SPEAKER_01:  In some hour-long workout, just at the beginning, when you're forming your habit, even if it's 10 minutes every day, just get that consistency going. Because having some amount of habit makes it easier for you to do it in the future.
SPEAKER_00:  Scripting Bits is brought to you by the following sponsors, MEV Protocol. Maximize your eXtaking value with MEV-E, exclusively on MEV.Iro, and convertible. Execute any intent on any chain coming soon to Mantis.App, as MEV-TIS.A-P, and Fastly Labs. Trust a smart contract-based sequencing from valid as an app. GMG of everyone, my name's Digachi, the host of Scraping Bits, and today we're exploring the math world with Justin Schizer. How's it going? GMG-O. Hey, how are you doing? Well, too bad or too bad. Just for the people that don't know you, who are you and what do you do?
SPEAKER_01:  Yeah, my name is Justin Schizak. I am the director of analytics, chiefquantatmap.com. I built all of the quantitative software and do everything sciencey quantitative coding for Math Academy, which is a math learning platform. It's fully automated. It does everything that a tutor or teacher would do if you wanted to sit down with them and just say, hey, teach me as much math as you can in some amount of time. Maybe I'm going to do it every day a week. It's basically like you're having your own personal coach at the gym of math.
SPEAKER_00:  Yeah, super fantastic. I've been using it for some time now, maybe two months. It makes you want to learn. Yeah, that's great. That's what I always like to hear. I think the barrier to math is so difficult because before that I was learning for textbooks and I thought I was doing well, but I was never doing the questions. Even if I did the questions, I wouldn't understand that. They were just doing the answer and the work, yeah, and so you're truly left hitting a roadblock each time, whereas Math Academy is explaining why you got it wrong. Yeah. You're like, oh, I see. Yeah. So optimizing for the optimizing for those is what you need, you need to be back. Before we get deep into Math Academy, I didn't even get into this. It was just being your journey thus far in getting into Math Academy. What are you doing prior, college, et cetera, and then finding yourself to where you are
SPEAKER_01:  now? So I guess the easiest way to think about it is before Math Academy, I had been leading essentially a couple parallel lives in data science tech that I was one life. Another life was tutoring math education, more pure math stuff. And Math Academy has been the merging of these two things. So when this all started, when I was in high school and I was getting kind of bored with my math classes, and so I just decided one summer, I think it was the summer of my sophomore year that I was going to teach myself calculus. So I ended up, I thought it was going to take the full summer, but it actually, it only took about a lot. So I was going really, really hard in it for many hours each day. But I got through it in like a month, and that was a big moment where I realized, hey, I can, I don't need to wait for a school to teach me things. I can just learn all this stuff on my own. And so this was on MIT OpenCourseWare. And so for the rest of the summer, I was just learning more and more math courses. And so I got into coding around that time to not really serious, just now that it's an insurance Python course. So I was working through that. And around that time, I also started tutoring at my school and I was working as a instructor at my local math museum in South Bend, Indiana. And so that went on for a while. In high school, in college, I majored in math. And I also ended up getting a job as a data scientist during college. And that's kind of when it really started to feel like two parallel lives. I'd be working as a data scientist in the office during the day, and then going over to math museum to the tutor for several hours a evening. And it was a lot of work. It was full-time job, plus the 20-hour of the week tutoring, plus doing math homework at college, other stuff. It was kind of, everything that I was doing at the time, I felt like it was only a one little piece of the puzzle. And I kind of hoped that someday there would be something that pulled everything all together. So, yeah, that turned out being math academy. After college, I moved out to Los Angeles with the intention of just starting my own math tutoring company. And so I went out there and I was tutoring for a while, but within one year, I ended up finding Jason and math academy and was really excited on what they were working on. And, yeah, gradually things kind of took off. That was the summer of 2019 and fast for five years, and here we are, and here you are,
SPEAKER_00:  onboarding every one of the math, killing everyone. So what actually made you decide that you wanted to get into math? What was the reasoning behind? Were you just like, actually curious? Why were you curious about math?
SPEAKER_01:  That's a great question. So I guess the... I always liked math. When I was in middle school, you can all imagine. Math was always like my strongest subject. I liked it. I was not super crazy, but I didn't really read books on math outside of school. But I was kind of a nerd. I would watch some documentaries on black holes and stuff. I was not really pursuing anything seriously, but it was almost kind of mathy, physics, computer, science, stuff. I guess it's all kind of interesting to me. But the thing that really flipped the switch for me, that got me learning on my own, was just realizing how deep math is, how much benefit you can get by learning it. And just the idea that you don't have to wait to learn this from a school or wait until you're in college to learn college level math, you can do this on your own. And in hindsight, I didn't really fully understand this at the time. But when I started learning a lot of math, it kind of threw me into this virtuous cycle of just good things that happened to me, where I was kind of just the obvious candidate for any sort of research opportunity at my school. I did two years of particle physics projects, actually. It was a very interesting component of this particle detector, who's in high school. And I went to international science there too. Oh, wow. Yeah, until ISF, I think it was like 2013 or something. But I started kind of realizing that, hey, you learn a bunch of math. You just get a huge leg up on your career. And not even, I mean, it's true, you get a leg up in the sense that you increase your college prospects and career earning potential or whatever. But the important thing is you get more freedom, more opportunities to find a really fun thing to work on that leverages your kind of unique skill set. So for me, math was one of those things that I started to realize, I was actually really good at it. It was something that made me special and gave me opportunities to capitalize on some sort of unique skill set that I had. It was really fun. So I was just like, well, this is fun. I'm going to keep on leaning into this. And I don't even know where it's going long term, but where it's going is good.
