Brennan's Podcast

Robert Caro's "The Years of Lyndon Johnson":- all in one (hardcover): https://amzn.to/3x1zCga- volume 1: https://amzn.to/3DtfoNK- volume 2: https://amzn.to/3iTHhVG- volume 3: https://amzn.to/3Dro86W- volume 4: https://amzn.to/3iQOwh0

Politics, religion, education, oh my!

Check him outSaurav: https://twitter.com/sauravpahadiaThings & people mentionedBen Laufer, who lies about having blog posts for people to give feedback on to force himself to actually write https://twitter.com/benjlaufer/status/1356025529879515139 the Amazon Affiliate Program, which I use for money and analytics when I link to products in these descriptions https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/"The Founder," a Netflix documentary/movie about the founding and scaling of McDonald's https://www.netflix.com/title/80101899Hack Club, a network of high school coding clubs https://hackclub.comTKS, a "training ground for future innovators" https://tks.worldFuture Engineers Camp, a startup Saurav made https://futureengineerscamp.comTeacherly, another startup Saurav made https://teacher.lyIn-N-Out, a burger chain renowned for quality and (not scale) https://www.in-n-out.comSupreme, a brand that limits scale to imply quality https://supremenewyork.com

Check them out:Saurav: https://twitter.com/sauravpahadiaWill: https://vimeo.com/willhoppinThings mentioned:FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frcFuture Engineers Camp, a startup Saurav made https://futureengineerscamp.comthe iPad Pro, which I used for high school & sold many of https://amzn.to/3diIt3ATeacherly, another startup Saurav made https://teacher.lyStripe, a fantastic payments API https://stripe.compersonal.website, a side project of mine https://personal.websiteMystery Books, a product Saurav built"How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie https://amzn.to/3bdRckVMadrona Venture Labs, where we both worked https://www.madronavl.comAI2 Incubator, where Saurav now works https://www.ai2incubator.comUW Seattle, where we both went to school https://uw.eduParkinson's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_lawEdyfi, the community house we live in https://edyfi.comulti.vote, a ranked-choice voting system I built https://multi.voteTesla Today, a Tesla-related news aggregator I revamped https://teslatoday.com"The Art of Negotiation" by Michael Wheeler https://amzn.to/3bfAq4WWEEKDAYS, where I'm winding down a job https://joinweekdays.comSynthesis, where I'm winding up a job https://synthesis.isPay 4 Hate, a potential project for inoculating against rejection (note: we didn't actually end up building this, it IS a bad idea upon sober reflection) https://pay4hate.comProduct Hunt, a place to launch projects https://www.producthunt.comGoogle Domains, my preferred domain registrar https://domains.google.comMechanical Turk, an API for repetitive human work https://www.mturk.comSamson's post about the "sync gap" https://www.samsonzhang.com/2021/01/13/the-sync-gap-a-framework-for-good-conversation-writing-learning-and-all-other-creative-dialogues-internal-and-external.html

Check them outDavide https://daviderad.comMattea https://matteaholtcolberg.comSamson https://www.samsonzhang.comThings, people & ideas mentioned, in orderKimberly Mitchell, who teaches excellent classes https://twitter.com/inquiryfiveReact, a rendering system for websites https://reactjs.orgCunningham's Law https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_LawClubhouse, an app for conversations https://www.joinclubhouse.com"How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie https://amzn.to/3qmmJHJthe Capitol rioters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_States_CapitolJesus and the woman who committed adultery (John 8:1-11) https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+8%3A1-11&version=NIVMahatma Gandhi and his hunger strikes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fasts_undertaken_by_Mahatma_GandhiStoicism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StoicismReciprocity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocity_(social_psychology)Charisma on Command (YouTube channel) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU_W0oE_ock8bWKjALiGs8QEloLeague, an app built by Samson https://eloleague.comTKS (The Knowledge Society) https://tks.world"Existentialism is a Humanism" by Jean-Paul Sartre https://amzn.to/37g60hupersonal website builder that I made https://personal.websiterevealed preferences (economic concept) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preferencememetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memeticsthe "Asian American" grouping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_AmericansDavid Hume https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/"Ulysses" by James Joyce https://amzn.to/3tZ7MgFVirginia Woolf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf"Ulysses Annotated" by Don Gifford https://amzn.to/3b5l6Yh"Dubliners" by James Joyce https://amzn.to/37g3k3HNapoleon Dynamite (movie) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_DynamiteTim Curtis, my amazing HS English teacher, "after winning a Walt Whitman lookalike contest" https://nordicnews.net/4171/feature/farewell-golden-vikings/

