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What we covered:
– Any successful endeavor requires a great team: capable people, who like and trust each other, and have complementary skillsets and ways of thinking. Some modes of thinking cannot be performed at the same time within a single brain.
– Accountability requires control. You can’t hold someone responsible for outcomes unless you also give them control over the system that produces those outcomes (though you can set reasonable operational boundaries).
– Solve today’s problems today. Smart people can invent endless hypotheticals and build giant solutions to fake problems. Not only does this waste time, but it also burdens the system with complexity that becomes a future straitjacket. Everything you build must be carried forward, so focus on what’s present in front of you, not on imagined futures five steps away.
– In a scaling system, the sheer volume of interactions will expose a long tail of bizarre scenarios, almost like rare diseases you’d never anticipate. Users will often try to repurpose software beyond its design, like hauling a trailer with a motorcycle.

Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
03:48 - The importance of finding your complements
24:07 - The origin story of Math Academy's content team
43:36 - No meta-work; just solve the problems in front of you
54:26 - Jason time vs real time (real time is longer)
59:00 - The long tail of rare edge cases and unexpected user behavior

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Watch on YouTube or Listen on Spotify

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

Jason (00:00) we’re Podcast number five. So what’s…

Justin (00:03) That’s right. Yeah.

Yeah, so ⁓ I’ve got, I’m just going to go down the list with maybe two or three things that we might start with and whatever, whatever you want to talk about. Let’s, let’s go. So, ⁓ here’s idea number one is small team engineering. How are strategies ⁓ and having a small development and just team in general differ from the kinds of strategies that you’ve run at a, at a big organization. Cause there’s a very, yeah.

Jason (00:24) Mmm.

That’s a good one. I like that one.

I like that one.

Justin (00:38) and another one that we could talk about is, ⁓ well, how do you get kids on the rails with deliberate practice? Like, how do you be the deliberate parent, setting incentives for kids to, ⁓ to engage in deliberate practice? I mean, we’ve, previously talked about, ⁓ like how to, you know, like sit down with your kid and stuff like that, but how do you, how do you keep this going after you like,

Jason (00:55) right?

Justin (01:06) you have your kid working independently, how do you keep them aligned with you? Or what do you do if your kid just doesn’t wanna do it? Like even with you sitting next to them, there’s like, don’t wanna do it. How do you incentivize them to play along with you? yeah, and then another thing that we could potentially talk about is…

Jason (01:20) Right. Right.

Justin (01:31) things that we noticed about kids in the Urisco program, that super advanced math and computer science program we ran in our original school program, where kids would kind of, we noticed different types of programmers kind of emerging as the kids, ⁓ you couldn’t tell initially in the first year that they were in there, but like eventually you notice like some differentiation, like, okay, like Colby’s a systems programmer, like Anton’s, he’s a quant.

Like it just there’s these like archetypes of programmers and ideally everyone’s like, like halfway decent at everything. But you notice like people have different ways of thinking about things. And we’ve even seen this sort of thing. And I guess recently when we’ve been talking to a bunch of social media people, the kinds of perspectives that they that they bring their approach to ⁓ social media posting. It’s like some of them treated almost like quantitative trading or some things and

Jason (02:00) ⁓ That’s great.

Yep. Yep.

Justin (02:28) or it’s like your zone, like zoom in to the nitty gritty strategies and others. If you have it as more of like step back, what’s the big picture here? ⁓ Anyway, what sound? Any of that sound good? All right, she’s a favorite. We gotta do one at a time.

Jason (02:39) Yeah.

I like them all. I like them all. ⁓

Well, I like your table of contents. First of all, where are you getting this from? Did you just jot down these ideas through the week or did you just sit down 10 minutes before? Where did these come from?

Justin (02:57) ⁓ two of them I wrote down several weeks ago. and I can’t remember what was the context, but the other one, well, so yesterday I wrote down the, the small team engineering strategies one, because, ⁓ I mean, that’s just something we’ve been talking about how, how your hiring process is, ⁓ it’s just very different. Like when you got a big company specifically, but the thing that made me think about is we were talking about when you’ve got a big company, can.

Jason (03:12) Mm-hmm.

Justin (03:27) You can bring in a batch of interns and treat it almost like a VC portfolio, right? Where you’re like, you’re not, there’s no way all 10 interns are going to grow up to be like superstars, like working at your, company or whatever. But, ⁓ if you, if you have a large enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason (03:41) Yes, that was, that was a conversation we had a couple of days ago, a little bit. yeah.

Yeah. So one thing that’s interesting at people is Justin does a great job of writing stuff down where I like write almost nothing down. It’s, it’s, it’s always depend on you to be like, okay, what are we talking about? Like what, what, what, you know, and you’re like, I got it right here. I’m like, awesome. Okay. So, um,

Justin (04:01) Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah,

you know, I should say just for listeners, it’s kind of interesting how I’m like, I’m always like, okay, don’t take notes when you’re learning. Like, there’s no point, just work exercises. That’s all you got to work on. ⁓ But the thing is, like the nuance here is that like, when there is information that’s passing through, and it’s not part of reference material, you can’t go look it up after, it’s just the spur of the moment, you’re brainstorming something with someone or a thought occurs to you, and you don’t want to miss it, like, write it down.

Write it down, because otherwise you don’t have the reference material. I just wanted to, before I get like pushed back on like, just did you said like, don’t take notes and now you like you take all the notes and nothing. No, no, no. There’s a big difference between these two things.

Jason (04:36) Yeah.

Yeah, it’s like, don’t transcribe everything that’s in the lesson or like, you’re just transcribing stuff, right? That’s a waste of time and effort, but right, this sort of ephemeral, we’re brainstorming, we should think about this, we should do that. Yeah, that’s totally different thing, because it’s gone, it’s gone, and you might remember it, you might not, or you might only remember some part of it. you know, what are the, just funny thing about that is, for me,

Justin (04:51) Yeah.

Jason (05:20) My brain, the way my brain works is when I start writing stuff down, I start losing some of the stuff I was thinking about. It’s like a dream. You know, when you wake up and like I’m in a perpetual dream state, or a perpetual state where I’m like, I just woke up in the dream and you’re like trying to remember it, but you start thinking too hard about any of it. The rest of it disappears and you have to kind of be in this state where you’re sort of.

Justin (05:28) Yeah.

Yeah.

Jason (05:44) trying, you’re in the dream, you’re not thinking too hard. Your mind is kind of going over it a little bit lightly. But that’s helping solidify it. And that’s kind of how I am with ideas. I get these ideas or things and like, but as soon as I start thinking hard about one, which then leads to like things related to it or aspects of it, and then the brain power or tension gets

Justin (05:52) Mm-hmm.

Jason (06:12) focus on it and then there’s just kind of like it’s almost like you you’re holding onto so many balloons and the balloons just kind of float around you go ⁓ you know

Justin (06:18) Yeah. Yeah. Well, it

sounds like a kind of a consequence of like a limited working memory capacity, right? It’s like you can either hold like, I mean, you’re limited to like four chunks, right? You can either hold like four high level, like broad picture chunks, or if you’re going to like zoom in on one, you’re like, you’re okay. Even though you’re zooming into a lower level of scale, these are still separate chunks that you’re holding when you zoom in, because it’s more information. And so

Jason (06:26) What are you trying to What are you saying when I have an evil?

And you’re right.

Justin (06:47) Yeah. That’s kind of funny though. like we, no, no, no. We’re just, you know how we talk about, ⁓ it’s like, you’re, you’re kind of the navigator and I’m the, you’re, you’re like, okay, I think there’s, there’s, there’s good stuff over in that direction. Cause you’re taking very high level view. And then I will just like zoom in into it. It’s like, it’s, ⁓ sometimes you need a multiple brains or

Jason (06:48) I think you’re saying I have no working memory. I’m like, what are you saying? Which may be true.

Let’s go there.

Justin (07:15) Or if you’re going to do it with one brain, kind of have to play it. can’t play both roles at the same time. You have to alternate back and forth. Yeah.

Jason (07:19) It’s hard.