SPEAKER_00:  Yeah, I feel like math is definitely something that would 10x you as an engineer, as a person. But I think your perspective of everything changes after you unlock this kind of language. You start seeing problems differently and in model solutions in ways that you would never be able to without it. It's been like, for me, at least it's been a giant perspective change of how I do every, including social interactions, like thinking about game theory and how the probabilities of it sounds super autistic, but probabilities of saying one thing over another and how that impactful of the decisions and interactions down the road, chaos. It's super crazy, but I'm only touching the service and I cannot imagine what it's truly like in your position after knowing so much. So how has your perspective changed over the years after gaining some much knowledge within
SPEAKER_01:  math? Yeah, you know, what you say about having your perspective changed by math, I hear that all the time for people who kind of get serious about math later in life. I always have a tough time relating to that, not because I don't think it's true, but because I, it's something that's always felt kind of normal to me. I guess I just kind of got into math early enough that I don't really remember not thinking in that way. So it's kind of like, I don't know, I guess maybe the comparison is like if you learn a language that it's very different from your native language, then maybe you start to, you kind of realize some things, some really interesting things about like how do you think in that language?
SPEAKER_00:  Yeah, yeah. Like that, it will like, conscious of the changes.
SPEAKER_01:  Yeah, but if it was kind of like your native time, you just, you're not even sure what the disc is.
SPEAKER_00:  Yeah, yeah, this is true. So, okay, I guess a better question is how do you perceive the load?
SPEAKER_01:  Yeah, you know, I got to say, I wish I could say that in every conversation that I was able to like, or in every competition, I was able to process all the game theoretical events that are happening and see the whole game trade. But I mean, maybe my brain just doesn't have enough compute power for that. I mean, it mostly comes down to, at least in my case, my big takeaway is more so just about first principles thinking. The thing that has always kind of drawn me into math is that you are going from first principles to derive things and to, you're not just whipping out some recipe book. So you're actually, the idea is that you're chipping away at some problem by finding elements of its core assets that you can, that make it easier somehow. And that's like, I'd say that is the main common theme in my life. So like, for instance, this is a, this might be a kind of silly analogy, but like I, I've gotten into home workouts recently and I've gotten actually into gymnastic rings. And oh, the reason why I got into the, the reason why I got into gymnastic rings is because I was, I was trying to solve this, this problem. Gymnastic rings ends up being the, the, what I would describe as the mathematical solution to this problem that I was encountering. The problem was that when I was in high school, I was, I was pretty into lifting weights and I had this barbell and like weight rack downstairs in my parents basement. And I'd go down to like every, every morning with weights for like 45 minutes and I was, it was great, it was great setup. And, and when I went to the college afterwards, I just, I completely stopped. It just, I, I mean, I didn't have the, the weight set in there. I don't, I don't really like going to the gym to, to work out so much. Cause there's all this, you know, friction of like, well, gym is that in your house. You have to be yourself out of the house. You have to be wearing some respectable outdoor outside clothing. You have to sometimes await your term for weight. It's like there's all this friction that makes it just easier for you to say, yeah, screw it. I'm not doing it today. And so eventually I was after some years like I, I got pretty, pretty skinny and like, I was, I was just not really, really happy with this like reverse body translation. And so, like, you know, sometimes tell people like, Oh yeah, I used to bench blah blah blah or I used to squat. I used to play hockey and then be like, what? You, you're a nerd. What are you talking about? Anyway, so the, the idea was like I got into this state of mind. And I'm like, okay, I, I'm going to figure out how to solve strong. I'm going to get back into a workout routine. But I have all these new constraints that are there. Like I, I don't have a basement anymore. I'm looking in the apartment. I can't just get a wave rack and set it up in my apartment. The slamming weights down on the floor. My downstairs neighbors would not enjoy that. And like I'm going to be moving every so often for a different system. From LA to Boston recently, it's like, can't take your weight rack with you unless you're getting the big moving track and stuff. I was like, what's the minimal approach to this? What is the core essence of this problem? What, at the core of strength training, what do you really, really need to build this thing up for first principles? And so that's kind of when I first thought was like, okay, what kind of athletes are just like super jacked, super ripped? And they don't really, then they're not weight lifters. And the first thing that came to my mind was gymnasts. And it's like, well, what kind of equipment do gymnasts use, especially like the guys on the rings? Well, they just use the rings. They're just tanging. The rings are just hanging from the ceiling. It's like, okay, well, how can I, is there any way that I can emulate that? And it turns out, yeah, you can actually just put rings on a pull-up bar. And I do a ton of these rings exercises. Now since then I've kind of changed the set up a little bit, or I've kind of like a, something like a hammock stand, or I think the rings from, it's not really a pull-up bar anymore. It's a little less janky, it's a little safer. But the idea is still, it's just a very portable, minimal solution that captures the core essence of like, you need resistance, and it has to be portable. The set up can't actually weigh as much as weight. Somehow you have to achieve a level of, a high level of resistance without actually having to carry around that much equipment of weight.
