it can be most efficient. And you know, when you're just learning self-directed and there's no curriculum, whatever, and it's just the next thing I'm curious about, that's what I'll go look up, there is so much more friction and in a certain way, I feel like a lot of people in the optimized learning space, they're not optimizing for efficiency in the way that you'd expect. They're optimizing for like, ability to master a given set of material given unlimited time. Like if you look at so many of these YouTube videos, they describe all these intricate note-taking processes and it's like, how much time you got it? Are you willing to take 40 years to master this? Or do you also have a life and something else you're trying to do at the same time? You know, like, that's the problem for me. And the reason why I think math academy is like a revolution in that, it's like taking all these things and trying to make it as efficient as possible while achieving mastery. Not just, let's achieve mastery at any cost, even if it takes you a year to write your notes and all this stuff, it's like, there's so much more to it. And anyway, I do think that's attention, you know, with project-based learning, like you said, with redirected learning or self-directed learning, pre-learning. It's all attention to me. It's like, how do you balance this curiosity-driven exploration of material with the fact that it is just much more efficient to have a mastery of the basics and build up from there?
SPEAKER_03:  Yeah, that's a really good point. Honestly, one of the reasons that I haven't, like, gone and learned biology is, yeah, it's because it takes a long, so it could just like compress it down to a smaller number of time without skimping on the rigor of the material. And that'd be nice. But yeah, I do think it's, what you mentioned about like LOM's designing a curriculum. I think that's actually pretty interesting. I've seen sort of more of that nowadays where people will ask like an LOM to set up like some kind of structured learning environment for them. And it's not perfect. But it definitely comes along way. And I've seen some people create like, for instance, like an arithmetic knowledge graph using an LOM. And there were some issues with it. If you had no access, if you couldn't find like a good curriculum to work from, and it was either that or figure things out on your own or work through some like five year curriculum or something, like it totally makes sense that you could kind of use the LOM for some guidance on how to go about it. And I guess part of that would be like, once you have like it can give you sort of, it can help you get a map of the territory a bit that might help you in kind of piecing together all these materials online. So maybe like, okay, if I want to learn biology, maybe smart biology covers like some amount of this curriculum and then there's some maybe, maybe there's some more like problem set focused resource that I combine with it or something like that. But yeah, it's an interesting problem to think about.
SPEAKER_02:  Is there a particular thing in biology that interests your problem or something?
SPEAKER_03:  Oh, actually, not in particular. I guess it's like, so my wife is a, she's in a virology PhD program. And I always like just like, you know, when there's, when there are people in your life who are just like in some nerd hole doing something, it's nice to be able to like talk to them, not just as like a lay person of like, oh my God, Justin doesn't know what a cell is. Let me explain to them one of some, but like an actual like a conversation of some of the more technical details. And so I guess that's my, one of my main motivations is just to be able to have higher than with technical conversations with her about things. I think it's kind of similar to like, when I, I know like, when I have kids, they're probably going to have interests that are different from mine, most likely. And I'd like to be able to, to just talk to them about those interests in, in proper, in proper depth. And so I kind of see this, like being able to talk to my wife about biology and, and, and in proper depth is kind of like the initial version of, of a problem that's going to occur later down the road, which is being able to talk to my kids and, and, and proper depth about whatever they are interested in. And so it's got me thinking about like, well, okay, if they know a lot more than me, how do I like go learn, learn a bunch without just having, basically having them turn into like my personal tutor. And like, probably like, if you, if you have a kid who's really interested in some subject and knows more than you, they're probably not even going to be great at explaining the subject to you because that's the whole separate skill on its own explaining. Anyway, this is, it's not a very directed answer. And this is probably not a strong enough motivation to really get me over the hump of seriously learning biology. Because I'm like, it's, it's sort of like, I run into people who are just like, oh, math is pretty cool. It'd be cool to know that. But like, it's, it's, it's not really enough motivation to get you over the hump of, of solving problems and mentally sweating, being exhausted all the time, typically. Anyway, that's, that's why I haven't been thinking about learning biology lately.
SPEAKER_01:  That kid's thing. That's an interesting motivation. I've never heard anybody anticipate that or even somebody with kids saying something like that.