Ben's background; my background; the "homeschooling loophole" as necessary for educational innovation; schools are bad because users aren't customers; lag times inhibit feedback loops, hindering educational innovation; real world "challenges" instead of tests; why focus on high school, if everything's bad?; homeschoolers get way ahead in their specific topics; dropout programmers succeed because work teaches more than college; age discrimination; education as the highest-leverage big-problem-solving activity; edtech is now supplementary because of flexibility to innovate and users being customers; the purpose of education; socialization & communication; language determines how you think; a dive into Chinese language & culture; programming languages as languages; what we were like at six; reading in childhood vs adulthood; mass reading and schools as a very new technology; communication & leadership as the final frontier of human skill against AI; Maslow and self-actualization; optimizing for effectiveness vs fame & glory; being in the House of Representatives as a terrible job; getting married at 19; battling tech industry inequality through hacker houses; debating the positive-sum-ness of finance; debt as a technology; challenges in publishing stuff online; watching the Kardashians as an anthropological survey; consumption vs production; attracting friends on the Internet; pitching Ben on my website builder.We mentioned:- Synthesis, our workplace - Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs- Elon Musk founding Tesla & SpaceX- The Big Short, a story about the 2008 financial crash- personal.website, my easy personal website builderCheck Ben out: @ben_m_somers

Technological progress as along a tech tree; cheap energy as the next frontier; labor isn’t free; don’t optimize things non-mission-critical things that you can outsource; there’s no such thing as infinite resources; everything is an optimization problem; people can’t perceive reality, just your marketing of it; fundraising is a marketing problem; delegation is not a magic wand; leadership is marketing and decision making; startups have to solve their problems, not just get funded; the easiest way to market something is to be telling the truth; my vague discomfort with Davide’s priorities; the dangers of getting funding through sheer marketing (via Theranos); Holmes had to lie, or she’d get shut down; make sure you’re actually right, instead of getting a vision funded through brute force; blindly believing something doesn’t make it true; first lay out a path forward, then make sure it will work; will perfectly simulating a cell cure aging?; jumping dozens of orders of magnitude fundamentally changes the problem; Amazon is basically just a scaling problem; software complexity does not scale linearly; we can’t “train” a cell model because we don’t know anything about a cell for sure; accuracy of models depends on calibration; results of models still need to be tested in base reality; it is critically important that leaders and modelers know what they’re talking about; how do you know when you know enough; “origins of life” simulation wouldn’t replicate historical evolution; overview existing research on the origins of life (from Mattea, a biologist); evolution is random, so you can’t simulate it forwards and get the exact life we have today; if you constrain an evolutionary simulation to have a certain result, it’s no longer random or accurate; the history of science is realizing that our models are crap; you can’t find novel ground truths through models; I haven’t made a high school because I don’t have an answer yet; sometimes you should start before you have a plan, because it’s hard to validate a plan before you start; always optimize for simplicity; I’m bad at optimizing for simplicity; always keep the end in mind, and look for easy hacks; always be doubting your premises; if you can simulate a human, there’s a ton of non-aging potential; the biggest value-add to fixing big problems is often unsexy; unhelpful fame and glory vs anonymous bigger impact; results count, not labor; my failure to launch a high school; we live at 20-30% overall efficiency; how can you work at 90% of potential?; fully-committed failure is scary; quantifying wasted time.Check Davide out: https://daviderad.comCheck Mattea out: https://personal.website/matteaholtcolberg

Publishing raw conversations for integrity; dependence → independence → interdependence; unifying people with ambitious goals; "build the schools of 2050"; explaining the road to Damascus; Davide's reflections on high school; overcoming introversion by focusing on others; nobody cares about your awkward moments; education as more urgent than longevity; improving education as a leverage play; education as an intractable social problem; early education as OS-level software; all the rules are fake; the potential non-universalizability of entrepreneurship; worrying about consequences before doing things; the politics of a cure for aging (via Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" series); social realization that it's possible to cure aging; aging will be cured probabilistically; simulating a cell to cure aging; longevity escape velocity; medicine saves most life at young ages (via Taleb's "Antifragile"); keeping additional life probability constant; technologists should make time for philosophy; death as a good thing; philosophy paralysis; education as philosophy; Khan Academy as the highest form of curriculum; does math require curriculum; whether Davide should take a gap year; the importance of structure; shame as a tool for accountability.Check Davide out: https://daviderad.com