SPEAKER_00:  Yeah, yeah. I did the same thing, actually. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. But part, or like, yeah, tell me about the entire thing. I did the entire ring, set up with the pull-up bar, and then I got to palsthetic super heavily. But now I've transitioned into like, weighted skipping rope, and the skipping rope isn't even a rope. It's a ropeless skipping rope. It's like a little string with like a bowl of weight on the edge, and you just kind of pin it on the... It's the exact same as skipping, and you have to use your brain to imagine, instead of hearing the cues of like hitting in the ground, and like the whipping sound jump, you imagine that, and you have much more freedom, you can do it anywhere. And I had the same idea, I'd like the same pull process. I want to be completely no dependencies physically being constrained in some place, because then you're not consistent, and the consistency is the main thing. And this was the perfect thing, like I just wake up, and I treat it as kind of a requirement to go and have a shower. I get up and I'm like, all right, if I don't work out, I'm not being a shower. I've always had this kind of philosophy. I think in like the Russian military, they have this thing where if you don't do work, you don't deserve to eat. So they work out, or they eat. And I did the same thing, but I doubled down and we're like, shower. So I do it every morning, and it turns out like having a really good vascular help for what your oxygen is like super correlated with like longevity. And since it's weighted, it's also like a weighted skipping rope that has like one pound on each side. It's like working your upper body, plus you're doing legs, and like helping your brain density, because you're always hitting the ground. It's not like running though, it's not much impact. So yeah, like having rules and constraints allows you to problem solve much better than if you were like really open to do anything. Totally.
SPEAKER_01:  That's really interesting. I had no idea that you, I've never run into somebody who actually had the same like, went to the same thought process and came to the same conclusion on this. That's really cool. It's straight all the way down to the rings. Yeah. So it's a good idea of skipping rope. What I've been doing currently is I have this for my leg workouts. I just have this like this water bag. It's literally like just the water bag you fill it with. Yeah, like 60 or 80 pounds, I think it's 80 pounds water. You can just like jump squats with it. But yeah, it's a little, I mean, it's all around. Yeah. Well, the thing is if you fill it up all the way, then you don't have to deal with the wobbling so much. But it's the thing is, the thing that's annoying is it takes forever to fill up and to train. Yeah. As portable as you like, I have to check out those kind of jump rope.
SPEAKER_00:  Yeah, it's super good. It's from a crossroad back to the company. So I basically put, I live in like one back now to have my life. Oh, that's. Yeah. And so it fits in there. It's just like a, it's perfectly. And you can just take anywhere in the hotel. So you can be consistent. And that's the main thing. But I also think some applies to work as well. Like how I've heard an article quite recently on this, but there's, there's no perfect plan you can have. The perfect plan comes from trial and error with an imperfect plan and where you discover unknown unknowns and then you create the perfect plan over time. And this only comes from consistently doing something. So I applied that to every aspect of my life, including like working out and eating well. What is like, how do you automate all these, all these board processes? And like with eating, it's like, okay, well, now I have like, I don't know. A single meal that I make repeatedly, it has all the nutrients I needed to not be wrecked, basically. And so I've automated that whole process. I don't even have to think about how to create food or like, you know, what I want to eat. It's just the same thing as long as Tesco, you made me mix out like spices or something. I do the same thing.
SPEAKER_01:  Yeah. So it removes a ton of complexity from your life just to have this. Yeah. I actually, when I was in middle school, I got like super into nutrition and stuff and I can tell you that the calorie counts and a lot of like vitamin nutrient information macro breakdowns of like any item of food off the shelf. I like to freak people out with that sometimes. Just like, for instance, like most people don't know that potatoes are a really good source of vitamin C, like almost as much as an orange. Like you should think of tons of vitamin C. But yeah, what do you know, these like these first principal things, you can kind of combine them in ways. Yeah, right. To kind of come up with these hacks that solve problems that you need. Oh, yeah. Which to me, that's like the spirit of math.
