Short Video Transcripts

by Justin Skycak (@justinskycak) on May 05, 2026

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PODCAST 2

(Short) How Would You Teach if Your Life Depended On It?

Jason Roberts (00:00) I used to play, this game with myself. I would imagine myself as if I were the tutor for this bloodthirsty king for his kids. And he really cared a lot about the education for his kids. And he had already executed the previous two tutors.

You’re the new tutor and you have these two kids and you know there’s a decent chance that after the session’s done, he’d be like, come here, what’d you learn today? And then he starts to quiz them on.

this thing that they said they learned. And if he was unimpressed, he was gonna have your head taken off. Okay, so if you’re in that situation, how would you teach? You’re like, my God, okay, so I’m teaching them how to solve linear equations or something. You’re like, okay, am I going to just talk at them for an hour? No.

with no practice. They’ll totally, because if he asks them to do some, some linear equations and they can’t solve it, I’m dead. So I’m like, okay, here’s what I’m gonna do. Here’s what a linear equation is. This is what it represents. Here’s how you solve it. Now let’s, I’ll go through a couple examples, then I’m gonna have you guys do a couple of examples. And then I’m going to give you progressively more.

challenging ones, negative numbers or fractions or whatever, and we’re gonna kind of build on it, progressive them, we get a lot of practice, but I’m gonna keep raising the level. But it’s always going to be you going through, as a student going through the process, the procedure of performing the skill that I’m trying to get you to acquire. This would be the same situation we go on of your tennis lesson or.

learning how to play the violin or whatever, you know, you’re the coach, the instructor, the teacher is going to have you performing the skill and giving you feedback on what needs to be improved, what you got right, what needs to be adjusted to correctly execute the skill. And so that’s what I did. and, and of course, when you take that attitude and sort of, it’s a way of defining, of describing in a sort of elaborate.

in maybe somewhat bizarre deranged way of extreme accountability. If your ass is on the line, your life is on the line, how are you going to do this thing? Well, you’re probably going to be a lot more serious about it. And you’re probably going to do it a different way than if it just didn’t really matter.

(Short) Find Your North Star

Jason Roberts (00:00) when people make decisions purely for the money.

it often leads you in the wrong direction. You end up in a place like why am I so dissatisfied with my life? Why am I so frustrated? It’s like, you’re not doing what you really, really want to be doing. I mean, this stuff can be overplayed. mean, obviously you have to make a living. You have to be realistic about what you can do to actually pay for, rent or mortgage or, you know, get by. but it’s important to just, to really always be thinking,

Justin Skycak (00:03) Yeah.

Jason Roberts (00:30) you know, looking at your North Star like, what is it that I really, really want to do? Go do that.

Justin Skycak (00:35) again, it just comes down to playing the long game, right? need to be making some progress in the short-term, but your goal is not to optimize the short-term outcome of salary, of prestige or whatever.

Do the short term well enough that you can continue playing the long game. That you don’t like run out of money or like you’re on the street or whatever. the long game, that’s what you always want to be optimizing towards. Even if it feels slow in the short term or there’s some pain in the short term, it’s like, whatever, as long as you’re making progress towards the long game, ⁓ then you’re good.

Jason Roberts (01:09) Yeah, well, yeah, 100%.

The thing about it is you get too distracted with the short term and you can lose sight of the long term goal, right? And you get these short term dopamine hits, hey, I made some, I made more money or whatever. Right. And then you look up a year or two years, 10 years later, and you’re like, where am I? And it’s like, well, I mean, you’re making pretty good money and you got a pretty good situation, but you don’t, you’re not really happy with it.

Justin Skycak (01:20) It’s like shiny object syndrome, all this.

Yeah.

(Short) Getting “Inside The Trade”

Jason Roberts (00:00) you got to get inside the trade. what that means is I came from a world of high frequency trading.