Yeah, it’s sort of similar to the whole deep work thing, like manager schedule, maker schedule, as Paul Graham wrote a great essay about, which is that the maker, meaning the creative, the writer, the coder, the artist, somebody has to just get in the zone and think really, really hard about something where it could take hours sometimes to really get into the zone. Whereas,

the manager is like the email and the phone call, the meeting, and let me look this up and check this and just lots and lots of little tasks, know, little tasks, meaning that they take anywhere from 30 seconds to, you know, an hour or something, you know, I got to review this document. got to coordinate with this person. I mean, both of these things are important, right? In life

and in business, you don’t get to just like, I’m just going to build stuff and then I’m not going to do these other things. Cause you, you get nothing and you can’t, if you spend all your time, just set up meetings and coordinating and stuff like nothing serious gets done. it’s like, gotta have both. And it’s really hard. one thing, that’s one thing that Paul Graham sort of really emphasized in his essay, which by the way, you should read if you haven’t read it, ⁓ is that.

It’s very hard to, think, if I recall, it’s hard to do that and be the same person who does those things. But if you do, you sometimes have to segment, know, and Sandy would always be like, why don’t you just do this in the mornings, then do that. And then sometimes it’s really hard once you get into a certain mode for the day. I’m bad at that. Like once I’m like in the deep work, I just resist. I resent.

Justin (08:58) Mm-hmm.

Jason (09:06) being pulled out of it I don’t want to do the meeting. I don’t want to do the paperwork. I don’t want to return these emails. And even other people I like, it’s interesting stuff. It’s like, I’m like, damn it, I’m in the zone, you know? And then when I’m like, hey, I’m knocking all this stuff. I respond to all these people. I’m feeling the stress is relief because I had all this sort of guilt about not getting this done and now it’s done. And then it’s like, I can’t.

get myself to focus, I have like this ADHD now and I can’t lock in on something. And it’s sort of like for me, it’s almost like a day thing. Once you get in a certain mode for a day, it can be really hard to switch. Now, sometimes maybe it’s like, well, you go to lunch and you have this like break in the day and maybe you can reset. And some people are probably better at this than others. I struggle with it. ⁓

But I think it’s kind of similar. So that’s what it makes me think about is that once you’re, whatever mode your mind is in, you kind of need to go with that. And that’s why, like sometimes when you’re working with somebody, if you’re a deep work person, you’re the person who’s responsible for getting this, some big thing done, which in this big thing can be something that spans on the order of not just days, but weeks or months. It’s a big.

Justin (10:08) Yeah.

Jason (10:30) creative problem-solving effort and then the person who’s doing all this, the manager type stuff, they got to leave that person alone. Just don’t interrupt them. Because sometimes Sandy would be like, well,

You know, you got to do this. We got to do that. And just like, do you really, do you really want to pull me out of this? mean, cause when I get into this thing, I can get like, it feels like months of work done in like a week. I mean, I’ll stop, but I’m just saying like, I don’t think you want, I don’t think you want me to stop, you know? Cause then like if you would say to someone, why isn’t this done? I’m like,

Justin (10:55) Mm-hmm.

Jason (11:14) Pull me out. You pull me off the field, coach. I was on the field. was making first downs. I was moving the ball. You pulled me out of the game. don’t, you know, and then like, well, can you finish up now? like, you know, I can’t just get in. It’s going to take me days to get spun back up and get it in my head.

Justin (11:14) Yeah, there’s a cost. Yeah.

Yeah, because you’re like, where

are we? What? What plays are we running? But where’s the ball? Yeah, you got to spin up on all that. By the time you do, it’s like, okay, it’s time to, we got another meeting for you. So how do you, so how, how, okay, I guess a question that I imagine probably a lot of people listening right now are going to have is like, how do you survive this? Like, how, like, what is your like, how are you not just like,

Jason (11:39) But.

Yeah.

Justin (12:00) I don’t know, how’s your brain not exploded? Or if it has, how do you put it back together every time? Like this just sounds, ⁓ this sounds like psychological torture in a way. what.

Jason (12:10) I

think I can be pretty good at compartmentalizing and what I mean is living in a state of denial about things that have to get done. And you know that fire is burning. And you’re just like, I’m just going to pretend it’s not burning. You you’re almost…

Justin (12:29) Yeah, you just.

So you just trick yourself for

a while, like, we don’t have any meeting. Like, we don’t have any, what do mean by inbox? Like, I don’t see it, dude. Yeah.

Jason (12:40) Meetings? What meetings? You know, and you’re kind of thinking,

you’re wondering to yourself, like, I wonder how long I can let this burn. There’s a party, there’s a little party, it’s like, I wonder how long I can let this burn. You know? And it’s, it’s, I mean, this is, it’s not great, right? I mean, so, I mean, part of it, I think is I’m lucky in that I have Sandy, my wife and co-founder, because she is very operational.

Justin (12:51) Yeah.

Jason (13:09) You know, there’s there people who are just operational people. just get shit done. They’re like, all right, make a list, collect the data, execute good enough, done, bang, bang, bang. So. You know, that’s why like in marriage is really important. You find someone who’s like a compliment. So like you make up for each other’s weaknesses and shortcomings as opposed to you’re both like the same person. You have the same strength. That tends to not work. Right. And so she’s like.

She treats me a little bit like the mad scientist, like, OK, you go to lab. I’ll take care. I’ll run interference. I’ll take care of everything else. But I will call you every once in while. And you’re going to have to do certain things. So she’s learned she has she is aware that there’s this trade off like, OK, if we can get Jason, we can get him doing stuff, then we can get a lot of. lot of great results.

Justin (13:53) Mm-hmm.

Jason (14:06) You know, but some, you know, so we’d want to let, let happen, but then we, he does need to pull out and do, cause he’s the founder. He’s, know, like he, there are things he’s got to do a lot of things that isn’t just write code or design UI or whatever. And, ⁓ so that, but, and so that, that has been incredibly.

beneficial to me, that she’s so good at that and that we’re such a good compliment. And I think that’s what makes really good relationships of any kind and marriage in particular, business partnerships, is that you have this complimentary skill sets and you appreciate what the other person can do. You’re like, thank God you’re doing this. Thank God. you know, and then you respect it and then you appreciate it and then you just like, I got this, you got that.

Justin (14:48) Mm-hmm.

Jason (14:57) And that’s how our marriage works with most things. very like, it’s not like, it’s your turn to do this. It’s your turn to say, no, no, this is my sphere. This is your sphere. There’s a little bit in between who’s picking up, you know, which kid and doing this obviously certain amount of things, but it’s a very, very much a division of labor, is very, very efficient.

Justin (15:13) Yeah.

Yeah, it’s like

you split the load, but you don’t have to split every single responsibility or activity because that is just inefficient to have like each person doing half of it. It’s like, okay, just whoever’s better at it, just go do the thing and then split it out.

Jason (15:30) Yeah.

Well, you know, I remember, like friends of mine, when they were first having kids who were like, maybe a little younger than us and there were, our kids were, they’re having babies when our kids are like six and seven or eight. So they’re a little further behind in the process and, and they would have their first kid. And I remember my buddy Todd and I was like, Hey, it was like a Saturday. You want to go grab some Indian food for lunch? He’s like, ⁓

You know, we’re gonna go shopping, we’re gonna go grocery I’m like, you’re both going grocery shopping? He’s like, yeah. I’m like, why doesn’t Mona just go by herself and go like, ⁓ man. I’m like, ⁓ okay. And at the time I’m like, hey, you wanna, whatever. He’s like, wow, we’re gonna give the baby a bath. I’m like, you’re.

both giving the baby a bath. I get it when you have your first kid and you’re just really excited and you want to do everything together. But I’m like, I’m telling you, like that doesn’t scale. What’d you have multiple kids? You’re like, all right, I’m taking this one to practice. I’m taking it to the park. I’m going to help with homework. You do that. It’s just a constant, you know, but you know, young,

Justin (16:24) Mm-hmm.

you made your memories

probably with the first kid, right? You’re kind of at the stage like, okay, I have memories. Now we need to just like survive the situation and like just let’s go. Yeah.