SPEAKER_00:  Yeah, yeah. I think I've always been had this wussly, but you have to know everything at the deepest level that you can, like incredibly good foundations because then you can build, you know, like a imagine or a continuously higher skyscraper. And this is like an analogy of knowledge. If you don't have great foundations, your building will just collapse eventually. And then you'd have to restart anyway with good foundations. And so that applies to everything. And like, for example, with potatoes thing, okay, now you know this. This was the potatoes, I actually have to buy oranges. I just optimized the potatoes and do, you know, roasts or, you know, mash. And I think it applies to everything, though. And I see this more with math. I was, because I tried to get into the algebra and like calculus. And I had the problem of algebra. It wasn't actually that I wasn't getting it. It was just that I didn't know the principles of the language, how to manipulate the characters and the properties of them. So I could have got further. It was holding me back and it comes back to the analogy of like the skyscraper. I would just come crashing down and never had to become more advanced because the foundations are so cheap. And so then I, you have to like drop the ego super, super quick and be completely vulnerable and say, I actually don't know this. I need to go nervous and just being okay with that. Because eventually you'll get good and you'll understand everything so deeply that you, I think at that point when you understand things so deeply, you begin to learn exponentially relative to like literally. That's what I've been doing. I'll be understanding the why and how like these proofs work and how can I replicate these without even looking. And you can only replicate it from like actual understanding. That's been very pretty cool for learning, at least for me. But it takes much longer and obviously people want to go fast. What if you're kind of like insights towards learning like from scratch that you've seen because I know you've done a ton of research on this. Is there anything that makes it easier to go longer, persist and do any better pathways or like being consistent and actually like wanting to do it?
SPEAKER_01:  Yeah, sure. So first I just want to say everything that you said about building up your knowledge from scratch and like having those strong foundations meaning that you're able to acquire new knowledge at a much faster rate than you would be able to otherwise. All of that like totally spot on. That's exactly it. That's the power of building things up from first principles and having good foundations. And also totally agree that a lot of people, especially like a map academy which had a lot of people who come in for instance like right before an exam. Like maybe it's like a month or two before the exam. They're like, hey, I have this calculus exam coming up next month. You guys helped me learn all this stuff and it turns out like they don't even know their algebra. And we're just like, well, we could have helped you like came to us a year ago. But yeah, the big question. I think it's not that hard to convince somebody that having strong foundations and this kind of approach pays dividends into the future. I think as you're suggesting the hard part is like how do you actually get yourself to build strong foundations? It's one of those things that's like it's easy to know how to eat healthy or it's easy to know that you're supposed to exercise every day. How do you actually get yourself to do what you're supposed to do? And I think there are well two things that come to mind on that are number one having a goal and number two game the process a little bit. So having a goal, I think it's really hard to get yourself to do something seriously if you don't know why you're doing it. However, when we were chatting before starting the podcast, I asked you like why so how come you didn't like weren't so into math when you were like a kid in school and you were mentioning about how it was just like unclear like why would anybody learn or use this stuff. And having some kind of goal like why are you learning that? If you don't have a good answer to that question, it does not bode very, very well for you sticking with it. So why are you learning math? Why are you getting or are you exercising? Why are you getting in shape? The goal doesn't it's best if the goal is something life changing, I think like if somebody's like well I'm learning math so that I can go get a career in a math field like engineering because I want to send rockets at the space or whatever like that. So that's a great goal for learning math. It's very long term. It's very like at the core of your life. Now I don't think that the goal always has to be that level but it might be like maybe you're in some other field and you want to learn math so that you can apply some math to do some cooler project. But maybe you're in some field that you want to do some kind of analytics or machine learning of approach in a field where that kind of stuff is not typically used. Like that's a great reason for learning that. You can probably come up with a number of these things. The other thing I think when you don't necessarily have a big overarching goal and it's kind of you know it's something that you're supposed to be doing but there's not like a discrete like life changing event that you're shooting for. I think gamification can really help. Just like finding ways to make your process of building up your foundations and engaging with the process feels sort of like a video game. So that's something that in my case that's what I used to keep myself consistent with my exercising. So I don't really have a big goal that like the exercise to keep myself healthy and feeling good and like living a long time but that's not like a discrete like changing event. That's just a regular maintenance. And so what I found works out really good for me is just like taking to trying to acquire more skills on the on the gymnastic grains for example all these different kind of moves that that gymnasts do just to see how close I can try to approximate some of these things and just get better at them over time. It feels almost like completing various levels on a video game and yeah yeah also also like record myself doing it each morning is really easy to just like set up the phone have an angle for me record go do my thing and then like I can look at these things over time and see improvements. So it's kind of like if I were to just think about if I were not recording any of these workouts and I were not game flying the process I would be very tempted to think like well I've been doing this for like doing this ring stuff for a year and I feel what am I even doing? Why am I doing it? I have that big goal I'm not going to do a professional gymnast or anything like what's the point I might as well just not even do it at all. And then I kind of fall off the train but because I have these particular skills that I'm like acquiring I can point to something and say like oh hey you know I used to not be able to do like an iron cross for example now I can get like three quarters of the way down and do an iron cross dip and it's really exciting to be able to like point to that and also just see like video evidence of these incremental improvements compounding over