SPEAKER_03:  So that's really, okay, that's, that is interesting. Yeah. So the reason, the reason why it comes to mind for me is because like, I was, I guess it's like a situation I felt like I wasn't as a kid. Like, I was lucky enough to have two parents who really loved me and, and, and want the best for me. And that was amazing. Like, I'm super fortunate in that respect. But they also did not know anything about math or physics or, or science in general. Like I didn't have any family members like that. And so it kind of, it just felt like there was, like, there's nobody I could have like a serious conversation with about like things that, that interested me. Unless I just went out and I tried to find some university professor to enjoy. But, which I guess has its, has its benefits of like forcing you out of your comfort zone and telling each other people. But anyway, that's, that's why it's on my mind.
SPEAKER_01:  That makes sense. Yeah. Anytime I think about this and how many things there are to know, whatever the number of red books, it's all just so, it's almost depressing to me how little of it we all get to learn. You know, because by the time you're an adult, you have a job of responsibility. The opportunity cost of learning an entirely new subject is so high. You know, and that's why it's so exciting to me. And I think the more popular math academy gets are any of these systems, any of these learning tools and the more they can be integrated with things that actually work in the way that math academy works. I think that'll be better because it'll be open to more people while you're living your life. You can actually master a new subject, learn it to a level of depth that you wouldn't just get by, you know, glancing at a few pages of a textbook, which is basically what most people do for any new subject. Most people, by the time they hit a certain age, they don't learn really any new stuff with any depth at all. I mean, it's a depressing thing to say. But even people who are curious, roughly speaking, just add little bits of knowledge to what they already know. They never actually master a totally new area or even get to a level of depth where they can, you know, talk to an extort about it and not feel out of touch. And so that's, it's just depressing to me how much it stagnates unless you really, really deliberately, you know, set aside a lot of time in your life. And even then, it's so inefficient to learn a whole new field without any kind of structure. Anyway, it's just, sorry to go on to a long about it. It's just exciting to me the idea that even with AI, we could do something like this. You know, it's plausible to me you can give AI a paragraph or an equation, anything. And you just go, I don't understand. And then it gives you some kind of math academy diagnostic until it finds all the way down at the level that you do understand and then builds you back up so you can understand exactly what you just gave. So it's still fine grained. It's still, you know, particularly to your curiosity in terms of that paragraph or that equation or whatever it is. But it's, you know, still allowing you to go up in the prerequisites and end up at master. So I don't know. I think those things are possible in it. I think it would lead you much more intellectually enriching life if we didn't get stuck in some subject or a couple of subjects that we learned when we were young and then just never learned anything else.
SPEAKER_03:  Yeah. Yeah, I agree. That'd be interesting. You know, it, it, I think I'm going to try that actually, just having like some conversations with an LLM about biology. And just see how far, how far I can get with it, how easy it is. Because it's, it's like, I think one failure mode that a lot of people who try to do that thing fall into is they don't actually know the, like what are the principles of effective learning. They're not asking the right questions. They're not asking, they're not telling the LLM to, to structure the learning experience in a way that's optimal. And so, some of it makes me wonder like, okay, well, if you, if you do have a good idea of that, and you can sort of try to instruct the LLM how to teach you this thing that you don't know, like how, how efficient can you make that.
SPEAKER_02:  Is it, is it, there was a really nice prompt in the original GPT four paper called the Socratic Tutor Prompt. And I think I've talked about it on here before, probably people are sick of me talking about it. Oh, I think it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's really, it's, it's really simple. I think they, they must have done, I think they did some fine-tuning on this prompt specifically for Khan Academy, because they've built it into their Khan Migo AI tutor bot thing. Right. But it's basically, you just, you just say like, um, you're as a Kratik tutor. That's worked for a problem. Never give me the answer. Just guide me with hinting sort of questions towards, towards me working it out for myself. And it's really useful because, uh, it will ask you a question. And depending on whether you get it right or wrong, it will take a step back and say, okay, I, I sort of understand it sort of can infer what you're not. And, uh, what you're missing sort of in your prior knowledge and backfill that. Um, but if you, if you get it right, then it will just skip over to the next thing. So you only, um, sort of need to fill in the, uh, sort of hierarchy that you have missing, um, as opposed to going through more of like a static curriculum where it will, uh, fill in everything even if you've already done it. So it's almost like, uh, obviously math academy does this as well with the diagnostic. It works out your prior knowledge level and then, um, doesn't make you do all of those questions from scratch, all the way from addition back up to calculus. We already know calculus at a decent level, right? But with this, it's sort of moving from a specific problem backwards through the other prior knowledge graph. So it's really interesting and very useful for specific questions and problems that you have. I, I like to use it a lot.