Jason (16:49) We have we have three kids. So it’s like you

go from man to man defense to zone. Like when you’re one, you’re playing basketball knowledge, you’re double teaming, like two on you. Right. Then you get two kids and it’s man to man defense. OK, you’re watching them in the bath. That’s one of this. And then, you know, you’re just switching off, right? Eventually get them to bed. You’re like, thank God we can watch a show or eat some dinner. You get three. And then it’s, know, and then it’s zone defense. It’s like, OK, I got these two. Think these two to the park. You’re taking her to.

this, know, haircut, doctor’s appointment, you know, whatever, right? And so you, you, kind of learn to not be so precious about every moment. And like, I, well, I can’t be, you can’t be everywhere once with multiple kids. Like you get plenty, you get plenty of everything, right? So you’re like, I don’t, and that’s just the kind of the kid analogy, but division of labor is something that creates great efficiency, especially when you have people who

Don’t enjoy the things that are more your responsibility and don’t feel they’re as good at it and enjoy more of the things that they do and vice versa. like, I don’t want to do your job, And the person was like, good, because I don’t want to do yours. Great. We respect it. Now, I have benefited greatly from my relationship with you and Alex because you guys have strengths that are in areas that I do not. Like, joking, you write all this stuff down. You’re really good. You’re very…

Justin (17:55) you

Jason (18:17) structured, organized. I mean, it’s, I mean, it’s, you know, you know, 10 out of 10, you know, and so like, I can rely on you to do a lot of this organizing. I’m like, what do we talk about? Okay, we talked, I we hit the you’re like, Yeah, yeah, I got a thing right now. Right, you know, and you’ll just like take care of that. And Alex didn’t for the his whole sphere of

You know, how he organizes and has this entire three ring circus with the curriculum team and all these different people and roles and editors and course designers and lesson writers and Christian editor reviewers. And this is that, and this is in this stage, it’s just, it’s like a giant factory. We’re every all across the world, multiple courses.

Justin (18:46) Yeah.

spread all across the world. Everyone communicating asynchronously. Yeah.

Jason (19:07) You know, at different levels, things are being fixed or improved, added on, just to be creative and scratch. And he’s got to stay on top of all this stuff. I’m like, that sounds like a nightmare for me. But he.

Justin (19:20) for me too. I’m so glad he does that. I don’t have to. Yeah.

Jason (19:24) Well,

good thing, the one thing that’s rare in him is that he is, well, he has a variety of skills or attributes. One, of course, he’s a mathematician. And so he’s obviously extremely mathematical, but he’s also a great pedagogue. He really understands how to explain stuff. But he’s also very good at hiring and managing people.

which is rare across the, that’s rare for anybody. Most people are not great at that. And it’s not just something you just, well, I just wrote a book on how to, it’s like, it’s sort of a natural ability, but there’s also, you also learn some things, but it’s there’s a certain natural ability, natural charisma or something. And in the ability to manage and organize a large moving machine.

Justin (19:54) Rare for a mathematician, right? Yeah.

Jason (20:21) which he’s constructed. So he has all these skills or attributes that are rare and that is in one person. if you have you, if you said, well, most people say, well, look, I mean, we gotta have, we have to have some senior mathematician who’s also a pedagogue. That’s rare because most pathologists aren’t necessarily great pedagogues. They like to think they are because they get out and give a lecture, but it’s like, can you really break this stuff down so like a non elite person can like actually understand that stuff.

But then you have this, you’d think, well, I need this project manager. I need someone who runs this stuff and is a project manager and sets up who’s doing what, when, and when stuff’s being delivered. So he does all that. And again, you have all the stuff that you do. So I rely a lot on you guys making up for my weaknesses.

or the things that I don’t really want to do or I neglect. You know what I mean? You guys are sick. Well, I think just I’ll take care of that. And I think that’s one thing is you get older, you just kind of learn like I. You just kind of accept your weaknesses. You say you learn like there are a number of things that I’m good at and I’m.

Justin (21:24) Yeah, just let the fires burn, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jason (21:48) I take pride in being good at these things. Other things I just, I’m not good at, I don’t wanna be good at, and I’m just not, I just, I need somebody else to take care of it. And if you’re, and for me, I got, I have to say I got, kinda got lucky with all three of you, right? I got lucky with my wife. That was kinda luck. She’s like, I’m, she’s like, how’d she phrase it? She says something, she’s like, ⁓

Something like, I’m the best decision ever made for you. And I she’s all business. We were dating. That’s a whole other story. But ⁓ in you and Alex, mean, we’ve talked about kind of, and that’s a whole other story which we could go into, but it’s like I got lucky with you guys. can’t say that, because I was sort of like, you know.

Justin (22:21) you

Yeah.

Jason (22:43) wasn’t like, I tried out 20, I interviewed 30 people and went this whole process and I came up with whole criteria to find this, like, you know, I got really lucky with you guys. So there’s a certain amount of, there’s a, there’s a big luck factor. Look, the last thing I’ll say, and I want to hear your thoughts, but like any successful endeavor requires a great team of people. And it’s just, and, and getting the right

Justin (22:52) Yeah.

Jason (23:12) group of people who not only are individually highly capable, but that you all kind of like each other, work together, and trust each other, and all that kind of stuff. mean, this is a luck. Sometimes it just comes together and you’re like, damn, we just did it. You what I mean? You run into people who, their roommates from freshman year in college are their best friends for life. You’re like, that is just luck. Right? You just happen to be this amazing two guys. for rest of you, okay, sometimes that happens.

Sometimes the girl you date when you’re in eighth or ninth grade and you marry, she’s like the most amazing girl. was like, that is just luck, man. You know, just sometimes. And I think for me, I got really, really lucky ⁓ with you guys. I I describe you and Alex as like…

Justin (23:48) Yeah.

Well, I think we all feel the same way. It’s

mutual, mutual feeling lucky. You know, I think, a question that, ⁓ probably, probably the, what everyone’s wondering right now is how do you know, like, okay, like in hindsight, you can look at this and be like, wow, I got lucky, but how do you, how do you get into those lucky situation? Like, okay, Alex or I or Sandy crosses your path.

Like, do you realize it’s a lucky event right there and you like start gravitating sort like, wow, I like this person. They really compliment me well. Or is that, cause sometimes these, these kind of these attributes, you don’t really realize it until later on. Right? I mean, like when he first met Alex, for instance, like he, he wasn’t

He wasn’t, he didn’t start like managing our content team right from the very beginning. Right. This was something that kind of. didn’t, you didn’t realize that, like he had this capacity, probably when you first met him, then he kind of grew into it quickly and like, wow, this turned out great. So I guess I’d, I, I am probably, probably everyone who’s interested in this, in the story would like to know how do you actually. Like it’s, one thing to look back in hindsight and be like, wow, that was lucky. But the second part is well, how.

do you do it? How do you notice the luck or how do you pull it out of people or how how do get yourself into this lucky situation? What’s the closest thing to a formula for it or just heuristics?

Jason (25:31) ⁓

Okay. ⁓ So I’m, it’s funny and this might seem kind of ironic because I’m sort of like kind of quantitative and analytical, but on the one hand, but I’m very ⁓ intuitive. Like I’m very, how do things feel? know, like intuition really, it just really sounds kind of like, dude, like what are you?

What is that? But you know, when things just feel good and feel right, like this is working. I like this, you know, like, ⁓ then you kind of double and triple down. So he’s have to, it’s kind of like you check your gut, you know, it’s like, because if things aren’t working, you’re not going to feel great. And sometimes they’re like small things, just the way someone’s talking to you or the way you’re communicating or the way you just like, I don’t know. This just feels a little off.

I just don’t feel, I’m not super excited about talking to this person or seeing them again or whatever, but sometimes she’s like, I love talking to this person, right? So like, let’s just talk about Alex. ⁓ So when he started, I was just looking for someone to write some tutorials. So at that time, this was very early on, I had, you we didn’t have a whole lesson, the concept was just like a topic. I had some tutorial and some questions with it, right? And.

At the time I had sort of a…

handful of like grad students who were writing some questions for me. Not a lot, five, 10 hours a week. Most in the US. And I had someone who was younger.

mm-hmm 20s. She was real bright, Caltech, all physics, all this kind of stuff. she had, her attention was being pulled in three directions. She was one of these people who was just good at a lot of stuff. And so she had like infinite opportunities. Like I’m gonna work at SpaceX, I’m gonna work at Bain & Company, I’m gonna go to med school. Everybody’s like, great. You know what I mean? Cause she’s just, and she just had all his doors open. And so she had a hard time just staying focused. Cause she’s like, she said, want to, you know,

I’m on math, I’m gonna do this. I’m like, great. And then it was, it didn’t feel like I could get her. ⁓

Justin (27:43) It’s like an extracurricular in college. Like, this job is my extracurricular.