time. Whenever I get like a little feeling a little bad or like there's these negative feelings that are trying to push me off the train like if I just like look back at my progress and see how much better so I made or like maybe just even try something that used to be hard for me and now it's just easy and it's a reminder that all what I'm doing is actually making a difference in the split and you can do the same kind of thing with math and coding I think. I taught this it's really intense coding program within math academy's original school program we independent from the online site but we had this nonprofit branch of math academy that that would that ran a or it still runs a highly accelerated math program within the past you know open the five school district. I taught this really intense computer science program there for three years the kids came in they didn't even know how to have a right like a four statement or a or just basic like a wild loop or whatever they didn't know even like definitely no no object oriented programming things like that and so it was pretty intense and the kids would would sometimes like what you're grinding on a skill acquisition building up your your your your foundations sometimes it's easy to to just kind of get a little discouraged and be like man there's so much ahead of me but I would often yeah whenever I felt like the class was getting a little bit like that I would often tell them like hey you know just look look at the kind of stuff that you were doing three months ago look at this problem that that used to be like it was basically a week long kind of project where they had to like build up some some model from scratch and do run it on some data sets and demonstrate some stuff and then I was like how long that used to take you a week to fully code up and write tests for everything how long do you think it would take you now if you did it again and they would all be like well it would probably take me like a class period maybe an hour and then they would kind of see like oh well that's that's they'd come a long long way I think that is so those two things that the goals and gamifying the process and looking back having some environment where you can see your priorist compounding I think if you get all those things you can really like
SPEAKER_00:  something yeah I think being able to recognize the progress and I think this also stems into like the why why the why is so important is because if you don't like actually care about the why I would never stick it's like a I think to broaden it a bit more is like curiosity or the why is super important because when someone asked you about something you're like oh okay well this is why I mean this or this is why it's important and then once you know why something is important then you're more I don't know what it is it's something like neurologically that it makes me at least more inclined to do something when I understand the why it makes me understand the pros and cons of the state of the ROI return on the shows return on investment and like especially with algebra like it's a fundamental part of math that everything relies on and so it's quite clear what the why is so you would never do anything advanced without understanding why these properties move the way they do it can be manipulated and also it's like when you get to the higher levels you want to be able to manipulate in any way and if you want to get to the point of inventing or create something that nobody else is done you're going to have to understand the rules of the game so that you can bend them to the like maximum basically you would never be able to play basketball at a super high level without understanding the rules doing things that seem borderline illegal but they're kind of like hacks because you're still abiding by the rules and so that's that's why it's super important you did mention you're you're teaching like in this accelerate school and it's i'm curious was there any any kind of traits that people showed that exceptional people showed that you notice when
SPEAKER_01:  teaching yeah that's a good question so if i'm thinking about yeah what kind of traits that the most successful students show i would say like you were just saying as being interested in the why was always always a big one there's yeah i'm not just thinking about there that i remember there's one student who was i mean he wasn't all uh he wasn't what you would point to as like a a super fast student or like a typical like precocious like really precocious math student but he was always like really interested in in the why and he got really really far uh with that because it was he things didn't always come super easy to him but he was always he always just had like this this level of interest in the material and however tricky it would be like you didn't care it was just it's just wanting to learn it and yeah you know i i'd say i'm not thinking about some other some other students some other things yeah just willing to put in i think it all comes down to being willing to put in the work to to learn things and i've encountered many students who math is really easy for them initially because they just have maybe they just have like a cognitively kind of setup where math is going to come easy to them at the beginning so maybe aliverthmatec is easy algebra seems pretty easy things start getting a little complicated during calculus but whatever it's still like kind of kind of sorta easy they can usually like do stuff and do a lot of things in their head and and they don't really but sometimes they don't really care about the problems that they're solving or care about the the material that they're learning and they're just looking for the quickest way to complete their homework and get back to video games or whatever and they can carry you through these these lower levels of math but eventually you you reach a point where math gets hard for everybody at at some point at that point is different for everybody but everybody has a point where math gets hard and if they don't have some motivation for really learning math that's going to carry them through with that time when it gets hard things are going to fall apart that motivation can be the why it can be or like it can be the intrinsic why does math work the way it does or it can be like wanting to get into like a nappy career do really cool stuff built some AI and she learning do some coding build rockets whatever without that motivation you're going to run into a rubber wall at some point now the one thing that I would say that the one caveat that that people sometimes forget about is is that motivation like excitement is is not enough like it has to even if you're like really excited about the subject yeah you have to actually like go do the the work you can't just be like really excited about the idea of watching of watching like the Olympics on TV watching workout videos and whatever and not actually like working out yourself if you want to you know get as Jack is those the people you actually have to be doing the work and you have to be you have to make that process amenable to you in some way even though it might not necessarily be like super enjoyable or fun you have to make it satisfying and and some way over yourself yeah this is I was reflecting on
