TechZing: Recent Episodes
TechZing
TechZing is an informal bi-weekly chat show aimed at entreprenures and hackers interested in creating their own web app startup. The show is both educational (with practical advice) and conversational.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's design choices and roadmap for Lightwave, the latest with Math Academy, including the technology beyond the proofs course and the plan for drilling math facts, the primacy of winning, the future of search in the age of LLMs, fitness updates, and the shows Residents Alien, The Jinx, Allen vs. Farrow, and Shogun. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss Math Academy's churn analysis and retention roadmap, Justin's decision to use Laravel's Reverb for Lightwave's real-time collaboration, why he's mocking up the entire new phase of UI development, and what was wrong with his initial weight-lifting plan, the effects of writing on less sleep, brain activity after death, the prospect of AI-generated video, girlfriends, music, and drip emails, how Jason is attempting to train around his tendinitis and why blood-flow restriction might provide an answer, the streaming series Winning Time, Shogun Fallout, and Foundation, and why Jason recommends the Pilgrim Pass YouTube channel. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss how Justin is transitioning PlayStrong's backend to Laravel's Vapor framework and how long it will be before he'll get back to working on Lightwave again, how Jason reduced his AWS footprint, and some preliminary numbers from Math Academy's churn analysis, Justin's realization about his fitness routine, and the shows 3 Body Problem and Winning Time. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss some performance improvements made to the Math Academy service, an embarrassing email debacle, Jason's self-diagnosed ADHD, Justin's newly established workout habbit, Jason's gout flair up, the most important things that effect health, why Jason recommends The Gentlemen and Justin recommends Mythic Quest, the difficulty with general advice and best practices, and the idea of hosting online Math Academy competitions. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss the current state of Lightwave, why Justin is implementing the backend in Node.js, his experience hiring a contractor to pair code with, and plans for the future, the latest with Justin's fitness journey and why he decided to stop taking Metformin, Math Academy's upcoming Methods of Proof course, a major code refactoring, whether there will ever be a Math Academy Discord server, and customer support challenges, Jason's pending race with his kids, how he tweaked his quad, and why no one likes to do back squats, and finally the shows Slow Horses and Mythic Quest. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss their recent health and fitness escapades, the latest with Math Academy and Lightwave, the pointlessness of GDPR, why we may have to kick Justin out of the country, a bunch of stuff Sam Altman wishes someone had told him, why Jason recommends the series Gaslit and the YouTube channel Clownfish TV, and Justin's much-belated review of Ready Player One that exactly zero people asked for. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss the fallout of Gabe's blog post about Math Academy and other company issues, Lightwave's formalized roadmap, Justin's new workout equipment and routine, Jason's project-superhero progress, the importance of having concrete goals, the shows Loudermilk, Bye, Bye Barry, Mr. A & Mr. M: The Story of A&M Records, and Killer Robots, and the Kosmo channel on YouTube. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss Areli's recent gymnastics struggles, Colby's go-kart project, how Justin has been organizing a conference for his day job and his new idea for implementing styling palettes in Lightwave, Jason's project superhero updates, his new back rehab program, and why he's interested in sprinting again, how and why Justin has fallen off the weight-loss/workout wagon, the development of Math Academy's annual plan, the problem with pausing accounts, and why they've decided to re-prioritize the Methods of Proof course, the movie The Family Plan, how Taylor Kitsch became such an underrated actor, and why Jason continues to recommend the series Bosch / Bosch Legacy. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason review and grade the progress they made over the past year on their respective health, fitness, and startups, detail their goals for 2024, discuss the shows Only Murders in the Building, Band of Brothers, Breaking Bad, and Better Call Saul, and Jason explains how he thinks Hollywood will adjust its strategy in the coming years. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss how Justin and his family had to leave town to avoid a forest fire, the show Welcome to Wrexham, how Justin is tiptoeing into his new diet program, the latest on Project Superhero, the professional dunker who increased his vertical from 25 to 45 inches and then later to 50 inches, Justin's reaction to Alex Jones being allowed back on X and some thoughts on free speech, Lightwave's features and usability and whether it would make sense to build in the open, creating a strategic plan for Math Academy and the foundational document The Science of Math Academy, the progress that's been made on climate change and why Jason is much more concerned about micro plastics and nano plastics, the latest season of Rick and Morty, the second season of Invincible, and the movie Interstellar. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's new weight-loss coaching service, why Jason got a coronary heart scan and his experience so far with the ATG program, the series Welcome to Wrexham, why Justin is wary of Sam Altman not least of which because of World Coin, a recap of the recent Open AI coup and counter-coup, and some speculation around Q*, the coming battle between swarms of good and bad AI agents, Justin's recent progress on Lightwave, Jason's opinion on the recent respiratory outbreak in China, the second season of Invincible, the new series Gen V, and the movie Napolean, and finally the idea of building a critic-matching service and a "pandering critic" detector using ChatGPT 4. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's progress on Lightwave (nee List) and the near-term development roadmap, why Jason thinks Justin would benefit from a diet coach, and why he believes the hype around Hoka running shoes is entirely justified, the latest with Math Academy including the prospect of building a distraction detector, and the shows Generation V, Welcome to Wrexham, and the Yogi Berra documentary It Ain't Over.. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss how Justin has been listening to The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy audiobook, their respective project superhero updates and the latest with Lightwave and Math Academy, the problem with mobile-first web development, what makes a great student, and the movies Donny Darko and Friday Night at Freddy's. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss how emotion fuels Justin's process and why that may ultimately be to the detriment of long-term progress, Justin's thoughts on the Steve Job biography, the latest with Lightwave, project superhero updates, why Jason believes de-optimizing our lives could lead to better health, Math Academy's upcoming Methods of Proof course and how to build a cheat-detection system, the audiobooks Control Freak and Sid Meiers Memoir, and the shows Star Trek: Lower Decks, and Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss Jason's birthday, reactions and takeaways from the Elon Musk biography, the new Ray- Ban smart glasses, Lex Friedman's metaverse interview of Musk Zuckerberg, the latest project superhero updates, how Justin got excited about List again, and John Romero's Doom Guy.. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss walking as a weight-loss strategy and Justin's health-journey hiccups, Isaacson's Elon Musk biography, why Justin changed his Discord photo, the latest with Math Academy, why Justin hasn't been working on List/Nitro and whether he's planning to continue with the project, Balaji's latest Gray Tribe ideas, what Colby accomplished over the summer with Galactic Conquerors and how he's been preparing to take some advanced, for-credit math exams, and Apple's streaming Foundation Series. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's new morning walk/run, Jason's college track career, Justin's diet regime, and Jason's new focus on lowering fructose intake and uric acid, the latest with Galatic Conquerors, and technical limitations of a web-based game, and how struggle is an integral part of the learning process, the prospect of the emergence of human-level AGI within 3 to 7 years, how the LK99 team is not giving up, Elon's plan to strip headlines and other metadata from Twitter/X posts, the image preprocessing library that will prevent AI mimicry and the power of AI image generation with tools like Midjourney, Eric Weinstein's criticism of String Theory, the latest with Math Academy, including locale-based courses, and the growth firm they're working with, the rom-com When In Rome and the sci-fi movie Zoe about the synthetic humans, the book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, how untrustworthy the mainstream news has become, how their viewership has plummeted as a result, and why this is driving the push for censorship. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's plan to integrate daily physical exercise, how excess fructose could be the primary driver for elevated levels of uric acid and metabolic diseases generally, the million-dollar prize for a solution to the Riemann hypothesis, Justin's idea for a website called AmISheeple.com, the non-replication of the room-temperature superconductor, whether AI is a solution in search of a problem or the exact opposite, Elon Musk's response to the anti-Tesla ETF closing its doors, his decisions to change the name of Twitter to X and to get rid of the bock functionality, and how he's paid more taxes than anyone in history, why a wealth tax is unworkable, how Justin has absolutely, positively not given up on NitroNote, Math Academy's free-response functionality, whether Jason's approach to automated testing has changed, and the upcoming marketing push, how Justin once brought down his company's entire network (by accident), Colby's work on his game's tech tree and how his play testing is working out, the movie The Godfather and the Hulu series The Bear. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss the rise in criminal activity and related factors that have led to the reduction in commercial activity and the general downward spiral of San Francisco, whether there's an agenda to end remote work, why people are avoiding the news, and how subscription-news outlets are eventually captured by their audience, thoughts on the TechZing Discord, what Justin and Jason do and don't enjoy about their work, thoughts on marketing Math Academy, various lifting strategies and what they're supposed to achieve, Justin's glucose charts, Project Superhero updates, why Justin loves Korean romantic comedies, and the movies Grand Toursimo and Barbie. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's multi-pronged approach to getting healthy, Jason's surf lesson and back injury, Math Academy's Twitter strategy, new screencast help system, and legal counsel, how Colby helped Justin solve a tricky technical problem and how building a multiplayer video game has leveled-up his coding skills, Justin's plan to implement NitroNote's real-time collaboration using Elixir, and the shows Mark Cavendish: Never Enough, Star Trek: Lower Decks, My Name, and Cyberpunk Edgerunners.. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss the idea of using List for show notes and thoughts on how to build in real-time collaboration, why working for a FANG would probably suck, the challenge that kids present at different ages, the potential progress on age reversing chemicals, and the tech founder who is trying to reverse his own aging process, why Justin thinks hiring a personal chef is a super hack, how extended lifespans could help balance out the dropping replacement rates, the theory that K-pop stars are causing South Korea's low replacement rate, Justin's continued streak of alcohol/coffee abstinence and his plan to better manage his blood sugar, whether and where to do another TZ Summit, Math Academy's seasonality, and growth and plans to create a series of number-sense games, the shows Strange New Worlds, White House Plumbers, The Big Door Prize, and Silo, the movies Extraction and Extraction II, and the YouTube show Pitch Meeting. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss Jason's recent trip to Utah, the molecular biologist who claimed he worked on exo-biospheric organisms, whether "disclosure" is happening soon, Justin's zero-beer hack, Jason and Colby's experience racing high-performance cars at Speed Vegas, the weirdness of The Weekend concert and why it makes Justin worry about the future, the latest with List/Nitro, why Jason doesn't comment on some HN math discussions, what he learned from Colby's Linear Algebra diagnostic, and why he's excited about Colby's game, why taking venture capital will likely kill your company, why Justin loves the game Paper Mario, and Jason's thoughts on Wes Anderson's latest movie Asteroid City. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss why Justin is trying to give up coffee and alcohol, the odd side effects he experiences when drinking (and not drinking) coffee, how Jason hit a wall with his weight loss, Justin's progress with List/NitroNote, the latest with Colby's game and how his first year at college went, why large companies can't innovate, more on the Musk/Zuckerberg cage match, recent progress in cryopreservation, Jason's thoughts on the possibility of an AI future, the shows SAS Rogue Heroes and Silo, and the Tetris documentary. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss Jason's trip to Palo Alto, the prospect of a Zuckerberg/Musk cage match, the TITAN submarine tragedy, the new direction of List/NitroNote and how implementing dark mode has reignited Justin's enthusiasm for the project, the release of the Math Academy proof editor, why Justin can no longer talk to Georgie about his projects, the Reddit kerfuffle and the fundamental misalignment between commercial social networks and their users, why solving imaginary problems is so common in technology, whether life was better before the Internet, and finally why Justin enjoys Ted Lasso and Jason doesn't. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's short-lived List/Nitro Notes partnership, his plans moving forward and a new brand concept, reactions to some of the predictions made on the Discord channel including what numbers Jason thinks Math Academy will hit by this time next year, the likely fallout of a full or partial UFO/UAP disclosure, the latest project superhero updates, the compounding evidence in favor of the Lab Leak hypothesis and why Jason thinks the story is so important, the shows Fubar, Manifest, and Schmigadoon, and the documentaries Arnold and Tour de France: Unchained. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss project superhero progress, the supplements Zinc-L-Carnosine, GlyNac (Glycine, N-acetyl-cystine), and Hyaluronic Acid, and the blood analysis service Inside Tracker, the latest with List, including image support, a new name for the product, and a new partner, Math Academy's countdown to breakeven and how Jason and Sandy have been funding the company to date, Jason's misgivings about hiring a PR firm, the emotional toll of customer communication, hacking the MathJax layout engine, and Sandy's concerns about system scalability, Justin's experience on a company retreat with 7 moms, the new process for generating cover art, and the claims made by an intelligence analyst whistleblower concerning recovered alien craft and what it may all mean.. Artwork by https://sonsofcrypto.com. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss their respective weight-loss journeys, the weight-loss app Lose It, the power of combing concrete goals with an effective process, the importance of attacking problems at their root cause, why Jason believes most people suffer largely because they're unwilling to accept responsibility and solve their own problems, the loss of purpose for males and the consequences for society, why generative AI can't seem to generate Justin's face, whether Jason's hold-the-line position on Math Academy can be made into a manageable pick-a-fight marketing strategy, what's left to do before an HN launch, why Sandy serves the role of project manager, how Jason is going to implement proofs and how he was wrong about encompassing topics, how Justin is adding image support to List (and why it's all Jason's fault), and the shows Silo, Slow Horses, 100 Foot Wave, Barry, and the Rookie. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss the latest with PlayStrong and TrueSpace, improving the Math Academy diagnostic communications, the lowering of standards and lack of honesty in modern education, Justin's workout struggles, Jason's inner trial lawyer, Justin's idea for using AI to generate weekly cover art, Justin's new login strategy, optimizing Math Academy's response times, when shoplifting comes to town, and why, despite his antics, Elon Musk is by far the most important person alive. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss how Jason lacks an inner voice and how his brain work generally, Jason's recent knee problem, Justin's solitary ping-pong workout, what current AI can and can't to it, Justin's AI ping-pong story, the potential negative impact of AI companions on the next generation, AI, genetic engineering, and futurism, the challenges and likely downsides of AI regulation, the latest with Math Academy, Justin's continual disappointment with Star Trek: Picard, the series Barry, and why Jason is excited about Rogue Heroes. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss the latest progress on Operation Superhero, Jason's new iPad, Justin's calculated life expectancy (it doesn't look good!), an update on PlayStrong, setting the terms for the AGI bet, the potential boom and doom if AGI is realized, how Sandy solved the Math Academy email problem, and the shows Unstable and Perry Mason. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss Balaji's BTC bet, Jason's problem with "frameworks", Areli's gymnastics, why Justin wants to increase his bet that full AGI will be achieved within the next 5 years, PlayStrong's recent success, Math Academy's positioning and the new diagnostic report, the shows The Consultant and DragonBall Z (Abridged), and how The Mandalorian and Start Trek: Picard both suck now. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss Star Trek, Math Academy, PlayStrong, List, SVB, the Wuhan Lab Leak, and Operation Superhero. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin talks with Jack Ellis, co-founder of Fathom Analytics, about how two indie founders were able to get their indie analytics project installed (and scaled) on over 500k websites. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss the two HN comments that led to a recent surge in Math Academy subscribers, what remains to be done before there's a proper Show HN post, the tradeoffs of the pick-a-fight marketing strategy, and the possibility of setting up a Math Academy Discord, using a documentary as a marketing tool, Justin turning 54 and what age he is in his head, the massive efficiency gain of hiring an expert to mentor you through an unfamiliar technology, and the shows The Last of Us, Shrinking, Wolfpack, and Outerbanks. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss why Justin is so inspired by his day job and his big marketing idea for the company, Math Academy's accreditation, the Math Academy drip-email system, and addressing Math Academy feedback, thoughts on the article Fundamental Math for Game Developers, the recent tech layoffs, the challenge of managing remote workers, the social problems that AI can't solve, and Jason's trip to Cancun.. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss ElevenLabs speech synthesis technology and the brave new world of AI-generated audio and video, recent advances in anti-aging research, the prospect of creating a Math Academy course in Geometric Algebra and the power of niching down, the benefits of SQLite being built from scratch, the Math Academy moat, how email is going to be the primary user experience for Math Academy parents, Sandy's role in Math Academy and how she keeps Jason on the rails, what Colby is learning by building Galactic Conquerors, the shows The Last of Us, and The Shooter, the documentaries Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street, and Don't F*ck With Cats, why Justin likes Korean movies, why Jason and Izzy are going to AlienCon, and how Izzy is getting back to creating animations, how much Justin liked The Boys, and Jason's recent Escape Room experience with his daughter Areli. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason talk about the future of AI, its potential near-term impact on coding and technology, and a bet on whether AGI will be achieved within the next 5 years (mark your calendars, You People!!), the cost and benefits of serverless vs cloud vs bare metal, why Justin has decided to focus on PlayStrong over List, the potential market and why he plans to build rather than buy, the latest with Math Academy, some thoughts on product market fit and where growth really comes from, the shows The Recruit, Madoff, The Protector, and Extraordinary Attorney Wu, Musk, Twitter, and why Justin can no longer buy a Cybertruck, the bureaucratic bloat that encumbers big business and government, and finally how Jason's daughter doesn't give a [bleep] what you think.. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss why Justin moved (yet again), the surprising success of Playstrong and why Jason thinks Justin should consider doubling down on it, an update on Math Academy and the plan for the next few months, the latest release of Colby's game and how his first quarter at college went, how Ben Boyter's Fediverse project went sideways, and the shows Andor and The Recruit. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss how Justin is getting good at Twitter, yet another example of why emojis seem kinda necessary, what Justin learned from List's recent marketing launch, where he should be spending his time, and whether he should build in the open or not, recent Math Academy milestones, why Jason isn't currently focused on marketing, Jason's question-rendering problem, how the TZ Discord is like The Lone Gunmen from the X-Files, Jason's communication efforts or lack thereof, making decisions using data, the prospect of recent AI advancements, hitting approximate breakeven with Math Academy, why Sandy wants Jason to move the marketing site to Webflow, Justin's new MacBook Pro, why we don't need new technology, just less dust, how the M1 doesn't support multiple monitors, how Jason is forcing his daughter Izzy to watch old sci-fi movies with him - The Blob, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, King Kong, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and War of the Worlds, and finally how The Quatermass Experiment scared Justin to death when he was a kid (and probably still would).. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss how Justin is preparing List for the next big launch, why he paid an editor to edit his blog post, and some upcoming development challenges, the Math Academy money-back guarantee, building features to reduce customer support, what Jason likes about Andor and why he finds so many of the recent superhero and science fiction movies and tv shows lacking, why Justin is offended by Elon Musk's meme habits, and Jason's Twitter bet.. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, why Justin thinks he's finally found the right project with List, and Math Academy's current growth trajectory. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, why Justin thinks he's finally found the right project with List, and Math Academy's current growth trajectory. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss Math Academy since the Washington Post article, Ben Boyter's code analysis tool, and Justin's failed attempt to onboard Jason to List. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's progress on List (formerly known as TaskFlow), Jason's idea that List should be renamed to ListyMcListface, the Washington Post article about Math Academy, the subsequent traffic, and the emotional rollercoaster of it all. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin & Jason talk about TaskFlow's rebranding to List, Colby's TechZing interview, Jason's thoughts about Colby going to college, and Math Academy's surprise launch on Hacker News. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin talks with Colby Roberts about his game Galactic Conquerors, and asks various questions submitted by TechZing listeners. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss the latest with Taskflow, Colby's game, and Math Academy, as well as the movies American Sniper, Wrath of Man, Crisis, the documentary House of Hammer, and the series Invincible. Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss the latest progress on TaskFlow, Math Academy, and Colby's video game.
Join our Discord, chat with us and fellow listeners! https://discord.gg/2EbBwdHHx8
Justin and Jason discuss how Justin's return to music after a long break and without proper equipment seems to have unleashed a new level of creativity, his recent challenges with TaskFlow and specifically the hand-to-hand combat he's been engaged in with contentEditable, how Colby's internship has been progressing and the YC-inspired project/venture that Jason has set up for him, the latest with Math Academy and how Jason resolved the Stripe custom-payments integration issue, and finally the movie The Gray Man and the streaming series The Terminal List.
Justin and Jason discuss why Justin had to take some time off from working on TaskFlow, the importance of momentum and the performance improvements that have resulted from the simplified FastNode data model, the latest with Math Academy, the problem with large updates, and the resulting communication problems they incur, how Colby's internship is working out, the problems with Jason's MacBook Pro and the how Jason and Sandy binged 10 episodes of The Offer.
Justin and Jason discuss Jason's recent trip to Belize, Jason's literature review of SEO and CRO, Justin's work on the TaskFlow DOM and how to make it work in a real-time collaborative context, the latest with Math Academy, Jason's sleepy feet, and a little bit about various tv shows.
Justin and Jason discuss the reasons why Justin feels his past startup efforts fell short, the user interface, data model and future use cases of TaskFlow, the new gamification model for Math Academy and how the system has been made more responsive and efficient, and the shows Stranger Things, The Boys, and Severance.