What would happen is some of these companies would hire really highly educated, smart people with PhDs in physics and computer science and math they would get a group of these people and they would say, here’s our, here’s our, massive historical database of historical time series data of all the trades that happened every minute or every second or every hundred over the second for the last 10 years, go write some algorithms that can predict

what’s going to happen, where the price is going to go in the next 30 seconds or minute or 10 minutes or whatever. And they were almost doomed to fail. typically what would work better is if you’d have a professional trader who would spend years and years trading this stuff manually and understood how you made money.

with a particular kind of trade. It’s like, look, when you’re trading this, when you do this kind of trade, these are the factors to consider. These are the forces that are at play. These are the things you’re to watch out for. This is how you can lose a lot of money. that’s this hard, hard won experience from a lot, from winning and, losing on a lot of trades and learning and understanding. And an emotional instinctual reaction to, yeah, I would not buy at that point.

my experience has been, if you have been the domain expert yourself, you understand exactly how this works.

get inside the trade. Don’t, don’t just automate it. Like do the thing and to understand what the hell is going on. Really understand it. Have, emotional scars from it. Then automate it.

Justin Skycak (01:16) Yeah, and I remember the…

There is some.

(Short) Efficient Learning Techniques are Obvious if You Think About Athletics

Jason Roberts (00:00) version one is the expert just demonstrates the thing over and over and over and talks about it. And the student doesn’t get any practice on it. That’s a fail. ⁓

Or two, I’m not going to tell them how to do it. I’m to just say, go and do this stuff. and they’re just flopping around. That’s highly inefficient.

Justin Skycak (00:16) Yeah, and it becomes so obvious when you think of it ⁓ in terms of sports, Like, imagine you sign up for lessons with a tennis coach and the whole time they’re just, they’re showing you all these techniques and stuff. And then like, and then it’s done. Hour passes, like you haven’t, you’re just holding your tennis racket the whole time. You haven’t hit a ball or anything. You haven’t even swung it.

the other failure mode is they just say like, okay, you two versus you two, go play each other and I’m going to go run an errand. I’ll be back in an hour.

Jason Roberts (00:45) This is a dereliction of duty. This is not doing your job. Right? So why in a math class would we expect the situation of the teacher just talking the lecture, right? Which, know, from universities in particular, but typically most schools have done with this sort of a lecture teacher gets up and just talks. Sometimes they cold call on people.

and if they assign homework, it’s like, okay, I’m gonna give you, I’m gonna talk about tennis for an hour and then I want you to go practice by yourself.

You know, and maybe I’ll have you take a video of a couple things, I’ll give feedback. Like that, no, that is stupid. anyway, anyone who has actually tried to acquire, seriously tried to acquire skills in something, sports, music, art, anything like that, where it was important to develop these skills.

They understand that this is basically how it’s done. I mean, there’s a little variation. You can change things up a little bit and whatever, but that’s the core of what a super efficient learning process would be.

Justin Skycak (01:44) guided instruction with rapid feedback cycles of explicit direct instruction on what the student is supposed to be doing.

what’s the proper technique, followed immediately after where the student is actually going and hitting the ball, going through their reps, getting really solid on the skill. They do that on some more skills. The next session, they pull some of those skills together, compound movements.

(Short) Enjoyment is a Second-Order Optimization

Justin Skycak (00:00) Enjoyment is a second order optimization. First is performance improvement. Like, get that right. And then without lowering your rate of improvement of progress, just try to make it as enjoyable as possible.

Jason Roberts (00:12) when a parent is spending their own money, or an adult if they were doing it themselves, and you’re paying for guitar lessons or something.

Like that money matters, right? Like the accountability, if it’s not working, you’re going to be like, this is bullshit.

extreme accountability means you’re focused on a result. And, and the result, is a combination of two things. It’s getting better at the thing, but also not making

it’s so painful that the kid or the adult doesn’t want to do it anymore.

If you hire a trainer to get you in shape, the trainer’s thinking, okay, well, I need to keep you consistent, making progress, showing you that you’re making progress and closer to the goals and making it so that it’s not so painful you don’t want to come back tomorrow or next week. Right? Now, if either of those things are false, if it’s too painful, it’s a fail. They’re going to stop coming after a week or two or three or depending on how much…

pain they’re willing to take or how much suffering they’re willing to endure or how stubborn they are. But eventually it’d be like, uh, or two if they, there’s like, man, I’ve been working out with this guy for like three months and I think I’ve lost a pound.

this isn’t moving things in the right direction for I don’t know why I need to find someone to get some results because it’s got a lot of money. It’s a lot of time, you know, whatever. And even if it’s fun, he’s like, oh, he’s like funny guy. All these crazy seal stories from his time at the seals. And be like, are you getting any stronger? No, you lose your weight? No. OK, well.

