Link to Podcast

What we covered:
-- How bureaucracies instinctively reject new ideas like an immune system attacking a foreign organ, and what it takes to keep your project from being "spit out." Concrete example: how Jason & Sandy muscled past institutional resistance to get 8th graders passing AP Calc BC.
-- Every system inevitably decays into mediocrity unless someone fights to keep the standards high. The way you keep people, systems, and projects moving is by "horsing" them forward. Concrete example: how Justin kept 8th graders passing AP Calc BC, and what it looks like when a school succumbs to the gravity of mediocrity.
-- Justin's math self-study journey in high school: grinding math like a video game, running a secret self-study op inside traditional classes, taking talent development seriously while simultaneously hitting his head on every ledge and making every rookie mistake. Ups and downs, lessons learned, with tons of concrete examples.

Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro: Willing Things Into Existence
00:11:43 - How Jason & Sandy Willed Math Academy Into Existence
00:36:45 - Fighting The Gravity of Mediocrity
01:02:29 - Case Studies in Educational Dysfunction
01:21:53 - The Birth of Justin’s Self-Study Madness
01:50:48 - Self-Studying on the Sly During School
02:02:41 - The Highs & Lows of High School Research
02:22:38 - Outro: Paving the Path with Math Academy

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Link to Podcast

The raw transcript is provided below. Please understand that there may be typos.

Update

I found the “proto-mathacademy” course that I self-studied from back in 2012! Dumped all the contextual info from the podcast and from my original reply to you into an LLM and it was able to help me dig up my long-lost memory.

In summer 2012 I worked through the AP Calculus BC course from the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC) collection, contributed by UC College Prep (UCCP). In 2014, the UCCP AP courses were retired from the NROC collection, and UCCP’s AP offerings have continued in heavily updated form under UC Scout.

The screenshots are from https://hippocampus.org/HippoCampus/Calculus%20%26%20Advanced%20Math?view=Courses. When you click “Click to Launch” it takes you to the original content.nroc.org link where I found it back in 2012, but it’s dead now.

Raw Transcript

Jason (00:00) Okay, so we’re gonna get going here on our second podcast. This is number two, no, this is number three. Three already, wow, okay. Okay, so what’s on deck? You got some?

Justin (00:06) Yeah, yeah, this is number three.

Yeah, well, ⁓

So one thing that we had talked about earlier this week is the idea of willing things into existence. That was something where we were like, let’s talk about that in the next podcast.

Jason (00:27) Mmm.

Justin (00:31) the universe is like conspiring against you, right? To make this impossible. You think you, you, you’ve got it perfect and it will just keep like hitting you in ways that you didn’t expect. But if you just click, keep at it eventually.

universe gives up and you win. now this thing that you had imagined is part of the universe. ⁓ we like to talk in abstract about these things, but I think everybody else likes to hear concrete examples.

Jason (00:52) Right.

Justin (01:03) to kind of understand the abstract as well.

Jason (01:03) Mm-hmm.

Right, right. Well, you know, that first came into the phrase was something I used on the spot. just, was before math, before the math academy school program existed ⁓ in the Pasadena Unified School District. And we’re talking, geez, the original group of kids that I was working with, they were in fifth grade. They’re now seniors in high school.

Okay. And I was trying to figure out how to expand this program, this, no, I’m sorry, this accelerated pull-up math class that I had just sort of been able to get going again, but sort of a force of will with the, you know, and of course with the cooperation of the school, but it was really something that I made happen.

And I was speaking with, there’s a guy who would run all the sort of like, he was running like the robotics program for the school district. And he was in charge of sort of like the gifted education, enrichment things that were happening. And he is he was a guy at a Caltech really bright guy. And so I had kind of connected with him and said, here, I’m doing this sort of crazy thing where I have these kids in fifth grade, and they’re doing algebra and trigonometry and all this stuff. And he’s like, really? Yeah.

And so I was trying to get some help from him or some guidance from him. Like, how do we make this a district program? Because he had sort of created, he was hired, even he was an employee of the district, but he had created this robotics program in all the middle schools. And then that fed into this thing called App Academy at one of the high schools where there’s this kind of a four year programming thing.

And so he says, you know, I want to introduce you to the basically the patron of the robotics program, because the school district doesn’t have the funds for this. He’s a really successful tech entrepreneur, and he has, you know, generously funded this thing. And so he set up a lunch, three of us and.

And the entrepreneur who has since become a friend of mine, but I’m just going to keep his name out of this because he’s kind of a low profile guy. And so he’s sitting there quietly listening ⁓ to the other guy and I talking about what I want to do. There’s what I’ve been doing with these kids and my thought of like, we can.

kids can do algebra and trainometry in middle school we could you know make this this should be in all the schools and you know all this sort of stuff and he sits there and he just goes you know and I think there was some back and forth about what it might look like and how it would work and all this sort of stuff but then then he goes what makes you think you can make this happen and I said because I’m going to will it into existence

And he just looked at me, he was just like, huh. And years later he said, you know, when you said that, had sort of two thoughts. It’s like, either this guy is kind of crazy or he is the real deal. Like, this is gonna be interesting to see what happens here. And…

You know, and what I meant by that is not that I’m going to manifest it, you know, or some bullshit. It means that I’m going to use sheer force of will to bring this thing into existence. This thing does not exist, but I’m going to make it exist because whatever obstacles are in the way, I’m going to find a way around them, over them, through them, whatever it takes. You know, it it might.

be problem solving, might be creative marketing, it might be building an army of allies, whatever it takes. And I think anytime you wanna do something that’s outside the system, that doesn’t already have sort of ⁓ a infrastructure and a thing in place, it really comes down to a force of will.

Because whatever idea you have, like, this is going to be this cool new thing, and here’s all the benefits. And that may be true, but there going to be so many obstacles. And frankly, people that are going to try and slow you down stop you. They’re going to try to derail you.

Justin (05:57) Yeah, because systems don’t like new things,

right? It’s just, it’s kind of part of what they are. They try to just maintain a state of homeostasis. if you want to get something integrated in, have to like, almost make it easier for them to just accept that it’s going to be integrated. Like it’s just easier to accept it than fight it because you’re an immovable force, or unstoppable. What’s that?

Jason (06:26) That’s right. That’s

right. ⁓ Right. And usually, you know, okay. So a couple of things, it’s almost like the human body, the human body is, it attempts to create sort of a homeostasis, like keeps everything the same. So whenever you want to change it, you know, you want to say, you know, we’ve used this analogy a lot, but you know, use this, but you want to say get in better shape.

Justin (06:28) Unstoppable force versus immovable object.

Jason (06:55) become more muscular or something. Well, guess what? Your body’s going to resist that. So you have to work hard to change your body, right? You have to go and lift heavy weights consistently, you know, over a period of time and your body will change. It will fight that or you lose weight or whatever you’re trying to do. It involves effort.

intention and consistency to do it. Now it would be perfect, but you constantly have to be hammering away with intention. ⁓

The world is like that in a way too. There are all these sort of moving parts and these systems and these vested interests and people are just, they found a place in this world. This is my job or this is my department or this is my thing that I do and they don’t really want it to change typically. They do want to change just some little thing just to make their life easier. It’s not some other person or other.

thing coming out to say, we’re going to change this. And people are like, what? How is this going to screw up my life? Make things more difficult for me? Make me do more work? Because in bureaucracies, meaning any, whether it’s a government bureaucracy or a…

corporation or company or like a school, those are all, there are layers of bureaucracy in this thing, right? Even at a middle school, you got, well, it’s just not the teacher. It’s the middle head of middle school. It’s the assistant principal. It’s the principal. It’s the resource teacher. It’s the counselors. I mean, all this bureaucracy is people that have opinions and ideas.

and plans and this is schedules and this is we figured it’s out this is what we’re doing this is what the school day is this is what the year is and then somebody wants to come in and go we’re gonna change stuff they’re just like what right no no this is right because not only is it screw up whatever they already had it in place which they had for whatever reason either either they were happy with or at least had accepted and made peace with

Now you’re just, you probably want to make them do more work or it’s going to, or force them to adjust. And people don’t want to adjust. They don’t want to change. Right. Even if you can make a strong argument for this, that this thing you want to do is going to be an improvement. It’s going to help kids or whatever. It’s easy for people to rationalize fighting against it or resisting it because

It’s just people don’t want to do more work. in, and in bureaucracies, they, you know, it’s filled with people and this is true of anywhere. It’s not just a school. go to any corporation around the planet and people don’t want to change how they’re doing stuff. Unless their boss comes in and says, this is what’s happening. And it’s not just my opinion. My boss is boss at the top. And then you’re like, Oh, okay. Right. But even then.

employees are undermining and resisting passively resisting if they can this extra thing that they have to do or this new thing and they grouse about it or fighting why are we doing this is stupid you know, whatever if it it makes them do more work, right so When you have this natural Impedance it’s natural resistance against you You have to have an incredible amount of will

to overcome it, right? Because it’s not the so called, well, I’ll just explain to them how this is gonna work. And then they’ll be convinced. Like it’s never, ever that, I’m just gonna go meet with the boss and I’ll convince them and then they will tell, make everybody do it. And it’s never even that simple because you have this resistance from within.

People are sandbagging you and sabotaging you behind. You don’t realize this sometimes until years later. In my case, I found that later there were people who were actively trying to undermine. so you have the humans themselves who are fighting you. It’s not even having any direct competitors. mean, forget if you’re doing a free market or something, you’re creating new product or service. You have competitors who see you as a threat.

And they’re often, they’re going to attempt to directly undermine you, directly fight you. But even in a situation like I’m describing where they’re not really competitors, it’s just people who don’t want to, won’t want their lives complicated. And yeah, I can understand it. Like nobody wants to do extra work. Like, why am I getting paid anymore for this? I get my job salary. This is what I do. This is my job. I think I do a good job at it. And now I have to do this thing or this extra work. You know, so.

Justin (11:27) Mm-hmm.

So can

you paint a picture? Like, what did this look like concretely in the school system? ⁓

Jason (11:54) Yeah, yeah, so what this looked like is.

You know Okay, I have a lot of lot of examples, but one other thing I want to say about it’s not just people it’s just the complexity of Resolving Is all being issues like when you’re writing code, you’re like, ⁓ I’m gonna write this these new functions gonna do this thing and like and you realize crap There’s these other things that’s gonna affect and I got a change. So you have to problem solving problem problem

problem solve around this thing you want to do and how it’s going to impact other things, right? It’s like, well, someone’s not going to be trying to resist you. They’re like, well, Jason, the schedule of this and this and this and this red tape. you’re just like, right, OK, now I’ve to think of a solution, right? OK, so what does this look like in practice? So in my case, it was, you know,

I would continually have to like get people excited about what I was doing. at the, at the school level, when this, you know, without going into the complete story, it was just getting the principal, getting the head resource teacher. was going to have gifted education, get her really excited, get the people who were had some influence or, or, some power, making them aware of what you’re doing and, and, and getting them excited about it. Right. So you building.

You’re building support, right? Probably anybody in any corporation would say, yeah, right, you gotta always gonna do, you gotta build allies and build an army in a way.

Justin (13:28) You

Jason (13:40) You know, that can look at getting parents excited, getting sure the kids are excited, for instance, make sure the parents are really keeping them emails, constantly sending emails to, we’re doing this, we’re doing that, look at what we did. the parents are like, it’s really exciting. So you get all this enthusiasm. Talk to the teachers. Occasionally run into teachers in the hall and be like, ⁓ hey, just make sure you what we did. And so the teacher’s like, that’s really cool. Right? So you want to make sure you don’t feel like you’re stepping on their toes. You’re just like doing this extra thing. Right?

and you can, if they have any kind of concerns or whatever, can kind of hear them. You’re sort of developing a rapport with them, right? And then when it got beyond the school and it got to the… ⁓

you know, school district, it was even though we had the superintendent, he was really excited about what doing. It was, you you, you, you end up doing is this some senior, someone in senior leadership might say, well, yeah, I want this to happen. Right. Where’s the CEO or whatever. Well, then it gets passed down to somebody who’s going to be in charge of helping you make this thing happen. Right. And that person may or may not be really excited about what you’re doing. Right. Or even if they’re not against it, it’s just, got other stuff going on.

Like this is just not a priority. It’s like, okay, yeah, well, my boss says all kinds of stuff, right? And they will say it to me. It’s like, yeah, well, okay, he says this, but he doesn’t quite understand that this can’t happen for these reasons. So they just kind of blow it off or just like, yeah, okay, yeah, yeah.

Justin (15:01) Mm-hmm.

So was like, basically,

but before you try to really muscle this thing through, like, you know, it’s going to be like just force of will at the end, but you want to make it as easy as possible, like just try to eliminate all sort of potential resistance, just kind of grease the situation to make ⁓ things go through as smoothly as possible.

Jason (15:33) Yes, 100%. mean, know, will, willing something existent doesn’t mean you’re a blunt, you’re like a blunt instrument, right? Cause that doesn’t work. That just pisses people off. Right. And then you get, instead of passive resistance, you get active entry. You create direct enemies, people who hate you, right? You do not, you want to avoid creating enemies, right? Cause they can do a lot of damage.

They may not come to your face and yell at you or something, but they will be sabotaging. They’ll be blowing up bridges and stuff in the middle of the night, right? You know, figured it out.

Justin (16:10) Yeah, because once somebody

hates you, then they just get pleasure out of opposing you no matter what it is. It’s like even if it makes their life easier, like you go from a state from like, okay, initially people are resistant to just like new stuff and stuff that makes more work for them. But once people hate you, like even if you’re doing something that ultimately makes their life easier, like they might resist it just because they hate you, just to oppose you and get satisfaction out of it.

Jason (16:35) Right.

So you don’t want to offend people, demean people, make them feel bad. You want to try and make it as easy for them as and you want to help them get credit for it. Say, hey, let’s do this thing. This is going to be really cool. I’ll do the heavy lifting. And so you keep them in the loop. You keep them updated. Hey, just want you know, I’m this person. I think we can do this. What do you think? You kind of try and.

pull them along and make them feel as good about it as possible. So there was this ⁓ one woman who was just amazing, who worked at school, just super bright. And she, I quickly realized that she was a problem solver. Like she’d be like, cause she would say, you know, Jason, like there’s X, Y, and Z requirements for common core math and accreditation and different types of red tape. And I’d be like, hmm.

Well, what if we did this and she’d be like, okay, let me think, let me see. So she would kind of help me navigate the red tape and bureaucracy by just explaining like, well, you can’t do this for these reasons. And I’d be like, interesting.

Justin (17:50) So she’s kind

of like your compiler almost, this bureaucracy compiler. You’re trying to like basically write code that compiles on this bureaucracy. And she’s giving you all these error messages telling you why this doesn’t work or that doesn’t work. And you’re just cycling through these quick iterations, feedback loops, planning, so you can get some kind of approach that’s gonna stand up against this monster.