Justin and Jason discuss why Justin is having so much fun working on TaskFlow and some potential features and functionality, the importance of refining the inner loop of a product and making the experience customizable, Mark's top three frustrations with his Math Academy experience, how Jason is making the system more efficient and responsive, why Justin is simultaneously skeptical about whether Math Academy will ever be released and why he thinks it's going to be HUGE, why Justin thinks it should be debuted on Product Hunt (if it's ever done), Jason's idea for creating user-story videos, why he's held out so long on releasing Math Academy publicly, and why he prefers Stanger Things to Severance, and finally, why Justin doesn't watch anything anymore.
Justin and Jason discuss the TechZing Discord server, the rebirth of TaskFlow, why Justin loves Laravel, Jason's approach to designing UI, why he wants to grow Math Academy without hring a lot of people and the latest improvements to the software, the series WeCrashed and Severance, and the heatmap software HotJar.Episode Notes
Justin and Jason discuss Areli’s push to be a division I gymnast, why Justin is moving back to London, what he’s doing with Georgie’s online course and how his trainer is too busy trading crypto to train him anymore, the latest with Math Academy, how Jason hacked together a math expression parser and evaluator, how to keep students motivated and making progress, the disaster that was this year’s college admission’s process, the shows Slow Burn, Fyre, We Crashed, Contact, Erin Brokovich, The Dropout, Super Pumped, and Severance, and why Jason STILL hasn’t managed to set up his new MacBook Pro.
Episode Notes Justin and Jason discuss Areli's push to be a division I gymnast, why Justin is moving back to London, what he's doing with Georgie's online course and how his trainer is too busy trading crypto to train him anymore, the latest with Math Academy, how Jason hacked together a math expression parser and evaluator, how to keep students motivated and making progress, the disaster that was this year's college admission's process, the shows Slow Burn, Fyre, We Crashed, Contact, Erin Brokovich, The Dropout, Super Pumped, and Severance, and why Jason STILL hasn't managed to set up his new MacBook Pro.
Justin and Jason discuss the fire that burned down Joe’s house, the death of Morning Brief, what killed AppIgnite, why Justin is leaving his mountain life behind, the latest with Math Academy, why Jason thinks Money Ball is the best startup movie ever made, Justin’s desire to start recording music again, and why Jason still hasn’t managed to set up the MacBook Pro he got for Christmas.
Episode Notes Justin and Jason discuss the fire that burned down Joe's house, the death of Morning Brief, what killed AppIgnite, why Justin is leaving his mountain life behind, the latest with Math Academy, why Jason thinks Money Ball is the best startup movie ever made, Justin's desire to start recording music again, and why Jason still hasn't managed to set up the MacBook Pro he got for Christmas.es go here
Justin and Jason discuss the possibility of Jason bringing on a new developer to Math Academy, how Jason is allergic to any kind of bureaucracy, formality or scheduling, the challenge of building newsletters for certain verticals, Justin’s anticipated pivot towards customized newsletters and premium memberships, what colleges Colby is applying to, how difficult it is to get into a decent computer science program these days, and the TV show The Boys.
Episode Notes Notes go heJustin and Jason discuss the possibility of Jason bringing on a new developer to Math Academy, how Jason is allergic to any kind of bureaucracy, formality or scheduling, the challenge of building newsletters for certain verticals, Justin's anticipated pivot towards customized newsletters and premium memberships, what colleges Colby is applying to, how difficult it is to get into a decent computer science program these days, and the TV show The Boys.
Episode Notes Notes go hereJustin, Jason and Joe discuss Morning Brief, Math Academy, and ... a lot of other stuff.
Justin and Jason discuss why Justin is reinvigorated about a premium version of Morning Brief and some of the new features that are on deck, how the first few weeks of the Math Academy beta launch have been going, and thoughts on how to structure and run a startup.
Episode Notes Justin and Jason discuss why Justin is reinvigorated about a premium version of Morning Brief and some of the new features that are on deck, how the first few weeks of the Math Academy beta launch have been going, and thoughts on how to structure and run a startup.
Justin and Jason discuss the launch of the Math Academy online learning system and the pivot of Morning Brief.
Justin and Jason discuss the launch of the Math Academy online learning system and the pivot of Morning Brief.
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Justin and Jason discuss Jason’s trip to the Pacific Northwest and Colby’s first college tour, why kids are maturing more slowly these days, the launch of Morning Brief, initial feedback from users, pricing, and thoughts on the future, the implementation of the Math Academy knowledge-graph algorithm and preparing for the upcoming commercial launch, John Carmack’s article on static analysis and the relationship between code size and code quality, Jason’s recent efforts to remove old and unused code from the Math Academy codebase and thoughts on how to better modularize code in a large web application, using a job service like Amazon SQS to process non-real-time tasks, how Justin injured himself gardening, why Jason is teaching his 13-year-old daughter calculus over the summer, the first legitimate math research done by a Math Academy high-school student, and billionaires in space.
Justin and Jason discuss the Morning Brief launch strategy, brand concept, and development roles, the difficulties of launching the Math Academy diagnostic in time for the summer program, why Jason had to develop an animation studio for his content team, the underrated “fast zombie” series Black Summer, the sad reality that while everyone in the media seems to have an opinion on the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis, few are familiar with the basic facts, and likewise for the UAP phenomenon.
Justin and Jason discuss why Jason isn’t planning to use Twitter as a marketing channel, personalized learning and the future of education, how and why the SAT and ACT are useful for college admissions despite their flaws, the orthogonal nature of student aptitude vs. consciousness, semantic tagging and the difficulty of categorizing text, reasons behind the sudden rise in UFO coverage in the media, the downside of always playing the skeptic, the potential of crypto-social networks services like BitClout, binary vs. probabilistic thinking, the ongoing collateral damage caused by Elon Musk’s tweeting, the challenge of building an efficient and accurate adaptive diagnostic math test and the prospect of adding coding exercises to Math Academy, why the Wuhan lab leak is the biggest story of our time, why the media screwed it up so badly and the dangers of gain-of-function research on human pathogens.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s two-week kidney stone ordeal, why Jason thinks Twitter is probably more distraction than it’s worth, the 6 levels of automated learning systems, how Justin and Joe plan to fund Morning Brief with a custom Kickstarter-like campaign, Brandon Sanderson’s lectures on writing fantasy and science fiction, Superhuman’s methodology for attaining product-market fit, how Jason is still paying off technical debt incurred over two years ago, the power and promise of Math Academy’s dynamic diagnostic tool, California’s boneheaded attempt to kill off gifted programs, accelerated academics and standardized college-entrance exams, the 60 Minutes story on UAP’s, why the gain-of-function research performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the likely origin of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the TV series Invincible and Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead.
Justin and Jason discuss the radically accelerated computer-science course sequence that Jason created for his Math Academy students, why PHP is like the C of the web, the character Scotty Jackson is creating for Morning Brief, Justin’s foray into crypto trading, thoughts on the future of NFT’s, the story of how Jason was finally able to buy the domain mathacademy.com and why the .com TLD still rules the day, the hypothesis that the laws of physics are evolving, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Young Sheldon, and the Ken Burns documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, Jason’s upcoming interview on Donn Felker’s podcast, why starting a podcast is an inefficient content development strategy for startups, how the Math Academy system’s adaptive algorithms will create a personalized and optimal learning plan for each student, and how Jason is implementing a free-response evaluator for math problems.
Justin and Justin discuss how and why Jason is reviving his long-abandoned blog and Twitter account and how he’s planning on building an audience for the launch of Math Academy, the First1000 newsletter, and some of the strategies utilized by the companies that have been profiled, the PDF Zero to Users, whether deferred tuition offered at boot camps like Lambda School is a good idea and the upside of buying and selling equity in individuals, the possibility of rebranding and relaunching the podcast, how the pandemic killed MV Code Club and the status of Jason’s crypto-trading project, the massive content development project that is Math Academy, why Justin is obsessed with the thumbnail creation service he’s building for Morning Brief, how to alter a large and highly active table in MySQL, how bad the series Travellers is and how good The Sinner is, and the upcoming TV sci-fi series Foundation.
Justin and Jason talk about their return after a 9-month hiatus, getting vaccinated and getting back into shape, Chris Schwarz’s novel The Cache and the character inspired by Jason’s son Colby, the origin and surprising spread of the luck surface area, why Justin has stopped working on TaskFlow, is saying goodbye to Nugget and his new foray into developing Roblox Games, how Jason’s daughter is growing a following for her animated stories and fiction writing, the monster project that is Math Academy, and Justin’s new project with Joe Stech called Morning Brief.
Justin talks with Adam Wathan creator of Tailwind CSS about distribution, the journey from 0 to $2m, and startup lessons learned playing in death metal bands.
Justin talks with Justin Jackson co-founder of transistor.fm about the importance of catching a good market wave.
Also Mentioned: Justin Vincent’s Indie Founder Bootcamp
Justin and Jason discuss their likely demise due to the pandemic, the advanced computer science course that Jason is implementing, the latest on Justin’s startup course and the importance of taking action, the latest on Math Academy, and how Justin corned the carrot market in Roblox.
Justin and Jason discuss how Jason shorted the COVID-19 crash, the winners and losers of the new normal and what the post-pandemic future may look like, how the shutdown has affected the Math Academy program and the latest with the software, the progress on TaskFlow and the what’s new with Nugget, the TV show Devs and Barry, and how closely the show Stranger Things mapped to Jason’s childhood, Grimes and Elon Musk, Justin’s new video-game addiction, and the Unreal 5 demo.
Justin and Jason discuss the novel coronavirus, how Justin is adapting to his new mountain lifestyle, Jason’s crazy, high-risk portfolio, the latest on Math Academy, the challenge and importance of writing simple code, Justin’s continuous glucose monitor, Grimes and her evil AI pun, Justin’s strategy for creating three things that help each other, and his idea for a productivity app.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s impending move to the mountains and what life will be like living there, how Justin is throwing off his mental chains, why you should take advice from successful people with a grain of salt, the importance of taking time off, working with the Web Audio API, the messy development process of the original iPhone, the General Magic documentary, how startups are responsible for most technology innovation, the history of Slack, Justin’s new podcast, and predictions for the new decade.
Justin and Jason discuss the Cybertruck debacle, why Justin is moving to a mountain hideaway, Jason’s plans for taking the Math Academy software to the next level, the importance of engaging in R&D even if most of what’s developed is thrown away, the Avie Tevanian Oral History, the brilliance of John von Neumann and the potential of the human race, the Legion rap battle, the Shelby American documentary, how any design that’s too radical is almost always rejected, the NeXT Computer story, how Jason uses emotion as a guide for context switching, and the modern technology that has eliminated a go-to plot device.
Justin and Jason discuss Jason’s struggle with juggling multiple projects, the latest on the crypto project, Justin’s predictions for his son Jack and a hard lesson for Jason’s son Colby, Justin’s new plans for Speak, Justin’s obsession with Occulus Quest and why he loves the Impossible Burger, an update on Operation Superhero, and the latest with Math Academy.
Justin and Jason discuss Speak and Justin’s thoughts on how to market it, why entrepreneurship isn’t for most people, the latest on Jason’s crypto-trading project and Math Academy, the motivations for mathematical proofs and why mathematician’s do what they do, and the mythology of the 10X engineer.
Justin and Jason discuss filmmaking with an iPhone and the power of the Filmic Pro app, the latest with Justin’s secret business widget, the Bob Lazar documentary on Netflix and his interview with Joe Rogan, Justin’s love of The Orville and other streaming recommendations, the summer math course Jason is teaching and how he’s tutoring his niece in calculus, the content and algorithms being developed for the Math Academy system, the importance of being challenged, the upcoming Washington Post article on Math Academy, what’s happening with OMG, how Luck Surface Area showed up in Gabriel Weinberg’s book Super Thinking, and why Justin likes the iPhone app Productive.
Justin and Jason discuss Peldi’s success with Balsamiq, the site Indie Hackers, the book Crossing the Chasm, Justin’s launch strategy for his secret project, how Justin got help with his “maths”, the advantage of growing slowly and focusing on developing a product that your users love, the summer Math Academy course that Jason is teaching on proofs and group theory, Justin’s desire to encourage entrepreneurship in any company he starts, and tradeoffs in database design.
Justin and Jason discuss Jason’s elbow surgery, Justin’s secret project, the deal he made with his wife, why he’s patenting the technology, and how he ended up building it himself, Gabriel Weinberg’s new book, a postmortem on SOLVE 2019, the growth of MV Code Club, the movie The Founder, and Jason’s automated-trading project.
Justin and Jason discuss Jason’s new puppy, when “quick and dirty” works and when it doesn’t, the latest with Math Academy, the transition from a subject-based to a course-based approach to content development, how Jason works with his remote developer, “The Math Academy Way”, fun and profit with 3D printing, Jason’s frustrations with trying to capture real-time crypto data, how to automatically and instantaneously restart a crashed Linux process, and the frustration of having to continually relearn Linux administration.
Justin and Jason discuss Sean Murphy’s extension to the Luck Surface Area, Gabriel Weinberg’s mental models, Uber’s impending IPO, how Jason is adopting a dog, the book Justin is writing called Founder First, the endemic nature of overengineering, the latest with the Math Academy program and software, why Jason is dabbling with cryptocurrency HFT, Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, and Justin’s former life as a musician.
Justin and Jason discuss how injuries have derailed Operation Superhero and Jason’s strategy for moving forward with the Math Academy online system.
Justin talks with Bryan Helmig (CTO and co-founder of Zapier) about Zapier’s genesis and how they won their first 10 customers.
Justin and Jason discuss the introduction of rolling batches in Nugget, signs that your startup project is about to fail, the book Blondie 24, Playing at the Edge of AI, how John Humphrey generously acquired MathAcademy.net for Jason, the impending arrival of Joe Stech’s book Compelling Science Fiction, the importance of having a MacGuffin in your life, the benefits of working on a project, why most successful entrepreneurs started with something small and why you should start your company without the expectation of raising money, scaling the Math Academy program to the high school and to other school districts, recent progress on the Math Academy software platform, the latest on Operation Superhero, the importance of moving forward despite setbacks and disappointments, Jason’s relative unsuccess at saying No to projects, the independent sci-fi movie Prospect, and how Jason and his daughters met Captain Marvel on Halloween.
Justin and Jason discuss the prerequisite viewer that Jason’s building for Math Academy, Rob Walling’s Tiny Seed, Chamath Palihapitiya’s advice to grow slow and to grow real, why Jason’s latest hire on Upwork didn’t work out, Justin’s Nugget webinar and why he’s no longer going to employ squeeze marketing, how Jason is back writing code again and loving it, Math Academy’s high-school curriculum and overall program, late bloomers, and nature vs. nurture as it relates to mathematics and mathematical talent.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s tendency to argue with himself about code, the strategy board game that Jason and Colby are building together, the JS 13K Game challenge, Jason’s advice on how to find inexpensive talent on Upwork and how Justin might include these ideas on Nugget, how parents think about after-school coding programs, the Hacker News post asking startup employees how much they made on an exit, the funded vs. the bootstrapped startup model and Jason’s plans for Math Academy, the latest on Operation Superhero and the unreasonable effectiveness of strength training.
Justin and Jason discuss some new feature concepts for Nugget and Jason’s plans for the Math Academy software, the Masters Of Scale Uncut Interview with Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, how Jason’s house is like the Tardis, the state of Justin’s cryptocurrency portfolio, Elon Musk’s fight against short sellers, top-down vs bottom-up automation, why MV Code Club’s future is looking bright, Jason’s most underrated movies list, real trends vs. fake trends, the key to happiness, the latest on Operation Superhero, finding underpriced freelance talent, why Jason isn’t crazy about the name Nugget, and the best genre of music for writing code.
Justin and Jason discuss the Nugget Mercury launch and some ideas on how best to assign mentors and configure batches, how Justin is helping Jason with the UX/UI of the new Math Academy website, Jason’s latest realizations on diet and exercise, Colby’s introductory computer science courses, Elon Musk’s slow-motion meltdown, how the Luck Surface Area found it’s way into yet another book and how Jason and Sandy’s work on Math Academy was profiled in the University of Chicago Magazine.
Justin and Jason discuss how Nugget users are validating their ideas, why and how Justin posted tracks from his old band Moneypenny, Jason’s haircut fiasco, the acid-trip television show Legion, why Jason likes the television show Bosch and why Justin likes Rick and Morty, the movie Mission Impossible Fallout and thoughts on the Mission Impossible series, the progress on Operation Superhero and the relationship between metabolism, obesity, and testosterone, what needs to happen before Jason can launch the Math Academy software and his plans for the future.
Justin and Jason discuss Jason’s new house, Justin’s desire to get back into music, the latest with Operation Superhero and Math Academy, the road to launching the commercial version of the Math Academy software and the launch of Nugget 3.0.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s electric car, what happened at Solve 2018, how the 8th graders just took the AP Calculus BC Exam, why Jason isn’t going to teach anymore, Justin’s new approach to designing a product, how Jason set up the management structure of his content teams, the local startup that Jason is helping and how first-time founders almost always do all the wrong things, the latest with Nugget, Justin’s workout plans and Jason’s ongoing debate with his trainer, how to live a healthy life, how Jason doesn’t really “hang out” with anyone, and the device that makes suggestions to you while you’re just falling sleeping.
Justin and Jason discuss how Jason is finally buying a house, the reinvention of Nugget, Operation Superhero (Part Deux), the software platform that powers Math Academy and the latest with the program, the importance of building a startup around your passion, Blue Origin, the Tesla productions delays, Jason’s OmiseGO investment, the latest on MV Code Club, how not to get old, Lost in Space, Electric Dreams, Black Mirror, The Walking Dead and SuperTrooper 2.
Justin and Jason discuss crypto as a tradable asset and as an investment (specifically Justin’s love affair with OmiseGo – OMG), the latest with the Math Academy program and the software platform, Justin’s plans for Nugget, ORMs vs SQL, Stranger Things, the best X-Files episode (Bad Blood), why Jason dropped off The Walking Dead bandwagon, why Justin loves The Last Man on Earth, the movies The Big Short and The Founder, and the TV show Electric Dreams, snowboarding, wireless charging, the computer Colby built, comparing Fitbit stats, Sandy’s diet plan for Jason, and why Justin is excited about the future.
Justin and Jason discuss CRISPR’s impact on curing diseases and on building muscles, the results of a promising new anti-aging drug, a pill that makes exercise obsolete, and a nanoparticle drug that turns calorie-hoarding white fat into calorie-burning brown fat, the TV show Future Man, the upcoming season of X-FIles, why Justin can’t go to movies, The Cheesecake Factory, Las Vegas, or country music concerts, Justin’s recent purchase of 500 OMG, trading cryptocurrencies and lessons from the Dotcom bust, how Justin got an article on Forbes, the changes to the technology and development team at Modern Teacher, Justin’s Nugget strategy, Jason’s plan to level-up Colby’s coding skills, the latest wiith Math Academy and how Jason is accelerating the development of the platform’s content and technology via outsourcing, when to use a modern Javascript framework, what Jason tracks with his new Fitbit and Justin’s struggle with exercise, how Jason met a real-life Mater, and what to watch out for when having your iPhone screen replaced.
Justin and Jason discuss the latest developments with Math Academy, Jason’s success with cryptocurrencies, Justin’s thoughts on Nugget and his upcoming startup course, why Phil is stuck in LA, Laravel and Vue.js, what Colby learned at computer camp, and what to do if North Korea launches a nuclear weapon.
Justin and Jason discuss SOLVE 2017, how Jason’s 7th-grade class took the AP Calculus test and other recent Math Academy successes, Jason’s return to algorithmic trading, Colby’s audition for Genius Junior, why Elon Musk seems to win at everything and Justin’s latest health/diet strategy.
Justin and Jason discuss how the English have lost their American accent and their plan to get the show back on a more regular schedule, Justin’s workout anti-pattern and his new 800 calorie diet, Jason’s plan to overcome some long-term injuries, the sudden appearance of a Nugget clone and Justin’s less-than-optimal reaction, the business Justin is starting with Georgie, the latest with the Math Academy, and why Justin’s prediction for the future of VR weight loss has yet to be proven.
Justin and Jason discuss why Justin wants a Vive and why he’s excited about the future of VR, Justin’s new swimming routine and his super-low heart rate, Jason’s “new” New Man Plan, the show’s Patreon campaign, how Jason is learning to play the piano using the app Yousician, the Nugget pivot of 2017, Mr. Robot, the latest with the Math Academy and some related publicity.
Justin and Jason talk to Joe Stech about his online magazine, Compelling Science Fiction.
Justin and Jason discuss comments from the previous two shows, Justin’s preoccupation with the election, how it affected his productivity and why Jason avoids spending too much time on the news, Justin’s plan for his first Nuggetcourse and his nagging doubts about the service, his recent health efforts, and his role at Modern Teacher, Jason’s three-year-old idea for an experience-based startup and its similarity to Airbnb Experiences, his plan to hold an end-of-the-year Math Academy competition at Caltech modeled after the MIT Integration Bee and his recent efforts to push the program forward, the movies Arrival and Passengers, the television shows The Walking Dead, Westworld, Mr. Robot and Black Mirror, Elon Musk’s plan to launch low-latency, worldwide satellite Internet, Britain’s new surveillance law, Jason’s recent purchase of Tesla shares, why Justin is worried about Elon Musk, and the security startup Defence for Startups.