SPEAKER_00:  this the other day I went out by myself to just a restaurant with my laptop and I was thinking about this I'm like hmm I really actually or enjoy bath no like it's very it's very ingrained in me although it's only been like maybe two months but I've been thinking about it constantly like it never leaves my mind and then the more I like unravel from these very basic things I and like I learned that like the algebra and like trigonometry I'm trying to do that quite deeply but then I occasionally go occasionally like explore different fields that I'm interested for example like computational complexity and like chaos theory and like you know empty complete that was something I was super interested in because I have like another I'm trying to build like architecture for some AI model and these kind of problems arise so there's a reason why I want to do this stuff and explore the things but then I think about it and then I'm like wow I could actually get into these really interesting subjects by doing the foundations so it's like kind of a sort of key the more foundational stuff you learn the more you understand these other things and it just keeps going yeah and when I think about like like very exceptional people in terms of like inventors like Lord Shaddad for example organization theory they are just like very curious and you know when when you have like this inherent curiosity of things you just want to do it so it's no longer this goal is like big overarching goal of I want to invent something I mean an epic invention actually happens like that at all I don't know if they actually care for inventing at all it just is a it's just a side effect yeah of being so curious about the thing that you get so deep into it and hit so many failures which is how actually you like build up a mental model much quicker by failing because now you have eliminated one part and you have the remaining left then yeah it just it just comes naturally because you're going so deep that you just become a master at everything that is that and now you know all the properties of any vendor it's like yeah you know all the rules and when you know the rules you can manipulate it when you're doing something simultaneously let's say like hardware for example electrical engineering you eventually combine them and now an invention is occurred it's this great book actually that explains this whole concept it's why it's called why greatness cannot be planned and it depicts us like very very well it uses reference of white allentarian with like the vacuum vacuum tube from mutation and how like the computer was derived from all the stuff they're super interesting I'm wondering what is your what is your perspective on this of like how do you see like great mathematicians and dentists arise is there any traits and like
SPEAKER_01:  skills that you see that are quite common yeah I would I would agree that it kind of comes down to this level of persistence and it's like so we've talked about like the wanting to understand the why and having good kind of incentive structure we've kind of gamified the process and I think really you want all these things like each of these is a multiplier on the chance that you're going to create something great the more of these things you're throwing into the mix if you actually care intrinsically about the material and you are like super incentivized by some external reward and you are just thinking about this all the time and you also are combining some insights with one field combining insights with another field they're like yeah mixing all this knowledge around in this stew the stew of ingredients that that few other people have you're just gonna yeah you're gonna arrive at some some unique some unique insights that end up just being valuable I think one kind of and this is one of the things that I think it's a great reason for learning math or for learning any other like highly skilled field and combining things it's one of the things that is so hard to communicate to kids for instance because it's so nebulous and like you can I mean you can just imagine like a teacher standing in the front of the classroom like okay kids learn this algebra because like one day like if you live smoke yeah it's gonna be useful like it's like how I'm gonna they're just like well just just know it is and it'll just I promise it'll it'll it'll come in useful just learn some other field really well apply algae like your math so that you have to like by then the kids spaced out it's like it's just so far in the future this it's such a it's such a big reward but it's such a long-term investment it's kind of hard to sometimes figure out how to communicate that in some way that that that beginners can begin to like kind of paste this long-term reward early on yeah I think most people can't even like
SPEAKER_00:  why especially kids like they don't see the actual workforce and although the house society even works you're not told that until you actually experience it so that would never understand why
SPEAKER_01:  yeah yeah it's true you give a great explanation right but if they don't really have this is a much experience about like how things work it's not good yeah makes
SPEAKER_00:  sense yeah yeah we use you learn by like experience and so being told because it's like the unknown unknowns there's no connection to these things there's nothing to reference it to like it's just a and this is why like learning is so difficult when you're learning something from scratch that isn't related to anything you have to try and relate it to something in some way and that's why now analogies are super useful because now you are linking them to like completely unrelated topics but you can see the connection and yeah it's really it's really interesting how i'm curious this is something I actually learned while doing math academy I was like I was doing notes all the time and then I would think to myself like I actually not learning anything because I would note-taking is super interesting because it's like you're putting all this information on the paper for reference but you're not actually understanding of knowing anything it's uh it's like a pointer to something you're outsourcing the information from your instead of from your braid it's to a paper and so now you're dependent on the paper without it you actually put on the standard so then I started not using paper and then I was like holy shit my brain is actually like recording it which stems into like all of the and I made like the reference to like programming I never wrote shit down on paper on paper about programming you just kind of did it and it's from the constant repetition of the the starts to like you know right into your brain and like all these neurological connections linking together and you associate one thing with another and now you have this whole branch of something but it's always the hardest when you're soft and scratched this is nothing to reference it to it's just like if you think of a neuron just think about like a ball or a sand dib there's just nothing there but then as soon as you bring in some other kind of like um you know or something that relates to it anyway you can finally make a link to it now it's stronger and then you continuously do that until some giant branch and groups happen and then that's how like the tree of knowledge grows but it's always always the hard thing starting like the the learning curve is so difficult to like climb up you just fall down unless you have like all of these intrinsic motivations yeah the more connections that you have yeah