Jason (27:50) Yeah, and because it was only part time too, but you know, it’s like when everyone’s like, everyone’s door is open to you. Everybody’s like, you’re amazing. Then it’s hard to commit to one thing. You’re like, you know, but you have that natural charisma that, you know, I’m like, oh, so yeah, you, and I could see it. It’s funny. Cause like, oh, so you could be this person.

director of creative, you know, I kind of this proto idea of I had and she kind of fit the, the look and the feel. I’m like, you know, but, ⁓ I said, she just had a lot of other stuff that was grabbing her attention. And I was struggling to get things done from these other contributors, these, you know, and if she’s not focused and keeping them on.

on the rails and getting stuff done, this stuff’s not happening. And I was like, ugh, you know, was frustrating. And cause I’m trying to teach these classes, I was teaching all these classes and they’re in the day. So I don’t have as much time to like manage people. And so it was kind of in that.

Justin (28:54) Yeah. Yeah, because you need somebody to stay

on top. it’s not just somebody to give directions for the week or for the day. Like, OK, everybody do this, and I’ll see you all tomorrow. It’s like, you need to be constantly. It’s almost like how we’ve talked about, ⁓ even in teaching, when you get the new batch of sixth graders, they’re like puppies going everywhere. Everyone’s excited to do this stuff.

but they’re always, their excitement is leading them to go off in all these different directions. And it’s like, there’s the compounding of misalignment. And you gotta be just constantly keeping people focused on the thing they’re supposed to be doing. And if you don’t do that, then things compound into suddenly, like somebody is one degree off course, two degrees off course, and you didn’t correct them.

Jason (29:23) You’re well over getting up.

I mean.

Justin (29:45) And they just kept doing that for the few days. And then you look up and you’re like, wait, where, where are you? Like you’re all the way over there. Like, why are you all the way over there? It’s like, well, you let them go that far without pulling them back in.

Jason (29:57) Well, it’s like a coach. why does a, you know, why does a soccer coach at a professional soccer team, what does he really got to say to his, well, he’s got a lot to say. I these guys are pros. They’ve been playing together many times for years. You know, they know what they’re doing, but you also need someone to say, look, we need to close down space here. We need to put more pressure here. We need to look for this, you know, whatever you have these things and you got to get people kind of.

working together or coxswain like in a rowing, you know, and it’s like, how hard is it to keep these guys all pulling together? Right? I they’re doing crew, right? And you have this coxswain who’s just this smaller person in the front is like, pull, pull, whatever. It’s like, do they really need that? I guess, yeah. Cause if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have that person, right? Cause it’s extra weight.

Justin (30:38) Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jason (30:51) And you’re talking about like elite athletes who do this very, mean, how much variance is there doing that? There’s almost zero variance, but yet it can get off or conductor in orchestra.

Justin (31:02) Mm-hmm.

That’s right.

Jason (31:05) I don’t really know what they’re doing, but apparently they’re keeping everybody moving together and doing their part until everything syncs up and creates its effect. And so we see that. That’s just how this seems to be required in human nature when you have multiple people working together and where some type of synchronization is critical. Now, I think when you’re working with people who are all working part-time or remote, it’s even harder than if they all show up to an office.

And they kind of sort of can self coordinate when they’re kind of doing this 10 hours a week and they’re grad, they’re working, they’re taking grad classes or working on a dissertation. And they’re like, I mean, it’s so easy for them to be like, well, what are we doing? You know, like do this, come on. okay. So that was a situation. And I additionally was like, I need someone to write tutorials because these people were all focused against writing questions. And I found, I searched and found a few people on Upwork who were.

Justin (31:45) Yeah.

Jason (32:02) PhDs in math and had done some kind of educational stuff and I hired him and he was just like paper the hour, writes some tutorials and kind of stuff like that and he… ⁓

He did a really good job. mean, it took, it wasn’t like, I mean, there was a lot of like me explaining him how this was supposed to work. It wasn’t like he initially immediately knew what to do. I mean, and a lot of things that he was thinking were not correct because it was like, he was thinking from more traditional, well, this is how we teach. Like, no, no, this is bath, well, we do this as small steps. And you know, that whole thing, short paragraphs, short sentences, as little text as possible.

Justin (32:37) Mm-hmm.

Jason (32:48) break it up with examples, break up with images, no more than a half a screen to a screen max, the younger it is, the shorter it needs to be, fall immediately to a concrete example, immediately where they start practicing. So like that was all kind of a new concept to him, but he was very open to instruction, to coaching, right? He was coachable.

He’s like, ⁓ okay. All right. And then, know, it took, and he, you know, there was a process of, cause I had been thinking through and doing this for awhile. So I had kind of figured out what worked and I had a strong idea about it. And he, he was easy to work with and was like, okay. And was open to feedback and was coachable. And, but so he was doing this. Like a lot of any, you know, 30 or hours a week or something like that. Right. So he was like every day and I was like,

Justin (33:38) Yeah.

Jason (33:40) maybe he should really run the content team because this other person, she was doing 10 hours a week and she was, I was here for three or four days and then she’d come in and do some hours on a Thursday night, you know, and where he’s like every day I’m like, you know, maybe it would be better if he did that. And I allowed her to do some other things that were more appropriate based on her attention and time commitment. And so he kind of took over.

Justin (33:57) Yeah.

Jason (34:10) that. And then I remember saying, and then after a while, he started doing a pretty good, you know, it was, was, mean, when I say never a while, I mean, like in my period of like a week or two, and I was like, Oh, okay, well, and he would say, Well, this person, not really getting back to me. And this, I’m not, I don’t know if this guy really is able to write these questions, this might be above the level that they’re, you know, either of their true mastery.

You know, and so I said, okay. I said, look, you know, you, you consider this your team. You don’t have to keep anybody. And it’s up to you. Cause I had learned, ⁓ had, ⁓ you know, for the listeners that you obviously know the story, but I had created a men’s soccer team, which we would call a semi-professional soccer team back in 2001.

And I had played college soccer and I really wanted to play at a high level and I couldn’t find a men’s team that was anywhere near the level that I was enjoying. And so I was like, you know, I want to create a team that could almost play at a professional level with amateur players, guys who maybe had played pro or almost played pro and played high level college, that kind of stuff. So anyway, whole another story. But my one guy who…

was that I made him the team captain. was an older guy or older than the other younger, he wasn’t like 25. He was in his early thirties and played at a very high level and really smart guy and, you know, I think he had a senior management role at work. So he was like a real adult, right? And a leader. And I made him captain of the D I said, like, you’re captain of defense is yours.

Because he would play center defense, right? He’s a sweeper. And so he’s kind of the quarterback of the defense. And there was one guy on the team who I liked, good guy. He was a good player and a good athlete and all that, but he wouldn’t, he would kind of just freelance.

Like he thought he was Dion Sanders. if anyone would know Dion Sanders, if he’s too young for that, like he was this defensive back in the NFL who would, they’d call him a shut down corner. You could not throw the ball to that corner of the field because he was so fast. He would make a planet intercept it. So he was, he was scary to throw to that side of the field. Don’t throw to Dion. Damn it. He’ll run it back for a touchdown. So, um, one of the greatest athletes ever played football.

Justin (36:43) if

Jason (36:55) And he kind of like fancied himself a Dion Sanders.

Justin (36:58) Yeah, so

this guy thought he was so good that you can just like, just give him the ball or just like, he doesn’t have to coordinate with people. can, once things get in his zone, then like he can just… Yeah.

Jason (37:08) Like I, like I got it. like, so,

so, so Richard who was counting for us to be like, he’d be like, Alan, you get on your guy. You got to mark him up tighter. Like he wanted to lock these guys down, these wing, ⁓ attackers, lock them down because if he’s like, but he’d like, yeah, I got it. So he would type was fast enough that he could just kind of like, gee, like I’m going to go up.

and cheat and maybe see if I can make a play on the ball and defense, whatever. Meanwhile, his guy’s supposed to be marking is kind of like, I think I’m kind of open here, you know? And then he gets the ball through and then Richard’s like, damn it, you know? And he has to leave his guy to go defend the guy who is now attacking and now his guy’s for innocent, it’s a

Jason (37:53) this would create problems for the defense.