This Shows Executive Producer @ $50 Donation
Joe Stech / Compelling Science Fiction
Rob Walling guest hosts this seminal episode to walk Jason and Justin down memory lane during which they discuss how Rob wouldn’t allow Jason to invest in Drip, Appignite, Pluggio, AnyFu, Uber, the interview wth Travis Kalanick, Nugget, the madness, luck surface area, entreporn, blog posts as lead gen and how to make yourself into expert on the web, Jason’s prescience on Tesla and Bitcoin, the interview with Patrick Collison, how they got started doing the podcast and what they’ve gotten out of it, the meaning of some of the funnier show titles, Operation Superhero, the failure that was Justin’s treadmill desk and how the show has evolved over the years.
Justin and Jason discuss why Justin decided to start pushing his Nugget users to launch their ventures (also known as “horsing”) and his plan for how to automate this process, lessons learned scaling Uber, Paul Erdos and the Erdos-Bacon number, the importance of just starting, thoughts on upselling the next level of Nugget services, the latest with the Math Academy pilot and the supporting software platform, the advantages of serving a higher purpose, and the fine line between embracing new tools versus falling victim to overengineering your dev stack.
Justin and Jason discuss Colby’s upcoming football season, a postmortem of their first Space Empires 4X game, how Colby keeps beating Jason at Star Realms and seemingly every other game they play, the latest with Nugget and why Ken and Justin are no longer working together, the latest developments with Math Academy, including Jason’s class, the documentary, the district pilot program, the software platform and Battle Math, an update on Jason’s (self-diagnosed) peripheral neuropathy, why the fathers of the Internet revolution want engineers to reinvent the web, the Scientific American article on how to increase your intelligence, how retirement contributes to physical and mental decay and why society is structured as a two-phase work/post-work system, why Jason believes in choosing quality of life over money, the positive effects of Justin’s newly structured work day and how John Humphrey helped Jason acquire BattleMath.com.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s new digs, the effects of taking a vitamin B-complex supplement on Jason’s (self-diagnosed) peripheral neuropathy, the launch of Nugget and Justin’s thoughts on it’s future, getting going again on Battle Math, Jason’s desire to play a space-opera style strategy game and how he ended up selecting Space Empires 4X (inspired by Stellar Conquest), Jason’s new workout plan, Justin’s struggle with diets and Jason’s theory on cheat days versus cheat meals, how MV Code Club is opening up it’s 4th location, Gabriel Weinberg’s post on mental models and the inclusion of Luck Surface Area, the summer math class Jason is teaching, the latest with Math Academy and Jason’s meeting with the Institute for Educational Advancement.
Justin and Jason discuss Colby’s drive to play quarterback and early sign’s of Jack’s athleticism, Justin’s new project – Nugget, why Jason believes his peripheral neuropathy may be caused by a B12 deficiency, the world’s biggest vertical farm, how the Swiss voted against Basic Income, why Jason doesn’t worry about the potential downsides of scientific advances, why he’s unsubscribing from all email lists, why he doesn’t blog or use Google+ anymore, and why he’s “getting rid of the crap”.
Justin and Jason discuss why Justin cancelled his membership at a local co-working space, lessons about weight loss and BMR destruction from The Biggest Loser, how Justin has returned to his Super Slow weight training program, Jason’s new machine-oriented training routine, dunking at SkyZone, why Jason left Uber and what his goodbye was like, the first anti-aging gene therapy, the assertion that a third of the nation’s cash is held by 5 U.S. companies, how to freeze people and bring them back to life, Jason’s story idea for an emergent AI, thoughts on Fear the Walking Dead, whether to believe claims that Elon Musk is a jerk, the latest with Math Academy and the first Ethereum-based company.
Justin talks to Robin Warren about his bootstrapped startup Corrello, a dashboard for agile teams using Trello.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s Soylent experiment and the diabetes-friendly shake he’s settled on called Keto Soy, finding the right diet plan, why Justin is splitting time between home and Cross Campus, Jason’s super madness and his new policy against taking on projects that originate from other people, the latest development processes implemented at Modern Teacher – leveraging Laravel’s ORM, test-driven development, hot-seat peer reviews, pull requests and Code Ship, recruiting mathematicians to serve as instructors for the Math Academy and the latest with the software platform, how Elon Musk is having the best week ever with the unveiling and pre-ordering of the Model 3 and the vertical landing of a SpaceX rocket on a drone ship, Ted Cruz’s Simpsons audition, Craig Venter’s minimal cell, why a rising number of startups have no plans to IPO, more evidence that the building blocks of life may have originated from interstellar space, the astrobiologist collecting unrecognizable beings from the stratosphere, recently discovered bacteria that eat pure electrons and plastic bottles, programming cells with Cello, the prospect of a proactive version of Alexa that asks questions and anticipates needs, the review of the HTC Vive, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and the Cheney’s One Percent Doctrine, the human-robot trust paradox, Alphabet’s two-legged robot, why Google is selling Boston Dynamics, whether software development itself will be automated, services that validate a physical address, an email address and a phone number, why the seeds of your destruction have been sown, The Walking Dead, how the FBI director puts tape over his webcam, the upcoming launch of Kite.com and Jason’s Catalina UFO tour.
Justin and Jason discuss the latest with Math Academy – Jason’s class, the district program and the software, temperpedic beds, the problem of living in the middle of a “fun” area of town, why Jason doesn’t want stuff and what he does want, Justin’s new “super router”, why getting a storage unit is generally a mistake, Phil’s hack for how to emotionally detach from books he needs to get rid of, the evolutionary advantage and repercussions of human curiosity, Duolingo and granular learning, why Jason thinks learning a foreign languages is rarely worth the time, Justin’s new work-at-home situation, how website design work is drying up, why future actors will have to compete with CGI versions of actors of the past, Justin’s idea to create AI from the DNA level, the path and prospect of strong AI, Jason’s desire to create a synthetic hedge fund using Collective2 and the prospect of a Trump presidency.
Justin, Jason and Phil discuss the Math Academy software and the latest with the rollout of the program, the silly idea that children are incapable of abstract thought at age 11, how to raise a creative child, Phil’s experience as an analyst for an angel fund and as a head TA in business school, learning from failure and success, what’s required in terms of a business plan or financial model to get funding, why Jason prefers to ignore competitors, the non-competition between Microsoft and Google, business models, not following for the aesthetic trap and various winning strategies, a brief history of Uber’s rollout, Justin’s futuristic UI concept for Twitter (think Minority Report) and the article where Jason was recently quoted about algorithmic trading.
Justin and Jason discuss why they decided not to publish that last show, Jason’s Christmas debacle, how we’re living in the future, the documentary An Honest Liar, how Dean Kamen is solving the world’s drinking water problem, solving problems solution first, the First Robotics competition, Jason’s recent addiction to the mobil game Hex Fvr, Gone Girl, the Bastard Executioner, Homicide Hunter, the Nerdist Podcast interview with Joe Kenda and the Detective podcast, why Jason receives so many emails about his algorithmic trading blog post, Justin’s new project, Jason’s idea of aggregating a handful of trading strategies on Collective2 into a fund of funds, Wealthfront and Betterment, the man who had virtually no brain, Jason’s new math class, the progress with the Math Academy and the software that’s going to power it, the financial pluses and minuses of working for a startup, the stress of running Slack, why Justin thinks the engineers at Slack might snoop on conversations and why Jason is skeptical, treating human disease with the CRISPR technique, The Strain, Nick Bostrom, Super Intelligence, the Open AI initiative and whether true artificial intelligence would have to be imbued with a fear of death.
Justin, Jason and Phil discuss how Phil got fit and why he got an MBA, the explanatory power of incentives, Jason and Phil’s time together in college, how nanobots in our brains will make us ‘Godlike’, why uploading your conscience will not make you immortal, creating an earth-sized virtual world, why we may not be able to find any alien neighbors, the anti-aging NAD fad, why Justin decided to kill Spoke and his one-month challenge.
Executive Producer: Ben Reyes
Justin, Jason and Colby discuss Colby’s strength training program, his view on the accelerated math class and why he designed his own football helmet and defensive playbook, the latest on the Math Academy, Justin’s 7-minute workout and his reinvention of Weight Watchers, Jason’s progress on Operation Superhero and his 3-week sprint concept and the latest on Spoke and Givetronic.
Justin and Jason discuss their decision to continue doing the show, why streaming is a pain in Justin’s ass and why the last show was so painful for him, Justin’s path to his latest project – Spoke, Jason’s jury duty service, getting Colby started on “lion-cub training”, the latest with MV Code Club, finding a developer for Givetronic, Colby’s defensive playbook, the latest with Operation Superhero, Justin’s new 7-minute workout and chiropractor, Jason’s criticism ofFear the Walking Dead, the book and upcoming movie The Martian, how most popular songs are written by a duo of middle-aged, Norwegian songwriters and the role of obsessiveness in achieving success.
Justin and Jason discuss why Jason thinks it may be time to put an end to the show, why Justin stopped working on Lyte and why he quit his low-calorie diet, the Chrome plug-in for motivation, nearsourcing work to Mexican consulting firms, Aaron Francis’ commentary on Entreporn, finding a developer for Givetronic, Jason’s thoughts on Bitcoin, the latest with the Math Academy, strength training Colby and why you don’t have to “protect” your startup idea.
Justin talks to Gabriel Weinberg about the re-release of his book Traction and the latest news on DuckDuckGo.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s new diabetes-reversing diet, the growing momentum of the Math Academy and Jason’s new madness, getting Lyte out the door, lessons learned through playing StarCraft that are useful in real life, using unfairness to your advantage, why IQ is more important than people like to admit and the status of Jason’s dual-n back experiment.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s secret project, Lyte, how he built it and what he sees as its future, the possibility of transforming the math class into a math academy, how Uber is making the world a better place, why inexpensive self-teaching and test-prep books are often better than their equivalent textbooks, Jason’s new color laser printer, Chris Sacca’s anti-portfolio, the U.S. defense department’s interest in hoverbikes, an interview with James Simons, how China is attempting to genetically engineer genius and Jason’s upcoming dual-n-back experiment.
Justin and Jason discuss the move from Perioscope to Meerkat, Justin’s health update and why he got rid of his treadmill, how Colby blew the curve on the math final, the field trip to Caltech and the visit from the district superintendent, BVP’s anti-portfolio, how to keep from reverting to the mean, teaching kids about money and investments, the story behind CryptoIQ, Justin’s “billion dollar” secret project, Jason’s idea of how to build the Memory Hole on top of Instapaper, Kurzweil’s cyborg predictions, the MagicLeap platform, the possibility of doing another TechZing Summit, the Outernet and whether its signal could be jammed, low-power devices running off WiFi and uBeam’s ultrasound charging technology, ideas on how to interview technical candidates, the difficulty of learning advanced mathematics on your own and whether Justin’s obsession with taking shortcuts has hamstrung him in other ways.
Justin and Jason discuss the technical issues of streaming the show using Periscope, the possible resurrection of Empath, Jason’s advising CTO strategy, fear-based parenting, Justin’s secret project and reserving a name in the app store, the Seasteading Institute, nature vs. nurture, the latest with Justin’s “get fit” effort and Jason’s injuries, the athletes who benefitted from Jason’s vertical training protocol, Jason’s spontaneous two-man TechZing Summit, the math team’s performance at the LA Math Cup, when parents take things too seriously, teaching calculus to the math class and plans for the future, the latest with MV Code Club, the upcoming TV shows Limitless, Fear the Walking Dead and Mr. Robot, the inaccuracies of The Imitation Game and Argo, how the story behind the killing of Osama Bin Laden is a myth, the lie about how Syria used chemical weapons against rebel forces and how easily people are manipulated by the media, the TV show The Blacklist and thoughts on streaming with Periscope.
Justin and Jason discuss Jason’s recent near-death experience and how his brother’s childhood friend has a small part on The Walking Dead, the Reddit button, how Jason is trading coding hours for Robocraft hours with Colby, kids and electronics, the iWatch and why people are always checking their phones, the essence of peopling, automatic birthday wishes and thank yous on Facebook, why everything that can be automated eventually will be, Patrick McKenzie’s new startup – Starfigher, remote working and productivity, the relationship between wealth, power and fame, the two federal agents who were indicted for stealing Bitcoins, the movie The Imitation Game, why the Caltech visit was postponed a week, negative social patterns and the heritability of personality traits, iZombie, how the editors of Basic and Applied Social Psychology are no longer accepting p-values, the Reproducibility Project, why null results tend not to be published as often, the latest with MVCC and Justin’s new workout regime at CATZ.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s recent purchasing debacles and his latest plan for getting healthy, the latest on Jason’s various injuries, Justin as Burger Meister, Meister Burger, the math team’s big success at Math Field Day, how Jason is connecting with Caltech’s Center for Teaching, Learning & Outreach, an update on the Battle Math card game, Justin’s TechZing breakfast, how everyone is seemingly trying to dunk, the problem of forgetting what you’ve read, how to capture selected text in a Titanium webview, the return of The X-Files, The Walking Dead spinoff series, why Jason can’t stomach shows like Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, why our brains love high ceilings, living off a dollar a day with Elon Musk and Tesla’s April Fool’s joke, the latest with MV Code Club, God’s Tweets, killing cancer cells with DNA nanobots, whether the human brain can ever fill up and the process of memory formation, recall and forgetting, why Jason is planning on cryogenically freezing himself, the new study that says it doesn’t matter how much time you spend with your kids, how inequality is far worse than you think and the prospect of a mostly robotic future.
Justin and Jason discuss the difficulty of finding a time to record the show, Justin’s walking-desk disaster, his new secret project and his thoughts on using Titanium, the latest on the MVCC, Justin’s movie concept, the show The 100, the roadblocks to getting God’s Tweets approved by the App Store, why you should build a Titanium app for Android and iOS at the same time, the benefits of decluttering your life, generating ten new ideas per day for ten days, the employment-status lawsuits against Uber and Lyft, the incredible growth of Uber’s engineering department, Jason’s ideas for a mobile note-taking app and for a site that teaches you how to do math proofs, the sites Sophia and Brilliant, the status of Battle Math and the latest with the math class.
Justin and Jason discuss the impending delivery of Justin’s walking desk and his health and fitness dilettantism, why Instapaper has become just another “to-do list” for Jason, their respective Hacker News reading strategies, the latest on MV Code Club, how the money raising process differs between celebrity and non-celebrity founders, why Jason pulled out of Empath as well as the crypto-exchange (AKA the “secret project”), why success requires focus, how multiple injuries have put Operation Superhero on temporary hold and the latest with the accelerated math class.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s short-lived madness about algorithmic trading, the book Building Algorithmic Trading Systems, using neural networks to predict the future price of Bitcoin, why Jason said no to doing the MIT Circuits & Electronics MOOC with his friend Phil, the unexpected benefits of working on toy problems, why teaching the accelerated math class is Jason’s favorite three hours of the week, the conditions under which accelerating kids can provide significant advantages and when it doesn’t, Colby’s “IQ” test and Ms. Extra Credit, moving God’s Tweets from a VPS to EC2, RDS and S3 and how changing Apple developer accounts caused a iOS/OSX/Titanium upgrade cascade, MaxCDN vs. Amazon’s CloudFront, tricks for developing professional-looking Titanium apps, the TED talk – Behind the Great Firewall of China and how Obama and Cameron are cracking down on encryption, why Jason, like most most security researchers, doesn’t believe North Korea was behind the Sony attack, why it’s a good idea to dismiss government claims when they fail to provide evidence, Seymour Hersh’s debunking of the USG’s claim that Syria used chemical weapons, the failed SpaceX Falcon 9 landing and Elon Musk’s recent announcement about the Texas Hyperloop experiment, Larry Summer’s response to Marc Andreessen’s tweet storm about secular stagnation, a listener’s app Happy Scales, why pursuing an academic career in math or science is the new monasticism, replicating the career paths of Elon Musk and Jeff Hawkins, the sudden handwringing about the future threat of strong AI, the series Extant, Black Mirror and Video Game High School, the problem with uploading your intelligence into a digital world, the cloned bull that changed, László Polgár and the nature nurture debate, Justin’s walking desk and the quest for workout economy, how Jason’s leg injury has put a pause on Operation Superhero and his philosophy of how to continue making progress (see Ray Liotta’s rant in Copland).
Grand Patron $100: David Walz (Thanks so much!)
Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s rebound project and the myriad questions Justin has about HFT (high-frequency trading), learning to code with CodeAvengers and CodeCombat, the latest on Operation Superhero and MV Code Club, scaling with Node.js at Uber, posting error messages to Slack and HipChat, scaling and managing servers at Digedu, Jason’s interview on Get Up and Code, why iXL didn’t work for the math team and how to setup a backup configuration using MySQL and EC2.
Justin and Jason discuss why Disco hasn’t worked out and what Justin has learned from the experience, balancing product development with sales and marketing, how to select and validate a business idea, the basics of algorithmic trading, how Jason increased his vertical jump by 8 inches, high and low adaptors, Justin’s desire for a walking desk, how to raise your IQ, the research in support of it, and Jason’s effort to keep the math team together.
Jason talks with Mike Walmsley, the founder and primary developer of the programming education site Code Avengers.
Justin and Jason discuss the summit and the prospect of hosting another one, whether growing the show would be possible or even make a difference, whether World War III could stop a rising population, how HP’s Thermal Inkjet printing is going 3D and how Google is developing cancer and a heart attack detector, Amazon Echo, the prospects for AI in the near term and the risks of achieving superintelligence, how Scientists made a telepathy breakthrough, the latest on Operation Superhero and the SAID principle, Justin’s diet and why he loves Space Nutrients, Jason’s new rules for Colby’s computer time and his recent tour of a local all-girls school, the latest with the math team, Justin’s private preschool future and what’s up with Jason’s various projects.
Justin and Jason discuss the TZ summit, the prospect of establishing a colony on Mars and what that process might look like, the prospect of an Ebola pandemic, betting on black swans and counterparty risk, why the TV show Lost was unable to close so many of it’s story lines, the idea for a productivity app modeled after Lost’s Swan computer, Justin’s vintage terminal app and his new cardio solution, what motivates people to change themselves, whether Justin has any regrets about selling Pluggio, why Jason gets satisfaction from helping other people and why he’s more excited about teaching the math class than any of his other projects, the fake legend of Walter O’Brien and Scorpion, the This American Life episode The Super, The Cracked Podcast, the upcoming content sites Nautilus, Quartz, Medium and Svbtle, productivity and anti-productivity habits, the apps Self Control, HabitRPG and EpicWin, an update on Operation Superhero, what happened to Jason’s screenplay concept, the latest with the math class, why Jason put learning electrical engineering on pause and the progress being made by MVCC.
Justin and Jason discuss the upcoming summit, the latest on Disco, Justin’s life with a newborn, the summit’s super sponsors, MV Code Club’s new location and possible sources of growth capital, how the brain can classify words during sleep and how people think more creatively when they walk, the book A Whack on Side of the Head, hitting the reset button in your brain, Jason’s progress on operation Superhero, Justin’s workout and non-diet diet, Justin’s favorite new tech site SciTechDaily, why Colby tanked his spelling test, Justin’s idea for a baby rocker that simulates a drive in a car, the fact that “luck surface area” is going to be in yet another book – “You:Rebranded“, the SyNAPSE Chip by IBM Mimics Brain and the mobile web app that Jason has been developing to monitor and manage Uber’s real-time systems.
Summit Super Sponsors
- Glenn Bennett / 250 big ones
- Aaron Night / 250 big ones
Justin and Jason speak with Dr. Doug McGuff about his book, Body by Science: A Research Based Program for Strength Training, Body building, and Complete Fitness in 12 Minutes a Week.
A special shoutout goes to Andy Chamberlain who emailed Justin with a heads up about Doug and the Body by Science protocol.
Justin and Jason talk with Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo, about his new book Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers.
Gabriel also appears in the following TechZing shows:
- 68 TZ Interview – Gabriel Weinberg & DuckDuckGo
- 91: TZ Panel – Phil Aman & Gabriel Weinberg
- 99: TZ Panel – Gabriel Weinberg & Peter Cooper
- 179: TZ Interview – Gabriel Weinberg / Blowing Up DuckDuckGo
- 225: TZ Interview – Gabriel Weinberg / The DuckDuckGo Step Function
Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s new baby and all of the related complications, an update on Jason’s weight-loss and fitness program and why he’s so skeptical of Justin’s 15-minutes-per-week workout, the new pullout math class for the 5th-grade math team, an update on Jason’s effort to learn electronics and how he couldn’t get Anki or Mnemosyne to display equations, the progress on the God’s Tweets iPhone app, why Empath has stalled out, how MV Code Club is all set to open a new location, and the status of the Battle Math card game.