Justin Skycak (01:35) So it’s like it.

you can’t have that and not have performance improvement. You can have performance improvement and not really have so much enjoyment. And it’s like, it’s a real thing. People will benefit from it.

but you’re gonna increase your surface area if you focus on the enjoyment part after. But the enjoyment part is like the icing on the cake there.

Jason Roberts (01:58) 100%.

(Short) Effective Teaching Puts Business First, Fun Second

Jason Roberts (00:00) You optimize too much for the fun and then you’ve taught the students that things are fun and they can’t really be hard.

Justin Skycak (00:00) Yeah.

Jason Roberts (00:10) you gotta be all business.

keep them focused, listening, taking their homework seriously, you know, whatever. you can’t go from being this lax teacher that the kids don’t respect,

You can’t say, right, now I’m serious. I come back from Christmas break, like maybe the principal came down and said, look, I mean, I’m looking at these tests. This stuff doesn’t look good. You got to bang, bang. then the teacher’s like, OK. You’re like, teacher, you’re like, decided you’re to be a hard ass or something.

Justin Skycak (00:37) Yeah,

there’s a directionality to it. You can’t recover from being a pushover. Once you’re a pushover at the beginning and then you become a hard-ass, like, they just hate you more. Yeah.

Jason Roberts (00:45) The kids are like, yeah, right. They just rolled around. I had

happened to me when I was in high school. I can’t remember this teacher. And she, she was like, started out like that. And she’s like, she then she realized she was a young teacher, a first year teacher or something. She just graduated from college and she was going to be our friends and didn’t take her seriously. And because she wasn’t a serious person, you know, and so we didn’t respect her. didn’t like hate her. And then when she started to be like a hard ass, then we hated her. Right.

And she was one of our biology, there were two biology teachers. The other biology teacher who was older, she was all business. There’s no messing around with Susan Radford was her name. She was all business and you’re like, pay attention, you did what you’re supposed to do. And she would lighten up a little as year went on. And then she could lighten up and then you loved her.

Justin Skycak (01:14) Yeah.

Jason Roberts (01:36) Because the most important thing for a teacher is not that they love you, is that they respect you and they do what they’re supposed to do and they take their work seriously. That’s the important thing, especially like middle school and high school, because then kids testing boundaries and they’re 15, 16, you don’t want to be in school. You want to go mess, you want to do anything but sit in your fricking biology class. Right? Even if you’re a good student, you’re like, I don’t want to be here. Right? So that model.

Justin Skycak (01:57) Yeah.

Jason Roberts (02:03) And any really good teacher understands this fundamentally. Not that you can’t do some fun things, but you have to instill respect from day one. I understand you are not to be messed with. And then you can lighten up over time. But there are boundaries, there are expectations, and there are consequences, and there are rewards.

So if you, if you, transpose that onto a learning app and you’re like, we’re fine. And this and dance and baloney and, know, and the kids are like, ⁓ you know, whatever. then you’re like, all right, now we’re going to start learning hard. The kids are like, this is stupid. I it used to be fun. No, it. You know, but.

Justin Skycak (02:43) Yeah.

Jason Roberts (02:47) We can go from the teacher that was a hard ass, and we can lighten it up a little bit. People are like, oh, think my daughter likes it a little more. It’s kind of fun. That’s how it’s going to go, I think.

[short] Get Closer to Doing The Thing That Makes You Happy

Jason Roberts (00:00) if you really want your life to be an A, you’re like, I want my life to be awesome. And even if you don’t have an absolute specific plan, get closer to doing the thing.

that makes you happy or that you feel aligned or whatever, what terminology you want to use. Like this is the thing that I like, I enjoy doing.

Justin Skycak (00:14) Yeah.

[short] We're trying to create the ultimate online learning system

Jason Roberts (00:00) We’re trying to ultimate.

online learning system, basically what that would do is replicate the effectiveness of the best possible human tutor that you can imagine that has almost superhuman abilities to understand exactly what you know and don’t know and what you should be working on. Okay, if that’s what you’re trying to do, then you need to continually keep that person in mind and try and mimic.

their behavior in that situation. And this is a long process and we’re getting closer all the time, but still we have a lot we can do, but you know.

[short] You don't really learn it until you start performing it

Jason Roberts (00:00) you don’t really learn by watching somebody else. You can become familiar with something, but you don’t learn it until you actually start performing it.