SPEAKER_03:  Yeah. Yeah. That's really, that's really interesting. Yeah. I think I started experimenting with this. Uh, yeah, that's just really, really interesting. It'd be interesting to know. You'd clon. Yeah. You'd clon. That's, that's the one to use. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:  Yeah. He's clon. I'm eagerly awaiting, uh, some twist and threads on this.
SPEAKER_03:  Yeah. Actually, um, yeah, I was thinking about like just, yeah, making like, uh, just kind of logging the almost like a lab notebook. Like here's, here's how I started trying to go about it. Here's what I tried. Here's the results. Here's what was good. Here's what was bad.
SPEAKER_02:  Uh, yeah, that'd be cool. Yeah. Especially for learning something new and unfamiliar, I would be interesting to see how you go about it.
SPEAKER_01:  Yeah. Just on the, on the Twitter thing, because I also wanted to get to the productivity stuff. Mm hmm. Oh, how is it that your back, because I'll, I'll just practice it with, with a few points that are common. A lot of people who use Twitter or any other kind of social media, they constantly say, oh, I'm so distracted. I, I can't focus. I'm addicted to all this stuff with me and it's the feed and all the rest. And so that's one problem. How do you avoid becoming addicted to it, wasting time on it, or just maintaining your ability to focus when you need to focus, which is assuming they have a problem a lot of people have. And just the scheduling of your time. I mean, it doesn't even, I don't even know when you sleep. I mean, you're tweeting all the time. I, you know, I don't know. It seems like you get an incredible amount done. I'm just wondering if you have any high level insights on productivity, high management, whatever else.
SPEAKER_03:  Well, thanks. I appreciate you noticing all the effort that goes into the output coming out. Yeah. But yeah, I think, I think if I had to like boil down, like what, what is my name in a loop on the sort of stuff is I'm trying to just constantly stay in motion throughout the day, just knocking out things that I, that I know I should be doing. And whenever I find myself getting a little bored of something that I'm doing at the moment, I, I switch to, I have this like, just, I have enough things to do that I can just pick something else off the shelf that I am like really excited about. And there's enough things to do that need to be done that I can just continually go through this, this cycle, just picking up other, it's like just picking up different toys to play with. All the toys are super funny. You get bored of money, pick up another one, pick up another one. And I think it's like once it wasn't always like this in, in my life. But, but, since I got involved with, with math Academy and that turned into a life consuming start of experience, it's like there's just no shortage of, of things that, that actually need to be done. And, and, and, and so like on, on Twitter for instance, like I, actually if you Twitter less as an enjoyment activity and more of just a like, oh, well, nobody knows about math Academy, that's a problem. We have to like spend some time talking about it, getting, getting some excitement going, some word of mouth, engaging with the community. It's, it's like, it's, it's just something that is to be done. So, and it can be fun. So I just, yeah, I'll do it experiment with different strategies. And I found that like this thing, this Twitter engagement can be structured in a way that I can be working on some other stuff for like, for half an hour, maybe get a little bored, my mind starts wandering and whatever it wanders to can sometimes be wrapped up in a, a, a tweet within a couple minutes. And so I just go post it there. And then, but, what the, the trick is I, I try to switch back to something, something I'm like, okay, I posted this thing. I can't spend the next hour just like scrolling through Twitter that like, I need to get back to, to moving the needle on another thing. So I think it just, I just try to be like very realistic on, on what's, what's moving but just honest with myself about like, what is actual just enjoyment versus moving the needle and then try to, try to align those two things as much as possible throughout the day. And also I just, other, other things like, sometimes if I, if I just want to like, before bed relax a little bit and I, and I find myself like, well, I'm having a little bit of trouble going to sleep because like my, I'm just thinking about too, too much stuff that then maybe I'll like pick up my phone and, and then just like spend like 10 minutes on Twitter and that'll kind of make it mentally exhaust me enough that I'm like ready to, ready to sleep. And, but it has the, the byproduct of having like some producing some, some things that, that are kind of valuable towards the goals. So it's all just trying to compact all these things that need to be done into the most efficient way of going about them given my motivation and given how big of a deal they are.