Justin and Jason discuss the movie Guardians of the Galaxy and the show Halt and Catch Fire, why they both like the post-apocalyptic genre, the final dates for the TechZing Summit, a progress report on Operation Superhero, Justin’s “audacious goal” of starting a funk band, why Jason thinks Derek Sivers is wrong about keeping your goals to yourself, Jason’s electrical engineering learning experiment and his idea of posting his notes and problem solutions to the web using CircuitLab and MathJax, what is was about Stanford’s Neurogrid project that inspired Jason to learn electronics, how Jason’s MightyHive convertible note actually converted into equity and how his angel investment, MV Code Club, is opening a second location, the latest on Disco, why Justin enjoys doing devops using Salt, how Jason and Sandy are going to be teaching Algebra to 5th graders this year and Jason’s plans for the Battle Math card game, a contrarian view of MITx, Parkinson’s Law, whether it makes more sense to join an established but growing tech company or to just apply to YC, why Justin sold his Soylent, Jason’s recent physical and Lightbot – the app / game that teaches basic programming concepts.
Justin and Jason discuss Jason’s ambitious health and fitness plan, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s six rules of success, why Jason has decided to pursue his two long-time athletic goals of bench pressing 315 lbs and of dunking a basketball, Karch Kiraly’s athletic transformation at the age of 44, a few of the top vertical jump programs, the 42-year who added 9 inches to his vertical, the before and after videos of the kid who transformed himself into a dunking machine, Jason’s “before” video of his vertical jump, the vertical jump calculation, Justin’s exercise and diet plan and why he wants a picture of Elon Musk next to his bed, how 40’s can be the new 20’s, the TechZing Summit, the latest on Disco and why ownership is split equally among the founders, Jason’s life hack for learning electrical engineering and the progress he’s made so far, why your perceived limitations are almost all just in your mind, why Elon Musk is so successful, the girl who made it to the finals of America Ninja Warrior, how Colby learned to program in RobotC in his summer school class, the latest on Jason’s angel investment in the Mill Valley Code Club, the awesome job that Phillip Monet has done with the TechZing Wiki, Jason’s idea for doing a monthly TZ meetup in San Francisco, developing content for Empath, why God’s Tweets got rejected from the App Store and whether your life really changes that much after having a baby.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s upcoming trip to Mexico, their new low-sugar / high-protein diet and HIIT training regime, the TechZing Summit, how Justin has STILL not received hisSoylent, Jason’s interview on Bootstrapped with Kids, how Jason found a personal instructor to teach him electrical engineering, the latest on Jason’s math card game – Battle Math, why his iPhone project got rejected by the App Store, his recent visit to the Mill Valley Code Club and what’s happening with Empath, the latest with Disco and why Justin likes SaltStack, why most people will initially mock and dismiss audacious goals, but later be inspired by them, and how a season of “Daddy Ball” has lit a fire in Colby and why that’s a good thing.
Justin and Jason discuss the details of Jason’s angel investment in the Mill Valley Code Club, Jason’s weight-loss plan, the power of gradualism, the time required to form a new habit, the importance of short and long-term goals, accountability and positive feedback loops, how an article by Jason’s brother Jay was listed as one of The Atlantic’s top pieces of journalism, a little bit about the TechZing Summit, Lucid Dreaming, the Pasadena App Academy, how MIT flipped their physics classes, how Netflix is creating original content like Orange is the New Black and House of Cards, what makes Silicon Valley so damn funny, the Weissman Score, the Facebook outage, how US Marshals accidentally Replied All to a list of anonymous bitcoin auction bidders, why it may be time for a hard Bitcoin fork, how Colby is writing a RobotC tutorial for the Mill Valley Code Club and Jason’s expected-value argument against teaching a rigorous, proof-oriented Calculus to high school students and non-math majors.
Executive Producer: Ben Boyter Thanks Ben!
Justin and Jason discuss Jason’s recent trip to Disneyland, the latest progress on Disco, Jason’s first angel investment, how Justin has been slowly accumulating Bitcoin, finding a remote, junior Rails developer, the site We Work Remotely, Jason’s new weight-loss plan,StrongLifts, the TV shows Continuum and Halt and Catch Fire, some details on the TechZing Summit, whether it’s harmful to let young kids use iPads, how Jason spent his youth fighting BB-gun wars, shooting tennis ball cannons and juggling burning tennis balls, Justin and Georgie’s plans for a natural childbirth,how zapping your brain with gamma waves can induce lucid dreaming, the possibility of interviewing the founder of AirPair, why Jason wouldn’t consider himself an expert in Titanium (or just about anything else for that matter), why it’s hard to give time estimates when developing software, what makes hell banning a pain to implement, why Internet bullying is the result of people not having any “skin in the game”, the promise-payoff matrix, Uber’s $1.4B raise,how the ridiculous Bitcoin predictions of Mark T. Williams have (predictably) been proven wrong, the difficulty of decoupling emotion from investing, the untraceability of DarkCoin and ideas on how to trade all of the new cryptocurrencies, how it’s now possible to build a complete mobile platform on .NET using Xamarin and EC2, why having more developers slows down development and the latest progress on Digedu’s “No DB” implementation.
Justin and Jason discuss the TechZing Summit, the last session of Catalyst, Uber’s new office and Jason’s thoughts on Uber’s rapid growth, Justin’s “no DB” project, how options work at most venture-funded startups, getting compensated in convertible debt, Jason’s experience with AirPair and why you should never do a fixed-bid project, shutting down AnyFu and some lessons learned about premature scaling, the latest on Empath and Disco, Vagrant, RabbitMQ and Composer, Justin’s DIY Soylent experiment and the problem with Soylent’s distribution strategy, Jason’s recap of a year spent coaching the 4th-grade math team, the book Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, Justin’s idea for an ancestor constitution, how Occam’s razor is a statistical syllogism and thus a logical fallacy, why people who write their names with initials seem smarter, Jason’s frustration with how mathematicians dismiss any mathematics that isn’t about proving theorems, and Izzy’s struggle with self-confidence.
Justin and Jason discuss Jason’s night with the “Korean billionaires”, the 30 for 30 documentary The Opposition, the big Digedu demo, Justin’s excitement over Node.js and socket.io, why Jason turned down an IdeaLab company, how Justin finally sold Pluggio and the new side project he’s working on with Lance Jones and Joanna Wiebe called Disco, how CNBC contacted Jason about debating Mark Cuban on high-frequency trading, Jason’s phone call with Mark Groton and the subsequent Gawker leak, Empath and Jason’s YCombinator interview, the latest evidence debunking Washington’s claim about the Syrian sarin attack, and the possibility of hosting a TechZing summit.
Justin, Jason and special guest Ben Reyes discuss Ben’s investment in Tesla and investing in general, Bitcoin as a technology and whether Dorian is the real Satoshi, how experts found that Mt.Gox lost a mere 386 Bitcoin due to transaction malleability, pending comments on Hacker News, Justin’s new meme – “The Iceberg Strategy”, Jason’s trick for scrambling his own memories, why Notch has canceled talks with Oculus Rift, the upcoming Math Field Day, Jason’s idea for a math TCG (trading card game), why it’s okay to work on small problems, and the future of the show.
Jason talks with Nathan Hawkins about his new (TCG) trading card game Conjure, what it took to create it and how they’re bringing it to market.
Justin and Jason discuss why the show has been on a mini hiatus, the Spritz speedreading technology and the open source bookmarklet, Justin’s Catalyst experiment, the face behind Bitcoin, the denial and some confirmations by Los Angeles County deputies, what most likely happened at Mt Gox, autotrading crypto-currencies at Cryptotrader, the death of AnyFu, why Justin likes the idea of being an older dad, the latest at Digedu and what Jason is working on at Uber, the Tesla Gigafactory, Justin’s losing cryptocurrency investments, Peter Thiel’s talk at last year’s SXSW, teaching George Pólya’s problem solving heuristics to the math team, why Nick Bostrom thinks humans could become extinct and the television shows True Detective and Almost Human.
Justin and Jason discuss why they’re not going to change the name of the show, the unpaid bill that launched a thousand starships, the cryptography breakthrough that could make software unhackable, how GoPro is going public, Russia’s banning of Bitcoin, China’s large scale 3D printers, the breakthrough bionic hand that restores an amputee’s sense of touch, the latest on the math team, how Colby is socially distractible in the same way that Jason is, the news that Justin and Georgie are expecting, why so many projects seem to come to Jason and his upcoming meeting with a couple of billionaire investors, the math tutor who claims to be able to advance gifted kids from arithmetic through Calculus in 2 years and the guy who taught his 7-year old Calculus, the new Snowden interview that has been ignored by the major media, achieving a form of immortality with Eterni.me and whether Solyent is ever going to deliver.
Justin and Jason discuss Digedu’s latest technical hire, how Uber’s real-time team uses Github, the growth of Uber’s engineering team and what Jason has been working on, building software that never gets used and the three criteria by which to evaluate a job, the two most unrealistic aspects of the TV show 24, Jason’s latest trip to SF and why he doesn’t like to spend money, math team madness, Jason’s idea for how to share information within a large engineering department, how Tesla has completed it’s L.A.-to-New York charger network, the Bitcoin exchange arrests, how Jason finally got an email reply from that HFT firm, how Richard Feynman became such a great problem solver, how Digedu is moving from the Allman coding style to the K&R coding style, how Starmade has taught Colby the importance of prototyping, avoiding premature optimization and how to manage expectations, the animated TV series Star Blazers, the guy who offered Jason $300 for a link to his algorithmic trading website, the “good guy” discount, how the NSA and GCHQ are now targeting mobile apps, the Tor developer who may have become the first known victim of the NSA’s laptop interception program, how the FBI probably owns your TorMail inbox and how the UK porn filter blocks League of Legends update for having ‘sex’ in file name.
Justin and Jason discuss Digedu’s latest technical hire, Quizlet’s incredible feedback center, the PHP logging extension Datadog, the realtime dashboard that Jason built for Uber, why hackers haven’t been more creative in the types of targets they’ve gone after, when it makes more sense to buy TV shows than to it does to just watch them for free and sit through the commercials, the TV show Blacklist and how the actor James Spader makes it worth watching, how Justin has started watching The Walking Dead, the upcoming spinoff series and the comic book, Jason’s secret plan for super accelerating the 4th-grade math team and the online math drilling websites AdaptedMind and iXL, why it can be advantageous to push kids to master advanced math at an earlier age, Dropbox’s $10 billion valuation and reasons why the startup succeeded where others failed, Google’s moonshot projects, how value is created by doing, MicroConf, how Jason’s purchase of his remaining Uber options wiped out his family’s savings, how a $100 worth of Litecoin a year ago is worth $30,000 today, understanding the altcoin markets, why it’s important to always remain liquid, why Justin is calling peak Dogecoin, Proof Market, mutual companies and whether the concept could be applied to websites dependent on user generated content, how the NSA has devised a radio pathway into computers that aren’t connected to the Internet, how Jason has gone retro with Java and is loving it, the IntelliJ IDE and the DropWizard framework, an AnyFu update, the Catalyst game development strategy, the importance of energetic execution and complementary teammates, and why you must always remain cognizant of your enthusiasm half-life.
Justin and Jason discuss the animated series Archer and why it’s no longer going to be about spies, how the NSA is attempting to build a quantum computer, how a France-UAE satellite deal is shaky after NSA spy tech was discovered onboard, how California legislators are attempting to banish the NSA from the state, the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps, the impending death of Facebook, how little western culture and styles have changed since the 80’s, Digedu’s upcoming technical challenges, how Assembly is crowdsourcing the development of startup ideas and Justin’s “venture matrix” concept, the difference between money and wealth, Paul Graham’s belief that a lack of energetic execution is one of the primary reasons why startups fail, the difference between college and NFL players, Jason’s desire for two weeks of solitude every quarter, last week’s Catalyst session and why Jason is so excited about coaching Colby’s math team, how Zappos is saying goodbye to bosses, some ideas on how to create an attribution platform based on layers of footprint, Simon Holmes’ new book on Mongo, Express, Angular and Node, Sebastian Thrun’s belief that the current incarnation of MOOC’s are falling short, the importance of teaching intuition, Stephen Wolfram’s remembrances of Richard Feynman, Justin’s responses for his job posting on We Work Remotely and Fallacy Man.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s hiring strategy for Digedu and IBM’s notorious “Black Team”, the women in tech controversy and how it misrepresented Paul Graham’s statements on the matter, how Jason finally conquered the Triangle Peg Board Game, his recent day at the slopes and his idea for a social checklistapp, the Cradlepoint Hotspot, a post mortem on Digedu’s Q4 technology goals, Salman Khan’s thoughts on learning and Digedu’s blended learning approach, how there were Von hipsters even in the 1600’s, when boys used to wear pink, the story of Minecraft and why Sweden is such a force in IT, the English dramaWallander, why Justin uses both Sequel Pro and MySQL Workbench, how software is eating the world and how it’s hollowing out the white-collared middle class, our robotic future, Jason’s sciatica, Aubrey de Grey’s link to Cambridge University, how the French high court has approved a 75 percent tax for top earners, the startup that’s refining plant seeds into jet fuel and how much jet fuel is required by US passenger and cargo airlines, how a former BP geologist claims that we hit peak oil in 2008 and why Elon Musks thinks electric jets are the future.
Justin and Jason discuss how 0.01 Bitcoin was donated to the show, why Justin has been blogging so much lately, their respective Christmas plans and family traditions, an intriguing anti-ageing compound that’s set for human trials, an Oxford debate on ageing, why science fiction tends to restrict itself to exploring such a limited set of advances and how difficult it is to predict the future, the possibility of
Justin and Jason discuss why they like recording discussion shows on Friday afternoons, PayPal dispute resolutions, Jason’s friend who lost his business and is now teaching himself how to code, how to determine whether your programmers are lazy, how Fog Creek compensates their developers, why Treehouse is eliminating managers, how to inspire developers to hit deadlines, using the minmax algorithm as a game strategy, why there’s so much hate for Soylent, Bitcoin and Tesla, why Justin only bought 0.01 Bitcoin and 1 share of TSLA, a method for identifying asymmetric investments, why Jason thinks Soylent haters are thinking about it all wrong, why Justin is worried about GMOs and why Jason just can’t seem to get worried about it, some Christmas present ideas for Colby – like a programmable quadcopter, an heirloom chemistry set or maybe some synthetic biology, how coaching Colby’s 4th grade math team is going and how the Catalyst kids are about to start programming their own games, a La Critique of CastFeedValidator and JustAddContent, the first 3D commercial game powered by asm.js, a map of the best medical prices, the new science show Futurescape with James Woods, the Neurogrid analog computer that can simulate one-million neurons using only 5 watts of power, the new SciFi show Almost Human, the British show The Wong Mans, the awesome video show This Week in Engineering, how Google has started caching email images, and how a 6,000-page report on CIA torture has been suppressed for 1 year by the Obama administration.
Justin and Jason discuss getting the show back on a weekly schedule, how listener Ben Reyes gave Jason a Bitcoin, China’s stance on crypto currencies and why it’s been to their geopolitical advantage to pin the renminbi to the US dollar, how Bitcoin’s inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, is now a billionaire and whether Satoshi is really Nick Szabo, whether Amazon’s drone delivery initiative is real or a cynical public relations ploy, whether drone delivery and self-driving cars are likely to become a reality in the near future, how easy it is to remotely hack into and gain control over a modern car, the fear mongering of mainstream news, the 5K MVP, the Heyday journaling iPhone app, the Pluggio update, Jason’s various secret projects – Vortex, Cryptonite, Givetronic and SnapLearn, using an S-corp to minimize consulting taxes, the prospect of building games in Catalyst, Colby’s day at Uber and the RC helicopters that Justin and the guys at MightyHive bought for him, how Jason and Sandy are going to co-coach the 4th grade math team, how Soylent has hit its 1.0 formula, the creation of XNA – a synthetic DNA that’s stronger than the real thing and the fact that there are likely billions of planets in our galaxy that could support life, the show Alphas, the Mindy Project, the Goldbergs, Defiance, The Black List, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and Treme, how the NSA slapped malware on 50,000+ networks, is tracking cellphone locations worldwide and how the NSA’s surveillance is having a chilling effect on American Writers, the new Bitcoin funded Assassination Market and the shocking news that men with attractive wives report higher levels of marital satisfaction.
Justin and Jason talk with Rob Walling about the rollout of his new project, Drip, as well as a few other assorted topics.
Justin and Jason talk about bringing on a potential marketing partner for AnyFu, why Justin may buy some Twitter shares, Jason’s investment thesis and why he believes Apple is reverting to the mean, Google’s mystery barges, Jason’s post on teaching kids how to code, Nitrous.io, the audio book Masters of Doom, the movies WarGames, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Enders Game, the surprising momentum of the Jason’s posts How to Increase Your Luck Surface Area and Why I Quit Algorithmic Trading to Do Web Startups, motivations for contributing to open source projects, how listener James Jensen taught himself electronics and designed his own circuit board on Upverter, dark silicon, memristers, Darpa’s analog computer initiative and spintronics, how IQ doesn’t appear to be set in stone and why watching TV probably doesn’t make you dumber, the Flynn effect and James Flynn’s TED Talk, the relationship of working memory to IQ, how Jason embedded Sandy’s voice into a trading system’s audible alerts, wireless devices powered by ambient backscatter rather than batteries, how US hypocrisy has come to light as a result of the Manning and Snowden revelations, combining mastery learning with the flipped classroom approach and Bloom’s two-sigma problem.
Justin and Jason discuss the debt ceiling and the government shutdown, the upcoming Limitless television show, a theory on what made Einstein so clever and the difficulty in finding a genetic map for IQ, how the Arsenic DNA paper exposed flaws in the peer review process and The Reproducibility Project, the television shows Breaking Bad, Falling Skies, Revolution, Defiance, The Agents of Shield and The Walking Dead, how to make Star Wars great again, the first two sessions of Catalyst’s second year, how kids differ in the way their brains work, training Colby to play quarterback and his Uber birthday party, using evolutionary strategies to solve Uber’s worker allocation problem, how Jason got to take pitches in a major league baseball stadium, installation problems with Kerbal Space Program, how Justin is looking to hire someone to do devops at Digedu and how Hired.com’s business model compares to what Mecruit was going to try.
Justin and Jason discuss the emergency emails that Justin received from Digedu while on vacation and why he selected Sifter as a project management tool, how Uber and Digedu use Git, Git rebase vs Git merge and general GitHub bureaucracy, how Digedu makes use of NodeJS and how Uber leverages the NodeJS profiler that Jason and Guyon created, the rising importance of system administration
Justin and Jason discuss the Uber wedding that Jason and Sandy attended over the weekend, their two female listeners, how the most recent Pluggio deal fell through and why Justin has decided to take Pluggio off the market for the time being, what needs to happen in order for AnyFu to succeed, possible plans for Catalyst, how Colby is reading Ender's Game and why Justin wishes the technology in Asimov's Foundation Series actually existed, whether physical immortality is achievable and why Jason believes that cryonics is the ultimate Hail Mary pass, how Simon Holmes increased his luck surface area and the book that resulted, why memories are inherently unreliable, how they're formed and how they can be hacked, Jason's benchmarking experiments using Node.js with MySQL, CouchDB and RethinkDB, how Miley Cyrus hacked the press, how LinkedIn tried using HTML5 for their mobile app but then changed back to native, Jason's frustration with getting Titanium to work correctly for Android and why Justin chose to build the Digedu mobile app using HTML5 and PhoneGap, Gmail's annoying new policy for dealing with email forwarders, how the NSA has broken or subverted the majority of Internet's encryption algorithms and security protocols and Bruce Schneier's call to arms, the twisting of truth about the chemical weapons attack in Syria, the missing evidence, and the rationalizations for a US led response, who's going to man the Digedu ship while Justin is on his upcoming vacation, a recent technology headache with the updater code, and their recently hired front-end developer.
Justin and Jason discuss Uber's latest fundraising round, the selling of Pluggio, Rob Walling's startup Drip, Justin's hack for creating a tablet unlock code and how's he looking for a front-end developer, how Tesla achieved a perfect safety rating and captured more than 12% of the luxury car market, whether it would be a good idea to invest in Solar City or Yahoo, the prospects for BitCoin and why Jason likes asymmetric investments, Uber's future and how Jason is building a dashboard for Uber's realtime system, why Jason thinks getting a post to the top of Hacker News requires the same recipe as launching a successful startup - a good idea, good execution and help from a group of supporters, the latest revelations on the NSA's vast illegal surveillance apparatus and why Jason believes it's an existential threat to democracy, how higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior and why Jason wants to formulate the laws of human nature, Julian Corlette's TL;DR landing page experiment, David Yang's HNSummaries, Kale Davis's TLDR.io, and Jason Calacanis's Launch Ticker, the NYC-based Fullstack Academy, Jason's skepticism on the Lean Startup movement, and Justin's latest SaaS idea that he's positive will work but isn't talking about.