[short] Enjoyment is a second-order optimization

Justin Skycak (00:00) Enjoyment is a second order optimization. First is performance improvement. Like, get that right. And then just, without lowering your rate of improvement of progress, just try to make it as enjoyable

Maximize progress subject to constraint that pain is less than quitting threshold

Justin Skycak (00:00) Maximize progress subject to the constraint that the pain is less than the quitting threshold. And you just run that over and over. And the quitting threshold, that can vary over time too. Once you start seeing progress, you’re much more willing

endure some pain for even more progress

Don't lose your soul and become corporate

Jason Roberts (00:00) you have to be careful when you make the transition that you don’t lose soul and become corporate. you can’t sacrifice or give up the essence, which when things become about the money,

and you’re just trying to make everybody feel good, can turn into that. The money will come if you deliver value for people. It’s as simple as that. And since we don’t have any outside investors, we can make that choice, that conscious choice. So we’re not going to give in to…

easy shortcuts and things to just make it nice for, but that while sacrificing results, quality of the education.

Project-based learning can be taken way too far

Jason Roberts (00:00) The whole project-based learning can be taken way too far. Projects are built on a foundation of skills. You can’t do projects without skills and have it be efficient at all. mean, you can. It’s just going to be incredibly inefficient because the students don’t really know what they’re doing.

Kids are finger counting in 10th grade

Jason Roberts (00:00) we’ve heard from a lot of families tutors and teachers that kids

have not mastered their math facts. They don’t know the multiplication tables. They’re finger counting. Not finger counting in fourth or fifth grade. They’re finger counting in 10th grade. And if you can’t do, you know, even multiplication, if you don’t know multiplication tables, you’re gonna really struggle even with basic algebra.

The benefit of learning math with coding applications

Justin Skycak (00:00) a lot of people realize later, who go into software engineering, like they don’t really care about math in school, And then eventually they build up the foundations of coding and then they realize…

that if they just knew all their math, then they could be doing so much more. the earlier you make this happen, somebody gets interested in coding, sees how important math is to doing non-trivial coding. in life the get the motivation to skill up on both fronts. just imagine a kid graduating high school.

not only do they know pre-calculus with like coding applications but also calculus linear algebra multivariable calc and differential equations basically your core engineering math all the coding applications and they come into college and they’re just blowing the socks off of

anybody who gives them an opportunity to do some research, an internship, they already get the basics of everything. They’re ready to actually make serious impact. It’s so rare to see in an undergraduate researcher or an intern, right? you can’t count on them You just like throw them a toy problem.

whatever, but like if you can actually make a serious impact at a young age, because you have the skills to do so, then you can just compound that into a massive compression of time and figuring out what you’re interested in and everything.

You only realize growth in hindsight

Justin Skycak (00:00) I’m doing a hard thing and I’m not sure I’m able to do it at the beginning, but then we actually get through reasonably quickly and now I can do it and that’s really cool. But also do things ever stop getting hard? Like when’s it going to become easy? what they see is the short game.

And the short game is on loop, it’s hard, it’s hard, it’s hard. They don’t always see the compounding so what I would have to do sometimes is I show them like the next assignment and they’re just like, that looks hard.

then I show them do you remember back when we did logistic regression, breadth first search and you had that same reaction right there. What’s your reaction to this now? And they’re like, no, I could that’s a component of this. could, I could code that up in 10 minutes. what’s the big deal? Like, no, no, no. Remember you were saying just like three or four months ago that you were, you were groaning in the same exact way. And I guarantee you.

three or four months from now, this back propagation, this Dijkstra’s algorithm, whatever, you’re have the same reaction. gonna be muscle memory. You’re gonna have new superpowers and you’re not gonna realize that you have them until I show them to you.

It's important to tell younger people the truth

Jason Roberts (00:00) it’s important when you’re in a position where you know how things work to tell younger people, this is the situation. This is the level of talent, the level of skill you’re gonna have to have if this is the thing you want to do. Now if you don’t wanna do it, that’s fine. There’s a place for everyone, everyone has a place. Not everybody has to be a math genius. Not everybody has to learn abstract algebra.