SPEAKER_01:  Is there anything you do? Because if you just look at the number of words you write, let's say per month, I would say, I mean, you're just an extreme outlier and that's, I mean, just unbelievable amount of output. And I'm just wondering, is there anything you do to capture ideas and then expand on them later or you just, you get an idea and then you write it out and then that's kind of done. I mean, I'm just wondering, Tyler count on his, like, as he asked people, what about their production function? So what's the justice guys act production function? What, how do you, what is your model of this? Obviously it's great to do multiple things and I want to get back to that because I think that's an interesting idea and counseling switching to keep your interest up. But there must be some other layer. I'm just wondering if you have a model of that.
SPEAKER_03:  Yeah. Yeah. So in terms of trying to maximize, for instance, words written, I'd say the way I go about that is I never just like sit down and say like, oh, I'm going to write about x, y, z and make myself do that. No, it's more of just like taking advantage of thoughts that are occurring naturally. So one thing that I often do, for instance, is like if somebody posts an interesting comment to some tweet, then I might like it might, it'll just spur like, I'll see that comment and then just immediately a couple sentences will just come to my mind. I'll just post it as a reply and then I'll be like, oh, hey, that would make a good seed for another post in the future. And then I'll just like, save a link to that. And then some day when I feel myself getting kind of a little bored of whatever I'm working on and I want to do like a quick other thing for like five minutes, then I might look at the links of comments that I've made and then just pull one off the shelf, read it again. And then I like instantly like some other things to say come to mind because it's been like maybe like several hours or day or several days. And then so I take advantage of that, just write it down. And then often the that'll create like a flow experience, which will which will result in some more writing. And so the better result is I don't feel like I'm thinking about this. I don't spend a lot of time thinking like, what should I write? Like that's I try to avoid that at all possible. I just whatever, just take advantage of the like thoughts naturally occurring, putting them down and then shipping them off. And another another thing though is so that's that's one part. The second part is more the more you write it, the easier it is to write other things. So the more that I write, the more automatic I am on these things that I've said before. And I have some some analogies that I can always refer back to some like some really tight quotes, some perspectives that I can just bring back over and over and over again. And it doesn't have to be like the same exact words or anything that not necessarily like a copy paste, but it's like just another regeneration of the memory. And oftentimes I find like that solves me refine it more and more and more like a retrieval practice, almost right sort of thing. And so the better I the more practice I put in the easier it is to to do that. I remember the first time I started to like trying to there was a moment where actually I was doing like one Twitter post today, I was viewing it as like just like, okay, we got to get some traction on Twitter. So every every morning, I'm just going to find something I've written and like previously and just encapsulate it into a nice little Twitter post. And I would do that once a day. And that was going okay. But I had a conversation with with Jason, founder, Matt Academy. And I he was saying that like I should just treat this as my Twitch stream, just whatever interesting thing I'm thinking about or working on. Just just don't put on Twitter right away. Just. And so I started doing that and initially it was it was it took more more. More time and effort initially, but eventually as these kind of as I as I practiced, it just became more automatic and it just became easier and easier to do and it happened faster and faster and quality increased. And yeah, even just kind of scrolling through the home screen on Twitter for like 10 minutes before that it used to be that that I would. I would find a single maybe a single thing that somebody said and then kind of have to force myself to. I think of like, oh, I have an interesting perspective on that, but it would take me like a longer time to get that perspective from my head on to the on to the. The post box and not because my typing was slow, just because I was like, I was not automatic in that. But now like from having practice it more and more, it's just so much easier to just find the right words to say. I guess it just comes back to like, how do you. I hear this quote about writing pretty often is like, what's what's the trick to becoming a good writer is just write a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. Like comes naturally refine your perspectives, stuff like that. But I should last thing I should also say is that some sometimes when I put a lot of effort into an article, like a blog post or something and I just know like, oh, this I'm so proud of this. This is so interesting. People have received this really well in the past. Then all I might like copy some of some particularly relevant snippet of that that I had said really in a really punchy or eloquent way in the past. And then just copy that over into a tweet at just just the right time where it makes sense. And maybe remove some extraneous details that are not relevant to the particular context. Just a couple minutes of editing and then like shoot it off. And so it's like in addition to having all the stuff in my brain, I'll have like just a database of previous writing that I can can pull from. So it's just building up the database, doing a lot of writing. It just it makes it easier to generate more output in the future. Definitely.