Richard complained to and he’s like, look, we got it. You got to tell him he’s got to stay on his man. He’s like, when he doesn’t stay on his man, then I can’t stay on my man. Cause I got to kind of like watch his man and my man. And then we don’t, we’re not locking down the defenders and I can’t, and he said to me was really important lesson for me. says, look, Jason, you, told me the defense is my responsibility and I cannot have.

the responsibility without the power to say who is or is not on my team and my defense. Because he was like, don’t, can’t use this guy. I’ve talked to him again and again, he won’t do what I’m asking him to do. And he’s like, if you want a clean sheet, you want to shut down defense, you know, you gotta let me choose my team.

I was like, that is a really good lesson. You can’t give somebody responsibility for something without giving them control. Right? That’s not fair. And it’s just, it’s not reasonable. And so was like, all right, fine. And so we had to cut him, which was not a great experience. I liked the guy personally. I know he was unhappy with that and thought it was unfair, but there had been many, discussions with him about…

Changing his approach to defense and he just wouldn’t really do it for more than a few minutes. And so we had to cut him And that’s that’s again being a leader You have to make hard decisions like that You gotta hurt people’s feelings. You know, it’s like you do you want a team as my goal is I want to make the best Non-professional team in the country. That was my goal Is like you want that or you just want to go have fun with your friends on the weekend? It’s not that great of a team

It’s not that serious. No one’s taking that seriously because you’re not taking that seriously. It’s, it is what it is as they say, but, I had committed, I was like, we’re going to make the best, you know, men’s team in the country. we pretty close to realize that. I mean, we got a point where we were, we had an exhibition match against a major league soccer team, you know, down at their stadium. You know, we, you know, we.

had some real high moments, we were right at the very top. And so, but that, that meant making hard decisions. Anyway, the point was that I had to give Richard, Richie B as we call it on control of the defense. And then we had a much, much better defense than that. Cause he’s like, either, either, either play like I want you to play or you’re not on my defense. And you get people online kind of rolling together.

Justin (40:40) Yeah.

Jason (40:43) With the strategy, this is how we’re playing defense. Okay, we’re moving up. We’re shutting down space. Okay, now we’re cutting down. We’re doing this. We’re doing, this is our strategy. Right. And, um, so I, with, with, with Alex, I had already learned that lesson. said, all right, it’s your team. As a, can keep anybody on the team who already have, who you think is getting with the program as you see it, who is going to write content the way you want it, right. And is it written and who’s going to, you know, coordinate well and be responsive and follow.

feedback and all those kinds of things. if they’re, if you can’t work with them, then, you know, you can fire, you can get rid of them and fire somebody else. Cause I can’t, you know, otherwise if I don’t give you that control, then, then I have to kind of be in there making all the decisions. And you’re just kind of like, I don’t know what your role is. You’re not really in control of the content, the curriculum development. You’re just sort of a, an advisor who writes stuff and I didn’t have time for that. So I gave them control.

Justin (41:34) Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

because you want somebody who you can hold responsible for the output of the team, right? And the only way to have that person is to give them control over the team that they build. There’s no way to otherwise. That’s the only way.

Jason (41:57) That’s right. You know, and I’d be like, you know, it’s, I would give him the resources that he needed. You say, if you need somebody else, if you need people, you can hire who you want. Cause he would add, I remember early days he’s like, you know, about hiring people. I’m like, hire whoever you want. It’s your team. Cause I’m just, I would say this because I’m holding, I’m holding you accountable. So pick who you want, you know, and the, you know,

I would of course be like, okay, well, we need to get this done or we need this. And so sometimes I be like, well, we need more people or we need, if we’re going to get this done and this amount of time, or I need another tutorial writer, I need another editor or something. And so there was all these kinds of discussions about what the resource needed, but I would typically say, look, I’ll give you what you need as long as it’s reasonable. And you know, I’m not going to overpay for stuff just because it’s easy. Hey, I pay everybody as much money as you want, you know? And I’m like, okay, well, that’s easy.

For everybody a million dollars a year, it’s like you can get the best people in the world, but it’s just wasting.

Justin (43:02) Yeah, it’s like

you put reasonable bounds on the space of decisions that can be made, but like just within that arena, it’s like, okay, Alex, you make the decisions. Yeah.

Jason (43:11) your team. And as

long as you feel like it’s reasonable, you’re like, okay, I can work with that. Then, okay, then I can hold, I can hold Alex count was okay. Is this the quality of this course going to be where, or what I expect? And is this going to be done within a timeframe that is reasonably like, so, so, ⁓ though the real role I played by the way, and that was just sort of just playing kind of a meta role and helping him just increase efficiency. I was like, so what, what work are you doing?

Like, tell me your day. Tell me what are you doing? You know, because he’d be like, well, this. I’m like, do you really need to do that? Because I felt like he was doing a lot more meta work than was necessary that you might see like on a corporate environment where you really kind of cover your ass to show that you’re doing stuff. Like, well, I’m writing these briefs and I’m doing this stuff. And I was like, God, I feel like there’s just a lot of brief writing. Like, just write a Slack, just do this.

Like, why do you spend half a day writing a fricking document? Just tell them what you want, and then question a couple back and forth, go. Otherwise you’re like crafting and formatting and this isn’t yet. And I was like, I don’t care.

Justin (44:23) Meta work is

not the work. No meta work.

Jason (44:26) It’s not the work.

And it doesn’t impress me. I don’t give a shit. In fact, I’m annoyed. Like when I see lots of meta work, I’m like annoyed. And he was initially kind of like, I remember talking to his wife. He’s like, yeah, Jason doesn’t want, he’s like no meta work. And he’s like, okay, so let me think about this. no. And I didn’t want to say like, can’t write any things down or you can’t create a document or a spreadsheet, but it’s like, as much work as can be.

Justin (44:32) Yeah.

Jason (44:55) effort is in time as possible to be focused on doing the thing and not talking about the doing of the thing. the meta work is just because like it gets just overwhelmed the process. you and I think you see it a lot of companies. They just the focus becomes that because the politics and bureaucracy and it’s like nobody’s doing is like one guy who’s actually doing anything. Everybody else is just.

talking about who’s doing what and the plan and when this is going to do. And I told them our meetings and approval and all right, you know what? Everybody’s fired that guy here. Do this. You know what I mean? And, so I, I was, I’ve always been allergic to bureaucracy and bullshit and meta work. And I can only talk about something for so long before we actually have to do it. I mean, you know, when you and I talked about something like, I can’t, I

Justin (45:46) Yep. Yeah, well, another one of the reasons I think that ⁓ we kind of have to bias in this way is because you can always come up with like a million possibilities of what might happen when the thing that you’re working on, when you introduce it, when you release it, when customers start using it, ⁓ when it just makes contact with reality.

And you can predict which way the ball’s going to bounce. You can try to do that. like 90 % of the time you’re going to be wrong. Like unless there’s just like really, really obvious, like you look at a UI and you’re like, I’m confused by it. And then you go and fix it. But if you’re thinking about like second order, third order, optimizations on this thing, you’re just, you’re going to, you’re going to waste time doing the wrong.

things. If you’re doing a meta work on like this whole plan for like what’s going to happen next after we release it, whether the next like bits and features and whatever, it’s like what, there’s no point, you’re wrong. All this is a waste because you’re focusing on the wrong things because you don’t know what the right things are because you didn’t do the work to figure out what it is. It’s like even figuring out what you should be talking about next depends on you doing the thing now to get that information from the world.

Jason (47:08) 100%. know, it’s like when, let’s see how I phrase this. It’s, I have like three things to say. You know what I talked about earlier about how I have like too many things to say and if I start thinking about one and I lose the other ones, okay, this just happened. Well, okay, so one thing I would say is,

⁓ you know, like when they had about like startups would go and try and raise venture capital and they have these pitch decks and they’d like in our growth chart and we’re going to do this. it was just, everybody knows this bullshit. The venture capital is no bullshit. You know, it’s bullshit. They kind of have to go through it just to, it’s just, that’s just part of the.