SPEAKER_01:  the more the easier it is it's easier to layer on new connections yeah when there's all right when it's like right when it's connecting to this the spotted knowledge that's already like pretty well connected it's like just building videos not too easy easy to install like some like to augment your your house a little bit what's really hard is actually like going from like a plot of land that doesn't even have good foundations to like building their structure around it yeah
SPEAKER_00:  fully improved so you are you're really into like and and like learning all the the science behind that and there was this article email you're not lazy you just lack a habit and i completely agree if you don't i think all of us are just byproducts of our habits i mean obviously there's some like some things that happen in life that just like are you cannot predict and they're not actually habits or just like one of events but then it's the habits after like the constant responses each day after that it's what makes you and everyone's a byproduct of what happens. How did you apply this concept to you know building out these dependency graphs in math academy and flying it all to this platform and even to yourself like how do you make a habit like that's so easy to just repeat each day for example doing the things that you know you should be doing but you decide
SPEAKER_01:  for procrastinating people to your true likes excels yeah yes the question is how do you how do you actually go about building this habit right so i think it comes down to to two things i i've got it on my on my list of things to look into like actual academic literature on habit building that's one of the things that i that i want to look more into but i i haven't explored that as much as i've liked currently but two things that that come to mind are it and then building habit are one reducing friction reducing activation energy to get yourself doing the activity that forms the basis of the habit and two is just doing it consistently like habit that gets more habit it's a it's a compelling effect and so what i what i mean by both these things is first of all just like we're talking about working out you said you work out in the in the morning right just get yourself out of bed like exercise start your day you don't deserve to to eat until you you've worked out like on the same way it's like it's you don't you it has to you gotta put yourself in a position where you have no excuse for not doing the thing that you're supposed to do so i think a morning workout is it's great for that because you're like okay you're up in the morning you can't say like oh i'm tired i had a long day no you just gotta you no excuse if you work out equipment like if you have a home workout you don't have to go to the gym it's like well you can sit down and do the thoughts doing in your mind it's like well the difference between me and working out is literally taking five steps over in that direction taking up my jump rope or or getting out my rings and starting my workout like there's the distance between you and your aspirational you it's so small that it's it's it doesn't take that much much energy you don't have to go like going over to the gym drive on over there whatever like in the cold walk around exactly exactly the the the smaller the distance you can you can make between you and the event the better that's one thing the second thing is i i think it's just the consistency and what i typically recommend when when when people are starting uh say on on on math academy if they are finding it a little hard to give themselves to do a big like one hour learning session every day i always tell them like don't worry about the time yet like right now all that matters is that you are doing some amount of math on the system every day it's the same thing with with exercise like you don't have to go do some like hour long workout or even 40 minute workout even a half hour workout it's like just at the beginning when you're forming your habit just just do even if it's 10 minutes every day just get that consistent see going because the having some amount of habit makes it easier for you to to do it in the future whatever amount of of like mental energy or willpower you have to exert to get yourself to do 10 minutes now like every day like fast forward a week of that like you can probably do like 20 or 30 minutes i'm the same amount of of willpower just because now you have this this habit in place this psychological mechanism that is helping you and engage in this process like an automated
SPEAKER_00:  yeah you like automated the process of like getting to start exactly and that's always the hardest part so yeah it actually makes sense you know like five minutes even if you just do five minutes each day at the same time eventually i think it's like 60 days into what happens for and so let's say you do five minutes each day for 60 days who cares what you do as long as you make some kind of progress and that's how i measure progress now as well what kind of always does it like level of understanding instead of okay i have just recorded x amount of time it's like sometimes things take way longer to understand the levels and then as i said like it's all exponential anyway so like it's a shift on there is just enjoy the thing for what it is you don't see like the beauty with it then like it's kind of artificial why are you doing it in the first place um no it's kind of being like that you know the habit forming of five minutes i yeah it's actually super interesting
SPEAKER_01:  concepts yeah i think by the the one there was always a caveat but the one caveat to that that i think like if somebody is going to misunderstand that advice the way they're going to misunderstand is they're going to say like well if i want to be an expert mathematician like Justin is telling me that all i have to do is do five minutes math every day and that's good enough and so i just want to clarify like that is good enough at the beginning to get you on this train but yeah you have to scale it like depending on what your goals are yeah you may have to scale up your your work to be like a an hour every day or more i mean think about how much like expert musicians practice they go for hours every day and it's very very intense kind of practice but it becomes super easy
SPEAKER_00:  though because they started very small and then at like at that level you must super enjoy it so the question is like how do you get to a point of actually genuinely enjoying it and wanting to know