Justin and Jason discuss the details of selling Pluggio, what Justin considers to be the ideal attributes of a SaaS business and his idea for a collaborative web app for doing mockups, the hypercritical startup advise of Ben Horowitrz and Dustin Moskowitz, the surprising wealth of A-list celebrities and Internet entrepreneurs, the Xerox compression bug and the Laravel "returning" bug, Nassim Taleb's Skin in the Game paper, analog mockups, developing an Android app in Titanium, why Apple's board is concerned about the current rate of innovation, the nonsensical empirical risk assessment of the U.S. government, the cynical political theatre of shutting down U.S. embassies based on non-specific terrorist threat, how Snowden was offered one year's asylum in Russia as well as a job by social networking giant VKontakte, why Lavabit and Silent Circle both shut down their encrypted email services, how the TSA is rapidly expanding beyond the confines of the airport and the increasing militarization of local police, the lurching surveillance / police state and the possibility of a quantum internet.
Justin and Jason discuss the canvas-based drawing app that Justin built for Digedu using his JS library known as $$, how Jason got drag and drop working in Titanium and his idea for creating a mobile game for learning electronics, the original Star Trek series vs. Start Trek: The New Generation, the single window strategy for building mobile apps, creating 180 websites in 180 days, the challenge of staying current with the latest programming technologies, the 97-year old man who makes art using MS Paint, how PayPal accidentally credited a man $92 quadrillion, coding vs managing coders, the selling of Pluggio, whether Jason's secret project will remain secret forever and his future plans for Catalyst, why men need women and why they become more generous when they have daughters, why you can't force kids to be what they're not, Jason's experiment with a low-carb diet, the Soylent production delay, Justin's intuitive eating / habit-building plan, Greenwald's drip news strategy for keeping the NSA story alive and how Nancy Pelosi saved the NSA surveillance program, the television show Breaking Bad (don't worry - no spoilers), what's killing the bees, how Joel Spolsky killed a software patent in only 10-minutes using AskPatents.com, Xamarin - an IDE and platform for creating native, cross-platform desktop and mobile apps using C#, and a new theory of cancer postulated by physicists.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's two-week work trip to Chicago, Sebastien Arnaud's recent visit to Pasadena, the tradeoffs of using a custom/personal framework vs a popular open-source framework, how Justin hired listener Jeremy Logan to work with Digedu, balancing feature development with stability work, why Justin is moving from Rackspace to AWS in order to avoid the single point of failure problem, how he was unable to sell Pluggio on Flippa and how he's going to try selling it through a broker, the summer Catalyst sessions and the effort to get Mindstorm robots to communicate with one another using Bluetooth, NCSS - the five-week online programming competition out of the University of Sydney, how Jason has been bribing his 8-year old son Colby with movies and ice cream to complete all of the DragonBox 12+ levels, Jason's thoughts on how you might extend the Dragonbox model to other STEM subjects such as electronics and physics, the potential for Google Glass to usher in a 'little brother' future and Jason Calacanis' recent screed on the subject, how the Man of Steel is more of a science fiction movie than a superhero movie, how the 5D 'superman memory' crystal can store 360 TB/disk, is stable up to 1000 degrees celsius and lasts a million years, futuristic user interfaces, the science behind controlling a quadcopter with a brain-computer interface, the show Through the Wormhole, the Instructible for creating an EEG cap, how the SpaceX Grasshopper rocket completed a 325m vertical landing, the speculation around Elon Musk's Hyperloop concept, how a self-flying Navy drone successfully landed on an aircraft carrier, the US government's strategy for minimizing revelations about the NSA's unconstitutional spying, Snowden's deadman switch, the the fact that the NSA is basically collecting everything and that the FISA court is a complete joke, DARPA’s real-world terminator, how an Oklahoma City hospital's posting of surgery prices online is creating a bidding war, PHP's comeback and why Laravel is going to become the Rails of PHP, and Boom, the volume booster for the Mac.
Justin and Jason discuss Edward Snowden's whereabouts and the EU's faux outrage over the NSA's spying, World War Z - the movie and the book, the surprising fact that Ensign Harry Kim lives next door to Jason, how the differ library could save Uber big bucks on bandwidth, investing in people with Upstart, why Justin ordered more Soylent, The 4-Hour Body diet, genetic cars, the informal summer Catalyst sessions and how the kids are obsessed with Kerbal Space Program, the new, more advanced version of DragonBox, Justin's business ideas for sponsorship and SAAS-like subscriptions, the shows Defiance, The Good Wife, and Through the Wormhole, advice for Aaron Knight on PhraseMix (read the notes from MicroConf 2013), Jason's brother's run-in with serial killer Randy Kraft, the site Let Me Google That for You, the unlikely possibility that investigative journalist Michael Hastings' car was "hacked", what former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke had to say about it and James Bamfords Wired article about the rise of Cyber Command and the US's offensive cyber warfare capabilities, Jason's idea for a TV series where the CIA and NSA are at war with one another, Tesla's 90-second battery change, and Colby's Arthur C. Clarke-like thinking on magic.
Justin and Jason discuss the NSA domestic surveillance story, including James Bamford's 2012 Wired article on the subject, how Edward Snowden revealed classified documents showing Hong Kong hacking targets, whether the fallout will effect US businesses, the NSA's definition of "collect", why Snowden leaked to Glenn Greenwald, the change in poll numbers on the subject, Jason's cheeky idea for an NSA video game and strategies for monitoring and storing vast quantities of domestic surveillance data, the NSA whistleblowers Thomas Drake and William Binney, the problem with partisanship, candidate Obama debating president Obama on government surveillance, how Microsoft is giving away zero-day exploits to the government, what Jason would do if he was working at Google and received a National Security Letter, how the vast majority of terrorist plots were organized by the FBI and how the NSA missed all of the recent terrorist plots including the Boston Marathon bombings, the Church Committee and Operation Mockingbird, the nature of power and the fundamental law of human nature, predictions on what will happen to Snowden, the TechZing wiki, Justin's authentic dim sum experience at Lunasia, how economic mobility has been decreasing in the United States, Jason's recent trip to San Diego and Sea World, Jonathon Kresner's Airpair, some ideas for how to market AnyFu, why Justin is putting Pluggio on Flippa, World War Z and the robot Justin didn't buy.
Justin and Jason discuss the danger of moving activities from the "get to" column to the "have to" column, Colby's dramatic improvement in baseball, why he's quitting soccer and the unreasonable effectiveness of private instruction, the show that didn't happen, the summer plans for Catalyst, the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and the founder who was tragically killed, learning to code using Treehouse, how NASA is funding a 3D printer for space, participating in Soylent fundraing campaign, how Jason is helping an AI trading company find a technical partner, Justin's M-trade strategy and how to test it using Quantopian, how Jason and Colby watched the Robo Rally at the recent Pasadena Engineering and Science Expo, using NXC (Not eXactly C) to program Mindstorm robots in Catalyst, why Jason has fallen embarrassingly behind on his secret project known as Vortex, how Mecruit is stalling out, the Node.js differ module that Jason and Guyon created for Uber and the similarity of NPM modules to Win32 COM libraries, how Rossi's E-Cat LENR (low energy nuclear reactor) might actually be for real, Charlie Munger's psychology of human misjudgment talk, how cognitive biases cause people to misjudge global risks, how Justin is a now a proud share of exactly one share of TSLA, why Justin put Pluggio on Flippa, how Jason burned himself out by working on too many projects, whether our own humanity could ultimately constrain the advancement of technology, Jason's theory of how the human race will gradually reengineer itself over time, why Jason recommends the show House of Cards and why Justin recommends the show Parenthood, and the discovery of a frozen mammoth in Siberia.
Justin and Jason discuss using Percona for just-in-time MySQL consulting and the idea of offering time-and-a-half "no-wait" rates for AnyFu, the idea of hiring open source experts to write custom patches, using GUIDs in place of auto-increment IDs to solve detached MySQL slave inserts, how Jason has been advising a startup as a consulting CTO, the importance of creating and documenting a well-defined API when pursing a simultaneous web and mobile development strategy, building a critical mass of AnyFu experts, why Jason is considering becoming active on Twitter, how Ben Reyes cleaned up with TSLA, setting up an online trading account, the consumer reports sterling evaluation of the Telsa Model S, why Tesla succeeded and Fisker failed, how conventional wisdom about alternative energy is way out of date, but how Kleiner Perkins has lost money investing in clean energy, the ground-breaking tech of Google Glass and it's implications, how space junk destroyed a Russian satellite, the possibility of doing a marathon podcast, the wide variation in medial costs by region of the country and how to turn this into a business, Jason's idea for a site that debunks false conventional wisdom, a new tech internship model, the study suggesting that college doesn't improve critical thinking for 45% of students, the study demonstrating that supportive parenting works better than "tiger" parenting which leads to a comparatively lower GPA and a more depressive emotional state, the hasty generalization fallacy and cognitive biases, how a 14-year-old discovered that the magnets in an iPad can turn off pacemakers, why Jason wants a TL;DR for everything, why it's valuable and how to create a business out of it, the prospect of using a mobile device to login to a website, how police departments are starting to use iPhone-based iris scanners in the field, the Twine Kickstarter project, combining Kickstarter, Google Trends and Twitter to mine sentiment analysis, why Justin thinks there's a Kickstarter bubble, Jason's theory of why the Google search term "color" is positively correlated with a bullish market, the Ersatz deep learning web platform and why people think it's a big deal, why Jason thinks there needs to be an accountability website for public influencers, the Freakonomics chapter about the performance of kids who were not accepted into a magnet school due to a lottery pick, setting up a subdomain for transactional email on Mailgun, how listener James Jensen is teaching a group of kids how to build Arduino-based robots, an update on Catalyst and the plans for the summer, the latest on Jason's secret project, using MathJax and jqMath to add equations to a web page, the latest on Pluggio, Justin's thoughts on Laravel, how Khan Academy Lite is using Raspberry Pi to stream videos, how the State Department ordered a firm to remove blueprints for a 3D-printed guns from the web, how Obama is backing the FBI's effort to wiretap web users and why Justin is moving yet again.
Justin and Jason discuss the technologies - Node.js, Socket.io & Redis, which Justin and Udi are using to build digedu's chat system, using CSS fixed positioning for popups on tablets, the influence of good looks on success, Miss Korea contestants and plastic surgery, and Jason's idea for scoring your looks, using Google Trends to beat the market, how Wall Street is gobbling up two-thirds of your 401(k), sending smart phones to space as personal satellites and the concern about space junk, surviving in space without a space suit, how the SpaceX Grasshopper flew 250 meters straight up and then landed vertically, the Kickstarter campaign to engineer florescent plants using synthetic biology, Zach Braff's Kickstarter campaign to finance his new film, kickstarting a Dungeons & Dragons project, the prospect of recording a world-record length podcast, the Soylent controversy, what it's like to get online after 25 years in prison, the prisoner who impregnated four female guards and the prisoner who escaped using a picture of a master key, Jason's thoughts on Oblivion, Just Add Content, thoughts on MicroConf, smoke and mirrors demo-ware, the Silicon Valley "miracle machine" and how Meebo is going to be shut down, AnyFu's recent resurgence, why Justin is purchasing a walking desk, the importance of mastering the underlying dynamics of a system and the pitfalls of pattern matching on superficial attributes, the Y Combinator labor arbitrage, how Jason rolled out an alpha version of his secret project for digedu to use, and Justin's concept of an MDP (minimum delightful project).
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's new Basis watch and his get fit plan, the upcoming MicroConf conference, how the NASA-backed fusion engine could cut a Mars trip down to 30 days, how one guy's code made it into a Hollywood movie, how Jason wants to shoot a sci-fi webisode with his friend Phil and how they were inspired by the low-budget film Primer, how previous show guest Dan Southworth is in the upcoming Mortal Kombat Legacy, the new TechZing Wiki, why Justin think's (with his marketing help) Jason's secret project could make $100,000 right out of the gate (and how Jason thinks Justin is smoking something), the concept of MVP+, how Jason had his iMac hard drive replaced, how Jason is going to start spending more time on his secret project as opposed to working on the Catalyst IDE, the complete Digedu story, the weird luck surface area email, Jason's involvement with Mecruit, the latest on AnyFu, the hardware failure at the latest Catalyst session and Jason's lesson on two-dimension arrays, whether Bitcoin is an existential threat to the modern liberal state or whether it's the future, how solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities, why Jason believes that Solar City is going to be extremely successful, how the US instigated the latest confrontation with North Korea and how North Korea lacks the capability to strike the US.
Justin and Jason discuss Philippe Monnet's visit to Pasadena, a new structure for the show, living on Soylent, the idea of dying on Mars and how to get there fast, the myth of focus, moments of opportunity for startups, echo chambers and the benefits of ignoring the competition, prospecting experts for AnyFu, learning to emotionally disengage from projects, Jason's weird shoulder problem, how technology is aging in reverse, how Jason is reengaging with his secret project, some benefits of pursing an MVP, getting your arms around a problem, scaling systems at Uber, the incredible efficiency of private instruction and how Jason's soccer team lost the championship.
Justin and Jason discuss the new server and router for running Catalyst sessions locally, how to keep the databases in sync and plans for the Catalyst software, how a couple of bug fixes have dramatically improved Pluggio's stability and performance and the possibility of growing or selling it, the Chromebook donated to Catalyst by Ben Rhodes, the AnyFu expert recruiting process, the sleuthing of Jason's secret project and how he's attempting to focus his efforts, Jason's awesome on-demand sys admin, how he's outsourced Colby's baseball instruction and why he's reading Ender's Game to him, the process of transitioning to a new computer and thoughts on saving versus deleting old code, advice on learning how to program and the psychological toll of trading, Justin's advice on building a SaaS app, more on why entrepreneurs should not select cutting edge technologies when outsourcing product development, and finally the foot-in-the-door technique, the door-in-the-face-technique and the foot-in-the-face-technique.
Justin and Jason discuss Udi's stay in Pasadena and his working relationship with Justin, how to manage sessions between a Javascript client and a RESTful API, solving the Catalyst network problems and why Jason thinks Javascript isn't the easiest language for kids to learn, thoughts on the Code.org video, how Pluggio was hacked, the evolution of the Catalyst stack and how Jason uses Node.js in combination with LAMP, the tradeoffs of building a startup on cutting edge technologies, the progress being made on AnyFu, the results of the Uber nearest cabs challenge, Jason's thoughts on the Upverter hackathon, the SHIELD Act and how patent trolls are going after popular podcasters, Justin's TV recommendations and why Jason listens to podcasts about the The Walking Dead, and Udi's concluding thoughts on America.
Justin and Jason discuss the Uber nearest drivers challenge, specifically a clarification on Jason's "reinvention" of the quad tree algorithm as well as a description of a new and improved version, Udi's arrival and participation in a Catalyst session, the Catalyst text-adventure project, future plans for the Catalyst IDE and the idea of making Catalyst an online offering, the NYT's Tesla test drive controversy, how Uber was ranked as one of Forbes most innovative companies of the year and Uber's fight against regulatory barriers, Jason's recent obsession with The Walking Dead and why Justin prefers teen dramas, how Udi's family escaped racial persecution in Turkmenistan, maintaining an old version of a software project while moving forward with a new version, securely storing passwords, a list of some favorite podcasts, and what it's like for Udi to be trapped inside of a TechZing episode.
Just and Jason talk about Udi coming to America, whether Justin should use the $$ framework for Digedu, Justin's theory on show titles, the role of talent in reaching the highest level's of success, the last Catalyst session, the TechZing bulletin board, Jason and Guyon's solution to the Uber hackathon, how Upverter is coming to the Pasadena Science & Technology Expo and how Jason is going to attend the upcoming Upverter / YC hardware hackathon, how Jason was quoted in the press, how Justin picked up high-paying consulting work, the logo for Jason's secret project, why Jason thinks it's time to learn Go if you're a consultant, the Zerigo DNS service, how Justin is using NewsBlur's RSS API, the Splittsville and MarkITx iPhone apps, why Tony Stark is the ultimate engineering role model, and an update on the AnyFu recruiting process.
Jason speaks with Ivan Savov about his new book, The No Bullshit Guide to Math & Physics.
Jason speaks with show favorite, Gabriel Weinberg, about how he's managed the growth of DuckDuckGo from 1,000 searches per month to 50 million.
Justin and Jason discuss Jason's new iPad keyboard from Logitech and the Zag iPad keyboard, Justin's past life in Ireland and England, his first computer and how he became a musician, the pre-history of the Khan Academy, the crazy story of the Virtual Irish Pub and how Justin met his wife, Justin's idea for creating videos for Catalyst, PostalPix's search for a CTO, a guy in Shenzen who's printing circuit boards, a DIY Bioprinter, the future of 3D printing and how automation is wiping out middle class jobs, the future of self-driving cars, the continual rise of TSLA, what it was like to work with Steve Jobs, his love for product development and his obsession with secrecy, the conclusion of Fringe (don't worry - no spoilers) and Jason's favorite quote of the series, Jason's lunch with the director of STEM education for the Pasadena Education Foundation, the power of math and science and how to sell it to kids, the idea for creating a Catalyst hackathon and getting the Upverter guys involved, an update on the outsourced AnyFu recruiting effort, Jason's success outsourcing sys admin work on Freelancer.com, the What Would Rob Walling Do t-shirt, how Jason has been getting a lot of email asking him for advice about high-frequency trading, making the transition from doing project work to getting paid for advice, and the story of how Justin recently became a CTO.
Jason speaks with Zak Homouth, one of the three founders of Upverter, a web-based solution for designing, simulating and manufacturing circuit boards.
Justin and Jason talk about what's happening with AnyFu, why Jason does a lot of stuff and how he gets it done, why Jason has soured on partnerships, how the Gmail interface kind of sucks, why Justin link spammed Jason, AdoptTogether - the Kickstarter for adoption, the Catalyst challenge / point system, methods of running Node.js in conjunction with Apache and PHP, managing long running Node.js processes using Upstart and Monit, the tradeoffs of different Linux distributions, some upcoming interviews, the latest underwhelming TL;DR service, Jason Calacanis' Launch Ticker, the monitoring / validation service that Jason wrote for the Uber dispatching system, considerations when exercising startup options, why Jason wants the new Logitech Ultrathin iPad cover / keyboard, the research suggesting that stating your goals publicly will increase your likelihood of achieving them, and the controversy surrounding Derek Sivers' claims on subject.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's important meeting in Chicago, why SQL is agile, how FriendFeed used MySQL to store schema-less data and when normalized data will hurt you, Justin's experience with Uber, how Jason works with the Uber engineering team as an off-site contractor and how they scaled the Node.js-based dispatching system, Gabriel Weinberg's thoughts on orders of magnitude, how Justin is working with Udi on Digedu and why they chose the new PHP framework Laravel, why Jason wrote a RESTful API for Catalyst in PHP and why he thinks building web apps in Node.js is usually more trouble than it's worth, the upcoming Catalyst point system, the possibility of creating a WordPress pluggin for Pluggio, how Jason bought an Arduino at the local Radio Shack and while there heard about a local hardware super hacker who built a long distance surveillance microphone, the difference between Raspberry Pi and Arduino, how a judge dismissed a dealers' lawsuit against Tesla's retail stores, why Jason thinks Hacker News needs a prerequisite reading list, why Justin is worried that we're all getting stuck in our own social media silos, why you should pay attention to power law distributions and why you should look for things you can scale.
Justin and Jason discuss email etiquett, Justin's workout progress, skiing vs snowboarding, CJ's thoughts on Catalyst Class, Jason's plans for Catalyst Academy and his difficulty in getting MongoDB to work on AppFog, why Jason feels that doing more things makes him more productive and his plan for launching multiple projects, Justin's experiments with paid advertising and Jason's argument for why statistics is not destiny.
Justin and Jason talk about how Justin bought the percentage of Pluggio he didn't own, what Buffer did right and what can be learned from their success, why Jason moved on from Appignite, what's happening with AnyFu and why Jason doesn't consider Catalyst to be a startup project, why it's better to focus on process rather than on specific goals and how small wins build momentum, the importance of engaging in deep work and the difficulty of getting small things done, the difference between trading and investing and why Jason wouldn't use an investment advisor, why Iceland is succeeding and Ireland is struggling, how AngelList is allowing accredited investors to invest in startups online, the uncovering of Intellectual Ventures 2,000 shell companies and how EFF's Patent Project got a half-million dollar boost from Mark Cuban and 'Notch', what's been working and not working with Catalyst, Jeff Bezos' regret minimization framework, and finally why it's good to do things.
Justin and Jason talk about Justin's idea for doing a catch-up show, foosball and table tennis, why Justin renamed $$ as Jefferson, the push and pull between product designers and developers, Jason's new travel hack and his recent trip to San Francisco, the talk he gave at Catalyst Class and his tour of Cambrian Genomics, why Jason is introducing robots into Catalyst, the progress being made by the kids and the possibility of having them program virtual battle bots, how John Humphrey helped Jason secure an expiring domain name, Colby's backflip off a swing, how SpaceX was awarded their first military contract, why Jason thinks single founders can succeed and the fallacies about the advertising business model, the idea of getting more people to recruit experts for AnyFu, Justin's experience working with Udi Mosayev and Bill Gross, and why the show must go on.