Jason (18:14) Yeah, yeah, I went to her, I jokingly called her the dark side of the moon. It was always bad. And she thought that was funny. She liked that. She would tell other people, she’d say, Jason calls me the dark side of the moon. It was always like, well, you can’t, I’m like, Jesus. And then she went on to win like administrator for the year in California or something. Like she’s, like I said, she’s really great. ⁓

You you build, you find people who are not just say supporters, our allies or that kind of thing, but somebody who really help you navigate. Like you need a guide. Like I’m in this dark forest and I need someone who lives here can walk me through this because I’m going to get lost. Right? And they’re going to be like, well, you know, you’re someone who’s navigating a foreign land. You need a guide. Right? She was my guide. Right. And

not only navigating the red tape and the regulations and state laws and all that kind of stuff, but just navigating the bureaucracy to some degree.

Right? So, but a lot of it would also take us, I would continually show up. Look, I’d be like, okay, so what’s the status? After teaching one of these classes, I just roll on over the admin building and be like, hey, what’s going on? What’s the latest with this? What’s the latest with that? know, it’s like, just, like, they’re like, Jesus, like this guy’s never going away. He’s just never going away. You know, and I would try and I would.

joke around with them and I was friendly. I mean, I liked them. wasn’t put on. I’m pretty good with people and I tend to enjoy people and I like joking around. so it’s easy for me to just…

Justin (20:00) You’re

trying to build like a genuine relationship with them.

Jason (20:04) for

relationship rapport and I did. I did and we had, I think we enjoyed talking to each other, but I would continue. I wouldn’t just wait for somebody. I would send an email and wait for somebody to get back to me. I would go and just pop in. Hey, so what’s going on with this? Hey, any progress on this? by the way, I did that, you know what I mean? And so it’s just like, we quickly realized that there’s…

Resisting Jason and there’s cooperating with Jason and it’s going to be a lot more work to resist Jason Right you want to be resisting you to be the hardest thing that they’re gonna have to do right not because you’re their enemy but be just because They’re just gonna hey, I like Jason. I like what he’s trying to do. It sounds kind of crazy like it’s work, but god, you know, he it’s just Okay, fine, you know

and you just try and make them feel good about it. You’re pulling them along on this journey, Like Lord of the Rings, you’re a hobbit. You gotta come on this journey with me, right? They don’t wanna do it. They’re in their hobbit hole and you’re like, You kinda inspire them and they’re like, all right, it’s easy to go on this journey with Gandalf than it is to resist him or something. So you kinda have to create that dynamic, but it’s just.

You’re problem solving, you’re communicating, you’re continually, what’s the status, what’s the status? And one of my oldest and closest friends, Phil, we did our first startup together and he said, his nickname was Horse.

He’s like, God, because he’s like, you’re like a goddamn horse. She was like bucking and rearing like in the gate and formed like a horse race. they’re just, it’s like, just got so much. And so like we would, he and I were writing code and stuff. we’d kind of come to conclude, okay, we’re going to build this, this, this. I’m like, right. And then I, like an hour and a half later, I’m like, how’s it going? He’s like, what do you mean? I’m like, how’s it coming? He’s like, Jesus, dude, I’m just trying to learn. Then like an hour later, how about now? He’s like, God.

Like you’re horsin’ me, man. You’re like, horsin’ me. How about now? How about now? Is it done yet? You know. Yeah. What’s up, Justin? I mean, I harass you all the time.

Justin (22:18) That’s funny,

This is relatable, actually. Yeah, I get it.

Well, the thing is, it’s like, I think the key, some key things to point out for listeners right here is like, number one, the horsing does not stop when somebody is on your team and is going on this journey with you. Like, the horsing continues. And it’s not a horsing ⁓ in a kind of like,

Let me annoy you into this sort of way. It’s a, it’s it’s a horsing of like, just like, keep whatever the excitement meter is. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right. So you, you’re always like driving that enthusiasm excitement meter, like all the way to the top. It’s like, it just naturally maybe comes down from a hundred percent to 80 % and then like, bam.

Jason (22:55) Pure enthusiasm, it’s pure, it’s just enthusiasm, right?

Justin (23:12) you just shove it back up to a hundred percent and it’s great and it’s fun. And it really has a positive effect of getting more stuff done. I mean, when you’re on a team and the leader is horsing you and you end up going further because of that, like everyone’s happy. It’s like, it’s really exciting. So yeah, it’s a very positive thing.

Jason (23:35) Well, I’m glad. I, you know, I always tell you like, Hey, if I call you and it’s cause sometimes I’ll call you and it’s the evening. Cause I’m, I’m on West coast. You’re an East coast. And I’m like walking the dog at like five o’clock, which means eight o’clock for you. And I’m like, you know, okay.

If you guys are eating dinner, don’t piss Sunjian off by answering the phone. I don’t want to go, God, Jace is calling again. That’s fine. You don’t have to answer the phone. But if you’re just sitting around working, and she’s doing other stuff, then yeah, I want to hear an update. I’ll tell you what’s going on. had some thoughts and some stuff. yeah, I try and, I realize I can be a bit much. I am fully aware that I am a lot.

You know, as Sandy always says to me, she’s like, you know, I have to take a nap every day because of you.

Justin (24:31) But yeah, funny thing is you’ve got Sanjana on the train now whenever I get off the phone with you, she’s like, what’d guys talk about? Like, what are you doing now? What’s next?

Jason (24:39) Really? What’s going on?

that’s well, that’s great. mean, I got I don’t want to create like I said, I want to create enemies. You know, and and I don’t want you don’t want the wives of your directors and key people to be like, damn, Jason, he’s just like, you don’t want them to be they want them to be like on board and excited. So that’s good to hear. But yeah, so you just kind of, know, and I think Phil had actually talked to me about.

Justin (24:46) Yeah.

Jason (25:13) even the math academy itself, online thing is like, dang, you goddamn horse this whole thing. You just horse it. know? And it’s like, yeah, I mean, obviously it wasn’t just me, you know? Justin and Alex and Alex, I mean, Sandy, and they’ve done a ton of work, ton of work. There’s no way. I mean, obviously it’s way beyond me, but I definitely horse it.

There’s no question. like willing something existence is in both cases, was, it was that really what that is saying is that I’m not, have this goal and nothing is going to stop me. I am going to finish. I’m going to make this happen and you commit to it and you just drive forward and use problem solving and use problem solve and you push and you’re, know,

And that is I said, I talked to my youngest who’s driving to try and get a Division I scholarship in gymnastics, which is like, it’s incredibly, incredibly difficult thing to achieve because there’s like 400 spots a year open up and it’s crazy, right? And I would say, look.

If you just can every day, you just keep doing what you’re doing, you just keep executing and keep improving and you just never give up and you keep pushing, the universe will bend.

Okay, the universe will bend. It cannot sustain that kind of continual pressure, the continual effort. The world would just say, all right, fine. ⁓ Fine, right? Just basically like the school district was like, all right, fine, Jason, we’ll do this math catamity thing. Because I remember we went and gave a presentation, you know, a couple of years after this thing, after the whole program got going, it was all the middle schools and the high school were getting press, you know, Washington Post and stuff, which are writing articles about us and,

And we gave this presentation to La Cañada School District, which is a wealthy school district nearby. And they tend to do really well. But they weren’t doing anything like this, mathematically. This was way above anything. Kids doing calculus in eighth grade is just crazy to them. And a lot of the parents were really excited about it. a lot of these worked at JPL, Jet Propulsion Lab, which is because we’re

Caltech is right here in Pasadena, Jet Propulsion Lab, JPL is 10 minutes away, right in the center, right in La Quina. So a lot of people who work at JPL, their kids go to the La Quina school district. So they’re all like, we’re a wealthy school district, JPL parents, Caltech parents, and our kids are just grade level, common core stuff. And yet at Pasadena, where two thirds of these students are on free and reduced lunch.

are doing calculus in eighth grade, WTF. And they’re like, and I had been talking to a couple of parents, one in particular who was just really interested in upgrading what was going on in Lacanian, a really super involved parent who worked at JPL. And he’s just.

Scheme you like how do get this into it’s like I’m gonna set up a meeting with the We got all these parents and then it was like the superintendent and principals and super like the parents in the super I mean the superintendent principals didn’t want to do it right they didn’t want change Right. They’re already Doing much better in their math scores and the work surrounding school districts Not because they were so great, but everything else is so bad that they looked great in comparison So they’re like why why are we changing thing? So last thing they need is this outside agitator?

trying to do this gifted math thing. They didn’t want to do that, right? And so the administration people showed up kind of mostly to resist this thing. just like, what is this? So Sane and I stood up and gave this big talk to the parents explaining how this thing worked. And it was mostly, again, asking very sort of,

questions, obviously they’re trying to find ways to not have to do this and they don’t want to do it, whatever. And I remember sitting around with some of the parents in the parking lot afterwards and they were just like, how did you guys make this? Because they didn’t quite realize the level of resistance that was going to come from the principals and superintendents and chief academic officers who just, they don’t believe in gifted education or advanced, they want everyone to just be at grade level, does everything at the same pace. That’s they want to do.

philosophically. Also just makes our life easier too. Conveniently, right? You’ll notice that doing less, making everybody do the same thing, is not only makes them feel good in some ways, but just makes their life easier and it makes less work for them, right? Everyone wears a size medium shirt, now this is easy.

I don’t have to measure, oh, you’re extra small and you’re a large, extra large, you’re double X. Oh gee, we got all these different size shirts and how many of them we order of each and who’s wearing what size shirt? They don’t want to deal with that. Everyone wears a size medium shirt. You know, like, wait, you know, my daughter is really small. It’s kind of like a dress for her. You know, just cinch it. You know what? You know, it’s really a medium. And you’re just like, and my son, who’s actually big, it doesn’t even cover his stomach. They’re like, well, it’s like air conditioning. You know what mean? Just like, it’s bullshit, right?

And you’re just like, you’re looking like this is so dumb, you know, but anyway, so the the these this group of parents who were organized, highly educated, PhD, physicist, astro astro astronomers, mathematic, computer scientists, problem solvers connected. A lot of them had were done could done well. Tech startups money. They couldn’t make anything like this happen. Couldn’t make it happen.

And they’re like, how in the hell did you and Sandy make this happen? And I was like, well, you know, I didn’t say force of will. was like, at the time, I actually don’t quite remember, but they just couldn’t understand because this parents around the country had always tried to do things like this. And they’d just get swatted away first or second efforts. They set up a meeting with the.

board or set up a meeting with the super, you know, whatever, and they just don’t do it the right way. And part of it is because they don’t have the mentality of a startup founder, which is fundamentally a disruptor, right? Disruptors are pirates, right? They’re like, we’re, we’re not playing by any rules. We’re going to make this happen no matter what. Your special forces or something. Where everybody else is like regular army. just.

And they just, it’s just, they don’t understand this kind of what it takes and the kind of resourcefulness and commitment and just out of the box thinking and just how many times you have to keep.

hitting on things anyway and of course it never happened never took hold in La Cañada and they just kind of got swatted away and because you know I think they just gave up the the parents gave up they’re just they put in some work but they weren’t willing to to do everything they needed to but one other thing I’ll say we hadn’t had my favor so I’m teaching this so Sandy would teach the class me when they’re fifth grade but then she kind of had enough after that she was on the executive committee of the Pasadena Educational Foundation which raised millions of dollars for the school district every year

from big foundations and corporations and stuff and put on big, would create programs. put on the summer, they like a summer school programs, like a half a day thing where you take like fun classes and they did this art program, did reading programs. They put all these special programs, all this money. So the superintendent, the board was just, you know, always trying to keep the Passing Educational Foundation happy, right? Well, she’s in the executive committee of this thing.

So she meets with the superintendent. She’s on a first name base with the super cheese. And so she’s like in headquarters, right? I’m out in the field and I’m like, can you like bomb this ending position on the top of this hill? And they’re like, she’s like, all right, I get it. She’s all right, guys, let’s go. You know what mean? It’s like, I had air cover, right? And I can’t.

overstate how important that was. Because if I was just me in the trenches with my guys trying to fight hand in hand common or just sort of jungle warfare, I mean, it’s really, really tough. Even if you have like a, you know, this crazy group of special forces or whatever, like you need, sometimes you need to call in air cover. You need someone who’s at headquarters who can get the resources in place to help you out.

Anyway, so what is willing something exists means? giving everything you got, marshaling all the resources and just refusing to give up and then just putting continual pressure on something until your goal is achieved. That’s what willing to exist is. It is not lying in bed at night trying to manifest it, thinking, I just really want this to happen for me. That’s, you know, that’s obviously just, know, menacing.

Justin (34:29) Yeah, completely passive.

Willing is like it’s, willing is an action, not as a thought, as an act of like you going out and doing things.

Jason (34:41) It’s actions all the way down. Actions, actions, actions, actions. Yeah, and you have to have a ton of energy. it has to be something you really want because it’s not going to come easy. It’s just something you really, want for whatever reason because you believe in it because it’s important to you for whatever. But that’s what it takes. And I think if you find the people who create

Justin (34:46) Yeah.

Jason (35:09) Big change, create big companies, big whatever, even non-profit, whatever, whatever the thing is, they’re a horse, right? In one way or another.

Justin (35:19) Yeah. Well, yeah, well, because

it’s also like, so in addition, there’s like the big willing stuff into existence, like the, like the bringing the organization into existence, like all that. But it’s like every, every single new feature that comes out, right? That’s like something that, that, that we haven’t done before that is like new space, new territory. comes with a similar kind of, it’s on a smaller scale, but it’s like a similar kind of battle where it’s like you.

It doesn’t give way in one day or two days or three days or even like one iteration or two iterations. It’s like, it’s a constant. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But so you really have to keep pushing on it. And it’s like, I guess, I guess, like after like the organization is established now, like getting all these like new features out. It’s like, you suddenly have.

Jason (35:56) or a week, or even a month, or even a year.

Justin (36:15) like battles of will on many different fronts within the organization, trying to push all these things into existence. Like we talked about last time with the breadth first development, all the progress bars loading, eventually a progress bar just kind of stops loading and you’re like, what’s going on? Why aren’t you loading? And you just have to like muscle it into like loading again.

Jason (36:37) What, you know, just, it would be interesting hearing your perspective, you know, because before you started working with me on Math Academy, you were 23, maybe 24, this is summer 2019.

Justin (36:43) Yeah.

Summer 2019, yeah, I was 23.

Jason (36:57) Yeah, 23. So you were just a year out of college or so, a year and a half out of college or something, two years, whatever. You didn’t know how really how the world worked. You know, like most 23 year olds, they don’t really. You don’t. I’m still learning how it works. You definitely don’t know, really understand. I mean, you you probably had no idea how you know, because your perspective of like the startup, how this thing.

came into being or happened, you know? I mean, what is your perspective on making stuff happen? Making something exist that did not exist?