SPEAKER_01:  It reminds me I've heard a lot of people who used to write newspapers talk about this. They say it basically removes the difficulty of writing because you're expected to write certain amount every day or every week. So you just get so used to just output all the time. And now the writing part of it is not the difficult part. When you're writing a non-fiction book, it's the researching is difficult. But actually going and doing the writing, it's like it's automated away in a certain sense like the actual skill of just putting the ideas down on the page. So that's very interesting. It does seem to make sense to me that after a while, Twitter, let's say Twitter in particular, reformat your brain or the way you're thinking about things. You go, how would people on Twitter receive this? The most popular Twitter accounts I see, they post 30 times a day, 50 times a day. And I'm thinking this is not possible unless this is some kind of skill, like anything else is a skill where your brain just does shape itself around. What do people on Twitter like? Well, how should I phrase this so it gets maximum engagement? You don't expect that kind of thing. Obviously it sounds kind of, I don't know, not nice if you phrase it like that, but it is a powerful thing.
SPEAKER_03:  It is a game. You have an audience on Twitter. Twitter audience is different from a Facebook audience or Instagram audience or a hacker. They all have different ways.
SPEAKER_02:  I'm going to be going to get a math academy for Twitter. Learn to write a Twitter place.
SPEAKER_03:  Learn to write a Twitter place. Oh man, that'd be funny.
SPEAKER_01:  Write 20 memes.
SPEAKER_03:  One expert for me. That'd be hilarious actually. Imagine a course like Twitter writing techniques in one of the units is like meme creations. One module is like text memes and other one is like image memes. Another one is like there is.
SPEAKER_01:  I'll be writing on it. Maybe a nice April Fool's joke. But anyway, I think that's all very powerful. And I just want to emphasize something you said repeatedly, just the way you go through your day. Because I think this through line, I see it in a lot of very productive people or even people who just consume a lot of information. Like I don't know if you guys listened to the Gwen episode of the broadcast broadcast. It came out a couple of years ago. But he was saying that he never gets bored when he's reading because he just reads something else. So he's just reading all day long. And whenever he gets bored of reading about something, he just reads something else. I mean, Nick was lumen who invented the Zetlkosten, which has got popular in recent years. He did the same thing. He would work on many books at once. And when he was bored of working on one book, he just moved to another book. And I've heard this kind of approach to productivity. Enough times to make me think that it actually is some kind of genuine secret also applies to my own life. But you have to have enough freedom in your day. Obviously if you just work a nine to five and type it's a task to do your roughly equivalent out the entire day, you don't have the freedom to do this. So it doesn't apply to everybody. But if you happen to be able to work on many things at once, and you just kind of say I have a reservoir of tasks, and you can just pull a different type of task when you get bored. I do think that's a huge key to what you said. If you have the freedom, I think that makes like a massive difference. Hundred percent.
SPEAKER_03:  Yeah, if you don't have the freedom to choose what you're working on, or at least structure, maybe you have like a bunch of different things that you have to get done, but it's up to you when you want to work on them and what order. Yeah, if you don't have that, it's really a major impediment to using the strategy.
SPEAKER_01:  You fully agree. And then just on the attention point, I hear so many people complain, oh, I can't focus on anything now that I'm addicted to Twitter or whatever. I see that every day someone popular will say, oh, I can't read books anymore. And I'm just wondering why you think that hasn't happened to you. What's the reason?
None:  Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:  It's a good question. So honestly, I... There might be something about me where I'm a little more like cognitively certain. Like cognitively set up not to have these sort of like a pulling of attention problems. My failure mode is often when I get too engrossed in something. And I like head down for too long I miss things that are going on around me that are important to pay attention to. Yeah. I don't know. I wish I had some kind of like some kind of tip or like secret that's like, oh, here's how you don't get addicted to Twitter. Here's how you can make yourself continue to read books. But it's just personally it's not a problem I've experienced. Does that happen to you?