Justin and Jason talk with Rob Walling about his recent success with HitTail, his new project, Drip, and other assorted startup topics.
Justin and Jason talk about how Jason's mail was stolen, some of the limitations with Phone Gap, the engineering salaries of Silicon Valley startups, the ridiculous cost of housing, Jason's idea for gamifying personal finance, incentivizing kids with cash, how NASA's Advanced Propulsion Physics Lab is working on the possibility of a warp drive, the new matter created by the Large Hadron Collider, how an advanced alien race (if they exist) might not be all that interested in communicating with us, Jason's Freakonomics and Singularity Summit binge, the future of 3D printing, the meaning of life without money, Micho Kaku's vision of the world in 2030 and what he envisioned a phone would do and look like, why Jason still hasn't purchased a backup system, how Brendan Dunn is making five figures a month off a bootstrapped product, whether or not to do interviews, a new approach to recruiting AnyFu experts, how to explain functions to kids and the possibility of using a combination of both a challenge system and personal projects in Catalyst, Jason's idea of how to explain advanced mathematical algorithms without using mathematical notation, Jason's bizarre knee problem and finally how a provision in the House-passed NDAA bill would overturn the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 prohibiting the U.S. government from using propaganda against it's own citizens.
Justin and Jason discuss their Thanksgiving holidays, how Jason stopped by a Tesla SuperCharger station, Elon Musk's talks at Oxford, the National Press Club and Pando Monthly, various diversification strategies and the idea of putting more money into AnyFu, investing in yourself versus investing in others, Jason's zombie killing strategies, how Megaupload got screwed, Justin'sarticle on his Splitsville app, Jason's love / hate relationship with Titanium, whether a developer can be trained in three months, the tradeoffs of building challenges into the Catalyst IDE, how to speed up a slow Mac and Justin's recommended backup strategies.
Justin and Jason talk about why taking multiple shorter vacations is usually better than taking one long vacation, Justin's plans to create an Udemy course, the latest on Catalyst, Colby's madness, Justin's personal training sessions, how to choose health insurance, the GOP's flip flop on copyright, Romney's IT fail, Nate Silver's prediction methodology, the Obama campaign's analytics team, the programming games Check iO and RoboNode, how Tesla won Motor Trend Car of the Year, the variance in home prices across the country, whether programming can be commoditized and why it's important to make a name for yourself, Hailo Cab vs Uber, the Uber profiler Clouseau and the dividends it's paid for scaling Uber's dispatching system, the science fiction web series H+ and Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome, the TV series The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad, how sixteen Fisker Karma's blew up because of Hurricane Sandy, why Jason wants to buy the Model S, how $75,000 is the happiness tipping point, how Pluggio is the little engine that could, and hints about Justin's next project.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's trip to Ireland and the UK and Rob Walling's visit to Pasadena, the latest version of the Catalyst IDE and the power of gamification, AppFog's free plan for Node.js, ActivityHero and the potential future of Catalyst Academy, Justin's thoughts on hiring for experience, how Justin resolved Pluggio's cascading query problem, Jason's idea for an Uber prize and scaling Uber's Node.js-based dispatching system, why you should CallTheseGuys.com if you need a website built, how computer science graduates are the least employable in the UK, how SpaceX completed the first delivery trip to the International Space Station and the Tesla Model S was voted car of year, the History Channel's show The Men Who Built America, Jason's investment strategy for 2013, and why Justin and Jason are both long Rob Walling.
Justin and Jason discuss how to make progress when you have too much to do, an update on running the audio job board, hiring someone to keep you on task and tricks to reduce the cost of context switching, why Jason thinks Justin will regret taking a three-week trip to Europe, the latest on Catalyst Coder (the in-browser educational IDE), Justin's domino method of teaching and the nightmare of explaining the for loop, some hacks for simplifying Javascript and the possibility of writing a new language called "KidScript" that transcompiles to Javascript, new stylistic conventions in Node.js, the idea of creating coding games and a simplified graphics library for Catalyst Coder, tracking who bought your politician, exposing messaged economic models ShadowStats, how the returns of angel investors are better than previously thought, why PC obsolescence is obsolete, the best way to find aliens, Nikola Tesla, his patents and his Tower of Power, why the possibility of being in a simulation is driving Justin crazy, what's realistic and what's not about aircraft carriers in space and how the modern carriers are sitting ducks, how Tesla's Supercharger network has gone live in six California towns, the rise of the rocketship school, setting up an AnyFu Paypal account and what's going to happen with the show while Justin is in Europe.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's approach to developing HTML5 apps that feel truly native, how Titanium finally fixed the build bug for iOS6 devices, more on the Titanium license issue, the first paid job advertisement (Java API developer at Uber Media), the effect of moving Catalyst to a new space and the browser-based IDE that Jason is building for the class, setting up a Node.js application on AppFog, resolving payment issues on AnyFu and using PayPal as a payout option, how to determine if reality is merely a computer simulation, Jason's iPad information workflow - Browser / HackerNode => Instapaper => Pinboard / Evernote, why the first laptop had such a hard time catching on, the mysterious book Jason received in the mail (Axiomatic - Greg Egan), and some of their favorite movies.
Justin and Jason talk about time management and focus, what Jason likes about the iPad, programming using Codea and Lua, managing information using Instapper, Pinboard and Evernote, Colby's soccer resurgence, why Jason is selling Facebook and buying Tesla and Tesla's plans for a supercharger network, the recent growth of the show and the idea of bringing in revenue via job advertisements, Jason's LinkedIn debacle, what happens when $$ meets Hacker News, better learning tools and a better space for Catalyst, learning bioinformations through problem solving on Rosalind, inconsistant complaining about the science of science fiction movies, and using a worker queue to process a large number of emails.
Justin and Jason discuss Jason's new iPad and his old MacBook Pro, the costs and limitations of Titanium's licensing plans and the surrounding controversy, a post-mortem of the third Catalyst session, KidsRuby, and the idea of creating a DragonBox inspired Catalyst coding game, the status of Appignite, Justin's $$ Javascript framework, "The Madness", the progress being made on SkyBoard and some potential revenue models, the movie Looper, how California has passed a law allowing for the testing of self-driving cars on public roads, how Blizzard was head-faked into creating a better StartCraft, the recent growth of the podcast, how everyone who attended OWS with a cell phone had their identity logged and the Apple patent that describes remotely disabling protesters' phone cameras, the Uber Javascript profiler to be named Clouseau, the superiority of the Singapore Math curriculum and the ThinkMath Foundation, the power of keeping a Spark File and of storing your notes in a BATF (big ass text file), Jason's overloaded schedule, Colby's football future, the awesome new hover bike that you'll never get to ride, and why Justin never wears shorts.
Justin and Jason talk about the latest progress on AnyFu, the new Catalyst volunteer CJ Winslow and lessons learned from the most recent session, Justin's new version of SkyBoard and how he built it using his new Javascript framework $$, the idea of creating a programming game in the style of DragonBox, their recent outing to a Richard Dolan talk, how Jason is getting back into watching Battlestar Galactica and why warp drive may be more feasible than previously thought, how Jason needs to buy a new printer, using Redis at Uber, the tradeoffs of storing schema-less JSON data, and why you shouldn't believe the hype about Iran conducting cyberwar on the U.S..
Justin and Jason discuss meeting AnyFu all-stars Joanna Wiebe and Lance Jones, the eBook that Jason thinks Justin should write, the lessons Jason wants to teach his kids, principles of negotiation, why kids have to learn things the hard way, a post-mortem on the first Catalyst session and what Jason has planned for the second, Rob Walling's advice on buying apps and websites, Justin's new $$ Javascript framework and what it takes for an open source project to take off, how the NSA is recruiting hackers and the AT&T tech who blew the whistle on the NSA's domestic eavesdropping program back in 2006, why Jason thinks Justin would make more money if he marketed himself as an on-demand CTO, how Jason's father-in-law mistakenly deleted every recording on their DVR, the results of Colby's academic standards test and what is says about his personality, the story of Wordspoke.me, why Jason likes Titanium, how Google, Amazon, eBay and Facebook et al. are forming a powerful U.S. lobby called the Internet Association, how NOT to recruit top technical talent, the bacteria that was discovered eating plastic in the Sargasso Sea, AnyFu's true market and why the experts charge so much, and how scientists bioengineered an artificial esophagus.
Justin and Jason discuss how much time they spend on the podcast, Justin's thoughts on becoming a multi-product entrepreneur, Seth Godin's book - The Dip, how much time should be devoted to consulting vs. working on a side business, potential email strategies for recruiting experts, building an email reminder system for AnyFu, problems with the donation model, the Node.js profiler that Jason and Guyon built for Uber, the misleading CNN article about why we need a longer school year and the other side of the story, Justin's idea for creating an ego depletion meter, the challenges of scheduling the first Catalyst Academy session, the Mathigon mathematics education project, how Oracle is moving MySQL towards the closed-source model, why Reddit only has two MySQL Tables - Thing and Data, Jason's idea for doing lazy schema migrations, why Uber is moving from MySQL to ProstgreSQL (PostGIS), how self-driving cars were just approved by the California legislature and the rise of drones, the free diving world records, why there is no American Ninja Warrior, why Darpa thinks the future of computing is analog, HP and Hynix's one-year delay on memristors, how the Flynn Effect isn't about people getting smarter, how the New York Times has been colluding with the CIA to boost Obama's reelection chances, how the spyware known as FinFisher can take over your mobile device, the Pirate Bay founder who was arrested in Cambodia, how the U.S. is probably using Sweden to get at Julian Assange, and finally how Obama's justice department has granted final immunity to Bush's CIA torturers.
Justin and Jason discuss why Jason is sad about Colby quitting club soccer, scaling Node.js to a million concurrent connections and how Redis is used at Uber, what it's like working at UberMedia and Idealab, how Sandy is helping out with AnyFu, ideas on how to share customer support responsibilities, why Justin is frustrated with Pluggio and what Jason thinks he should do about it, the upstart success of Jason's iPad fund and why Justin wants to raise money for audio software, building iPhone apps with Visual Studio and JyOS, the panic over Fukushima and how uranium extracted from the ocean could power the human race until 5000AD, Justin's update on intermittent fasting, recruiting kids for Catalyst, RoboRally and learning to program by training a robot, how your brain can be hacked, the high performance PHP framework Phalcon PHP, how Coursera is introducing an honor code in an attempt to reduce cheating, how Twitter is slitting their own throat, individualist and collectivist coding and why quality happens when someone is responsible for it, the problem of sorting out who owns what when signing IP contracts, speculating on whether Buffer was influenced by Pluggio, and how Rob Walling was quoted in a New York Times article.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's experiments with intermittent fasting, the latest on AnyFu, Justin's call for an open Twitter, how to be a math or science rockstar, why the singularity is not coming, sci-fi predictions from 1987, storing 700 terabytes of data in a single gram of DNA, Jason's thoughts on learning synthetic biology and the GenoCon competition, Jason's teaching strategy for Catalyst and why he thinks Python will be a better learning language than Chipmunk Basic, Justin's new Galaxy Nexus 7, how Google's self-driving car is going to change everything, why WebRTC wil change the web, TrapWire and the new totalitarianism of surveillance technology, and the efficacy of using loss aversion to improve teacher performance.
Justin and Jason talk about the response to the wives show, Justin's new life in Pasadena and his new contract at UberMedia, how Jason is going to spend his half of the podcast donation money, the latest on Jason's math and science academy - Catalyst, why Justin is excited about intermittent fasting, the recent scientific reversals on salt, sitting posture, positive thinking and fluoride, why Justin wants to pay Jason to work on AnyFu, deploying real-time systems code at Uber, how Justin moved Pluggio to a Rackspace Cloud Database and why he thinks growing Pluggio's revenue is so difficult, whether App.net has any chance of disrupting Twitter, engineering bacteria to survive on Mars, the discovery of the Gauss cyber weapon, why Algebra isn't necessary, why Jason thinks most textbooks are inefficient, and the stark contrast between electronics hobbyist books and introductory electrical engineering books.
Jason speaks with Scott Young, creator of the online course Learn More, Study Less, about his effort to master the entire 4-year MIT computer science curriculum in only 12 months.
In this wives tell-all episode, Georgie Wisen-Vincent, Sandy Roberts and Sherry Walling give their respective views on what it's like being married to a technology entrepreneur.
Justin and Jason speak with Matin Tamizi, founder and CEO of Balanced, about the opportunity and challenges of building a payments system for marketplaces.
Justin and Jason discuss the psychological impact of getting out of debt, the Gabriel Method and the Paleo Diet, the mystery boom, whether the freemium model will work for Pluggio, Justin's entrepreneurial ups and downs, whether Pluggio is fundable, the pros and cons of red ocean and blue ocean strategies, the first episode of Divergence, the terrifying background of the man who ran a CIA assassination unit, how the super-rich are hiding at least $21 trillion in offshore tax havens, whether the Colorado shooter was crazy and the sociological impact of the event, the Russian research project that offers 'immortality' to billionaires, planning for episode 200, why Jason decided against taking the Coursera course Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computation, Scott Young's MIT Challenge and the possibility of replicating an undergraduate education with only online courses, the negative network effect of having a college degree, and Colby's enthusiasm for learning electronics.
Jason talks with Peter Stone, director of the Learning Agents Research Group at UT Austin, whose team, UT Austin Villa, won both the standard platform league and the 3D simulation league of the RoboCup 2012 competition. They discuss why robot soccer is a good motivating application domain for machine learning, how the RoboCup competition got started and the kinds of teams that participate, the offshoot competition RoboCup Jr, why the machine learning technique known as reinforcement learning works so well in complex, dynamic environments, the role played by game theory in multiagents systems, Peter's involvement in developing autonomous driving vehicles and what it's like to run an artificial intelligence laboratory.
Jason interviews Omri Drory, founder and CEO of Genome Compiler Corporation, about how they're aiming to build the AutoCAD of synthetic biology.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's move to Pasadena, whether you can fake being a nice guy, how John Humphrey reserved the domain AnyFoo.com and donated it to J&J, thoughts on the Pluggio pitch deck, an update on AnyFu, selling the Preezo codebase, the Udacity experiment, the apology to Elon Musk, the books A Life Decoded and Turing's Cathedral, Justin's tentative workout plan, the money-empathy gap, Jason's request that Cathal Garvey write a Make style biohacking book and teach a Udacity course on synthetic biology, Jason's idea for a TV show called Resurrection, Jason's strategy for teaching Algebra to his his 7-year old son Colby, determining your enthusiasm half-life, planning for a wives "tell-all" interview show, the possibility of fan-funding new and canceled TV shows, and the dream of getting Elon Musk as an interview guest.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's upcoming move back to LA, how Justin got his wife Georgie to do the voice over for some Pluggio instructional videos, why Justin is putting Pluggio on AngelList, Guyon's recent visit to LA, why Jason is holding office hours with Pat Maddox at Coloft, why there are going to be two back-to-back interviews on synthetic biology, the upcoming interview with machining learning expert and RoboCup champion Peter Stone, Jason's plan for teaching electronics to his son Colby and his strategy for bootstrapping a math and science academy, Google+ vs Twitter, how the EFF is taking up the patent fight with Defend Innovation, the cognitive overload of having a lot of browser tabs open, and Jason's surprising connections to Jeff Dean, John Conway, Sarah Brown and Amy Jo Johnson.
Jason interviews Cathal Garvey about the exciting new field of synthetic biology, its amateur cousin DIYbio and his new startup, Glowbiotics.
Justin and Jason discuss how Jason missed Rob Walling's text message, the hiccups and challenges of the Pluggio mass emailing and why Pluggio is probably competing with HootSuite despite Justin being in denial about it, moving the AnyFu payment system to Balanced, why Ben Reyes needs to settle on a name, why Justin "needs" to tabulate the show's donations, how Jason is using DragonBox to teach algebra to his 7-year old son Colby, using projects and games as teaching tools for math and science, the rise of Google+ and why power Twitter users are rooting against it, Orrick LLP's documents, how SocialWOD reduced their cancellation rate by 87.5%, the 14-year old who was hit by a meteorite, the incredible size of galaxies, the Science Channel show Through the Wormhole and the theory that a black hole gives birth to a new universe, the surprisingly effective method of first mastering a new technique and then seeking out formerly difficult problems that will yield easily to it, Jason's idea of resolution-based learning, Kurt Vonneguts's advice to start as close to the end as possible and how that can be applied to teaching, Jason's drive to learn genome hacking and why he believes it might be possible to do without years of formal education.
Justin and Jason discuss why Iron Man is the ultimate geek super hero, the positive user feedback about Justin's recent solo interview and Jason's concept for a math and science academy, interfacing .NET with a Win32 DLL, the latest progress on AnyFu, Jason's HN comment that received 75 up-votes and no replies, rbutr - an application that allows people to follow inter-website debates, Jason's idea on how to merge spaced learning with the workgroup style learning being experimented with at MIT, the two Kickstarter projects that Justin has donated to, the latest on Pluggio, Justin's movie marathon, why Michael Lewis believes that luck is a bigger part of the equation than most successful people like to admit, the rise of synthetic biology and the bio-hacking movement, the federal judges who spiked the Apple-Google case (calling the patent system “dysfunctional”) and ruled that indefinite detention of Americans is unconstitutional and a critique of the movie Prometheus.
Justin talks to Ted Pitts & Harry Hollander about how they bootstrapped Moraware.com to more than $1m revenue.
Justin and Jason discuss the lastest with Pluggio and the power of the discount, the prospect of using Kickstarter to finance cancelled TV shows, political campaigns and even for paying off the national debt, why Justin should hurry up and write the definitive "kickstrapping" blog post, why you shouldn't discuss your startup name in a cafe, Craig Venter’s synthetic organisms, the Yale scientist who discovered a Fungus that eats plastic and the 16-year old kid who discovered a microbe that does the same, Jason's idea for using genetically altered sea algae to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, experiments that hint of longer lives, why no one under the age of thirty seems to know how to write desktop applications, using APIfy to turn any website into an API, estimating tasks and making progress on AnyFu, how Lance Jones got AnyFu clients through a blog post, Justin's desire to efficiently auto-generate documentation from PHP source code, Jason's idea for the ultimate math and science academy, the power of "spaced learning" and it's relation to "spaced repetition" (the SuperMemo algorithm), how memories can be erased and a few tricks to improve your retention.
Jason speaks with Wayne Graham, author of Beginning Facebook Game Apps Development about the process, technical issues and tradeoffs of developing games for the Facebook platform. Following are some links discussed in the show: Open Source Game Engines: - CAAT: http://hyperandroid.github.com/CAAT/ - Crafty: http://craftyjs.com/ - LimeJS: http://www.limejs.com/ - MelonJS: http://www.melonjs.org/ Commercial Game Engines: - Isogenic: http://www.isogenicengine.com/ - ImpactJS: http://impactjs.com/ Comprehensive List of Game Engines: https://github.com/bebraw/jswiki/wiki/Game-Engines
Justin and Jason talk about the latest with Pluggio, the dangers of starting with a free service and the Google nuclear winter, the irregularities with the Facebook IPO, CashBase and the personal finance market, the effect of Elon Musk's success with SpaceX and what sets him apart, the power of balancing relentless optimism with brutal self-awareness, the against all odds story of Jimmy Conrad, how an e-paper watch raised over $10 million on KickStarter, how Jason is learning electronics so he can teach it to his son, the power of spending a fixed amount of time per day on a project, Jason's idea for a virtual standup web app, how Germany set a new solar power record, the overwhelming size of the universe and the powerful new telescope to be located in South Africa, Australia, the self-driving Google car and why the future of space is going to be robotic, the CDC on preparing for a zombie apocalypse, whether HFT, or most startups for that matter, have any real social value, Jason's equation for measuring evil, a proposed amendment to lift the ban on government propaganda, the Internet Bat Signal, the Citizens United verdict and the power wielded by Super PACs, the new patent troll, Rockstar Consortium and why Justin donated $25 to a human powered helicopter project.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's upcoming move back to LA, an update on Appignite, avoiding depression while not running a $1B company, the new Pluggio UI and why some existing customers don't like it, Company 52's new focus, Jason's thoughts on Steve Job's biography, the new interview format, how Jason bought some Facebook shares, Mesh01's upcoming design competition for a "luck surface area" t-shirt, the aborted SpaceX launch, why Steve Blank thinks the age of Silicon Valley is over, when a blow to the head creates a sudden genius, the Reproducibility Project, the genetic basis for why Jason talks so much and the progress being made on AnyFu.
Jason speaks with James Thomas, Director of Research for Headlands Technologies, LLC, about the business of high-frequency trading.