Justin (47:43) Yeah, the projecting revenue

like couple of years out from zero. We have zero right now. We’re going to pick up this many customers. Like, really? You can predict.

Jason (47:47) And we’re going to make a billion dollars.

Everybody’s like, great, okay, sounds

great. A little bit of that is okay. It’s like, is a big enough market, and then the profit margin and the cost of the, okay, yeah, okay, get it. There’s big opportunity here. That’s all you need to say. But it’s nonsense because there’s just so much between that has to be done that’s just gonna dictate what’s gonna happen. You can’t make these predictions.

With any lower accuracy. And I remember one thing I used to say to you and Alex all the time, we’d have sometimes conversations. And you guys would be like, well, what about if, and what this has said, let’s just solve today’s problems today. You cannot solve tomorrow’s problems today because you don’t even know, or like next week’s or next month’s problems today, because you don’t really understand what those problems are, and you don’t even know if they’re real.

Because we imagine we can imagine all kind of cat. What if they want to do what what what it what we play whatever forever? It’s just total. It’s mostly a waste of time. It’s okay to do a little bit of that. It’s okay to do like well, you know, Think I mean, I’m gonna say you can’t think at all about what the future might look like when we happen But you got to be careful not to get caught going on that rabbit hole and spending too much time thinking That you can make all these predictions because you’re probably going to be wrong

Or at least you’re going to be wrong about the relative importance. Like, okay, these 10 or 12 things I might want to do, yeah, but like, there’s the one thing that like everyone’s going to do that’s important now and you’re getting distracted by this other bullshit and would really would have been helpful if we just built that and got it out for people. And then not only that would have been done, everybody’s happy and using it and they’re telling other people, but now it opened up, more light on this other thing or two that kind of related or depend on it. So like just, you kind of like, okay, here are all these things.

that were interesting or could be important. Okay, let’s figure out what’s the order of our, what’s really the most important one, and let’s just kind of do that, and then we’ll pick our head up and go, okay, based on what we’ve learned from doing that, now we can talk about the next thing, because it’s, think for smart people,

They love spending time trying to predict this stuff and thinking through this stuff. And they kind of pride themselves on predicting, well, see, we avoided that catastrophe, did that. Everybody wants to, we all want to avoid problems and catastrophe. And why, there’s going to be a scaling problem. There’s going to be a race condition. were like, you want to try and get ahead of some of these things, but you just got to be careful about overestimating your ability to really pinpoint what they are. Cause what’ll happen is you’ll, you’ll over-engineer things.

that are just not, you’re solving problems that are fake problems. not real problems. You over-engineered it. You came up with this vastly complex solution to a non-problem, to a imaginary problem.

Justin (50:42) And in

the process, you’ve actually created three more problems that you don’t see currently because you’re anticipating the future. If you just wait until the problem actually happened and then you tried this as a patch to the problem, then you’d notice like, ⁓ shit, like I just, this is gonna be more headache. But if you do that too far in advance, you solve one future headache that you see and then you introduce three more that you don’t. And now you’re net behind.

Jason (51:07) Yeah, because everything

you do, everything you add to a system makes a system more complicated and it puts down constraints. We’ve got a wall there. Now we got another wall. It’s like, do you really want a wall there? You better be happy about that wall because now you got a wall. like, know, sometimes there’s some really important walls you can put them up, but you just make sure that they’re the walls you want because now you got to work around that wall.

Now it’s a load-bearing wall.

Justin (51:38) Yeah, so it’s like you want to, okay, so to kind of summarize a little bit, you do need to think hard about the stuff that you’re doing, but you don’t want to think hard about making it, how do I make it more complex? You want to think hard about how do I make it simple so that I’m not putting a straight jacket on myself? That’s kind of the thing that you’re thinking about, yeah.

Jason (52:00) is you’re gonna have to carry this thing around

with you, this is the complexity. It’s almost like, you know, like I don’t like owning a lot of stuff because now you gotta lug that stuff around with you. Now that stuff owns you, right? So it’s like the code owns you, right? I mean,

Justin (52:09) Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Jason (52:17) Buddy of mine in my first startup, used to say like, you better be careful what code you write because you’re going to own it for the rest of your You’re going to be supporting it for the rest of your life. That’s a little bit of exaggeration, but the point is well taken. It’s like, you may be that not, you’re going to be supporting it. That is going to be a thing that you have to deal with. So don’t add, don’t add anything into the suitcase that you don’t want to lug around for the entire vacation. Like we’re going to Europe. don’t like, don’t bring a lot of stuff, man. Cause we’re going a lot of countries, it’s only what you need.

And that’s kind of what you think. And if you’re solving problems that aren’t real problems, now you have all this extra code that you’ve got to lug around that are putting constraints on these other solutions. Like, oh, we want to be really cool if we build this. It’s like, oh, jeez, but there’s the thing, and it’s going to impact this thing. And now it’s harder to make it work quite the right way. And we have this added stuff. And now it takes five times as long to build. And then, oh, by the way, you spent the time doing that. It’s switched to building the thing that everybody really cared about. So there’s just so many reasons.

to try to avoid getting caught up building stuff that doesn’t really need to be built and just focus on the really critical stuff that you know how to solve now. And then, and there’s also the attention, if you get too focused, what about that? Don’t worry about that, don’t worry about that, don’t. Stop, I don’t wanna talk about it, it’s stupid.

You know, I know it’s fun to talk about. It’s a waste of time. We need this. Let’s focus on it now. And so sometimes you have to do that as a, know, when you’re running a team of smart people, because smart people can invent an infinite number of problems themselves. They can read and they can make a great job convincing you and themselves that this absolutely has to be done. And you just, and I think sometimes smart people struggle with the.

Justin (53:58) It’s true.

Jason (54:10) you know, setting limitations, constraints on their own hubris and their ability to just think through anything. And you just remember, it’s like, you just have to remember the times that you did that and you screwed it up and you’re like, okay, yeah, I guess sometimes I’m, you know, I mean, that’s the joke, you know, you always call it Jason time in the real time, you know, it’s like, what that is, is that my inability to really imagine all the conditional levels of complexity that are involved in this thing that has to get done.

Right? And I know this about myself and I’m still always underestimating how long it takes to do stuff.

Justin (54:43) Yeah.

Yeah, it is kind of funny because, It’s like, on one hand, you don’t really want to think too hard about these additional levels of complexity, right? Because you’re like, don’t, because I mean, we just talked about this, you don’t want to be thinking too far into the future, anticipating all these.

downstream things that you’re gonna have to do because you’re probably gonna be wrong about a lot of them. So it’s like, okay, on one hand, you wanna kind of like, just focus your field of vision on what you’re doing right now. But then at the same time, when it comes to like, actually like, okay, realistically, how much work is this? How much is it gonna take? It’s kind of like, at least…

The way I kind of think of it is like, you don’t always know exactly what are the things that you’re going to do after, like after what you see in front of you, but just historically there’s always like some amount of like additional journey to make, to push it. Like historically, maybe what you see in front of you is maybe the first 30%, 40%, 50 % maybe. like, just put a, put an extra two X or.

2.5x factor on there, even though you don’t know exactly what it’s representing, it’s gonna be there in some way. You’ll figure out what it is later, but it is there.

Jason (55:56) In my case, buyback.

Yeah, I try never to give an ETA when something’s going to be done because I always take longer. It’s always frustrating. And then I’m always apologizing. was like, I don’t know. It feels like it should only take three days. That’s what it feels like. know, because Sandy’s like, so let me guess, two weeks. I’m like, yeah, yeah, it’ll be done in two weeks. She’s like.

Justin (56:28) Yeah, this is like, this is the reality of that one. There’s this Twitter meme that kind of went around like a few months ago. It was like, you can learn anything in two weeks. You can do anything in two weeks. I mean, the joke is kind of like, you can’t really, but you can, if you think that you can, then you can get far enough in two weeks that you can actually like follow through and close the loop.

Jason (56:29) Two weeks.

Justin (56:58) much later.