SPEAKER_01:  For me, I think like you I've just for whatever reason I'm able to focus on things. I guess throughout my life I'm able to focus to ensure that. So for me personally it's not a huge issue. But what is is like just kind of a time wasting thing. Sometimes you just go on one of these things and you just start wasting time. But I still generally I seem able to focus when I want to. Yeah, and I think that's it's an individual thing. And what I do think so it may take tomorrow my time. Then I would want it to sometimes just get caught and you're I've been doing this 45 minutes. What a waste.
SPEAKER_03:  Oh, yeah, I see what you mean. I guess one thing I can say about that is like whatever I'm going through if I feel like taking a little break and going through through Twitter. If I have not made a post within several minutes of looking through Twitter. I just get this like bad feeling in my stomach of like that I'm wasting time and it's like. It's like a versa to me. It just makes it easy to just kind of like close out the the app and just work on something else. But I could totally see like if you if you don't like maybe you don't get that feeling or maybe there's some element of like the addictive quality that that overcomes whatever feeling or maybe it is somebody's not paying attention to that that feeling that it is the kind of like get sucked into this black hole of. Kind of passive consumption. I guess maybe that's that's part of it. I view Twitter kind of like as a a mode of production not a mode of consumption. That's that's what it is to me and that probably makes it easier to not to get sucked into the black hole consumption.
SPEAKER_01:  Yeah, I think some of it is you just have a stronger story of your life, you know, like a self narrative almost people who just consume a lot of content and don't really create things and they're not bothered by this kind of. Constant if femoral stream of information. You know, or you could say lack of anything grounded or whatever. It's they just have a different narrative about their life. Yours is kind of you're producing things all the time trying to get as much done as possible. You're going to live a maximally effective life. I mean these kinds of narratives I think can set things up for people and produce the kinds of feelings you're talking about. I mean, I have those same feelings. Like, man, I've been spending 30 minutes on here. I was just reading a book. I was actually writing code or doing something else that actually brings me value. I'm going to sustain that value a week from now instead of forgetting all this five minutes from now. And that's it's a kind of a narrative experience to me.
SPEAKER_03:  James, what's your experience like on Twitter?
SPEAKER_02:  Well, to me, Twitter is definitely my favourite kind of social media, for sure. Twitter is actually my way I found my first job. It's through Twitter. Oh, that's cool. I've been studying languages at university, nothing related to coding at all. And in my third year I'd taken a year out to basically because I didn't really like the course. In that year out I kind of stumbled into learning coding. And then when I did eventually graduate, I didn't know really what to do because a lot of employers here in the UK, they'll purely go based on your CV. As soon as they see that you don't have a related degree, kind of screws you over. So, yeah, it was only through Twitter really that I was able to find any kind of opportunities. Fortunately enough it was really one of the first people who I messaged and asked to do a sort of voice call with. His guy called Moritz, who was the founder or co-founder of a company called Remde. Oh, yeah. I think I've seen him on Twitter before. Yeah, yeah, it's really cool. That's really cool. I've been active on Twitter and we just had a conversation and he mentioned that they recently got funding or hiring. So, yeah, I've managed to sneak in through that channel. That's a good order. Yeah, for sure. For sure. I think that's honestly something that's very weird and unique to Twitter, I think. There's sort of blending between the casual and the professional. Because it's not weird and cringe like it is on LinkedIn where everyone's kind of holding on this facade and this mask of who they really are and all of the interactions feel very forced and artificial. On Twitter, it's much more casual. Most people aren't there to do business, so to speak. They're there to be social, have fun, share memes, laugh at each other and stuff. But there's still that opportunity to make it genuine, even personal connections with friends. I've met friends on Twitter as well, but also business relationships and stuff as well. I think it's just great.
None:  Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:  Yeah. Totally. I've heard that same thing from people who are like, you want a job just post some cool stuff on Twitter, reach out to some people. It's really amazing. Yeah. How good of a networking tool it can be to use it, right? So, yeah, so it sounds like you're coming from a similar perspective where it's less about consuming information on Twitter as more like using it as a tool to produce something or meet people or like there's some kind of end goal that you have in mind with it.