Justin (37:33) ⁓ yeah, I mean, yeah,

I wasn’t there to witness the whole like, math academy in school program – ⁓ but I mean, I taught in it, right? And I got a little bit of a taste of the kind of pushback from just bureaucracy and administration because there was even like, after it was even like established in the school program running

fairly smoothly. I mean, there was still, it’s like, it was never, it was never just like done, like, just like, like you write code and it works and you just like leave it there and it keeps working and you check back on it, it’s the same code and it’s doing the same thing. And you’re just like, all right, well, that, that was like a constant source of like, it was like.

Jason (38:26) Well, you know what it’s like? It’s like an organ transplant. You can get the liver or kidney transplanted, but your body is going to be continually, it’s immune system is continually trying to reject it. Right? So you have to have these sort of, I don’t know, white cell suppressing drugs or things, immune suppressing drugs to keep the organ from being rejected.

Justin (38:29) Yeah.

Jason (38:49) Which was something that we were dealing with because I would be asking you about what’s going on school, know, for administrators talking to you, different thing. It’s like how to keep math academy from being rejected, expelled from the school district. Right.

Justin (39:04) Yeah.

Yeah. Right. Cause it was like math academy was like an official program. There’s kids in class. It’s not like there’s the risk of the, like the class just suddenly like drops out of the school program midway during the year. But there’s like, there’s stuff like the instructors is like not reviewing topics, not holding like there’s a, there’s a bar for the level of standard and accountability that has to be met to keep this thing running smoothly, to keep kids doing like legitimately doing AP Calc BC.

Jason (39:23) animal.

Justin (39:33) in eighth grade and getting solid scores on the AP exam. And there’s always the pressure like, ⁓ from people who are not fully. Vested in it, who are not just, yeah, they’re not fully enrolled and they want to like, it’s like they’re, they’re running this incremental gradual, like, let’s, let’s just make it little bit easier each day.

Jason (39:46) I’m not fully enrolled. I’m not fully enrolled.

Degrade it, just

continually degrade it. Reversion to the mean, right? Because people ask, well, why is everything mean reverting? Right? It’s because it’s a lower energy state.

Justin (40:00) Yeah.

Jason (40:10) you know, for the system or whatever to accept. Like, why do we, you know, why have you stopped exercising? Do you get out of shape? know, or why, you know, why does things just because it’s less energy, it takes less work to be out of shape than it takes to be in shape. So your body, soon as you stop like actively going running every day or whatever you’re doing, you’re losing your drop, your degrade, your fitness.

You know, this stuff is degrading. And it’s the same with the program is that you just have these people who are like, well, Math Academy, because it has such high standards, requires more work, requires more vigilance.

you know, more effort from the instructors to keep the kids doing these things that they have to do that they can’t just like phone it in and be like whatever, you know, like they do with most of other classes. The parents have to kind of stay on top of it and keep them enrolled. And if a teacher just wants to get in and doesn’t really want to, you know, fight against the degradation, they don’t want to push.

And I can’t push that hard, it’s easy for people to get lazy. Humans are fundamentally lazy. We fundamentally don’t want to do shit. Your instinct is to just lie down, watch TV or something. It’s just to do the least amount of thing possible. And as you’ll notice, people are always… Because how we evolved, it’s like there’s…

to into an ecosystem where it’s like, we don’t know where to get food. We don’t know how much energy it’s going to take to find more food. So we need to be.

careful about how we expend our energy. mean, you don’t see lions or whatever running around just for fun. They conserve energy until it’s time to go hunt, right? And that’s that because that gives them a competitive advantage, an evolutionary advantage is to conserve energy unless you need to. So humans, we conserve energy unless we really need to expend it. And what that means is people’s default is to conserve energy. You know, it’s like, look, if I’m going to if I if I have three ways to drive to work and one takes 10 minutes and one takes 30 minutes, I’m gonna take

the minute drive. You know? I mean it’s like I can walk around if I you know what it was the fastest way gonna make a sandwich I’m not running walking the long way around the island every time I get the things out and then I’m gonna make it and I’m put everything back I’m not gonna be bang bang right just we always are optimizing to conserve energy conserve time. Okay so that’s the default reflex of all humans which means if the thing that you are doing

in some way requires more effort, more work, even if it’s not that much more, it’s still more, then they’re going to try and do less, which means they’re going to be degrading it over time. And if they degraded a little bit and there was no real pushback, say, hey, hey, what are you doing? Get that thing back up, right? Then you’re going to degrade a little more.

the next time and you just agree and I got away with that. It’s like the power of gradualism. And then I’m sitting here like, what happened? This thing is just a husk of what it used to be. It’s like, well, humans did less and less over time, got away with it. There was no painful pushback from someone to say, hey, fix this or you’re fired or you’re losing funding or whatever. then they will degrade. They will find other ways to cheat it. It’s like, you know,

You know, if a trainer has, you know, is training someone and, know, and, and, know, whatever the thing is, and they’re just doing less effort and they’re kind of cheating and they’re kind of moving their body around so don’t really have to do as much effort and the trainer doesn’t say anything, we’ll just keep cheating it. You know?

Justin (43:46) Yeah.

Yeah. All right. And it’s the trainer’s job to point it out. And ⁓ yeah.

Jason (43:50) Hey, you’re back straight. No, no, no, don’t

look about just use that money or whatever it is. Like, do you do the thing? Yeah. So, right. And, and in people are actually paying trainers to keep, cause people know they themselves will cheat it. Like I won’t go to the gym, a train. I have a plan with a trainer. So I gotta go. Right. Cause it was like, you know, you’ll, there’ll be this debate. Like you’ll see these like, I don’t

these actors and they’re all like, they’re for some action role and they’re like totally really fit in. They’re wow, they got their own nutritionists and their own personal trainer. And so, okay, well, why? Okay, true. Why is that an advantage? mean, working out is not that hard. I you can get a YouTube video, you can get app on your phone for free or a dollar a month or whatever, and you can get very good exercise. It’s not that hard.

What it is is somebody who is sitting there making you not do less, do more, do what you need to do. Show up six days a week, do this stuff that I’m telling you to do it the right way, and then you’ll get, because we just, naturally, we all know, like, I won’t go. I won’t do it.

Justin (45:02) It was kind of funny

how you’d see this in the… When you and I would talk about our classes, we would talk about the exponential decay of XP. So basically, you get kids, they come in at the beginning of the school year, you make it a rule, you guys need to get 40 XP done a day.

And I want at least half of that done during class. Like you can talk to friends, like you can be a kid, like there’s time for that, but you also, way you earn that is by actually sitting down and focusing for at least half the time and knocking out your XP. And so…

So the thing was like you initialize them correctly. They’re, knocking out like their, their desired XP. But if you, if you don’t continually check in on them, hold them accountable like that, the XP will gradually go on an exponentially decay curve. And, and so they’ll, they’ll start out like some kids doing like 30 XP a day. Um, on, uh, in the first couple of days, it turns into 25 XP a day, 20, 15, 12, 10.

Seven, like if you don’t check in and like force a standard.

it’ll fall below the standard. The standards is only it is effectively only how much you enforce it. Yeah, so that was it definitely felt like a kind of like every every every year was kind of like a almost another like small, small scale one of these battles where it’s like, okay, got to get all the kids excited. Got to get all the parents excited, email every single parent establish good relationship.

Even if there’s no issues with the kid, like if a kid like aced their quiz or whatever, or just was like really focused today and did a great job or asked a good question, go email their parent, establish a good relationship. I was fortunate that you coached me on this at the beginning. That where it was like, I had a lot of these good relationships in place because you’re going to need to use those later when the kid is not doing as well. The kid has kind of fallen off the rails a little bit.

and they’re not responding to you in class telling them to get their act together, can email their parent. Or if they, sometimes this is not, sometimes this kind of sneaks up on you where the kid will just tell their parent like, oh, I had so much homework today. They didn’t actually have that much homework. They just didn’t really, they goofed off in class. They had like 25, 30 XP to do at home.

And then they didn’t really focus on that at home. They were like simultaneously watching YouTube or texting with their friends or whatever. And it took them like three hours to do because they were only working like a quarter of the time. and, and so like the parent will, will email, ⁓ or a couple of times when I got an email from a parent and I was like, what, what is going on? Like, so I, what I would do is I would have, I would have the kid like sit next to me during class and then I’d be like, all right.

You’re knocking out all your XP today during class. ⁓ you, I, today is not a day for socializing, but if you, if you knock out all your XP today during class, then you can kind of go back to like, you’re, you’re not, you’re not in jail tomorrow. You’re out again. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And just to demonstrate, just to demonstrate to them and their parents that like, if they actually just sit down and focus and I’m not helping them, by the way, I’m not.

Jason (48:34) Not permanent detention, to temporary, just one day detention with me.

Justin (48:48) helping them do their work or anything. am just their accountability manager to make sure that they’re just show them what they can do if they if they focus the whole time. And so they complete all their XP and more than I got like 50 XP in the day. Like, so they completed all of today’s work, they have no homework today. And they even like, they’ve cut down their workload for tomorrow as well. And so they

They go home, I email their parent like, Hey, guess what? Like I made sure so-and-so was on task today, like fully focused the whole time. They knocked out like all of their XP and then some. and like, and the parents reaction is like, this is not like a, adverse communication with the parent. It’s all like a, like you, have a positive relationship. So the parent trusts you and knows that you just want to see their students succeed in this program. And.

And you frame it as a positive, like, look how much they did when they actually focused and like every, like you got the parent on your side. The kid is like, hopefully at least somewhat on your side because you’ve kind of demonstrated to them, like, like, dude, it’s not, I’m not asking you to run a marathon every day. Like, this is just like, just do your pushups, do your pull ups. Like it’s, it’s. It’s like taking the dog for a walk. It’s 20 minutes, 30 minutes of, of like full.

full effort is all I want from you in class. you can chat with your friends outside of that time. There’s plenty, the other 20 minutes of class, like, yeah, you can goof off. It’s just, yeah, making sure they put that intensity in.

Jason (50:27) Yeah, this is not a work camp, you know,

but it’s also not recess. You know, it’s like, Hey, just do some work and right. Well, you know, it’s, ⁓ yeah. So it was funny when we, when you first started becoming an instructor and stuff. mean, I, obviously I had been doing this, I had done it for years. So I had some experience, you know, with it and how to make it work. But,

Justin (50:32) Yeah.

Jason (50:52) Also, as a parent myself, I understood, OK, how do you get parents on your side? Because if you can get parents who are totally enrolled in this project and they really trust you, then your life is way easier than if have parents who are like, I don’t know, there’s some class or something. I don’t know. I don’t know who teaches it. They don’t know you. They don’t trust you because they don’t know you. By default, people don’t necessarily trust people they don’t know. They just do a little bit of trust, but not much.

And, but if you’re like, send them an email at beginning of year, hey, this is what we’re doing, this is really exciting thing, and then you kind of, your student, hey, your student’s been doing really well, you get them, great, I’m really excited about what her capability is, I think she’s do some great stuff, and know, and parents are like, they love those emails. They love them.

Right. And to get a, it’s so easy to write as a teacher. You don’t have to send that many out. You send a few and it’s just catnip for parents, you know, Oh, your daughter is such a delight to have in class. I just see she’s been pressing so well. And I’ve seen her overcome some of these obstacles. And I think she can great in this program. And I just have just, you know, it does require consistent effort. And so, you know, sometimes students will, you know, let, you know, kind of fall off and I may occasionally have to remind, you know, and they’re like, Oh yeah. So the parents are like, they’re in.

They’re like Justin’s awesome. This guy’s incredible, right? And so then when this girl like slacks off for a few days and you send him I say, you know, I’m a little disappointed because Monica didn’t you she’s I don’t know with last a really rough couple days. She’d really distracted but you know, I understand that every kid has a week.

as humans we just, know, but we need to get her back on because I don’t want to fall too far behind because then the parents go, yeah, yeah, right, right. They’re like, sure, yeah, yeah, we’re on it, right? We’re on it.

Justin (52:40) Yeah, right. Because

they will, right, if you establish that good relationship and communicate to them early about any problems that are kind of starting, any way that the kid is starting to fall out off the rails, like the parent will solve the problem for you outside of class. Like I can’t tell you how many times like a kid kind of like slacked off in class and like I just, I emailed

their parent just to say like, hey, just the heads up so and so has more homework than usual today because they were not really completely focused in class, which like happens sometimes, but I just wanted to give you a heads up in case the kid has some more work today. But the good news is like last week, there was a day that they just like were fully focused the entire day. Like their best friend wasn’t.

wasn’t there in class. And so they just, they just focused the entire time and they knocked out like, like 50 XP in 40 minutes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason (53:40) Cause you’re getting ahead of the kids spin. Cause the kids are spinning this. You have

a disinformation agent actively trying to counter all of your messaging. Right? It’s like, it’s like a, it’s like information war going on. And this 11 year old or 15 year or whatever, they’re like, well, you know, it wasn’t fair and it was too hard. didn’t, they’ll come up with so much nonsense.

Justin (53:48) Exactly.

Jason (54:07) And the parent, like you kind of want to believe your kid, right? You’re like, well.

Justin (54:10) Yeah,

well that’s your default. Your kid is right unless you have very strong evidence to the contrary.

Jason (54:17) Right. So, and I remember one thing I used to say to you, communicate early and often. You almost cannot over communicate with parents. I mean, you probably could, but it would pick, that’s not gonna be an area. The error is not gonna be that you’re sending three emails every day and the parents are gonna be like, Jesus Christ, I get these wall of text emails from Justin three times. You’re not gonna do that. The error is, you talk to them and then two, three months go by and you don’t talk to them and they’re kind of out of the loop.

Justin (54:23) Mm-hmm.

Jason (54:44) kids falling off and then you’re like, this kid has spent the last six weeks doing nothing and it’s a whole problem. Right? It’s like you want to stitch in time is save nine. ⁓

Justin (54:50) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can’t let it, can’t

let it like grow to be that big of a problem. Cause then if you do, then like everyone just digs in their heel. Like the problem is just too big to accept that like this is an actual problem. So, so everyone just wants to say like, no, you’re, you’re crazy. Your expectations are way too high. This is not an actual problem. And like, so it just creates, it makes it.

harder and harder to get things back on the rails because now there’s like some momentum in being off the rails. And that’s kind of the state of homeostasis. The kid is used to not doing a whole lot of work in class. Whereas if you catch that at the beginning, get it early, communicate with parent, the parent will catch the kid up that evening. If there’s only a deficit of 30 XP, 40 XP, guess what? The parent’s just going to make the kid do it that evening.

and then the kid’s going to come back, they’re fine. They’re on the rails the next day. We’re all good. Now we just maintain, maintain. But yeah, if the kid has racked up a deficit of thousands of minutes worth of learning that they didn’t do, then it’s just… You get into the position where… One thing I saw sometimes with…

with teachers who did not do as good a job on keeping kids on the rails is like the kids will come in at the end of the semester. They’re like, they’re like 2000 XP behind or 3000 or whatever. It’s like, again, like one XP, one minute, 2000, 3000 minutes. Like you’re not going to make that up in one week. Like if it’s the last week of the semester, like guess what? It’s already too late, but they would, they would lobby for some kind of like,

Jason (56:43) And

so can you just do this thing? And they all want to like makeup and makeup’s on the makeup. they’re, you know.