SPEAKER_01:  about it you know i think one thing that just popped in my mind that we haven't actually talked about is like having it be in some sense like part of your identity there's a thing that you do it like like you talk to any any expert musician or like professional athlete like the thing that they're doing is not just a hobby it's it's not like oh well i i do blah blah for fun it's like this is such a core part of their identity that if they stop doing it like who are they anymore like they don't even know yeah i feel the same way like for myself in terms of like working on math academy building all this learning system and and learning about the science learning and talking about the science knowledge acquisition just all these sorts of things it's like it's so far baked into my identity this is who i like consider myself as a person that that will be like i can't not do it i just want to pursue it to its fullest extent i think no that's of course like something that that takes a lot of time i don't know maybe that's like the combination of like when you develop a lot of expertise in something that you they're doing for a long time build a lot of habit around it and become gotten to the point that you are able to make some unique contributions to the the feel that you get like this yeah like it being special for kind of like what i was talking about the beginning when you learn a bunch of advanced math and school that you're like the math kid or the smarty fan then that's good all these like after a down title yeah but that like it's it becomes part of you it's a good part of you you don't want it to to leave you just lean into it more and more and more yeah i think the constant
SPEAKER_00:  identification of that thing and like truly believing that thing with no doubt in mind that all well you can just say delusional to the point of being delusional i mean it's all about like thinking in these ways because your mind is like a like a seeking machine so anything that you see will eventually manifest and truly believe this because like if you think you're depressed and you're thinking about this all the time you'll become depressed but you'll find every reason to become depressed and but the opposite is true and for anything like you can truly do anything and it's so crazy that people do not like recognize this it's just maybe it's a societal thing and it's like it's it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy because you eventually do the thing and then you think about oh what else could i do you continue to do that and you just keep doing
SPEAKER_01:  that's it yeah right like that yeah you do one thing and that kind of expands your horizons and what else you think you know possible and it's just you it keeps on leading into more and more things
SPEAKER_00:  which also yeah and then like that helps with consistency and everything whatever little bit yeah like all i think all of like the self-help shit like you know the motivators on youtube and it's all kind of like masturbation in some sense i think you just need to actually find a way to care about it and i think people don't give things a long enough chance like give it a chance for like two months do a little bit each day and then like at least try to understand whatever that thing is instead of seeing it at like the surface level maybe there's a deeper meaning behind everything i think it's a bit like philosophical but yeah it's super important but
SPEAKER_01:  it helps a lot yeah that's a really good point that this kind of intrinsic caring about what it is you're doing it doesn't always come at the beginning sometimes if it takes some time to manifest and they can also just like i'm thinking about like somebody who who works out for instance maybe at the beginning when you're working out there's focusing on like maybe you start out kind of like overweight and it takes some time to to get yourself like into into shape and then like during that period of time maybe it's not like super fun it's just you just have to kind of grind through it but eventually you might get to a point where it's just really really interesting and you're able to do all these things you never thought or or possible and you're having a lot of fun with it you know the whole dynamic changes so yeah sometimes it's just getting yourself over this initial like lack of knowledge as a beginner and once you start to build up these cognitive structures you start to have
SPEAKER_00:  more fun play or not to them yeah it's also a relationship like a friend when you first meet someone when you go to school or anywhere you don't really give a shit about them what would you do if you're a bit more like moral moral incline but like let's say you don't have the sake of the analogy so you have this relationship and it's very surface level you're just random people and then over time you see traits that you like and you start to build a friendship at the start and then when you go down the line let's say five years now you're super good friends do everything together experiences but at the start of this whole friendship when you first met each other you didn't care there was nothing there surface level and you didn't understand didn't know and you're these hidden things are the depth of their core of like who they are their post-nality what they've been for how you relate to it all these other things like the beauty that is them and you only get this for time and wanting to understand about them and even though it may not even seem apparent you know there is something behind it and that is what makes you drawn to them and want to be round them more and more and learn more about them and you can apply that with anything any relationship because you could make it like an abstract thing so a relationship with math or like yeah or even with yourself and like how you think because like people don't give themselves enough time to be with themselves without distractions and just think in like their own faults to see who they actually are so this is what I mean with the philosophy of love art but it's I think it relates super well and at least that's what I started to see with math and how I deal with that it's super helped and now I like super enjoy it it's yeah totally
SPEAKER_01:  passed it out of it totally agree I feel the same relationship with math too and and everything but that's cheating on me yeah that's that's the problem you think it's so fun it's it actually that happens to some people or they think like oh I'm really good at this I'm the person who is most interested in this thing and then they find some other people who are also interested and suddenly it's like this weird like wait who am I I thought I thought math was my thing it's all the their thing is it more their thing than my thing and then you start like questioning you have to find like different ways that makes me special I think there's a lot of ways in which that that yeah joke about like math cheating actually can be explored further it's an actual thing guys
SPEAKER_00:  well yeah I think I think we should definitely do like a normal podcast bit more on the technical side later on I was not expecting us to go this deep but this is just like a starter I think hot coming soon but man Justin it was fantastic finally talking for once this was our first
SPEAKER_01:  talking interactions yeah it was great talking to you too yeah I am surprised I'm still trying to get over the fact that you have a that rings on your pull-up bar like never met anyone that's that's what you go out of this no I mean it was great it was great talking you know it was yeah I'm just surprised that I guess now that I have started to get to know you beyond the the surface level there's a lot of interesting stuff it's just in similarity it's like the math
SPEAKER_00:  the math look now extends into the ring levels it does you push me yourself now but man it was a fantastic talk to you I would definitely go with level one real soon like talking with you if I need a time it's my pleasure