SPEAKER_02:  Is that, would that be accurate? I think so. I think that's accurate. I definitely relate to a lot of what you said about sort of what member was under said as well about that sort of tension you have between the scrolling on Twitter and the producing and feeling. You know, if you just scroll through Twitter for 30 minutes, it can feel like you basically just lost 30 minutes of your life without much return. But posting can either, you know, either you write something out and no one sees it and it doesn't really matter or someone really important might see it and you end up having a really interesting conversation with them. You know, there's any kind of a huge infinite number of possibilities of where that could lead. So the, I think the producing side of things, it has this sort of asymmetric or like to put it in a Tel, Tel Aviv way that seemed to level up kind of way has that sort of black swan potential where you might want post and 80% of them go nowhere, 20% of them get some interactions and then that's that zero point zero zero one percent, where it leads to something really, really interesting and you're really glad that you spent the time writing that post. It's, it's, it's always the producing that has that, that payoff function, not the, not the just the scrolling and consuming.
SPEAKER_01:  Honestly, I think these algorithms are truly merit, meritocratic in some genuine sense where you can have zero followers. But if you make a good post, it can go viral and you can have something. I remember when you did that on Twitter three or four years ago, whenever that was, and we were all chatting like, what are we going to do? How's James going to get a job? You know, I don't even remember this. And then you just make a Twitter account and post a video on YouTube or whatever and almost right away you got this opportunity. And it's like you didn't have to build up a following for years. The algorithm as much as people, you know, hate it and think it's destroying the world in some way. It is meritocratic in some genuine sense where if you post good content, the content gets traction. And if you don't, it doesn't. Yeah. That's a powerful thing to me.
SPEAKER_02:  It's kind of brutal in a sense because when if you have a market mechanism like that, you get very honest feedback. It's never sort of the hand holding kind of style at school where you can submit a homework assignment or a paper and you know that you'll fall within the spectrum of an A to an F, you know, on average, you're going to get a C grade, right? On Twitter, if you post something in this trash, either no one will read it and you'll feel bad because you put time into writing this post, but no one's read. Or it can even go the other way where people start roasting you for how bad it is. Right. And then on the other side, there's that asymmetric upside that I just mentioned where it's like this could really have very positive downstream effects for you. Whereas at school, the best thing to do is get an A and it doesn't really move beyond that. Right. So yeah, whenever you have a market, it's like, it's the same in business, I guess. You start a business. No one's going to buy your products if they're not better than anyone else's stuff. You really got to be a competitor in order to get people's money or attention. Right.
SPEAKER_01:  Yeah, I've only started using Twitter in like the last month. And already, I know I have a sense of like when I tweet something, is anybody going to like it or not? And I start out with like no followers and takes time. And I have this sense. And a lot of times I tweet stuff that I know nobody's going to like. And it's like, in my soul, I have to do this. If I'm only doing what I know is going to get your approval, that's a kind of weakness to me. Like, it's almost like if I only do it because I know people are going to like it. I don't know. I just, there's something aversive of that.
SPEAKER_02:  There's definitely a truth to that. Like, it would be, it would definitely be bad to just post in order to get the likes. Like, there are all kinds of extensions you can use for Chrome to actually hide all of these things. So, I'll just pick out the using the CSS selectors that will just hide them, basically. And those can be useful. Because in a way, like, I think the best outcome for your posting on Twitter is to, it is almost to post something, post stuff that starts off not really getting any traction. But then it's kind of, it becomes its own thing. Like, it doesn't fit into a niche or whatever. Right, you're not just copying some random trend that you've seen there, but you kind of create your own thing and people start to like it for the post's actual value and its content being unique compared to everything else.
SPEAKER_03:  I think that's the idea. Yeah, it makes sense. So it's like less about pattern matching to success, supposed to see it more about just like trying to shape whatever you're trying to say into a, to, to be a little bit tastier to the Twitter audience. And it's still retained the authenticity of what you were trying to put out in the first place.
SPEAKER_01:  Exactly. Well, actually on that point, because we kind of got our track here and we can wrap it up in a minute. Do you feel kind of that there's stuff you want to post on Twitter, but you have to stay within a certain niche or do you feel like you can post whatever you want and it's no big deal? Or is it all to you? It's just kind of like related to this math academy and learning related things, so it's okay that you primarily post it like that.