Justin (56:45) Yeah.

What if I do 500

XP this week, 100 XP every single day? Like, can I get an A in the course? And it’s like, well, like I appreciate the effort, but like you, you have 3000 XP to make up 500 XP. You’re going to learn a sixth of what you were supposed to learn. So it’s just, once things get to be that bad, it’s just like, it just becomes a bad explosive situation that you just, but the solution is just don’t let it get into that state. Cause that’s you never win.

Jason (57:14) Yeah,

the thing is that parents have, because of ⁓ the accessibility of teachers, that they are a text or an email away, right?

You know, parents have become much more involved in this process. So like when I was in high school, you had a progress report maybe, and you know, I don’t even think high school, I’m thinking of progress reports, you just got your semester or quarter, your quarter grades. You gotta be. You gotta be minus, you gotta be plus, whatever it was. Hey, you know, it’s like that is it. There’s no negotiating.

There’s no nothing. That was it. We didn’t have makeup tests. You got to see, you got to see, man. But I think what happened is, it’s a combination of helicopter parenting and all this. a lot of sort of cultural changes that taken place over the last 30, 40 years. But one of them had to do, think, parents being able to have direct access to teachers. When I was in high school, teachers didn’t meet with parents.

ever. so there was no but now because parents can lobby and make parents lives really I mean make teachers lives difficult. What if I say this the right way so if since parents can lobby easily lobby through a barrage of emails and texts make and send emails to the teacher to the principal to the whatever and then just make everything really painful

The parents are acting like an agent. It’s like a sports agent, right? And they are just gonna, and then what they want, what they want, a lot of them want is their student to do, they want them feel like they’re learning, but they want less work because they don’t want the stress of their kid having to do a lot of work and they want to be able to have family time and all that, which is understandable. And then when the kid, they have like great grades so they can go to whatever college they want to go to, right? But they also want their kids to learn a lot, but they don’t want their kids to do a lot of work.

Right? And kids aren’t going to do a lot of work, not going to learn much unless they put in a fair amount of work, unfortunately, that’s how the world works. You don’t learn a lot by doing nothing or by just spacing out in class. have to be.

Justin (59:29) Yeah, and it doesn’t have to be

a ton of time, just like you have to be actually doing intense work for that short period of time.

Jason (59:37) you’re reading Hamlet, actually gotta read Hamlet. You actually gotta go and take notes and try and decipher passages and it takes work. You don’t just go watch Mel Gibson’s version of it on YouTube or something and be like,

Justin (59:45) Yeah.

Jason (59:54) I know, no, you actually gotta do work. So, but parents, they, you know, they can, they wanna do less work. want my life, I want there to be low stress at home, but I want my kid, yeah, I my kid to be really educated, but I also want them to get great grades. Okay, well, the kids, there are some kids who like work really, really hard by default. Most of them don’t. You know, there’s a whole spectrum.

But anyway, the parents at the end of the day, once they realize that, my God, my kid’s gonna get a C, or is he gonna get some Bs when I tell them they’re not gonna get A’s and they’re like, my God, this is really, they’re not gonna get to go to Harvard or whatever dream they have. And so then they serve as this, they wanna lobby the school. And so they do, and so that has helped lower the standards, I think, especially these private schools, right?

Justin (1:00:29) Yeah. So.

Jason (1:00:41) paying 30, 40, 50, $60,000 a year and, and, and, and, know, and my kid works really hard in this. these, these costs and the, and the superintendents and the head of school and stuff, they’re like trying to keep the parents at bay. Cause that’s what pain for the pain for the schools, for the administration and the teachers are parents, parents P for pain. Right.

It ain’t pain. I remember asking, so I used to coach this men’s soccer team for years and all these guys who were these ex college players and I’m a bunch of them would coach these sort of elite academy level club soccer teams, you know, under 12, under 14, under 16. And I’d be like, I asked him like, how do you like that? Like, oh, it’s great. The kids are great. He’s like, but the parents are a nightmare. I’m like, really? He’s like, oh yeah. Oh yeah. It’s like.

Justin (1:01:04) Yeah.

Jason (1:01:32) Why didn’t my kid play left? They should play the right side. And why isn’t he starting? And they use it, you know, and it’s just a constant lobbying for the parents. It just ruins the experience for the coach. The coach is trying to, you know, not saying every coach makes good decisions or this affair, whatever, but it’s the parents. Parents equal pain for

coaches and teachers and administration. so they’re knowing that that’s where the pain’s coming. They’re trying to everything they can to limit said pain. And a lot of the changes you see in the curriculum, well, there’s no gifted class, accelerated classes. We don’t do a lot of homework. We have makeup tests and makeup’s on the makeups and we have all this stuff. It’s to the complaint, the agents, parents from…

be lobbying and creating all this endless cycle of pain. so then you get this situation you have now. so the teachers are just like, whatever, man. I mean, just make it really easy. mean, you taught at a very kind of a froufy, expensive public school. had a private school that had a bunch of, a lot of parents worked in entertainment in Hollywood and the music industry, right? mean, relatively famous parents, right?

Justin (1:02:45) Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s right. ⁓ Yeah, there were a couple like well-known ⁓ musicians, musical artists, people you’d recognize by name, their parents, their kids went to the school. But yeah, it was a…

Jason (1:03:03) There were probably a lot more

that were just like one notch down that you just didn’t know about that are just, wow, that’s a guy produced this and she’s the head of whatever, you know. ⁓

Justin (1:03:13) Yeah,

yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, a couple. was one like really big, like, probably like 80 % of the USA knows their name. ⁓ But yeah, there was a whole spectrum. But but yeah, I mean, it was a similar thing where, I mean, especially with these, these parents ⁓ were very successful, right? But they didn’t exactly make their success off of

like a straightforward academic discipline. It’s not like they, like you got a bunch of like well-known authors or a bunch of like mathematicians or it’s not like a

Jason (1:03:50) or

even people who worked at the CDC or worked in technology. These are musicians. These are…

Justin (1:03:53) Yeah, Not software engineer.

Like it’s not hardcore academic focused ⁓ parents, right? it’s kind of like, it gets to be that kind of like they want their kids to be set up for success. But they also don’t really believe that much in the success of like, in an academic sense. So it becomes

Jason (1:04:19) It’s not a

direct correlation. Like you get A’s in all these AP classes means you’re going to have a really successful career. Cause I didn’t do that. I dropped out of college. went to community college for a year, went to some music school for a while. And then I kind of, now I’m head of licensing at, know, whatever music company and I make a million dollars a year.

Justin (1:04:36) Yeah.

Yeah, so

basically it turns into that they ultimately want like what they want their kid to get into like a good college form good like professional connections in college. Yeah, right. Status. Yeah, yeah. And but right, they don’t really. Subject to the constraint that the kid gets into a good college, they want to minimize the amount of work to get there. Generally, I mean, there’s Yeah.

Jason (1:04:49) Just status, just sort of status in general.

Yeah, what’s the least amount? Because that’s a headache for them, right?

Justin (1:05:09) There’s, there’s, there’s, many exceptions to the rule, but these exceptions prove the rule, like 90, 95 % of the time, this is what you’re up against. And, um, and it’s, it’s kind of similar to like, just the whole, comes back to like, if, you let things drift off the rails for long enough, it just becomes an unsolvable problem later down the road.

once it’s built up enough steam. Like you get kids who come into like Calc BC class and they don’t know what the sine of pi over two is. Like they have forgotten how to factor a quadratic. not even like standard like, I forgot like the secant tangent identity for trig or I forgot this like, what’s the rational roots theorem again? like, you know, like the pre-calculus.

Jason (1:06:04) Yeah, which is understandable. yeah, I mean, yeah,

Justin (1:06:07) They’re like,

Jason (1:06:07) what is the head?

Justin (1:06:08) yeah, like, like way, way back, like we forgot some, some basic algebra, like really basic algebra. And by the way, we didn’t just forget that we forgot like everything that depends on it. We forgot all of exponents, all of logarithms. What’s a logarithm again? I forget what that is. Like, geez, man. Like, and so, right. just becomes like, well, in order to get these kids like legitimately back on track.

Like there, you can’t do that in a one hour a day school class. you got to, you’d have to like make it a whole thing. They got like tons of homework every night. Um, by the way, the school, it didn’t even have a class like one hour a day, five days a week. was, it was in this kind of like weird block schedule where I think like effectively you got like maybe like 35, 40 minutes of class per day on, if you averaged it out.

And then also subtracted out like whatever like events or there was a lot of that kind of stuff.

Jason (1:07:11) Did they do

something like you couldn’t grade homework or there was some limitations on what you could do with?

Justin (1:07:16) Yeah, well, it’s like,

you can, you can grade the homework, provided that you don’t assign a numeric grade. You can, it was some, like, you had to break it into mastery standards ⁓ that are like, very vague, nebulous things, you can’t make a mastery standard too specific.

And so it has to be in this vague, like student can solve problems by reasoning mathematically using like the structure of equation. what, how are you gonna, it’s just too vague. So it’s hard to like enforce like a real like where is the standard for that? Well, that could mean anything from student is able to like.

simplify trig identities to leverage trig identities to solve difficult integrals to like, student can solve a linear equation by noticing that you can combine like terms like what is just anything. But yeah, so the standards too vague, but also it’s like, ⁓ but it was like, you couldn’t like, ensure repeated practice too, because it’s like once a student has, has demonstrated proficiency,

Jason (1:08:23) What is a

Justin (1:08:41) of a standard, how do you take that away from them? You can’t really take that away.

Jason (1:08:46) Yeah, they’re,

you know, operating under the delusion that once you know something, you know forever, you don’t forget it.

Justin (1:08:53) Yeah. So it was like, it was one of those things where it’s like, even like, okay, if you want to like seriously assign homework and like force kids to do homework, you have to fight this whole battle on just, just on getting this homework mechanism in place. So, so yeah, it was, was one of, I mean, yeah, I only taught for a year. ⁓

Jason (1:09:16) Well, I remember you were just in

shock at how little math your physics, they didn’t, students knew. Like you had like a physics class, they, most of them really struggled to solve simple linear equations, like basic algebra. Right. And you were like, I’m not sure.

Justin (1:09:27) Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I thought we were,

I mean, I was told the kids had taken algebra before, which I guess was technically true. In some sense, they had technically signed up for a course that was technically called algebra and they had technically received some kind of end of the year grade in it that got constituted passing. There’s a lot of technicalities there that really like, either it wasn’t actually algebra or the grades were not assigned properly or

whatever, there’s the end result was you got kids, they didn’t know how to work with quadratic equations. They didn’t know how to factor a quadratic. They had to be retaught how to use the quadratic formula. And even then, like it took several days to reteach this. This is, this wasn’t just a reminder. Like, like remember last year when he did the

Jason (1:10:22) It’s almost like they had never seen it before. They’re like, what is this?

Justin (1:10:24) Yeah, was almost like that.

They’d either never seen it before, or they had maybe seen it like once or twice and not seen it for a year since. So like effectively, they had forgotten it to the point that it just had to be like retaught from scratch. And even stuff like linear equations ⁓ was like, I had to reteach some of that. What happens if the variable is on both sides of the equation? Like this is a high school physics class, like after algebra.

Anyway, yeah, was just, yeah, was, was, it was not good. So yeah, we basically just checked a few boxes on like some algebra, some, some easy algebra based physics, just like, just plug this into some formula, a little lab. Yeah.

Jason (1:11:09) the sort of physics for poets, like, what can I do here? And I think,

yeah, and I think a lot of teachers, well-meaning teachers who are doing their, want to do their best, who are optimistic about the capability of students, they’re in a situation that’s just like a no-win situation. I mean, you’re in a no-win situation. The kids come in, they don’t have the prerequisite knowledge that they absolutely have.

There is no enforcement or expectation of the enforcement of reasonable standards, homework, grades, grading. And so you get this thing happening where it’s like, you know they talk about AI slop, so you get education slop. It’s just you get, all this thing is called education, but people aren’t, the kids haven’t learned anything. They have no,

or very little in the way of demonstrable skills that anyone would go.

Justin (1:12:12) Yeah, everything’s

on paper. But you ask a kid to perform the skill in front of you. Like, do you actually have the skill? No, it’s it’s optimizing for like the paper communication of these skills. The stuff that colleges will see.

Jason (1:12:25) It’s all credentialism. You have this GPA,

you went to this school, you have this degree, and we’re all finding out that the emperor has no clothes, that a lot of these people don’t know much of anything. And if they had, they’d forgotten it. It’s really bad. teachers who care, well, they’ll give it up. like, yeah, it’s kind of a joke. I mean, you have some individual teachers who are really good and they’re trying to

overcome this situation in their local vicinity of what they have control over. Maybe you get someone who’s head of their little math or science department in some high school and they’re like, look, we’re going really push these kids starting in ninth grade. I’m going to get them up because they need to be able to do this stuff and we’re going to take this seriously. But it takes a lot of work. And it takes a lot of effort. And they don’t get paid anymore for doing it. Right?

Justin (1:13:17) There’s really no

incentive other than them not to have to deal with the, like, it’s kind of just keeping their own house clean. So, so that like, they don’t end up in a situation where like, they have kids taking their calculus course can’t pass the, the, AP exam because they don’t know their algebra. But beyond that, it’s just, yeah, there’s really no, no incentive.

Jason (1:13:43) Yeah, I why you got to fight with parents, you got to fight with the kids, you’re going to be going to fight with the principal. Everybody’s like, well, why are you making everybody do extra work? And this is all too much. And we have policies against grading. we it’s just a nightmare. mean, my daughter, who’s a senior in high school at Pasadena High School, and a lot of her classes, they don’t grade homework. They don’t grade it. I mean, I remember when she was in ninth grade.

Justin (1:14:08) Yeah,

I remember you asked me to just sit down a couple of years ago, back when I was in Pasadena, and she was like, yeah, yeah, and I think she was taking physics.

Jason (1:14:18) She was a freshman in high school. Because she was

more advanced in math, she was taking AP physics. And I wasn’t seeing her do a whole lot of work. wasn’t hearing much what was going on. I physics is really hard. And I’m just like, and you’re a physics guy. You did a lot of physics in high school and stuff. You were thinking that was the direction you wanted to go and was physics until you went into math. So I knew. I.

Justin (1:14:26) Yeah.