Justin and Jason discuss their experiences at MicroConf and the Rock Rock Hotel, Justin's new focus on being focused, the Atlantic's article about Justin's Yelp nightmare, why Justin believes Kickstarter is the future of seed funding and should be called "kickstrapping", why Jason and Guyon are probably going to kill their HackerEvents project, how Edwardo Saverin and Derek Sivers are renouncing their U.S. citizenships, the development of Colby's Star Stream project, why Justin thinks Appignite should be open-sourced using a WordPress-like business model, Kevin's Rose's likely net worth, how the UK is going to station missiles on a residential roof for the Olympics, how the CIA's MKUltra project likely created the Unabomber, the Pentagon's claim that they have no photo evidence of Bin Laden's death and the treasure hunter who says he's located Bin Laden's body, Richard Stallan's Facebook notes and Jason's memory system project, how Fringe has been renewed for a fifth and final season, playing with CircuitLab, Jason's idea for a Facebook game that uses the game design of Scrabble but applied to electronics and why future interviews will most likely be conducted by either Justin or Jason alone instead of both of them at the same time.
Description: Justin and Jason talk with application security expert, Matt Konda, about how to harden web applications against common attacks, tools that can help locate vulnerabilities and his new security startup, Jemurai.
Justin's upcoming post about the Yelp review filtering system, the new version of Pluggio, looking forward to MicroConf, Freeman Dyson and his global warming heresy, a La Critique of RootBuzz, more thoughts on simulating the zombie apocalypse, island economics and the danger of extreme wealth inequality, TBTF banks and thoughts on the MF Global fiasco, Matt Tiabbi's coverage of Wall Street's endemic corruption and why William Black thinks the American JOBS Act will introduce fraud, $10 million loans for everyone, how Iran is reverse engineering a downed U.S. drone, why CENTCOM's Operation Earnest Voice will ultimately be turned inward like the NSA's Operation Stellar Wind and completing the AnyFu payout cycle.
Justin and Jason discuss why Justin is moving back to LA, how he was swindled by a moving company and why the Yelp review system is partly to blame, how people are able to rationalize bad behavior by the creation of false narratives, how the US, Israel and China are influencing social networks with the help of tools like persona management platforms, why Justin thinks Breaking Bad is the best drama series ever made, the awesome Prometheus trailers and viral TED Talk, how Justin improved Pluggio's performance and the lessons he learned along the way, the homogenization of blog engines and how it aids and hinders creativity, the awesomeness of Light Table, Meteor and Firebase, the recent down-tick in VC funding, the technology behind Preezo and the idea of writing an article about it, why Netflix decided not to implement the prize-winning algorithm the science and technology behind a quantum Internet, the MIT study predicting global economic collapse by 2030 and the OECD report pinning it at 2050, the subject of System Dynamics and the concept of stock and flows, thought's on simulating the zombie apocalypse, creating a massively distributed P2P dispatching network and how someone other than Justin wrote the new version of ezSQL.
Justin & Jason talk in depth with Gabriel Weinberg about how he raised $3m venture capital for DuckDuckGo.
Justin and Jason discuss balancing time when bootstrapping, the categories and costs of context switching, strategies for recruiting AnyFu experts, the status of the AnyFu payout system, what was learned from the first five AnyFu sessions, the DNA of the perfect AnyFu expert, whether or not we're in a startup bubble, when it makes sense to bootstrap and when it makes sense to raise money, vaccinating yourself against customer feedback, Helmut's document signing demo, the Hacker News slap, why Jason believes the "donate to charity" business model won't work for AnyFu, the importance of keeping your message simple, the PhantomJS web stack, why writing business plans are a waste of time for web and mobile startups, the new Node.js profiler, how Justin got into business with Uri Geller, the story of MashAPI, and the scam of automatic traffic ticketing.
Justin and Jason speak with actor / producer / stunt-man, Dan Southworth about life as the Quantum Ranger and how he bootstrapped the sci-fi / action web series Divergence.
Justin and Jason discuss some big donations from the Australian contingent, the story of Spent - an expense tracking iPhone app, the importance of momentum, how Ben Boyter got a raise, Justin's new life in Savannah, building an NDA signing service, the customer development being done for AnyFu, whether life is easier as a funded or bootstrapped startup, the maven versus the consultant, quality over quantity, drafting an LLC agreement, traveling to MicroConf, developing a payout system, bringing Preezo back from the dead and why Jason and Justin love their accountant.
Justin and Jason talk to William Saito author of "An Unprogrammed Life: Adventures of an Incurable Entrepreneur"
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's drive to Savannah, the recent iTunes review surge, the success of the first AnyFu transaction and the lessons learned, whether or not AnyFu qualifies as a "Lean Startup", the new TZ comment policy, what happened to _why, why Jason is excited about Colby's renewed interest in soccer, different types of memories, whether Fringe is going to be renewed for a fifth season and why Justin likes teenage dramas, MySQL replication, the NSA's domestic spying technology, how Kevin Rose is closing down Milk and joining Google, why Jason is paring back his Appignite ambition, the latest on Koz's job hunt, why Justin thinks Google+ is dying and the science behind the 8-hour work day.
Justin and Jason discuss how Rackspace went down for 7 hours and took Pluggio down with it, some ideas for implementing a robust failover solution, the latest on AnyFu and some feedback from the first two users, why Justin is moving to Savannah, GA and what makes him think he's actually going to get work done on the drive there, what James Dyson wants to do to improve the Brittish economy, how Jason ghost wrote the "Help a hacker out" post on Hacker News, what happened when David Wasmer increased his "luck surface area", what to do about the asteroid that's headed directly at earth, why we're underestimating the risk of human extinction and the three propositions of the ancestor simulation hypothesis, how you can double your brain power through "transcranial direct-current stimulation" and for only $99, what's been learned from the hacking of Stratfor, why kids born later in the year are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, Jason's idea for a real-word "like" system, the difference between grinds and princes, an Appignite update, and why YOU need to review us on iTunes.
Justin and Jason speak with Baron Schwartz, Chief Performance Architect at Percona and lead author of the O'Reilly book, High Performance MySQL.
Justin and Jason discuss how Justin's apartment almost burned down and how he sold his house in the UK, the television shows Fringe, Prophets of Science Fiction, Bloomberg Game Changers and the movie Limitless, the progress being made on AnyFu and the challenge of recruiting well-known experts, listener questions, the story of what happend to Jason's movie idea, the possibility of recurring donations and winning the iTunes review war with Startups for the Rest of Us, effective criticism, Alex MacCaw's new Ace framework (think Sinatra for Node.js), insight from Uber's most successful driver, the risk of premature generalization, how SmartGit makes Git easy and why research on the H5N1 virus has been temporarily halted.
Justin and Jason talk to Alex MacCaw, author of JavaScript Web Applications, The Little Book on CoffeeScript, Spine.js and a bunch of other cool stuff.
Justin and Jason talk to Patrick Collison, co-founder of the online payment processing startup, Stripe
Justin and Jason discuss the latest in brain boosting, why to-do lists don't work, the ethics of deleting a user's data after they've closed their account, the upcoming MicroConf 2012 conference, getting more iTunes reviews, Jason's idea for applying a points system to Masterminding, the latest progress on AnyFu, the painful process of acquiring an SSL Extended Validation certificate and why Jason opposed the idea of purchasing an SSL certificate from GoDaddy, encrypting social security numbers, how one of the founders of TheGlobe is applying the Angel List model to Hollywood, why the actor who played Darth Vader still isn't getting paid residuals, some ideas on how to disrupt Hollywood, why ACTA is the new SOPA, the new show segment known as the Doom and Gloom Report, how the oldest ship in the navy, the USS Enterprise, AKA the "Mobile Chernobyl", is heading straight to the Strait of Hormuz, why India is going to pay gold for Iranian oil, how the LAPD coordinated with the CIA on terrorism (which is a big no-no) and Jason's prediction for the evolution of AnyFu.
Justin & Jason talk to Anthony Goldblooma and Jeremy Howard co-founders of Kaggle a platform for predictive modeling competitions.
Justin & Jason talk with Rob Walling about the acquisition and release of his new site Hittail.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's recent post about converting his site from PayPal to Stripe, Jason's idea for a mathematical equation describing the tyranny of choice, the latest on Pluggio, AnyFu and Appignite, why Jason believes war with Iran is likely and how the price of oil will skyrocket if it happens, the story of how Jason's attempt to sell his house before the market crashed in 2007, 3D printing, RepRap and MakerBot, Colby's awesome new RC helicopter, the DC taxi commissioner who's trying to stop Uber, what kind of jobs belong to the 1%, Jason's idea for crowd-sourcing the identification of logical fallacies in news columns and opinion pieces, whether journalists should be truth vigilantes, how Jason and Guyon built a profiler for Node.js, NASA's discovery that there are 1,500 earth-sized planets within 50 light-years of earth, upcoming interviews and Jason's idea for creating a synthetic university education.
Justin and Jason discuss: The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, How in-flight entertainment systems are architected, Irish ATM's weird defaults, How Moore's Law may work for years to come due to quantum anomaly, Justin's idea of flipping a house, and much more.
Justin and Jason discuss why Peter and Alex were asked to fill in for Jason on last week's show, why our brains seem to get slower over time, Justin's struggle to remain productive while on his six week "work-cation", why Jason accepted a full-time consulting contract with Uber, whether it's worth entering the LAUNCH startup competition if you're not planning on raising money, the process of setting up the AnyFu bank account, switching some of Uber's infrastructure from MongoDB to Redis, comparing Uber's rocket-ship growth rate to it's humble beginnings, the success of Louis C.K.'s DVD experiment, Jason's one-dollar Christmas moment, capturing light at a trillion frames per second, the latest breakthrough in solar panel efficiency, why long vacations and retirement are boring, the only real way to stop SOPA, the indefinite detention provision of the NDAA and the FBI's abuse of National Security Letters, and how Jason's kids helped him get through his mother's death.
Justin, Alex Gemmell & Peter Cooper talk about various Hacker News stories including The Unintended Effects of Driverless Cars, What really happened aboard Air France 447, More Paypal nonsense, Don't Be A Free User, Why we ditched PayPal for Stripe, 17-year-old wins 100k for creating cancer-killing nanoparticle , Zendesk CEO calls Freshdesk a freaking rip off - Freshdesk responds.
Justin and Jason discuss Jason Cohen's WP Engine, the idea for a Kickstarter-like site that would allow customers to prepay for a pre-launched service, getting AnyFu out the door and lessons learned so far, the man-made super flu that could kill half of humanity, why musicians and other creatives seem to get progressively worse over time, 17 Jedi mind tricks for persuading people, understanding the Hype Cycle, selling brand name training shoes in India, and the latest on Justin's juice diet.
Justin and Jason discuss working while traveling, their dissatisfaction with Asana and the low tech solution they've adopted, the pros and cons of "banking your enthusiasm", the Cern Neutrino experiment, how a vacuum isn't empty but contains "class definitions" of real particle known as virtual particles, the TV show John Doe, Arrested Development's deal with Netflix, ideas on how to create AnyFu's legal documents, PicoMoney and the virtual money concept, why SOPA is a nightmare, the best time to submit an article to HN, Jason's experiment in using economic incentives to spike his son's academic and athletic progress, how Roger Craig broke the all-time Jeopardy record using a knowledge tracking web app, three memory hacks that work, the dawn of the robot age, how the inventor of the Super Soaker is creating a new electric car battery and how spacing your kids two years apart makes them smarter.
Justin and Jason discuss the progress being made on AnyFu and related business decisions, concepts from the book Running Lean, Paul Paetz of Innovative Disruption, why no one is going to steal an unproven idea, why you want to buy when everyone else is selling and sell when everyone else is buying, how Mark Pincus is attempting to steal equity from his employees, selling equity in private companies on Second Market, whether Andrea Rossi's E-Cat (Energy Catalyzer) is real or a fraud, how a new cancer drug is being used for weight loss, how energy efficiency of computing is doubling every 18 months, how the FBI is using GPS trackers without warrants and how Twitter had to turn over user information to the Feds without a warrant, the book The Shadow Factory (about the NSA), what elite achievers do differently and how the founder of Color is off his rocker.
Justin and Jason discuss the tradeoffs of various payment options for AnyFu, Jason's recent trip to Uber's headquarters in San Francisco, Justin's evolving partnership with Company 52 and Pluggio's new design, the possibility of starting a TZ Fund, how news is like junkfood, MongoGate, Node.js for beginners, how to increase your "follow me on Twitter" conversions, why Justin unsubscribed from AppSumo, why Anonymous isn't as anonymous as they need to be, the secret U.S. panel that can put Americans on a "kill list", why the feds want to be able to lie about the existence of public records, and how the New York Times is suing the federal government for refusing to reveal its secret interpretation of the PATRIOT Act.
Justin and Jason talk to Mathew Klein, founder of trading systems community Collective2 and author of the novels Con Ed and Switchback, about his experiences in the Dotcom crash, researching algorithmic trading systems, bootstrapping a web startup, and balancing his life as an entrepreneur and writer.
Justin and Jason discuss the progress being made on AnyFu and their differing development styles, Anonymous' threat to expose a Mexican drug cartel, useful coding tools and JavaScript libraries, how Jason installed Windows 7 alongside OSX using Parallels and is kickstarting a collaboration with David Fogel on an AI trading project, Justin's partnership with Company 52 and the future of Pluggio, some of Jason's failed partnerships and why it's better to take the high road, how you're the average of your five closest friends, the secrets of a mind-gamer and the 60 Minutes segment on people with extraordinary memory, the Dan Plan and putting the 10,000 hour rule to the test, some of the friendships and collaborations that have resulted from Jason's recent posts on algorithmic trading, the slave-master Node.js library that Jason and Curtis wrote for Uber, a short recap of some of the talks given at Startup School, the Netflix debacle and how Amazon is becoming a publisher, why Jason is so hard to please when it comes to non-fiction books and Justin's book recommendation - Mars.
Justin and Jason talk with Joanna Wiebe author of CopyHackers the definitive how-to guide for copywriting for startups!
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's new Pluggio partnership and Pluggio's latest revenue numbers, the progress being made on AnyFu and ideas for how to launch, Jason's thought's on Google+ and his recent post "Letter to a Flash Developer", a list of recommended geeky audiobooks, an econometric article extending Jason's "Do * Tell" concept and Jason's realization of why he should have studied applied rather than pure mathematics.
Justin and Jason speak with Chon Tang about his journey through MIT, the Dot-com bubble and angel investing to how he ultimately became a successful and independent algorithmic trader. Due to Jason's background in the field, this episode digs deep into the details of algorithmic trading to discuss everything from the development, testing and optimization of trading models to trading software, execution gateways, clearing firms, leverage and risk management.
Justin and Jason discuss the TweetBoard.me results and it's impact on Pluggio's revenue, Justin's upcoming blog post about three dimensional pricing plans, the tradeoffs of using PayPal Adaptive payments for AnyFu, Justin's new consulting client and the possibility of their involvement with Pluggio, the Bitbanter podcast calling it quits, Matt Swanson's generous donation to the show, Jason's blog post about why he quit algorithmic trading and his meta follow-up post of Google+, why Uber is having a hard time hiring developers, whether instantiating a virtual machine for each Appignite app would be overkill, Moneyball and other math geek movies, and Jason's poll on what he should write about next.
Justin and Jason discuss the release of Justin's latest project, TweetBoard and it's potential impact on Pluggio, some thoughts on writing single page web apps, why Jason is using Google+, whether the ORM is an anti-pattern, the latest on AnyFu and Appignite, an update on Justin's plant-based diet and why Jason remains unconvinced of it's scientific validity, Jason's idea for using JSON to define the structure and behavior of a hierarchy of javascript widgets and the recently released book Design for Hackers.
Justin and Jason discuss the status and recent progress made on Pluggio, Appignite and AnyFu, lessons learned about when to initiate the design process, The Birdy's custom feature voting system, Dan Filipe's startup filming project, using NLP to cure "the madness", when it makes more sense to incorporate as an LLC vs an S-Corp or C-Corp, a documentary on the evil business practices of Monsanto, an update on the sit vs stand debate, the weirdness of Benford’s Law, creating rich interactive web apps with KnockoutJS, the launch of Trello and whatever happened to Skyboard, finite state machines and the State design pattern.
Justin and Jason talk with Stavros Korokithakis, founder of bookmarking service Historious, about how he bootstrapped a simple side project into a money generating startup while running a freelance consultancy.
Justin and Jason discuss the movie Forks over Knives, how a Twitter-based hedge fund beat the stock market, the cause of riots and the price of food, our oil-constrained future, the Japanese wind power breakthrough, the surprising truth about what motivates us, Puggio's new three-ways business plan, why Jason is translating Appignite to Javascript, Steve Jobs and the eureka myth, lab grown meat, why the UK startup scene is doomed, rational home buying, Paul Graham's patent pledge, Bid On My Day, when it's better to increase conversions and when it's time to hire a sales team, how John McAfee lost 96% of his wealth, going mobile first, the idea of investment tithing and how enthusiasm goes a long way over email.
Justin and Jason discuss why staying up late can screw up your life, how Skype is almost the full realization of the magical CTU tech of the TV show 24, Peter Cooper's Javascript Weekly newsletter, the prospect of migrating Appignite to a single-page web application, the advantages of leaving a problem unfinished at the end of a work session, Justin's idea for a collective version of Groupon for websites codenamed Groupio, the high-cost of the context switch, whether AnyFu should be incorporated as an LLC and some ideas about vesting and founder death, Justin's review of Zarrella's Hierarchy of Contagiousness, using Twitter's location based search streams, the science of extreme life extension and Leslie Kean's History Channel documentary Secret Access: UFOs on The Record.
Justin and Jason discuss whether software is actually eating the world, why Elon Musk is the most impressive entrepreneur in modern times, splitting payments using PayPal Adaptive Payments, how to solve the problem of the fractured social web, why Justin posts the kinds of links he does, some upcoming changes to Pluggio, the status of Jason and Guyon's custom scrollbar component, Justin's concern about working on code with Jason, whether begging is a type of social defection, Justin's theory that the recent Anonymous attack on BART was a false flag attack, the movie Apollo 18, NASA's discovery of nucleobases on twelve different meteorites, a recent discovery that early life was sulfur-based, the current status of Appignite and the design of the AnyFu logo and character.
Justin and Jason discuss Scotty Jackson, the magical genius illustrator, why Justin is impressed by the Gooveshark UI, Jason's frustration with the design process, what it takes to be entry level rich, more on the downgrading of US debt, the ethical implications of Justin automating his Twitter feed, the Bloomberg Risk Takers profile of Elon Musk, an update on the Pluggio SEO strategy and affiliate marketing campaign, how markets are efficient if and only if P = NP, how the San Francisco police asked wireless providers to turn off their signals to prevent a protest, possible causes for the London riots and who should be held accountable, former Clinton and Bush counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke's accustation airing on ABC news about a CIA cover-up of 9/11, how Apple is stepping up to defend iOS devs against patent troll Lodsys, why Jason thinks losing weight is like doing a startup, adding TameJS to CoffeeScript, SafeCast, Jason's interview about high-frequency trading and the prospect of open-sourcing some Uber code.
Justin and Jason chat with Rob Walling and Mike Taber hosts of Startups for the rest of us.
Justin and Jason talk to Jason's partner in Appignite, Guyon Roche, about how they began working together and the advantages of pair programming, Guyon's take on Appignite and AnyFu, why design can be important for startups, what percent of Twitter and Facebook accounts are real, an investment manager's take on the top 1%, the most likely way to get rich, the reason for AnyFu's high-end pricing policy, the potential impact of S&P's downgrading of US debt, Rob Walling's advice to bootstrap as a partnership rather than as a LLC, Jason's idea on using resources like OpenCourseware and Tutorspree as an alternative to traditional education, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX, the status of Justin's juice diet and an update on Pluggio's growth.
Justin ans Jason discuss Steve Perlman’s impossible wireless tech known as DIDO and the technology of WiTricity, why Pluggio's growth has suddenly stalled out, logging slow queries using MySQL's Slow Query Log and monitoring your site using SiteUptime, Jason and Curtis's upcoming post on Uber's Node.js based dispatching system, the designer they've hired to create AnyFu's brand identity and UI and whether they should use Braintree or PayPal for payment processing, how Jason tried and abandoned jScrollPane to build his own custom scrollbar, Justin's new Juice diet and the movie that inspired it, the sophistication and complexity of SQLAlchemy and Doctrine and the ORM Jason is building for Appignite, the Airbnb fiasco and some ideas on how they could mitigate that kind problem in the future and the industrial scale patent trolling of Intellectual Ventures.
Justin and Jason discuss the suspension of Justin's 600 calorie per day diet and whether his plan to move to Ireland is such a s good idea, the process of finding a designer for AnyFu and the progress on the site mockups, the incredible rise in the value of Bitcoins and whether Bitcoins will ever really go mainstream and threaten the dollar, how the Japanese character set cracked Pluggio and made Justin confused, the importance of momentum in just about everything, Justin's crazy work schedule and how Jason is juggling five client contracts, why Jason is considering open sourcing some of his code, whether the Singularity is near or far, the possibility of a CrunchFund, the worrisome addiction of drawing Anime, "black ops" in Pakistan, whether the world economy is near collapse and whether following the news is worth the effort, using Qwerly to clout rank your email list, why working for startups is a smart career move, how MemSQL offer's a 30x performance enhancement over MySQL and the coolness of Google Web Fonts.