SPEAKER_03:  Yeah, I think, so I do definitely try to keep it sort of on brand, but I think the, when I consider to be on brand, this is pretty wide. So, right, anything relating to math academy, math coding, learning, productivity, skill development, it's kind of like a sort of a big problem. Now, there are limits, right? I wouldn't post like everything. Like, I guess something that I would maybe think about as more belonging on something like Facebook or Instagram. Like, I don't know, like for example, like wedding pictures or, you know, stuff that's, I try to keep the Twitter posts, things that I think other people will find interesting or valuable. Beyond just like, look at me. Right, so, and I also just, I try to stick to things that I'm confident talking about. So, like, for instance, or, yes, it's just that I'm confident talking about or stuff that is like a recurring theme in my life. So, so, you're like related to, so for instance, I have not posted anything about like the idea of learning more biology, but if I try to get like an LOM to guide me through this and just run like a lab notebook sort of things, then that's kind of, it's adjacent to this whole like learning and talent development. Suddenly, because it feels like it's relevant. There's a connection and I can sort of talk about it. But if there's not a connection like that, it's just like an isolated thought that has no connection to this knowledge graph that encompasses all my Twitter content that I'll hold off on posting it.
SPEAKER_01:  Right. Well, I would personally like to say that maybe throw into some skitzel posts, you know, anything you want. I would like to see it.
SPEAKER_02:  Just, but Justin actually has an old account where he posts as spicy as takes. You have to try to find out.
SPEAKER_03:  That'd be funny. Yeah, just have like some anonymous account.
SPEAKER_01:  And by the way, I got just, just, we can wrap it up here. I just want to say your ability to reply to people who are, I don't want to be ungenerous. I don't know what to call it. They are bad face actors. They're completely morons. I don't know what you want to call them, but your ability to reply to these people and just go, this is not for you or whatever. It's crazy that I would just waste my own day responding to these morons.
SPEAKER_03:  Yeah, yeah, I try not to get sucked down too far. One thing I noticed is like they, it's, whatever there is something like, whenever you write something and then somebody nitpick something and you're just like, oh my God, why did you just seriously? Are you going to nitpick that thing? I think it's often an indication that you need to be more defensive than you're writing. You need to like state a caveat or some kind of clarification in the actual writing. I feel like it's been a, I've taken a lot of those experiences and tried to like pull proof by writing from it. So that's one reason that I, that I will sometimes like poke the trolls, see the trolls. But then like there comes a point where like, okay, now we're now you're just trolling. I'm not really extracting any more knowledge of how to defend against people like you in the future and then they just got to leave it.
SPEAKER_01:  A lot of times when you post a long Twitter post, which is not uncommon, people say, I'm not reading that. You know, it's way too long. I'm not reading. It's like, okay, then don't. You don't need to tell people that you're not reading it. I don't understand that part of Twitter. It's like, I just have to tell people I'm doing this. I'm not going to read that. That's ridiculous. Like, then don't read it. It's not for you.
SPEAKER_03:  Let other people read it. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that's, that's, that's less of a defense like it is an amorphous meeting. So that comes out. That comes out.
SPEAKER_01:  No, I, but I think that's how it should be. It's like these people are ridiculous. If anything, these people should be blocked. You're not contributing positively to society. Somebody else is doing something and you're going, oh, why are you doing that? It's not used for the mid. It's like, well, it's not about you. You know, it's, I just, that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_03:  Well, the funny part is like, they still share the posts. They still comment on the post. So we get like some more business. It all, it all helps the algorithm. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:  Anyway, yeah, we can wrap it up there. But like I said, it's just very impressive to me the way you handle all the responsibilities. And once again, I've personally gotten a lot from this. I think I'm going to double down even more on switching between types of tasks. Is that something that's always in the back of my mind and just to go even more on that? I think that'll be valuable to me. So anyway, thank you again. This was, this was very fun.
SPEAKER_03:  Yeah, yeah, had a great time too. Be interested to know how that task switching turns out for you.
SPEAKER_01:  Well, how it's all about it on Twitter. Right now I'll make a post when I'm on. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:  All right. Thanks again. Thanks guys.
None:  Thank you.