Jason (1:14:45) I took one physics, C or physics in college and I kind of, you know, it wasn’t something I kept up with. So it was like, all right, Justin, can you like sit down and tutor for an hour? I’ll pay you whatever, but just, you’re like, yeah, yeah, okay, okay. And continue.

Justin (1:15:00) Yeah. Well, it was, it was amazing. Cause I, I asked her like, okay, like, so what homework problems are, are we doing? And like, what, what did you, or what, what, what problems did, did you get wrong last time or whatever? And she was just like, well, like it’s not graded. So I don’t know. I was like, what do mean it’s not graded? Like we’re just doing problems that are, there’s no point. just like, we might as well just write down some gibberish and a, so some just like,

math slop on a piece of paper and just upload that and that’s there you go get your completion grade. And so the problem is like if nobody’s checking the homework how’s the kid gonna learn? Because the kid doesn’t know how to do these problems correctly. The parents almost certainly don’t know how to do these problems correctly. Well you depend on it like the only kids that get through are the kids who have somebody in their life or whose parents can bring in somebody into their life who can effectively do what

the teacher is supposed to be doing. You’re right, yeah.

Jason (1:15:59) Or they’re at the 99th percentile. They’re just super

high aptitude and they’re really into it. And so they’re going to all these extra resources because they’re a physics nerd or whatever. And they’re just going and watching videos and doing such stuff. Cause this is what they want to do. But that’s like that, that’s the one out of a hundred kit. Maybe everyone else is like, I don’t know what’s going on. Right. And have a couple of kids you’re drafting off that one kid. He’s helping his or she’s helping her little.

Justin (1:16:18) Yeah.

Yeah.

Jason (1:16:29) a few couple friends and they’re kind of figuring it out, but everybody else is just like, what’s happening?

Justin (1:16:31) Yeah.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah, exactly. And eventually it gets, well, actually very quickly, it gets just so out of hand that like, even if you had a tutor sit with the kid and help them work through the homework problems, like they wouldn’t get a whole lot out of it because the problems are now so far ahead of their ability. We’re asking them to do like situations like, like block rolls down a wedge with friction.

and some other like pulley force or whatever and they don’t even know how to like do this under frictionless pulley less just gravity like how long until it hits the bottom like they don’t have their component skills and so you’re basically like it’s almost like their homework like they they can’t their homework is to do a double backflip kid doesn’t even know how to do a single backflip like they don’t even know how to like tuck their legs when they jump like that’s where you’re at and so you’re you’re

But what you have to do is you have to somehow get video evidence of them doing a double backflip or something. Well, actually, you don’t even need video. You just need because it’s only graded on completion. You don’t have to get it right. So you just have to film them doing a double backflip attempt. Who cares if it lands properly or not? And then we’ll just check the box, say that they learned double backflip. Meanwhile, can’t even do a single.

Jason (1:18:02) Yeah, because the teachers like the administration, well, did you get everyone through this unit? Yes, everybody got through this unit. did this check. All right. And I gave him my paycheck, right? My checks for paychecks, right?

Justin (1:18:09) Mm-hmm.

I guess

it’s so it’s just too it’s so vague. What does it mean to get through a unit? Well, we’re gonna with the forces that we’ve talked about, incentives at play, what’s going to happen is, is the amount of work and effort is going to be reduced subject to like that you can argue under some technicality that they have gotten through the unit, even if that means just having heard the material communicated to them in class, not

but not understood it, not able to solve problems to it or whatever. We have read this section of the book in class.

Jason (1:18:53) Yes, it’s terrible. so I think parents are not aware of actually how little their kids are learning. Whatever you think your kids are learning, in most cases, they’re learning a lot less. They know less, they’re doing less work, they have fewer skills, less understanding. You know, it’s bad. know, especially…

Things in math and physics and stuff like that. Nice stuff. It’s like, well, how’s their American history course or how’s their French class? Like, yeah, it’s less important. It’s easier to be just kind of like, all right, you know, we talked about, you know, the constitution or something. We talked about the revolution and war and you’re like, all right. You know, any of your parent, you might talk about them Who will tell me what was the Boston tea party or something? You know, it’s like, it’s not that important, but.

Justin (1:19:46) Yeah, it’s just,

it’s less foundational for other skills that you might need to do. And also it’s less of a hierarchy or it’s like, if you fall behind on the history of one country ⁓ and we move on to the history of another country, like, okay, you just start with the history of this new country. Like it’s not.

Jason (1:20:02) Yeah. If you forgot about

what happened in Sparta and Athens, like it doesn’t really affect, you know, the Renaissance. It’s like, I don’t know. mean, was Sparta the one that was the warrior one or was that Ithaca? I don’t know. I mean, it’d be great if you knew it, but it’s not going to, and your parents probably don’t remember it. And it’s not going to affect, you know, you’re, you’re doing the unit on the enlightenment or something, but, ⁓

Justin (1:20:09) Yeah, yeah. Or as in that, like… ⁓

Yeah.

Jason (1:20:27) Math, physics, things like that, yeah, it’s real problem. But the problem, thing about math and physics and all that stuff is it just takes a lot of hard, consistent work to keep making progress. It’s just that the standards have to be higher, they have to be more rigorous, they have to be quantitative. ⁓

That’s just is and if you’re not going to do it and you’re to make everything mushy and fluffy and we’re just going to have group discussions and we’re new projects and we’re going to progressing towards standards, then guess what? Everybody’s going to do less work. Kids, teachers, everybody. And then at end of the day, people come out and nobody knows anything other than like that one, two kids who were sort of mostly self-taught and you know.

That’s it. That’s how it rolls. So let’s maybe switch gears, talk. Is there anything else we want to get into other than school stuff? We want to…

Justin (1:21:10) Look at this.

I can go down

the list of, do you want to do more or?

Jason (1:21:23) Yeah, let’s

see what else we got. Give me another topic we got.

Justin (1:21:27) Okay. Yeah. Let me

just read out several things and you can, you can, ⁓ whatever sounds good to you. So, there’s still the, the, the gravity stuff. There’s, how to get kids on the rails incentives, like, how to foster independence and kids, how the, the relationship of holding a kid accountable changes those kid ages. ⁓

Jason (1:21:31) Okay.

Justin (1:21:56) more about the Eurisko program.

Jason (1:21:58) You know what I want to talk about?

I want to hear about, because you were that 1 % kid, or the 0.1 % kid or something. At some point, you took upon yourself to go through some significant portion of the MIT’s open courseware, OCW.

Justin (1:22:06) Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Let’s talk about that.

Jason (1:22:23) And they post, and what that is is they, for a bunch of their classes, they posted the lecture notes, problem sets, answers to problem sets, midterms and finals, and videos for a bunch of the classes. You’re totally on your own, but if you wanted to, you could kind of, in theory, do this stuff. Now, it wasn’t for every class, and the quality of the materials, I think, for some of the classes were much better than others.

but there was a lot of stuff posted. So why you give a little overview of what that is, how you get started and what that looked like. Because I was really impressive that you did that and it would be interesting to hear.

Justin (1:22:55) Yeah.

Yeah, sure.

So, ⁓ yeah, how did this start? Well, ⁓ this started my sophomore year of high school. Yeah, the summer of my sophomore year in high school. I had always kind of been into math. I liked math. in middle school, I did math counts or whatever, but I didn’t really take it seriously. I was…

Jason (1:23:27) You’re like

two years ahead in math, right?

Justin (1:23:30) Yeah, I was on

like the just the standard like the most advanced track that’s like an actual track. Yeah, yeah, geometry in eighth grade, algebra two and in ninth grade and and well, school made me take geometry again and take 10th grade even though I had already taken it and I had to do like a crap ton of lobbying to to get into pre calculus. I get well, just

Jason (1:23:36) Geometry in eighth grade, I think you said, right?

jeez.

Justin (1:23:57) briefly what would end up happening. Like I had to like basically say like, like, come on, guy, I’ve already taken geometry. Like, why do I need to take it again? Like, okay, fine, I’ll take it again. But can you let me take pre-calculus? And then so the, the instructor ⁓ actually, or one of the head of the math department, I was talking with him about it and he gave me his, notes for the class on, on, on ⁓

Or it was like trigonometry or something. Like it was like trig and precalc combined or whatever it is, some integrated course. But I thought he was giving this to me as like, here’s what you need to spin up on for a pre-calculus. Like, let’s talk more after you look at this. ⁓ And so what I did is I solved as many problems as I could in there over the span of like,

2 days. And so I got like, there’s this booklet of like 100 pages, like a big, big workbook, I got maybe to like page 50 or something, page, page 60. And like each page has like a bunch of problems. So probably did maybe like on the order of like 300 400 problems over these two days. Yeah, I went like completely, I was taking this, this this packet around with me, like to every single class.

Jason (1:25:16) Jesus.

Justin (1:25:22) And just doing it in class, like instead of whatever subject, cause I’m just like, I’m like, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so I learned he actually like tracked me down at the, at my, my, my last period of class on the second day that I had this booklet.

Jason (1:25:27) Sit in health class and music class, you’re like mad.

It’s like, hey kid, where are my

notes?

Justin (1:25:40) Exactly. So I didn’t realize, but this was like his one copy of class notes. He was trying to teach class with it. And he was like, where are the notes? Like, I thought, wait, I gave them to Justin. Why didn’t Justin give me back the notes? Like, so he was so confused. And so problem is like, I had written in pencil, like, all over these notes. He’s like, he’s supposed to make photocopies of this for like, for the kids to do for their homework or something.

I don’t know what he did the previous day. Maybe he was just like, ⁓ crap, I don’t know where they are. guess no homework today, but like, ⁓ but yeah, so he got them back. had to go and erase all the, all the stuff that I had written down. And I think through that, he realized that I was doing like at least most of the problems correctly and that I had actually like, I didn’t just say that I worked through a lot of it, like that I actually like put the work in and then I was willing to do that. Yeah.

Jason (1:26:34) Yeah, because he had to race every one. He’s like, damn it.

Justin (1:26:37) Yeah, you have to go like erase like 50 pages. Yeah, either that or like, I don’t know if he like had some other source where he could like reprint it out again. But like, yeah, I don’t know. But it seemed like a he was kind of annoyed initially. But but yeah, so then then I got into that that pre calc class my sophomore year after all that after

Jason (1:26:40) F’ing Justin?

Damn kid. Damn kids ruined my life.

Justin (1:27:03) And this is not like a me arguing to get a year ahead. This is me saying like, I already took geometry in eighth grade. Do I really have to take it again? And I did have to take it again. They still made me take it again, but at least I got to take them work. Yeah, it was a private school. ⁓ My parents sent me to a, I went to public elementary and middle school, but my dad wanted to send me to a

Jason (1:27:18) You went to a parochial, like was a Catholic school or something, right?

Justin (1:27:32) a good high school, ⁓ a ⁓ private high school just for superior quality of education, supposedly. ⁓ So the thing I noticed, okay, we’ll get back to the original question you asked shortly, but the thing I noticed was, ⁓ the private school, actually, if you took the mean student of the local public school versus the private school,

Jason (1:27:42) like taking geometry again in 10th grade.

Justin (1:28:02) Private school means student is going to have better stats on like their ACT and SAT or whatever. But the spread of this distribution in the public school, they have way, way, way more kids and way, way, more kids who, who are kind of in a more similar situation to me where they’re just like really pressing on. Like they’re far away, they’re outlier like

In the private school, there’s so few students that these kids look like major outliers. ⁓ They’re like, this isn’t even part of the distribution. Like, what do you mean? There’s no, this kid doesn’t exist. I refuse to believe it. Yeah. In the public school, they’re still like way, way off on the spectrum, but at least they’re part of the long tail. And they know that there are some of these

Jason (1:28:43) We can just pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s an anomaly. It’s not real. Eliminate it.

Justin (1:29:01) like crazy kids who are just love with stuff.

Jason (1:29:04) Yeah, both ends. had your super

low performers and then you got super high performers. And like, we got to have like AP classes and things. And we have to have some program where somebody’s kids can take classes, classes at the local community college or something. Right. If you have, especially if it’s sizable high school of like, know, 1500, 2000 kids, there’s going to be some of those kids. Right. Pro-Kiel school, it’s like, we got 300 kids in the high school or something. It’s like, well,

Justin (1:29:09) Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah,

still a tiny proportion, but there’s a large enough absolute number of them. That’s greater than one that like there’s actually a little bit more support for them. Um, but, oh yeah, it was just kind of funny. Cause like, it’s like, ironically, like, okay, you pay more to send kid to the private school. The private school has higher, like average stats. You think it’s a better quality of education for an outlier kid. Like it actually is like way, way worse. It’s like the public school. So my.

Jason (1:30:00) Well, one thing I want to say too, you some of the private schools around here, I know that like Poly and Westridge, like they’re really good schools, but they don’t like kids that are too far ahead. They don’t want weak students. They want strong students who are in that range. Right? So the top, the, the 1 % are the 0.1%. They, they just like, I can’t deal with these kids. It’s cause it’s a headache. Right?

Headache like we got what do we do with this kid took a kid to calculus in 10th grade? What are we supposed to do with them alone? So it’s not like public school We don’t want to send them off. They go take in private school They don’t feel like you have to go to junior college to take classes because the private school can’t handle it, right? They can’t facilitate their learning and how much am I paying you guys? Okay public school It’s like there’s no less ego about it than there is in the private school, right? And so it was just such an interesting thing. I had heard about that they

Justin (1:30:53) Mm-hmm.

Jason (1:30:58) because we’d have math academy kids coming out of eighth grade having taken AP Calculus BC. And some of the parents, like your parents, were like, well, I want them to go to private school. We’ve been planning them to go in private school their entire childhood. was like, and even with Math Cat, be like, really like, Math Cat has been amazing. And yeah, think it’s gonna be, it’s still disappointing that they can’t continue in the high school program, but.

We want them to go to Poly or Westridge or one of these, you know, expensive, know, very selective private schools. then the school’s like, what am I what are we supposed to do with this kid? This is the headache, right? This is a major headache. OK, one year ahead. Definitely we have kids one year, two years ahead.

Justin (1:31:42) Mm-hmm.

Jason (1:31:52) fine, maybe we’ll do that. Because then they can take a, but you know, they don’t want to do it. It’s just a headache. They don’t want to deal with it. It’s just, they don’t want deal with it. And so they won’t, they just sort of turn those kids down. Anyway, so can you continue on the story please? Cause that’s, was.

Justin (1:32:04) Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah. So, okay. So took pre-calc and geometry sophomore year. After that, ⁓ next course is going to be calculus. so I like, this was kind of getting into the point of like, I’d always kind of been interested in physics and like black holes and stuff, like astrophysics, like kind of makes for cool visualizations. to watch the history channel documentary on it. You’re just like,

Jason (1:32:33) Right.