Jason (57:00) Yeah, well, think that’s sort of an attribute of entrepreneurs is they have to be sort of self-diluting. It’s the only way that you can get started on an actual project because if you knew the actual, was really gonna take, you wouldn’t do it. This is way too much. It’s just, my God. You you’re like, it’s gonna take me two months, three months, max. ⁓

Great, and then you get going. And then, of course, it takes 18 months. in for a dime, in for a dollar, you made enough progress, you’re excited, okay, whatever. You need delusional people sometimes at the helm just to get everybody. It’s like Steve Jobs is known for his reality distortion field. And I’ve been accused of that by a number of people.

You distort reality around you because you believe so strongly that something is possible. And it’s not only possible, it’s possible in a relatively short period of time. And then you get everybody moving in the right direction. sometimes that’s enough. Because that’s required. If you’re going to finish it, you’re going to have to do that. And then a lot of times, once you start making enough progress and learning enough, you get enough momentum and everybody’s, OK, yeah, yeah, we got this. It’s going to take more work, but we’re in it. So you’ve got to have.

that level of self delusion. At least I’m fully aware that I’m delusional about things. you’ll occasionally indirectly point out to me and I just think it’s hilarious because I’m like, that’s about right. But yeah, do the things in front of you. Prioritize. Pick your head up every once in while. Look at the landscape. What needs to get done?

Justin (58:39) funny.

Jason (58:50) make a sketch out, here’s our preliminary sort of order operations, here’s the most important one, do that and then pick your head up and go, okay, what are we gonna do? Because you know, I mean, how many times a week do I ask you to do something that wasn’t on your to-do list?

Justin (59:08) ⁓ Probably seven days a week. Yeah, I mean, these things just kind of come up and the further we kind of get along and in terms of building out more infrastructure, the more students we have, just the more stuff pops up randomly. It’s like just the…

Jason (59:12) And.

Justin (59:27) It’s a stochastic process, right? And you just have more, you take more samples at like, each time you like cast the, the, the fishing line, there’s like a, it’s one of those cases where they’re like, okay, 1 % chance you’re going to get a fish. And now you’re casting, there’s, you got so much surface area on it. That’s like every day, there’s just like something that you just didn’t expect to have to deal with. Right.

Jason (59:51) Well, know, it’s because, you know, yeah, because there’s because there’s just ⁓ it’s sort of level zero is just cost tech support issues. We’re saying to you’ll be like, she’ll email you or email me. She’s like, OK, this person, this they’re not getting tasks or this thing and some weird thing. And you’re like, and I’m like, that’s a Justin problem. You’re like, that’s a problem. And they want to look into it. And it’s like, OK.

Justin (1:00:13) Mm-hmm.

Jason (1:00:17) Here’s what happened. We have this edge case. Or some things like that happen. Or I get a request from someone. I’m like, OK, we got to, actually, this is a problem. We got to deal with it. And so stop the presses. And we got to do this thing. And so that’s stuff you just got to deal with. then sometimes you can fix it. But then there’s like, actually, this is a systemic problem. And this is the only person who’s going to affect. We should just fix. We need to fix this now.

That happens a lot with you or you’ll notice something at the model level. You’re like, okay, this kind of uncovered something that is affecting more in this person. I, and you want me to fix it? I’m like, yeah, yeah. And sometimes it’s half a day. Sometimes it’s two or three days, you know, depending, you know, I mean, you’re pretty fast. A lot of times it’s only like a half a day to a day, but nevertheless, it’s kind of stuff happens for someone regularly either.

because of our feature request that’s really important or a or something that we just have to change to deal with it. You got to fix it. got real customers paying you money and you’re like, can’t do, the diagnostic won’t progress. I didn’t, you it’s like, you got to fix it, right? I don’t care what your plan was, you know? And so I think acknowledge, acknowledge the unpredictability of like what you said, the stochastic process and just don’t hold on too tight.

Justin (1:01:18) Yep.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, things take priority.

Yeah.

Jason (1:01:34) This to-do list is written in sand. But you know thing that was funny, we’ve talked about the last couple days, is the analogy of like, I can’t remember, I’m gonna get this wrong, somebody could probably fact check this on using ChatGPT or something, but it was like.

Justin (1:01:41) Yeah.

Jason (1:01:57) Something like 50 % of the people in the world have what’s known as a rare disease. And a rare disease is a constant, someone has less than 10,000 or 100,000 people are afflicted with. So it’s it’s a rare disease, but a lot of people have rare diseases. Which is kind of a weird thing to think about. It’s like, ah, I got this sort of weird, what is it? it’s, get this.

can’t hear it in my left ear, ⁓ whatever it is. If anyone’s watched these little shows like Mystery Diagnosis, you’ve seen these crazy shows, these people have these bizarre diseases that no one’s ever heard about, and really hard to diagnose. anyway, so lot of us have these things. Some are minor, some are major. ⁓ And I think our system, when I was joking the other day, because it’s just our last month or two, there just seemed to be a lot of little things that pop up, you’re like, God, this, you know,

weird thing that only affected this weird edge case. It doesn’t affect that many people, but there were a lot of these things that would pop up. They’re these very, because the model and the system is incredibly complex at this system, at this level.

Justin (1:03:06) Yeah, yeah, that’s the consequence of, ⁓ yeah, just doing an expert system. It’s like, yeah, it gets complicated.

Jason (1:03:13) So in effect, because the human body is incredibly complex, which makes it unsurprising that there’s lots of different ways is that they can have little diseases, little problems, genetic problems, whatever. And I think that’s sort of similar with the system. It gets complex and you have these rare diseases and you’re like, I another one. is, you know, I haven’t really seen this before, but it’s like the, and I think with the point, the observation you made is like the more people we, more customers we get, the more surface area of the system.

is exposed, where it’s like you can hit these rare combinations of, well, they were in a course, but then they quit halfway through the diagnostic and changed to another course. And then they switched back to the original and then they clean slate. You’re like, wait, what did they do? know, because people do these weird things. And because we’re not anticipating all these weird things that they would do and just people do stuff. You know, like, I don’t know. They just click around.

Justin (1:04:02) Yeah.

Jason (1:04:11) try this and do this and then they tie themselves up and not they send you a Sandy D email as email to Sandy it’s like I don’t know how this happened but apparently this person and you’re looking at you’re like okay so they did this and they did this and this and because we split and we created a new course because they quit the diagnostic halfway through and was in a course and it was six months ago and then they reactivated it and we changed the course and added more topics and the diagonal you know it’s just crazy you know

Justin (1:04:39) Yeah. Yeah. It’s kind of like, I mean, when you’re coding it up, you try to, you try to control for all these edge cases, right? But when you’re, when you’re controlling for these edge cases, you’ve got like one or two actions in mind. It’s like, you’re, building your game tree kind of, and you like, you build it up to like two ply or something. You’re like, cause you’re trying to just like limit things, trying to code it up in a way that these like sequence of act like that long sequence of actions don’t matter. They can just reasonably keep the scope down in your head.

⁓ and so you make this net and you think the net has the mesh fine enough to, catch everybody. But, but eventually, like once in a while, yeah, you get some, some weird sequence of actions in the action space that you thought was like, like I thought that was going to be covered by my mesh, but, but it turns out that there was actually like just a, a little opening in the armor. And I mean, the armor still like it’s,

It’s good. It’s good armor. But if there is any little opening and you’re shooting like a billion arrows at it, like, what’s it going to get through? and, and, and, so, yeah, just the, more, right. The, the, the more arrows you got going, the tighter your, your armor has to be in all these spots.

Jason (1:05:58) Well, it’s like, you know, think of the human body. It’s like most people are walking around and most people are pretty healthy who were not elderly and who would not totally abuse themselves with drugs and horrible life. But assuming you took really good care of yourself and you’re not elderly, it’s amazing how many people walk around and are pretty healthy. And that’s the same with the system. Vast majority of people are not having any real bugs. They’re fine. They’re just progressing through. there’s people who…

Maybe they abuse their body. They abuse the system. And they do things to the system that we did not anticipate. Right? Like kind of what I was describing before. They did this and they quit that and they just flailing around. You know, they they flail.

Justin (1:06:36) you

It is kind of funny how different, like you expect people to use the system in a certain way. There’s like, there’s this zone of expected behavior. And I mean, a lot of people do use it that way, but just as you get more and more people using it, you see a lot more of this weird, like just never like wasn’t on your bingo card, would not have.