Justin and Jason discuss the death of Justin's father, Udi's blog post about Appignite, Uber's technological origins and the new Node.js based dispatch server, rapid UI design using mockups, the core problems that AnyFu needs to solve, using Showcase Lane to get feedback on UI design, a La Critique of The Birdy, an update on Pluggio's growth, whether it's better to use dashes or underscores in SEO slugs, finding a logo design for AnyFu and the importance of good design, Jason's slightly contrarian position on the lean startup model, using MySQL fulltext search vs a search engine like Solr or Sphinx, running server-side Javascript on RingoJS, Justin's strategy for curing himself of diabetes, how Kevin Rose and Evan Williams are both starting incubators, the possibility that Justin will be moving back to Ireland and the idea for an open version of Y-Combinator.
Justin and Jason discuss the progress they've made so far on AnyFu, why Jason thinks Sweden smells like ice cream and his idea for yet another TV series, life lessons from the very wealthy and preschool's huge payoff, an update on Justin's outsourcing effort, Jason's idea for compiling compiling CoffeeScript to PHP, Justin's micro-depression about Pluggio and an update on the numbers, ideas on picking a designer and a design for AnyFu, what makes a good finisher and why women make teams smarter.
Justin and Jason discuss Pluggio's numbers and the results of a Pluggio product-market fit survey, Jason's recent trip to Scandinavia, how Justin is upscaling his outsourcing, making Appignite command-line accessible, why AnyFu is worth pursuing and the summer show schedule.
Justin and Jason discuss the events of Microconf 2011 during the drive back home to Los Angeles. This is part two of two episodes.
Justin and Jason are on the road to Microconf 2011 in Las Vegas. This is part one of two episodes, part two will be released this coming weekend and is a recording of the trip back.
Justin and Jason interview Erica Douglas, founder of Whoosh Traffic, about how she built and sold her web hosting business for $1.1 million at the of age 26, why and how SEO works despite what you may have heard to the contrary and what her rules are for success in business.
Justin and Jason discuss how Justin has managed to get out of debt so quickly, Jason's Appignite generated issue reporter - Complainer, how Justin and Jason are teaming up to do AnyFu and some ideas on how the site might work, how Justin optimized Pluggio using APC byte caching, overriding include_once and increasing MySQL's buffer pool, Justin's idea on how to grow the show, how disappointed they are that the TV show The Event has been canceled, why Jason is jealous of Colby's big summer, an update on Pluggio's numbers and the integration with Totango, Jason's idea for how Justin could increase Pluggio's traffic, Jason's idea for starting a non-profit to fight patent trolling, the new version of Uber's God View and working with the Google Maps API, the speed and flexibility of JSONP and why ordering posts chronologically devalues them.
Justin and Jason interview Guy Nirpaz, CEO and co-founder of Totango, an analytics SAAS offering that provides a deeper understanding of customer interactions. They discuss how they validated the idea and got started, how they provide value and where they're headed in the future.
The impending Rapture and post Rapture looting, Bitcoin and it's economic implications, Teamviewer and why the native OSX VNC server is so slow, getting useful feedback from listeners, Justin's premature optimization and an update on his outsourcing experiment, the status of the Appignite beta, why points are no longer displayed for comments Hacker News why Jason thinks that they also shouldn't be displayed for news items, the latest Pluggio numbers, Justin's upcoming talk at MicroConf, the confirmation of Einstein's theory of gravity, Jason's idea for doing a show segment called Gotcha that will cover cognitive biases, logical fallacies and social dilemmas, how little sleep you can get away with, how to increase your cognitive potential and five unexpected downsides of high intelligence.
Entrepreneur, investor and writer, James Altucher, is back for more and this time to talk about why you shouldn't go to college, own a house, buy stocks or follow the news. He also talks about his new book, How to Be the Luckiest Person Alive, and how it's easier now than ever to be the master of your own destiny as long as you're willing to own it.
Justin and Jason discuss Pluggio's scalability challenges, password hashing problems in PHP and whether Appignite can generate itself, the danger of working on more than one problem at a time, Justin's outrageous idea of erecting a pay-wall window for the podcast, how Justin is making a tech love connection, comparing Walmart to Microsoft, the power of commitment, an update on Jason's TV show idea, Justin's new apartment and Jason's upcoming trip to Scandinavia, an update on Justin's outsourcing experiment, what Justin is doing for Pluggio in terms of marketing, how to detect when a customer is about to drop their account, the cancellation of Stargate Universe, solving the memory leaks in the new Uber dispatch system and whether it's hard to bootstrap a startup that makes $1,000 per month.
Justin and Jason discuss Rob Walling's upcoming MicroConf, what Justin has learned from his outsourcing experiment, an update on Pluggio and it's revenue growth, why Justin uses Nozbe and how it's made him more productive, the kickoff of the Appignite beta test and how Jason plans on conducting it, how Neville fell of the TZ bandwagon and some ideas on how to get back him back on, methods of implementing full text search in MySQL, Jason's strategy for getting Jerry Pournelle and Elon Musk on the show, how Justin formatted his blog to work on mobile phones, Jason's latest idea for a TV show and where Jason and Justin rank on Google.
Justin and Jason speak with Keith Posehn, founder of Zorz, a performance marketing firm based out of San Diego, about how and why affiliate marketing can work for startups, his criteria for selecting clients and why he's taken on Pluggio and why he's launching a portfolio of startups through his mobile/social app think-tank AppZorz.
Justin and Jason discuss some of the issues surrounding the UFO topic, Justin's experiment in outsourcing development work for Pluggio, Rob Walling's upcoming bootstrapping conference - MicroConf, alpha-testing Appignite and the challenge of generating an API and AJAX functionality, how Justin and Jason both got themselves into debt and how they're getting themselves out, the impressive quality of the low budget science fiction movie Monsters, an update on Jason's experiment on applying extrinsic and intrinsic motivation to his six-year old son, a better methodology for teaching mathematics, an update on Pluggio's revenue growth and why Jason is impressed with Elon Musk.
Jason interviews Leslie Kean, investigative journalist and author of UFOs: Pilots, Generals and Public Officials Go on the Record, about her ten year effort to collect, validate and present the most credible evidence of the UFO phenomenon.
Justin and Jason discuss how Jason's son was recently diagnosed with meningitis, the consistent growth of Pluggio and why Justin is still depressed about it, the possibility and practicality of using Appignite to build a portfolio of web applications, Jason's ideas on how to get started as a freelancer, the surprising effectiveness of SEO slugs and various ways to implement them, Jason's idea for hosting a "startupathon" on StartupGuild, John C. Dvorak's new X3 podcast, StartupGuild's mirror image FounderList, the IMF bombshell that China will overtake the US in terms of real GDP by 2016 and Jason's observation that all startups (by definition) suffer from NIH.
Justin and Jason interview Ruben Gamez, solo founder of Bidsketch, about the mistakes he made and the lessons he learned on his path to building a successful bootstrapped web application.
Justin and Jason discuss StartupGuild's early growth and some ideas for it's future, how Anonymous is targeting Sony executives and whether Jason should start a podcast on government corruption, genetic screening and designer babies, the cost of context switching when juggling multiple client projects, the types of problems for which Node.js is best suited, the stupidity of blaming the Microsoft stack for MySpace's demise, what's driving Pluggio's recent growth trend and ideas on how to goose it even more, dynamically adjusting equity allocations in bootstrapped startups and an update on Jason's experiment with applying extrinsic motivation.
Justin and Jason interview Lucas Carlson, about how a hacker news post turned into $1.8 million funding for PHP Fog.
Justin and Jason discuss the surprising success of StartupGuild and the software that's powering it, why Jason is begrudgingly making the move to jQuery and why Justin hates REST, why Jason uses an HSA for his family's health plan and Justin's idea for offering a group health plan through StartupGuild, how the US is using socketpuppet software as a propaganda mechanism, how Justin is using jQuery Mobile for his new secret project, and whether or not TechZing is a "bootstrapping" show.
Justin and Jason interview founder and former CEO of DoubleClick, Kevin O'Connor, about how he's applying the lessons he learned as an engineer, entrepreneur and investor to his latest venture FindTheBest.
Justin and Jason discuss StartupGuild and what Justin will need to do to make it work, the difference between game theory and game mechanics, Jason's case study of applying extrinsic and intrinsic motivation to his six-year old son, how to increase your luck surface area via email, whether Google can reclaim any of it's startup vitality with Larry Page as the CEO, the challenges of the super rich, Jason's proposal for a startup word stop list, what's up with Appignite and the latest Pluggio growth stats and upcoming guests Leslie Kean and Kevin O'Connor.
Justin and Jason speak with Michael Sliwinski, founder of Nozbe - a web and mobile productivity application, about how he was able to bootstrap a "scratch your own itch" side project into a successful startup that employs a dozen people and services tens of thousands of paying customers.
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's blockbuster post about Entreporn, his prediction for the disintermediation of startup investment capital, an idea for how to synthesize microlending and angel investing into something called "microinvesting", Pluggio's resultant growth from funnel optimization, Justin's desire to facilitate startup masterminding on a large scale, the movie Limitless and predicting outcomes via game theory, the book Prisoner's Dilemma, and the possible discovery of Atlantis.
Justin and Jason interview Jason's older brother Jay, a nuclear engineer in an previous lifetime, about the situation with Japan's nuclear reactors, his experience with Japanese culture (his wife is Japanese and he spends half his time in Japan), his thoughts on Drupal and open source software, and why his social media startup is targeting the .gov market.
Justin and Jason interview Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network, about how he got started as a coder and his passion for programming and mentoring, how he and Joel Spolsky came up with the idea for Stack Overflow, his belief in free software and the Open ID initiative, the process of raising venture capital for Stack Exchange and his views of entrepreneurship, why he and Joel stopped doing the Stack Overflow podcast and whether they might start up again, and the hardest step when scaling a web app.
Justin and Jason discuss one of Pluggio's new features and Justin's estimate of Pluggio's growth rate, Twitter's recent change to their developer ecosystem guidelines and the inherent risk of developing on the Twitter and Facebook platforms, the variety of SEO strategies available to startups, data driven vs visionary driven development, the status of Appignite and Jason's development and product strategy, Jason's upcoming blog post about Facebook, an awesome new DIY pulse laser, the 25 steps to installing and running Diaspora, the best approach for implementing an enumerated type in a database and Justin's idea for generating a configuration file.
Justin & Jason talk to Amy Hoy of Freckle, and Patrick McKenzie of Bingo Card Creator about finding an audience and making money from it, what is SEO and how to do it, how important is design?, Jason's inability to have a boss, and what Amy and Patrick are up to these days.
Justin and Jason speak with guest James Altucher about his surprising experiences as a programmer, author, journalist, entrepreneur, trader, financial pundit, venture capitalist, angel investor and blogger.
Justin and Jason discuss getting into Forrst, why arguments tend to escalate when conducted via text, Justin's struggle with his Man on a Wire post, the dynamics of CEO compensation, using form tokens to prevent CSRF attacks, the possibility of moving Pluggio to the enterprise, Justin's surprising experience with Facebook adds, whether Jason should get an iPhone or an Android phone, spooky experiments that see the future, the impact of technology on political freedom, how Jason is teaching his 6-year old son HTML, server and client-side HTML rendering, migrating off Google App Engine and building a workflow engine in Appignite.
Justin and Jason talk to Kyle Bragger, founder of the developer and design community Forrst, about what sparked the idea and how he launched it as a side project, how he selected the technology stack and how it's evolved, how they've dealt with scaling and security, his thoughts on coding frameworks and development methodologies, why and how they created a user-linked karma system and his vision for Forrst's future growth as an angel funded business.
Justin and Jason discuss the specific methods that Anonymous used to hack HBGary, how social media power tools like Pluggio could be used for ill in the wrong hands, more about when to abstract and where to store images, Jason's idea for a two-way linked karma system, the skill required to articulate complex ideas, how Jason gave an ownership stake in Appignite to a previous investor, how Uber raised 11 million in VC funding, Justin's idea for a "no investment" movement and the secrets of freemium pricing.
Justin and Jason discuss WordPress backup site BlogVault, the backlash on the Skype 5 UI and the possibility for a Skype competitor, the guerrilla tactics behind bootstrapping a startup, methods of sending email through code, Anonymous and the Wikileaks controversy, why Jason is irritated by Justin's iPhone email trailer, securing images on a web server, why arguing is pointless, Justin's eager vs Jason's lazy approach to abstracting code, why Jason feels that switching to Subversion has been a waste of his time and understanding the motivation equation.
Justin and Jason discuss the concept of the Infinity Inbox, point inflation on Hacker News, the latest with Appignite and Pluggio, how to build authority on the web, how Jason took on too many projects and how he's rectifying the situation, why Stargate Universe was canceled, why Justin was in and out of school as a kid and the cost-benefit analysis of learning a second language if your first language is English.
Justin and Jason interview Andrew Warner, host of the entrepreneur interview show Mixergy, about his experience with his first company, why he started his podcast, what he's learned along the way and what his plans are for the future.
Justin, Jason and panel guests Sébastien Arnaud and Samuel Clay discuss the status of Sébastien's game AI framework - Cerebro, the AI behind News Blur, the News Blur business model, Open Calais, Game Center and how Titanium does not actually compile to native code, Coffee Script, Backbone.js, Underscore.js, Node.js, Couch DB, Gabriel Weinberg's recent PR coup, homeschooling and unschooling, the prospect of cloning a Woolly Mammoth and the latest in Justin's dental adventures.
Justin and Jason speak with the creators of the serial drama series Pioneer One, Josh Bernhard and Bracey Smith, about how they were able to raise $6,000 in donations on Kickstarter to shoot a full-length pilot episode that was downloaded over a millions times on BitTorrent and won best drama of the 2010 New York Television Festival.
Justin and Jason discuss life with kids, the Calacanis interview, the mismatch between Jason's voice and face, the status of Appignite and the inherit complexity of the problem, how Justin increased Pluggio's customer conversion rates and why his localization effort was a waste of time, hypothese driven development, the top ten mistakes in behavior change, the lessons learned from TechCrunch's bad review of MinuteBox, the story of how Jason sold his 300 ZX, how Reddit grew 230% in 2010, the lessons learned from Quora, seed stage valuations, Gabriel Wienberg's latest micro opportunity and startup advice from Tim Ferris.
Justin and Jason speak with guest Jason Calacanis about his surprising relationship to TechZing, the This Week In web TV network and his unfortunate fallout with Leo Laporte, how he's iterated and pivoted with Mahalo, the Jason Nation email list and why he stopped blogging, the LAUNCH Conference, the Open Angel Forum, Weblogs, Inc., delegating and growing companies, doing a startup while raising a family, the Beta Cast, martial arts, fat blogging and about a million other things.
Justin, Jason and panel guests Peter Cooper and Gabriel Weinberg discuss the weaknesses of Google search and the opportunities that exist for upstart competitors, how to recognize the early signs of exponential growth, the importance of maintaining psychological resilience as a solo entrepreneur, dispelling the myth that ideas are worthless, the two primary habits of creative people, recent changes made to Pluggio's user journey, pricing and signup process, Peter's e-book project and the potential growth in e-book readers, the tools they use, the technologies they're most excited about and what they wish they knew better.
Justin and Jason speak with conversion expert Lance Jones about the three fundamental questions that need to be asked to optimize conversion and the tools required to answer those questions.
Justin and Jason discuss streaming Netflix on the Netgear Roku XD and the LG BD 570, how the show Pioneer One was bootstrapped with only $6,000 in donations, refactoring the Uber code base and implementing a node.js solution, the value of building a presence on GitHub, optimizing the Pluggio customer funnel, A/B testing "merry christmas" vs "happy holidays", relying on intuition vs testing, how you can succeed in spite of making mistakes, why it's important to set short-term as well as long-term goals, Jason's idea for a goal setting app, how success can paralyze future efforts, a list of potential blog posts and how Jason is learning Python to solve a series of boring problems.
Justin and Jason speak with Sean K. Murphy, founder of SKMurphy, Inc, a Silicon Valley strategy consultancy for B2B software startups, about how tech entrepreneurship has evolved over the past thirty years, the most common mistakes made by entrepreneurs, the analytical framework he uses to understand and advise startups, the thinkers that have most influencing his understanding of the startup process, his criticisms of the product/market fit concept, his thoughts on business plans, why he started Bootstrappers Breakfast and his thoughts on how Jason should proceed with AppIgnite.
13: TZ Interview - tr.im, bit.ly and Twitter The REAL Story / Eric Woodward by techzing
This is the first episode of techZING! where Justin and Jason discuss the following: * Is Twitter useful? There’s a high noise to signal ratio. Justin suggests that maybe a Bayesian filter like Paul Graham outlined in “A Plan for Spam” would work. Jason wants to like Twitter, but so far has only sent one twit (or is it tweet). At this point he just seems to find it a little confusing with the disjointed half-sentences. * Justin wonders whether being able to filter for the users who post most frequently on a particular topic would make Twitter more useful. Jason poses the idea of applying Digg-like ratings to individual tweets as a way to solve the signal to noise problem. * Justin tries out Stack OverFlow and gets his feelings hurt when a 21-year old kid with a lot of points down votes his answer to a jQuery question. As a result he wonders if it’s really the kind of community he wants to participate in. Jason suggests that maybe he’s being a little too sensitive. * Jason mentions the Google Wave Demo given at the Google IO conference and expresses particular interest in the growing support for HTML 5 by Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera in spite of what Microsoft is doing with IE. Justin is impressed by what Mozilla Labs has done with Bespin in their use of the canvas element in creating an in-browser code editor. Justin thinks it’s amazingly responsive and that it has a much better feel than Flash-based editing. * Jason describes how he and another developer wrote a custom in-browser text editor for Preezo without using the built-in browser editing provided by designMode and contentEditable (for IE). Instead they trapped every keystroke and mouse event and managed the entire editing process manually. He claims that it was their only choice if they wanted the editing process to work as well as it does in PowerPoint. Jason notes that it was the most difficult code he ever had to write. Justin is duly impressed. * Jason mentions that for drawing Shapes in Preezo they wrote their own cross-browser graphics library that mapped to VML on IE and to SVG on Firefox and Safari. Justin asks whether they could map it to canvas as well. Jason says that in view of the growing support for canvas going forward he would just write to the canvas API and use the ExplorerCanvas Javascript library to convert canvas API calls to VML. He also thinks that the raster graphics of canvas is more generally useful that the vector graphics supported by SVG and VML. * Justin wonders whether doing a startup indeed requires an entrepreneur to work 14 hours per day as Jason Calacanis claims, but Jason disagrees. He allows that what Calacanis says might be true for doing certain types of work, but that he find it’s difficult to be productive writing code for longer than about 8 hours per day without burning out. * Justin finds the idea of extreme programming to be an intriguing approach to avoiding burn out. Jason agrees and says that it’s more fun and that you write better code with fewer bugs. Jason says that while he’s never done pair programming in a professional setting, he describes how he’s been pair programming for years with another developer located in Europe using Skype and Ultra VNC and finds it to be extremely productive. Jason wonders why you don’t hear more about people trying this. * Justin asks whether you really need a physical office for a startup with all of the collaboration tools now available like Skype, VNC and web-based project management software. Jason doesn’t think it’s necessary and in fact would prefer to with the smartest people he can find that he enjoys working with regardless of where they might live, even if it’s in another country. * How important is to have high quality office space for attracting talent? Justin recounts a story of how a company he once worked for was able to entice a top notch coder simply because they had table tennis. Jason thinks that if you want to attract the best people then you need to provide an environment where people want to spend their time. He tells a story of how his first startup had a great office at the center of a cool area of town (Old Pasadena, CA) and how much fun it was. He says that they were always at work because they enjoyed the space and location so much. * Jason mentions that he once visited a 3D gaming engine company based out of a house in Sherman Oaks, CA, where developers were working in bedrooms, the living room and the dining room. Justin liked the idea a lot, but Jason thought it was kind of weird even if it was just because it was in Sherman Oaks (not that he has anything against Sherman Oaks). * Is it important to be in the Valley in order to be able to find and work with smart people in the web startup space? Justin is concerned that it might be, but Jason isn’t convinced that it’s necessary and considers that it might actually work against you because you have to compete against other startups for talent. * SWFUpload seems to be a great solution for uploading files and receiving dynamic client side updates (like progress complete). It’s powered by a hidden Flash control wrapped by a simple Javascript library. Jason mentions that he had previously looked at various PHP/Javascript only solutions, but found that they either didn’t work, wouldn’t scale or required installing some type of Apache extension. Justin mentions that jQuery provides support for Javascript file uploading, but doesn’t do quite what SWFUpload provides.