Justin (1:32:37) think about space and stuff. like, I knew that calculus is like, I mean, I didn’t understand calculus at that point, but I knew that like, I knew enough around the subject to know that it underpins. Yeah, yeah. Cause you see that all the time in like physics books and, and, whatever. And then like all these like history channel documentaries on physics, it’s like when they’re just showing like math equations, just like.

Jason (1:32:48) seen enough as big S’s, as DYDX’s to know that stuff is important.

Justin (1:33:06) you know, for like effect, like there’s always a bunch of these big S’s like the D, Y, like whatever, what is that? Well, whatever this calculus thing is, like it, I guess it must be important. And ⁓ so I just decided ⁓ that summer that I was going to try to learn it on my own ⁓ because like, just got, so it was just cool. It had the cool factor.

And like, was, it was also the thing. we were like, you know, in every movie where like, when you hear that some movie character is a genius, the way that they, they, often communicate it is that like so-and-so took calculus, like, no, it was advanced calculus or like, what, like from the public perception, calculus is like synonymous with like super advanced math. And so, so I was like, okay, this is really cool. I can’t believe like I’m already here. Like I’m going to try to just.

teach myself over the summer, because I just can’t wait. ⁓ so that’s how I got into these online learning resources. And so I guess I had kind of started to get an inkling of this back when I was solving those trig problems, getting through a high volume in one day. But self-study turned out to be so much more efficient than I was used to at school. And it was just like,

Jason (1:34:12) Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Justin (1:34:33) I thought it was going to take me ⁓ the whole summer to learn calculus. It took like maybe a month. ⁓ And yeah, yeah. Well, I was, I mean, once I got to like,

Jason (1:34:41) Well, that’s super pussed.

Well, you

already demonstrated they do three or four hundred problems in two days. OK, if you’re doing it at that rate, that’s like, you know, I’m doing three hundred, four hundred XP a day. It’s like, OK, or more. I’m doing five hundred XP a day. You can run a lot.

Justin (1:34:50) Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I was

pulled up in my room. And especially once I got to optimization and related rates and basic differential equations and stuff, I was just, it was more than just like, is cool from public perception, but this is just so interesting to me. it was like, I guess it like, it felt like my first experience of being able to use math.

like as a weapon to open up just a can of whoop ass on whatever modeling problem I want to. It’s like suddenly I got like this like this Jedi lightsaber. I’m just like swinging it around, like destroying all these modeling problems. Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, I just like holed up in my room just working out math problems. It was like it was almost like playing a video game except that we see the

Jason (1:35:28) Like a power tool. It’s like a power tool. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Justin (1:35:52) thing is like, I was also kind of big into video games in middle school and early on in high school. And I mean, my parents never thought that was like, I mean, they were fine with it, but they were like, whenever I would like would be playing for like too long, they’d just be like, like, why don’t you like go outside or like just do something productive. ⁓ But like with math, with the calculus stuff, it felt like playing a video game.

⁓ except the longer I played, the more proud my parents were of me for working so hard. So it’s like I got like unlimited video game hours by doing this math.

Jason (1:36:28) What is your mom?

So your mom, she went to art school. So she’s like, what is, what are you doing? What is she, she, what was her reaction? You remember.

Justin (1:36:32) Yeah.

⁓ well, I mean, my parents didn’t really

actually they didn’t ask me a whole lot about at least that I can remember. They were just like, yeah, Justin’s prepping for the next school year. Like, like, good, good for him. I’m glad he’s like, taking his, his academic seriously. Like, like, I mean, they knew I was like into like, like, they know I was a serious, serious student and everything. Getting straight A’s and everything. But they, they, it, I think it took

Jason (1:36:50) Kids do that all the time, right?

Justin (1:37:07) ⁓ some time for them to understand the caliber of what I was doing ⁓ like there. It’s like, it’s almost like, like they, they, they, they think like the kid’s playing with like a, ⁓ some kind of, some simple chemistry set. Like let’s, let’s make, ⁓ yeah, make a dye or whatever. And like, actually the, the kid is, is like building fireworks or something. Like it was just so like,

Jason (1:37:25) Make a dye, make a color, make…

Justin (1:37:36) order of magnitude difference. anyway, yeah, so was holed up in my room and like, so after calculus, like I finished calculus in like what, like four weeks or something like that. And I was like, wow, like, it’s still summer. It’s like, I still have lots of time. So I was, and also like this, this whole thing, this whole experience was just so mind blowing to me because it was like, I didn’t, I didn’t understand how slowly we were moving at school. I mean, I

Jason (1:37:46) That was a word.

Justin (1:38:03) I knew we could be moving faster by doing more work, but I didn’t understand until that point, just the level of inefficiency that is happening at school. Like I was always like blowing through the homework, like really fast in class and like, and mostly just like sitting around being like called up to the board to work problems for the class. And like, it was just.

I mean, on one hand, was, was, was kind of fun being like, I mean, I was, I kind of got a reputation for being like the freshmen who is like showing up all these, like the smartest junior in like, in whatever algebra two class, but, but it was also like, just, I was not working at the, at the forefront of my ability. And so, yeah, so I just, I didn’t, I didn’t realize how fast I could have been moving. So, so yeah.

Jason (1:38:41) Right.

Quick question.

What materials or book were you using to teach yourself calculus?

Justin (1:39:02) So actually the single variable calculus course, ⁓ it was not on MIT OpenCourseWare. Everything else was on MIT OpenCourseWare, but the very first calculus course that I took, it was some kind of…

It’s it doesn’t exist anymore. As far as I know, I can’t even remember the name of it. I tried to look it up like a year or two ago. I spent like hours, like trying to Google for it, like just see if I could just uncover what it was. But it was, but I can kind of describe it a little bit. It was almost, it was almost like, ⁓ like a textbook, but it was like arranged in, in slides of information. Like you do, you read a slide, you read a slide, you have like,

10 practice problems and you solve those those 10 practice problems and and then it checks the the it checks each problem for you and and says whether you you did it correctly there’s not a whole lot of explaining yeah yeah it was so weird it was like it was it definitely yeah

Jason (1:40:06) It was the math academy before math academy. What the hell? That’s the first time I’ve heard this story. That’s crazy.

So a couple slides, they do 10 problems. What? I don’t think it didn’t do it. They were, you got it. So you can skip these problems and move on, but that’s crazy.

Justin (1:40:16) It wasn’t adaptive.

Yeah, so it wasn’t adaptive. didn’t force you to do the problems. You could click ahead and if you got the problems wrong, like whatever, was just like, it really was just a textbook, just like kind of cut up into like problems interspersed. And there were some videos and whatever.

Jason (1:40:25) Mm-hmm. Right.

Yeah, it’s Proto Math

Academy, right? Proto Math Academy, right? Really basic.

Justin (1:40:42) Yeah, yeah,

something like that. And it’s so weird because like I this thing like doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t know what it was, but I cannot find it anywhere. ⁓

Jason (1:40:53) Well, you know what you could do

is you could go on the web archive to the year that you did this in search for a name and maybe to show up on the web archive.

Justin (1:41:00) I don’t even remember the name of it though. That’s the problem. At the time, didn’t know that this was going to be such a big deal. I didn’t bother writing down any of this. It’s just a fuzzy memory from a decade ago. I’ll try and see if I can dig up any other information. ⁓ But they had something like…

Jason (1:41:02) ⁓

Mmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, it would be interesting. It

would be interesting for you to do a little bit of archaeology on this and say, was my sort of proto math academy. This is what it did for me, you know, and you could kind of, and then kind of have some screenshots of it. There’d be people probably find that pretty cool. If you could, don’t know. Like I said, it might not ⁓

Justin (1:41:34) Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah,

I’ll try. Let me just say like everything off the top of my head that I remember about it, just in case anyone else knows what I’m talking about. And also just so that I can like take this transcript and feed it into like an LLM to just see if it knows anything. like, so it was, it didn’t have like any other advanced math. didn’t, I don’t even think it…

I don’t recall it having any simpler math either. I think it was just for like AP classes. Cause I remember I, I mean, at this point, I, when I was, ⁓ initially the first couple of weeks, in addition to studying calculus beforehand, I was also just trying to like, I was also partially just trying to, trying to get a leg up on the upcoming school year and like learn AP US history beforehand and, stuff like that.

Jason (1:42:16) Mm-hmm.

Justin (1:42:40) So know they had like an AP US history course as well on there. again, by course, I don’t mean it was like interactive or anything, but the slides.

Jason (1:42:50) Yeah, it’s just a slide. Okay, was it AP Calculus

or just like Calculus, Calc 1 or intro to A, B or B, C?

Justin (1:42:55) No, it was, was AP. It was AP calculus.

BC. Yeah.

Jason (1:43:01) Okay, so AP Calculus BC, right. Okay, so it says AP Calculus

courses.

Justin (1:43:06) Yeah, and an AP US history. This is kind of coming back to me now. It’s like, this is funny. It’s like recovering a memory. Yeah, I didn’t even realize that this was so similar to Math Academy. I kind of forgotten even that I did this sort of thing before MIT OpenCourseWare. Okay.

Jason (1:43:26) We’re going to give

you like regression hypnosis or something. Hypnotize you on the podcast.

Justin (1:43:29) Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that’s what we need. Yeah, there were also, I know there were some other courses. can’t remember what the, okay, I think they may have had like a AP world history as well.

Jason (1:43:38) Okay.

Justin (1:43:52) I don’t think they had an AP physics, because if they did have that, I’m pretty sure I would have been interested in that as well. ⁓

Jason (1:44:02) Was it

like a school that was hosting it, or was it like a something else?

Justin (1:44:10) I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I could be wrong. I don’t think it was on a school webpage or anything.

Jason (1:44:17) Can you think of what

the name of it might have been? What’s name pops in your head? Or the URL, the name of it? you?

Justin (1:44:23) Uhhhh

Jason (1:44:29) I’m hypnotizing you. What do you see, in your head? Close your eyes. What are you seeing in that dress bar? Look harder, Justin. What are you seeing?

Justin (1:44:36) Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to be able to recover anything I just don’t know.

okay, the format was like, was, it was like this, it was not a standard webpage. It was almost like a square box sort of. even the text and stuff in the box, was not like, I don’t think it was like copy and pasteable. It’s like, it wasn’t like part of the HTML. was like some other, like it was some widget in there.

Jason (1:45:05) like Java.

Justin (1:45:07) Yeah, something like that.

Jason (1:45:08) It was a Java

or like, or, you know, it could have been like, could have been like, I think a Macromedia or Adobe had like a courseware thing. They could have used like Adobe or Macromedia’s courseware to create it. Something like that. Or like a FileMaker Pro, something they exported it online or something like that. It’s old 90s software.

Justin (1:45:22) Yeah, yeah, probably something like that.

I think there

are quite a few videos. ⁓

Jason (1:45:38) I’ll bet you, I could be wrong, I’ll bet you it was something like, was either Adobe or Macromedia or something had something called Courseware. I think it was the name of the product. I don’t know if it’s still around. And it would allow you to probably organize, which is probably why it was structured in slides and problems in videos, right?

Justin (1:46:00) Yeah.

Jason (1:46:01) So you could just go in and be like, all right, create a module. Okay. And somebody was cutting and pasting from their notes or from textbooks and some videos and they put together this, this thing. So, anyway, okay. Well, well, you know, maybe you’ll come to some, I’m, I’m, you know, but let’s go into the open courseware real quick.

Justin (1:46:04) Yeah.

Yeah, that’s probably what it was. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. after calculus, single variable calculus, then I just like, okay, I was just so hooked on this because I mean, there was all these things that was like, it almost felt like, ⁓ you know, the Harry Potter where like, Harry learns that he’s like a wizard or something. And like that there’s this whole Hogwarts school and everything. And it’s just so, it’s like, there was

Jason (1:46:48) That was your moment.

Justin (1:46:50) There was some pieces of like weird shit that had happened to him in the past, where it was like, he had like talked to a snake or whatever. And he was like, not even sure if that was real, but there were, there were some indications, but then all of a sudden, like it came to a head and then he’s like, he’s like, Holy shit. Like the glass just shattered. so, so this was kind of what I was experiencing at that point. I’m like, Holy shit. I can learn way, way faster than I can just sitting in class in school.

I can do it myself. I don’t, I can do it like with online resources. ⁓ or just like even probably just books would have worked. ⁓ cause that’s basically what the online resources were. They were just like books with videos essentially. and, and, and, and it was also just like really cool. Like it was almost like I found a new video game, like calculus. just felt like a video game. Like it was the best video game that I had ever played.

because ⁓ there’s like infinite, like this climbing up this math ladder, there’s just like infinite progression. There’s no beating the game and having to go on to a new one. It’s an infinite game. And you know, like everything that you do in this game, you can take with you later in life. This is a game that actually matters. And it’s a game that your parents are actually like really, like they’re proud of you for spending like eight hours just like holed up in your room playing this game.

Jason (1:47:59) The infinite game of math, yeah.

You’re

playing eight hours playing Eve online or EverQuest or World of Warcraft. What are you doing? Like, what am I guild? And you’re like, what? Get outside. This is terrible.

Justin (1:48:20) Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

And everybody’s like super impressed when you come out and you’re like, wow, like, my kid taught himself calculus over over the summer. And like, it’s just, it’s so it’s so it’s so funny how similar it is to just like, my kids spent the summer like playing eight hours a day of Call of Duty and ⁓

Jason (1:48:48) You’re not telling

people that unless you’re just complaining like my kid only plays Call of Duty. I don’t know. I’m worried they’re going to become deranged. You know, what do we do about this? It’s the opposite.

Justin (1:48:54) Yeah, exactly.

Yeah,

right. It’s it’s seen as a problem. But you just change it to like calculus or math. And suddenly, it’s like, like, the perception just does a complete 180. But the experience is the basically the same. So yeah, so I was hooked on this. I’m like, I Yeah.

Jason (1:49:16) Yeah, you were having more fun. was more fun than playing Call of Duty or Eve Online.

Justin (1:49:22) Yeah, so I beat the calculus game basically, and I’m like, okay, what are we doing next? Like, I’m, I’m like full on addicted at this point. I’m just like, I can’t, I can’t make it through the summer without more math. Like, what am I going to do? Like, like not do math the rest of summer? Like that sounds terrible. So I’m like, okay.

Jason (1:49:39) What am I gonna

go to a pool and swim with my friends? I’m not gonna do that. That’s terrible.

Justin (1:49:43) Yeah, Yeah,

exactly. It’s like, can’t can’t can’t even bring scratch paper there. I’ll just get wet. ⁓ Yeah, so. ⁓ So I that’s when I went to MIT OpenCourseWare because I was like, okay, well, I know, like after this is like university level math, where where do I learn university level math? And it was like, part of the reason that I went to MIT OpenCourseWare is it was not just because it had these courses on it, but it but it also had a ⁓

Jason (1:49:50) Yeah.