Jason (1:07:00) Yeah, just

this sort of flailing behavior, you know, and a lot of times it’s that they’re trying to get the system to do something that doesn’t really do. You know, or was it meant to do, but they’re trying to just wedge it in there. It’s like, want to do this thing. And you’re like…

Justin (1:07:04) Yeah.

Yeah.

So

they’re kind of spamming kind of different actions that they think might like kind of jig it in a way. Yeah.

Jason (1:07:24) You know, like they’re trying to use Microsoft or like a Google Docs to like, as a Google spreadsheet. Like I’ve read a table and it says, it’s not a spreadsheet, it’s just a table, you know? And they’re like, use the spreadsheet. Well, I like, are using a spreadsheet like a database or something, you know? It’s like, well, you kind of use it that way, but you wouldn’t use it like a database unless it’s like a really small list of people like that really, you know? So people, they just, or they just have a different use case in mind. So for instance, I had a mom.

Justin (1:07:37) Yeah.

Jason (1:07:53) Who’s a really, really nice lady. She’s been a real supporter of math Academy and on like an ⁓ accent. She’s like, well, she sent me this email and she’s like, well, so I want to use the gravity because she’s one of our gravity beta testers. And she’s like, we’re using math Academy is sort of as an adjunct as sort of a review and is sort of an extra review, extra practice for a school. So when he’s a gravity to keep.

what he’s doing in the system aligned with what’s going on class. And I was like, well, you know, like we created gravity because we want to have people some ability to sort of prioritize certain things. Like, so you’re, I need to learn this stuff sooner rather than later. Right. And people say, I don’t have any control over that. I want to be able to, I really need to get to systems of equations. Or I really need to get integration with trigonometric.

you know, substitution or whatever for the class, because there’s something they’d learn. OK, I get it. You know that. You want to give people a little more control over a set of just you sign up this course is just going to give you whatever it wants you to do, because the idea is that you’re going to complete the course. Now you open up more control, more decision points for the user, and guess what? They’re going to do different things, but it’s never going to be enough because it’s always going to people want to do more.

or using away an intent. And so I had to tell her, said, you know, I get what you’re trying to do. that’s not really how the system was meant to be used. The system was meant to be a primary learning platform. I’m learning algebra or calculus or whatever it is. Take a diagnostic and then I…

spend so much time each day and I learn, master the material in the course. It’s not a, I’m in algebra course, but I’m doing this on the side and I come in once or twice a week. It’s not how it’s meant to be used. And it’s probably going to be a frustrating experience to try and get it to do something that it wasn’t meant to do. It’s like, you don’t want…

to use a motorcycle like a car and then try and go to shopping at Home Depot and put a bunch of stuff. Like it’s not, your motorcycle, man. It’s not, you’re not going to the Home Depot to buy plywood for your, your build out of your kitchen. Like get a truck. Like that’s a motorcycle. ⁓

Justin (1:10:18) Yeah, and then the next question is like,

can I just put a trailer on the motorcycle?

Jason (1:10:23) Exactly.

you know, and I get it. You people want to try stuff and they may not totally get what your intention was and users are going to use it. Users are going to use, right? They’re going to use your software in a way that solves their problem, right? They’re on there. They’re solving their problem. And we’re here to help them solve their problem. But anyway, the point is you build, every time you build new features to allow more control, understand that you’re going to open up more

Justin (1:10:36) What’d I do?

Jason (1:10:52) potential problems because you’ve made the system more complex because there’s a surface area of things that are happening to the system or as increased and They’re always going to disappointed because they want to do more than what you’ve even added You’re never gonna make everybody happy everybody’s in but in of course the more you add more control the more people get confused Like well, I’m to the gravitas and then you get more email support and people like that and you’re just like, ⁓ man Why are they even doing that, you know?

Like I have people come into gravity and they go, know, because typically the way gravity work for anybody who hasn’t is listening, has anywhere. So you would, have this knowledge graph. Anybody’s looked at the knowledge graph and you see this big sort of like, like a tree of topics and how to connect the prerequisites. And you say, well, I know all this stuff here. I want to get, it’s five topics away. It’s a systems of linear equations. Like I want to, I need to get to that. Right. I don’t know that it’s on some test and something or whatever. And you,

add gravity to it and then it will prioritize the path of the prerequisites. Like there might be like nine prerequisites that have to be completed to get to that topic and it will prioritize them. Well, one person came in and they clicked every single one. Like you already have gravity on that. Like you don’t have to do gravity. And it was like a weird thing, but I was like, okay, I guess I don’t think they quite understand what gravity is supposed to do, but this.

then we need to explain that. And then another person was like, they put it was like 100 topics away. It’s like, really? mean, how would he get to the end?

Justin (1:12:30) Yeah, you chose the topic at the

very, the most, one of the most advanced topics in the course that depends on like most other topics in the course. Yeah.

Jason (1:12:40) And I guess, I mean, you know, everybody has their thing that they’re trying to do. it’s always, or they, you know, and I had to put a limit on it. Someone put like, you know, gravity on like 30 things. I knew that was going to happen. So I’m like, we’re limiting it to like five or seven, because that’s just, you’re just the more, if you have gravity on one thing, then it will.

Prioritize that and you could get to it relatively soon if you’re probably on ten things. So you’re prioritizing ten things

Justin (1:13:11) You’re prioritizing everything, therefore nothing is prioritized. Yeah, too much gravity means no gra- they all like kind of cancel each other out.

Jason (1:13:13) So they’re prioritizing nothing.

If I suggest, just what are your life goals? You’re like, I got 100 life goals. I’m like, okay, well, I’m do this, I’m do this, I’m gonna this. Okay, so recently I do nothing. Because you can’t do everything. So you say, no, my goal is this. Have one or two priorities, maybe three. You get beyond a few priorities and then they just water it. You have to spread your time and effort among them all so much that nothing’s prioritized. yeah. What was another one that was… ⁓

Justin (1:13:26) Yeah. Yeah.

Jason (1:13:49) was funny that I was looking at, was like, God, I don’t know what’s escaping me now. the gravity situation is just an example. It added complexity. I haven’t had too many bugs with that. There was one where someone would, they go to a more advanced course.

They add gravity to that course, and then they go back to a lower course, add gravity, and someone had reported this bug to me. And so it’s like, it’s still including the gravity on the course they’re not in. It says, you have gravity on seven topics. It’s like, I only have it on five. I’m like, OK. Somehow when it was doing a database query, it was saying, OK, it needs to limit it to the course they’re in now. So that’s not a big deal. But ⁓ there’s always things you just really think about and add complexity. And again, people do things.

They don’t expect, and you just have to go well. And it opens up problems. So I mean, I think that’s also like, as products become more mature and you add more advanced features for your more, your power users, and this is sort of a well-known problem and sort of the innovator’s dilemma, and then it gets so complex that new people come in and they’re like, I don’t, it’s like looking at Photoshop. You’re like, pfft.

I gotta take like a semester long course to understand how to use this. Even get started. I mean there’s tons of like software like this AutoCAD and 3D modeling and rendering and like you look at you know these rendering programs and graphic they’re all like that and you’re just like my god you know.

Justin (1:15:24) Yeah, so it’s a real challenge to introduce all these capabilities without increasing the cognitive load placed on the user. You want them to be able to do more stuff, but if all that stuff’s in their face, then they’re gonna be overwhelmed.

Jason (1:15:37) For Null, it’s

much easier to move forward. Because every feature you add is putting walls down. It’s making stuff more complex. So we want to do more things. Like, well, because we’re going do this, everything affects us. But the other problem is things become so complicated that new users come in and are intimidated. They can’t even get started. And it’s just not a beginner product. So now you open up space for a competitor to come in and have a slimmed downed.

Justin (1:15:45) Yeah.

Jason (1:16:01) version of what you do and say, well, we do the really important 80 % has 20 % of the features. it’s like something like we’re video editing. It’s like cap cut instead of, you know, what is it Adobe Premiere or something or, know, it’s like people like Adobe Premiere. It’s like, oh my God, like super powerful. But like I need to just cut this video in like 15 minutes or yes, probably not the thing. So the simpler thing. So it’s just it’s all trade offs. Yeah.

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