Justin (1:50:13) clear progression. I’m like, OK, this is a 100 level course. This is a 200 level course. This course has those courses as prerequisites. So it was like I could get a sense of the skill tree. So I found out that linear algebra and multivariable calculus are the two courses that you take after single variable calculus. So I just went on and started with those.

And I actually got through like most of them during the rest of summer. ⁓ And once school started up again in the fall, was just like, I was not about to just stop this and go back to just normal going to class sitting there, like while the teacher waits. like, you know, screw this. Like I’m going to, I’m doing self-study in school.

Jason (1:50:51) Which courses?

Yeah.

Justin (1:51:11) school, my school hours, I’m going to be self studying as much as I can. I’m going to print out like materials. I’m going to like sneak an iPad into class if I need to. actually did that for one year. ⁓ this, and this was like a no, no technology allowed in class. get a detention for bringing a phone or something.

Jason (1:51:32) recorded attention for

Teach Yourself Linear Algebra. That would be a first.

Justin (1:51:38) Yeah, yeah, so eventually, yeah, this is a little later on once I realized like how much I could get away with as the smart kid in school, like.

Jason (1:51:46) The

teacher’s not worth her trouble. He’s like, Justin, what are you doing with that? just, whatever.

Justin (1:51:52) Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I would also like I wouldn’t be like, obviously out with it. I would like have my stack of books arranged have a little paper covering it like I was I was exactly don’t ask don’t tell me so the teachers get like a suspicion like, okay, Justin is never looking up. He’s always like writing something or looking like he’s reading something. But the thing is, I would also I would keep a general sense of what’s going on in class. So I would like

Jason (1:52:00) It was kind of a don’t ask, don’t tell self-education program.

Justin (1:52:22) Because I knew if the teacher calls on me and I’m just like, what are we talking about? They’re going to be like, OK, Justin, what are you doing? But if I can actually respond with a decent answer to whatever question they have, it doesn’t have to be my highest effort, best answer, but it has to be just something that’s like, OK, kids paying attention, ⁓ even though they don’t look like it. Then I can continue doing what I’m doing.

Jason (1:52:45) Because you always have those kids that are to doodle and draw and teachers

like whatever, you know.

Justin (1:52:51) Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So I would, I would kind of, yeah, kind of keep an ear out for like, anytime the teacher is like asking questions or anytime there’s there’s a risk of me being called on. ⁓ And just make sure I’m kind of prepared for that. But other than that, like all the other time, I’m just I’ve got my my educational resources, my my, my, my papers that I printed out or my my iPad for

for reading this PDF of a book. And ⁓ so I’m just going through doing this thing like eight hours a day at school. Probably six of those eight hours were ⁓ dedicated to this math self-study every single day. yeah, ⁓ so I got through linear algebra, multivariable calculus. ⁓ I got through like…

Jason (1:53:42) That’s a lot.

Justin (1:53:52) the first semester of like calculus-based physics, mechanics, I got through ⁓ like, I think like half of the electricity, or most of the electricity and magnetism. It was more than half, maybe like three quarters. ⁓ I got through like basically up until like however much you need to know for like the AP exam, which was not like the full MIT course, but it was most of it. ⁓

also did differential equations, ⁓ I think like maybe two thirds of that and, and maybe half of real analysis. And I also got an abstract algebra book and I did, I did group theory. I didn’t go on to like ring theory and field theory, but I did group theory. ⁓ I also did probability and statistics. Sorry.

Jason (1:54:44) that was not open courseware.

That was not open courseware. group, the abstract algebra, that was the one you got a book for.

Justin (1:54:54) Yeah, well, okay. So what I, what I, at some point it kind of turned into the OpenCourseWare courses were really, they were, they were pretty solidly built out for like linear algebra and multivariable calculus. Like there were plenty of problems and videos and for the freshmen physics. And yeah, I, I, I, the, the, the, the physics OpenCourseWare course is the one with Professor Walter Lewin.

Jason (1:55:07) The sophomore level stuff, right? Yeah.

Justin (1:55:23) He’s like that famous, do you know that guy? He’s got all these like cool physics demonstrations that he does here. Yeah, yeah. He would like, his thing was like, he would always like put his life on the line for physics. Like he would, he would do like a pendulum experiment where he like, he has some big pendulum with a big like bowling ball on it. And he’s going to take it to one side of the room, let it go. And then, and it’s going to swing.

Jason (1:55:25) I don’t know. ⁓ yeah, he’s famous for that, right. Yeah, okay, I know the guy.

Justin (1:55:49) back at him after it completes a cycle and he’s not gonna flinch, he’s just gonna stay there and it’s gonna come within like a centimeter of smashing his face. yeah, so he would do all those things. Anyway, so that was like on the, right, that was like on the, I would watch the lectures for these and do the problems. But for the higher level courses beyond that, it just got like thinner and thinner.

Like you eventually you get to like an abstract algebra course or real analysis course. And it’s like basically the, they have an open course or at the time, ⁓ I think it’s built up more now, but at the time when I was using it, like, like, ⁓ 2012 or whatever, ⁓ was, it would just list the textbook that they use and maybe have like the copy of their, of some midterm and a final or a couple of problem sets. If you’re lucky or something like that.

Jason (1:56:40) So best.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Justin (1:56:45) Or some

like scratch lecture notes or whatever. it got to a point where I was like, okay, I don’t really use MIT OpenCourseWare anymore. I just use it to point me to what courses are realistic to take next and what are the books that they use. And then I go directly to the books.

Jason (1:57:02) What are the expectations?

What are you supposed to learn out of what’s covered?

Justin (1:57:06) Yeah,

yeah, so I actually ⁓ printed out. Yeah. ⁓

Tom Apostol analysis book. I forget what might just be called analysis. I can’t remember the name of it, but yeah, it was Apostol. ⁓ Yeah. And so it would take that with me to school then. Yeah. And I just worked through that.

Jason (1:57:21) Yeah, yeah, possible.

He’s a Caltech professor, right?

What abstract algebra book did you use, do remember? Who was the author?

Justin (1:57:46) Ugh.

Yeah, I don’t remember. I’d have to look that up. I would probably know it if I saw it, if I went through like some of the common ones, but I don’t know off the top of my head. But I should say one thing I

Jason (1:57:52) Okay.

like Herstein and Fraleigh

and Gallian or something. And I remember that the honors one we did, was, well, let’s see, there was, well, we did Hungerford, which was the graduate texts and mathematics, which was just brutal for a first year abstract algebra course. I probably didn’t use that one, but yeah, okay. So you were using both at that point, yeah.

Justin (1:58:17) Yeah.

Yeah

Yeah, well,

I was using books, but in hindsight, ⁓ I did make the mistake that pretty much every ambitious math learning ranks, which is to go to materials that are just too advanced. so like, Apostol, ⁓ I mean, that was like the honors calculus at MIT, or not, sorry, not calculus, honors analysis at MIT.

⁓ And so it’s just very, very dry and abstract. so through that, yeah, theorem proof, theorem proof.

Jason (1:59:01) Theorem proof, theorem proof, theorem proof. discussion,

very little motivation context. Really discussion about what are we really doing here? How to really think about this stuff, how to frame it. And it’s just, yeah.

Justin (1:59:17) Yeah,

and a lack of concrete examples in particular. I didn’t realize that at the time, but how you’re supposed to think about it as like, here’s the theorem, let me think of some concrete examples of it, or try to come up with counter examples, that kind of thing. So I was, but.

Jason (1:59:22) terrible.

Justin (1:59:42) So what ended up working out okay was I got really solid on a lot of the proof writing mechanics of it. But so I got really good at pushing the symbols around in logically consistent manner, but I didn’t really have a great feeling for analysis. I mean, I could do that on Delta proofs.

Jason (1:59:55) Yeah.

Sounds

like most undergraduate math majors, right? We’re playing this little game of pushing symbols around, but nobody really has a great intuitive grasp of the subject itself because it’s not really taught. You’re not really structured in that way. I mean, it’s fine. I could see how we’re going to push symbols around until you get fluent in this, and then we’re going to talk about.

Justin (2:00:02) Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason (2:00:27) things at a more structured, intuitive level. Although I think pushing symbols around without concrete examples is just a really inefficient way to go about things. But they just skip the concrete examples and they never get to the, let’s talk bigger picture here. What is real analysis about? What are we trying to achieve? How to think about the subject? How does this fits into the framework of upper.

Justin (2:00:38) it

Jason (2:00:55) mathematics into the profession of a mathematician’s profession and you never get to do that. And so you just do the theorem proof theorem and then so, so poorly done at the undergraduate level, almost without exception. There are probably a few, probably like 2 % of professors, math professors in the university level, undergraduate university level who take it really, who take the pedagogy seriously and are really trying to teach them the rest to show up lecture, problem set, whatever.

Justin (2:01:06) Yeah.

Jason (2:01:24) Good luck.

Justin (2:01:25) Yeah, yeah. So I fell into this trap. yeah, it was in hindsight, was, it yeah, it was very inefficient to be working this way. Because I, I basically ⁓ was picking up on what most math undergrads pick up on is like, okay, this is how you do proofs. This is general, like logical reasoning patterns, but what exactly have I proved?

in real analysis, like how does that work again? Like what is all this like, do I have concrete examples of these theorems or like, do I feel it in my bones? Not really, no. So this took me a while to realize, that was the situation at the time. But yeah, so after I did… ⁓

Well, okay. That was my junior year of high school, when I was just like going, going crazy, doing all this, this math stuff and, ⁓ my junior year of high school, I also, well, I should say also did a like introduction to Python course on MIT open courseware. So, so that it wasn’t like super intense. didn’t follow it up with more computer science courses, but that at least got me to the point where I could write some simple like.

play scripts to compute this or that or run a simulation of something cool. And so my junior year then, ⁓ the one thing that my high school did have going for it academically was it had this research program, which would, it was a research class. was almost like the…

So the chemistry and biology, AP chemistry and biology teacher, they were friends and they ⁓ had, it was kind of a similar thing to, I think that a smaller scale of like what you and Sandy did for math academy, it’s like you just like your own sheer force of will, like just rammed this thing through, made it a thing and now it’s a thing. And so they had done that.

like decade ago or something. It was a long-standing thing. ⁓ And so they had this research class and they had some relationships with professors in the area where they could, ⁓ they would, would, you signed up for the research class and what you were expected to do is you would, you would cold email ⁓ professors that you were interested in doing research projects with and they would coach you on how to email a professor, how to like who to

Jason (2:03:52) and

All

Justin (2:03:59) they would kind of coach you through the process, but you had to go out and do it and you had to go. It was the last period of the day. So you would go and meet with the professors in person. You would leave the school. You’re allowed to do that as part of this class. And ⁓ so the goal was to get a kind of like year long research project that you would do in some professor’s lab that you would then present at science fairs. And so I did that and I ended up working ⁓

at IU South Bend ⁓ in Professor Ilan Levine’s lab. He does dark matter. yeah. University in South Bend. Yeah. And ⁓ yeah, so he did dark matter research. particularly, it was like an experimental physics lab. they had these, they worked with the

Jason (2:04:37) IU is Indiana University. Right, Indiana University.

Justin (2:04:58) the COUPP project, which is in Fermilab. And so what they would do in their lab was they would supply these sound detectors. And so these sound detectors would be attached onto the sides of this bubble chamber that was, it was filled with a superheated liquid and it was ⁓ a ways underground. And the idea was like,

⁓ detecting ⁓ unknown particles whizzing through the air by the sound signatures that they make when they whizz through the bubble chamber, hit a molecule of the liquid. And then because the liquid is superheated, ⁓ even a small collision then causes a bubble that like expands and erupts.

and this creates a sound signature. So now you’ve got all these sound signatures of different particles and it’s underground to limit the amount of ⁓ particles that we don’t really care about. And so the sound signature would get picked up by these ⁓ acoustic transducers. And so my project had to do with creating a material to

to improve how much sound pass through, just to improve the resolution of these. ⁓

Jason (2:06:29) Or was any of the math you

learned applicable in this case or the physics itself?

Justin (2:06:34) ⁓ the, the physics came into play a little bit. ⁓ but it was mostly, ⁓ it was kind of like materials science, I guess. The thing was like, I, I was super into like the astrophysics stuff, but it’s just like, you know, as a, as a high school student, ⁓ you get kind of slim pickings, for, for, yeah, exactly.

Jason (2:06:55) beggars can’t be choosers, right? I don’t want to do dark

matter. I want to do, you know, ⁓ white dwarfing out.

Justin (2:06:59) Yeah, it’s like, I don’t want to do experimental physics.

I want to do theoretical physics. want to like, but it’s just like, yeah, exactly. Right. So it’s like, like, okay, like, I’m doing a dark matter project. It’s an experimental physics. I’m not great with experimental physics. doesn’t leverage all the skills that I’ve built up, but like, but it’s physics and it’s dark matter. I get to write about it. I get to talk about it. And that what ended up, um,

Jason (2:07:05) Shut up, kid. This is what you’re getting.

That’s still cool.

Justin (2:07:29) coming in useful is like all the physics and math that I’ve been learning for talking about the subject, about dark matter and like presenting at science fairs and stuff. Like there’s a difference between a kid who just does a project and it doesn’t really know much about the subject ⁓ outside of the one project that they just like followed the recipe on versus like the kid who has like lots of exposure to physics and math and everything.

Jason (2:07:51) Right.

Justin (2:07:59) And so you can just talk more and impress the judges more. Cause like at these, as the science fair competitions, what they’re, what they’re looking at is like, it’s not just your, your, project. It’s also your communication of your project and your, your ability to talk about like just the overall context of the project, like convince me, you know what you’re talking about. And this is not just like that, that you are.

begrudgingly like going and presenting this at a science fair because your parents made you like do this thing. ⁓

Jason (2:08:32) Yeah, this

is which you went to like the National or Westinghouse or some some big science here,

Justin (2:08:38) So yeah,

this ended up, I ended up taking this project to ⁓ Intel International Science Fair in… ⁓

Jason (2:08:46) They kind of took over

the Westinghouse, kind of became the Intel for a while, I think. Westinghouse was the big one for a long time and then they gave out scholarships and stuff and I think Intel basically took it over. I don’t know if they still run it right now.

Justin (2:08:50) Okay, yeah, now it’s the regeneron.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so that was 20, the spring of 2013, it was the 2012 to 2013 school year. And yeah, so I got to go to fly out to Arizona, I think it was, Phoenix, Arizona, and present that. And that was just, yeah, was kind of a wild experience.

I mean, and now I see like the paths and the pipelines for doing this stuff. And it’s like all clear. have bird’s eye view of how this goes. But at the moment I was just like kind of like running in whatever direction felt like I was learning a lot and felt like it’d be good for my future. And yes, it was just, it was shocking to me how much my life had changed in that year. yeah.

Jason (2:09:55) because of doing that math. Did you

learn any more math after that or were you focusing on the physics research?

Justin (2:10:06) So, ⁓ yeah, so actually I had, around that time, I had decided that the next year I wanted to see if I could get some original math research ⁓ to do as a science project. Cause I was like, I was still like, okay, don’t, do I really want to do experimental physics again? Like, I don’t know. I mean, it was, don’t get me wrong. Like it was, it was fun. I had a good time.

But it was like, there was something calling to me over on the math side, the pure math side, ⁓ or at least like very intense mathematical modeling. And I wanted to see if I could do that. the summer one year after I had started this kind of self-learning journey, I was like, okay, I’m gonna try, take the summer and just come up with like original math research and see if I can roll that into another.

science fair project. so what I did was, I mean, okay, it’s one of those things where it’s it’s a little embarrassing in hindsight, because I fell into like the trap, that like, lots of people fall in. It’s like, you make the jump into research too early because you get cocky, you skilled up, you get too big a head. You’re like, oh, I’m like the math genius because like, because in South Bend Indiana I was the math genius, like out of

Like I didn’t know like just where the where the bar is for like I didn’t understand that there were other people elsewhere in bigger cities who are doing the same track. ⁓ and, and I thought I was just like, stand out and I’m like, okay, well, like, why don’t I like try to do math research now? And so I, but I, I came up with a kind of cool

Jason (2:11:35) Yeah.

Justin (2:11:59) project that was, ⁓ where I was, I, I, of the, one of the things I learned in calculus was about the partial fractions decomposition. And yeah, one thing that I kinda liked, ⁓ one perspective to math that I kinda liked was like, just like really like reining in hardcore computations. And so like, I was like, a kind of thought experiment that I was having is like, what if you like,

Jason (2:12:07) Yeah, I remember you talking about that. Yeah.

Justin (2:12:27) suppose you have an arbitrary polynomial over an arbitrary polynomial, can you come up with a formula for the partial fractions decomposition of that? And that just seemed like such an interesting thing to try to tackle. And so I spent the summer trying to tackle that and just running, I took a kind of like almost like an experimental mathematics approach to this where I would run, I would run simulations of in Wolfram Alpha, there’s

Jason (2:12:36) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Justin (2:12:54) Here’s the polynomial over a polynomial. And I would get like a table of like the partial fractions expansions for like a first degree, second degree, third degree over a first degree, second degree, third degree, like these coefficient relationships, whatever. then like, and then try to extract patterns from the table. And that actually went, went pretty well. And I got some patterns and I was able to, I think what I,

the full case of polynomial over polynomial got like way, way too hairy, but I could do like a, like X to the A arbitrary power over, ⁓ over a fully factored polynomial, a product of linear factors ⁓ and ⁓ raised to any, any power. ⁓ And, and, and so I came up with a general formula.

for that and I proved it ⁓ using double induction actually. So I never learned about double induction before, but I had learned single induction and free calla class and my proof writing chops from working through a lot of this ⁓ like MIT open course, like abstract like ⁓ proof bait, like Tom Apostol ⁓ analysis.

Jason (2:13:56) Mmm.

Justin (2:14:14) Like my proofreading chats were developed enough that like double induction was just like kind of an obvious consequence. Like, well, yeah, of course you can, you can do double induction on two parameters. Like what’s the big deal? And so, ⁓ so I did that and, and, and yeah, I got a, ⁓ a result there, which was kind of cool, but, ⁓ I, I later realized, I think, ⁓ this was more in the

in the fall of the school year. I had just been poking around other math and I realized in complex analysis, there’s this thing called the residue theorem, which basically it’s a more efficient way to compute, you can use it to ⁓ more efficiently compute partial fractions. And like most things in complex analysis, it just turns out really beautiful. so, yeah, exactly. So I was like,

Jason (2:15:06) ⁓ a general case for the real analysis. You have this extra dimension

and it makes everything fall right into place.

Justin (2:15:13) Exactly. But

Jason (2:15:15) Which is kind of

like why physicists are always trying to add these dimensions, because you add these extra dimensions and then all the really hard stuff and the three or four dimensions just like falls right out of it. You’re it’s like magic. If we had this extra dimension, assuming they’re real.

Justin (2:15:25) Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Exactly, exactly. so, but the end result was I realized like, wow, this thing that I had done, like, I mean, it was a cool result for me. It was like, if, if, if, if, if complex analysis had not been discovered yet, maybe this would have been like a cool result. But we’re further along in that then it’s like, well, I guess nobody cares. But so that just turned into basically a, ⁓ a rep.

Jason (2:15:48) But it has, so.

Justin (2:15:55) on research for me, but it was like, okay, well.

Jason (2:15:57) It sounds like it was a good exercise

for you. sounds like it was a really good… You came up with the idea, you researched it, you characterized it, you used experimental methods, you proved results, you found, saw patterns from the experimental results, characterized those, came up with a way of stating it, improving it. I mean, that’s, you went through all the…

Justin (2:16:01) Yeah. Yeah, totally.

Jason (2:16:21) the full, and then discovered that it was actually had been already done elsewhere as a special case with some other things. So yeah, you the whole experience of a mathematician’s research project.

Justin (2:16:27) Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

But I mean, there’s a lot to learn from that. mean, okay, so that’s one of the reasons why ⁓ I, on X Twitter, I’m often like, discovery learning, like, save that until you’ve got your fundamental skills in place. ⁓ Like, because like, you don’t want to, it’s just inefficient. like, I mean, there’s stuff to learn from it. But it’s just, it’s way better if you, it takes so much time.

to go through and make a discovery. Like, how about let’s save that for when like making the discovery actually yields like serious results.

Jason (2:17:07) get more out of it. If we want to get more out,

we can get more from these reps if you have the component skills in place. mean, it’s like, right, we’re thinking of like, what’s the most efficient way from go to A to Z? And so,

Justin (2:17:14) Yeah. Yeah.

Jason (2:17:25) If you do, if you, know, the total number of sort of area under the curve, the total hours put in, if you try and do stuff too early, then there’s a great inefficiencies, great, like you’ve got, yeah, you brought some stuff forward that you would have learned later, but in aggregate, spent more hours getting to Z because you’re not getting as much out of it. And you could have spent that time getting these really important requisite skills in place, you know.

Justin (2:17:51) Yeah,

exactly. And the end result of your discovery, even if you manage to make the discovery, like, guess what? Nobody gives a shit because like, it’s not real new, it’s new knowledge to you. You did research, like, relative to your own knowledge base, but humanity has more knowledge. It’s not like a publishable result mathematically. ⁓ So it’s like, yeah, you want to, when you’re going to like invest a lot of time and effort into a project, make

Jason (2:18:11) Stuff in there, yeah.

Justin (2:18:20) make sure it’s something that’s like actually like really, really impressive. ⁓ But so yeah, so what I ended up doing is I ended up doing another ⁓ experimental physics project because so that same summer that I was doing all this mathematical stuff, ⁓ I also was doing an internship at Notre Dame’s QuarkNet program. And so it was another kind of like, let’s improve a ⁓ physics.

detector. This one was ⁓ the CMS detector at CERN. ⁓ And so they were the way the data was transmitted in this detector was optical data. It was flowing through these light guiding ⁓ plastics. And so the goal, it’s a similar thing. It was like, let’s just improve how much, let’s improve the resolution by choosing plastics that ⁓ allow

most light to get through, conserve the signal the best. And ⁓ I got this ⁓ internship there because ⁓ I guess like in junior year, like I was just kind of like the standout smart kid at the school. it’s like, well, ⁓ there was ⁓ some, the school had a relationship with this, this quarknet program where it’s like every year they send like a kid there.

Like who’s the smartest kid in the grade? They get offered the quarknet project. Yeah, send us your top nerd. And so it kind of goes into the effect of like pre-learning and the smart kid effect that we’ve talked about on previous episodes where it’s like, well, I’m in the running for, I’m the one who got selected for that. And so I got this opportunity and so I did that. So the following year I did another science project on this. ⁓

Jason (2:19:52) Send us your top nerd.

Justin (2:20:17) Yeah, I, this one didn’t make it as, it was kind of funny. This one didn’t make it as far to like internationals. And, ⁓ but the reason that it didn’t was, there were two things. First was ⁓ I was doing it with a partner, ⁓ which I thought would be kind of fun. ⁓ My, the,

The teacher of this research program advised me against it because he was like, dude, like there’s a limited amount of funding to send kids to, ⁓ to the, the international science fair. It’s not about we can only send, ⁓ this many projects is about we can only send this many kids. So if you’re, if you have two people on a project, then, ⁓ it needs to be. Yeah. Twice the cost needs to be twice as good. You need to have.

Jason (2:21:08) Twice the cost, you know.

Justin (2:21:12) more than twice as high likelihood of going to international. and like doing well there. ⁓ the project was, I think it was better than my initial one, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t like an order of magnitude better. ⁓ And ⁓ yeah, which again, it’s, I fell into so many of these like junior researchers, scientists traps like

Jason (2:21:32) Right.

Justin (2:21:42) the whole like, okay, let’s go take analysis, hard analysis, concrete examples, what who cares? We don’t do that. We were like, we’re the elite. I only use the elite hard books that don’t do concrete examples, because like, that’s what smart kids do, right? And like, oh, let’s do like mathematical research. Let’s not nah we don’t have to consult anyone to make sure our problem statement is worth digging into. Let’s just dig into it and see where it goes. And

Jason (2:21:43) Rookie mistakes, rookie mistakes,

to go.

Justin (2:22:11) And then again, the adults in the room who has plenty of experience with science fairs are saying, like, dude, don’t bring a partner on this. And there was no need for me to bring a partner on it. There was this other guy who was working on just a similar vein of the internship. at the end, I was like, dude, like,

why don’t you be my science project partner? And we’d like do this just because I thought it was fun. again, like not listening to the advice of the person who actually knows what they’re talking about. So yeah, the reason why I’m so like, like learn your fundamentals first, like concrete examples, like all these things, like kind of like that on Twitter and in my writing and everything is cause like I’ve.

I’ve fallen into, I’ve hit my head on basically every ledge there is to hit your head on, on this kind of thing.

Jason (2:23:11) Yeah, well that’s, I mean, so I think it’s hard won advice. You learn stuff the hard way. You’re not just repeating what you heard somewhere else. Like I can tell you why this isn’t gonna work or why this is not a good idea just like that. I’m sure the professor told you. was like, you money, the constraint of money is really a big one that you need to think about.

You know, and so he was trying to tell you, of course, you’re like, money, I don’t know, adults, that’s adults have money. They have tons of money. Like, no, you understand. So, yeah, I think that’s it. But that’s why it’s so. You know, there are more and less efficient ways to do things. You know, it was important things that you do something, you really put your effort into something. The best is if you kind of listen to some good advice and you can get the most out of it possible. Worst case.

you know, it’s not as efficient, you you learned a lot. You made some mistakes. I mean, it’d been cool if you had gone to the internationals or whatever, you know, maybe that would have been like a more interesting and rewarding experience in total, but you certainly, you certainly got a lot out of it. if, you know, at very least, you know, not the very least being you got some hard, hard lessons, like, I’m not doing that again. I’m not doing that again. These are some.

Justin (2:24:07) yeah.

Jason (2:24:30) These are, these are rookie mistake. That’s the thing is like rookies got to make rookie mistakes. And part of rookie mistakes is they don’t listen to senior people, right? No, was old people. They don’t know stuff, right? I just want to do it. Okay. Rookie. See you at the end. I’ll see you at the finish line. You know, how’d that go for you? You know what I mean? So that is, but that’s great.

Justin (2:24:30) Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly. So that’s, mean, this is all one of the reasons why like, I’m just so intensely motivated to like, just get all the foundational skill building, everything, get all this like pipeline as part of math academy, because it’s like, if you have the right guidance in this, like I saw so many other kids who went so much further, who had put in, ⁓

it’s not that they put in more work, but it’s that they had like better guidance and they were better listening to said guidance. ⁓ And they came much further. ⁓ yeah, that’s been one of my core motivations.

Jason (2:25:26) Yeah.

Yeah, I think

that’s a really ⁓ good point. it’s like really, yeah, get it. So for math academy, for kids who go beyond calculus, for the segment that is in high school or whatever, or early college, and they’re like, look, I want to just get way ahead and making it very possible to get these undergraduate level skills on lockdown.

It’s like probability and proof writing and analysis and linear algebra stuff is just rock solid, complex variables and stuff. It just makes so many more things possible and open later. But the is, this stuff is a solved prop. We’ve solved this for the most part. mean, we still got some more to prove.

Justin (2:26:15) Yeah.

Jason (2:26:23) No pun intended on the proof stuff, I think. I think we still have some R &D work and how we’re going to really tackle that and how it’s really going to be done, you know, in a real analysis and abstract algebra courses. But we can lock this stuff down so that it is just extremely efficient to go whatever level you want up through the undergraduate level. No, there’s no rough edges. It’s just, and like, you know, and then it allow people to just launch.

earlier and more with more momentum and with more confidence in these various directions, know, where otherwise people get, they don’t even get nearly as far as you did. I mean, you had a lot of perseverance. think a lot, this is a lot about, you know, everything from your aptitude to your work ethic, to your ability to self-organize, time manage that you were able to get through all this stuff on your own. But a lot of kids, it’s just not, most kids just aren’t gonna be able.

to push through that stuff. It’s just too difficult. It’s too, not enough support, not enough structure, not enough of everything, you know?

Justin (2:27:30) Yeah, yeah, right. Having the path and the direction makes it more accessible to lots of kids who could do it if they focused on it. ⁓ Yeah.

Jason (2:27:42) Yeah. We

always refer to it as the cattle shoot. Just get them in the cattle shoot. Right. Just go. Right. Like, don’t you don’t want to be like, what? Just don’t worry about it. Just go. Trust us. This is the way we’re going to get you to the end as efficiently as possible. Just you don’t have to be like, well, what about just don’t don’t don’t do that. I mean, you can. You can. You want to learn some lessons about how to waste time and.

Justin (2:27:56) Yeah.

Jason (2:28:10) you know, not get to where you want. But if you just get into the system, like it’s pretty straightforward.

Justin (2:28:13) Yeah.

Well, we can maybe on a later podcast, we can go through through part two, which is like there’s there’s all of these lessons that I learned like in high school. there’s this is like, yeah, this is the first half. There’s like a whole other half of like getting into like college, placing into the most advanced math classes, whatever like that.

Jason (2:28:40) care.

Justin (2:28:44) you had like a lot of ⁓ experiences on that front and like just getting slammed in the face with like some of the craziest math day, day one abstract algebra. Here’s this 20 page packet of definitions or whatever.

Jason (2:28:56) yeah, 50 page packet on your own

definitions and abstract algebra. You’re like, geez, what is this? Yeah. Yeah. I gotta get some lunch. That’s complaining, I’m starving. Why don’t we just cut it here? ⁓ We’ll just, you know.

Justin (2:29:03) Yeah, we should probably save that for a future one because I know that we can get pretty deep into it.

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