But if you want to do the things that you say you want to do or from this list, then okay, let, let us lay out a plan to help you be on schedule to get that. So you don’t find yourself in a situation where you’re getting blown out of the water

You better know what the game is

Jason Roberts (00:00) You need to understand. look, there’s a lot of things you can do in life that are just not super competitive. It’s not that hard and just kinda go in and just do your thing and it’ll be fine. But there are other things that are just super, super hard. And there’s a lot of competition.

So you better know what the game is.

We're trying to increase optionality for kids

Jason Roberts (00:00) we’re trying to increase optionality for kids. when they’re 12, 13, 14, even 15, 16, they don’t really know who they are what they want to do.

But you want to keep those options open. As an adult, as a parent, or even as a teacher, you’re trying to help kids keep as many doors open as possible so when they get a better idea of who they are what they want to do, that they can get through the door.

(teaser) Either you make decisions, or decisions get made for you

Jason Roberts (00:00) If you don’t make the decisions, the decisions get made for you. That’s just how it is. Either you go into the world and you make decisions to make things happen, or decisions be made, and they will happen to you.

Turns out if you make things happen, you make intentional decisions, make things happen, you tend to get something that’s much closer to what you really want.

(clip) Kids are finger counting in 10th grade

Jason Roberts (00:00) heard from a lot of families tutors and teachers that kids

PODCAST 1

What Happens When Students Don't Know Their Math Facts

speaker-1 (00:00) You know, and I hear from teachers and chief academic officers and tutors, and they’re just apoplectic about the situation because you get kids who are in sixth, seventh, eighth, tenth grade. Finger counting.

don’t know the multiplication tables, it’s like, how the heck are gonna factor quadratic when you don’t know the multiplication tables? Can’t do it, not really. And then guess what? Now we can’t factor quadratic, now can’t do algebra.

speaker-0 (00:27) And if you do manage to grind through, ⁓ just figuring out these factors on the fly, it’s gonna take you way, way, way too long. It’s gonna take you like 10 minutes to factor.

speaker-1 (00:37) Which some kids can do in their head and be like,

10 seconds. So you’re not going to want to do any proms. It’s through, yeah, teacher gave us four factoring problems and it took me all night, you know? And you’re just like, dude.

speaker-0 (00:42) Yes.

When you get to calculus, if you’re taking 10 minutes to factor a quadratic, that’s only one component of a calculus optimization problem. You’re going to be spending half an hour on this problem that should take you two minutes.

The Secret To Success in Life is Consistent Effort

speaker-1 (00:00) The secret to success in life is consistent effort. You don’t have to, whether it’s exercise or learning math or learning a language or whatever the heck it is you’re trying to do. It’s like you don’t have to do the superhuman effort thing. Just get started and then make a consistent push every day, even if it’s only 15, 20 minutes.

Intuition is Earned Through Repetition

speaker-1 (00:00) cause people are like, ah, I don’t want to do so many problems. just want like a conceptual thing. I want an intuitive understanding. It’s like, it’s repetition. Intuition is the

of repetition. You have to do reps. That’s where the intuition comes from. Me or anybody explaining something to you that feels intuitive. You don’t have the intuition. You have to earn intuition. Intuition is earned through pain.

through failure, through suffering, through trial and error. That’s where your intuition comes from. You don’t wanna suffer, well you don’t get intuition. so, and that’s something that we, you know, obviously you wanna limit the suffering, like let’s just do the things and go through repetitions and say, okay, trial, okay, okay, right, I made a mistake there, right, okay, right, I see how this works. You do enough of the reps, whether it’s shooting free throws or…

you know, or doing math problems or whatever, it’s like you have to, you have to get the reps in, you get the intuition. But then when you get the intuition, then you can really understand how this stuff works and you can actually solve challenging problems. Because until you have the intuition, it’s hard to really see your way through innovative solutions. There’s just nothing to work with.

One of the Worst Mistakes You Can Make While Studying

speaker-0 (00:00) One thing that I have seen ⁓ students, even adult students do a lot is look back at the reference too often, like thinking that it’s free to look back at the reference. When in reality, if you are trying to recall something from your head

and you look back at the reference instead of trying your best to lift that weight off of your, long-term memory. If you look back at the reference, you’re basically just letting the spotter lift the weight.

speaker-1 (00:26) Yeah, so you’re weightlifting and you’re like, I can’t get it and the guy behind just lifts it up for you like, okay. He didn’t really lift the weight.

speaker-0 (00:31) Well, yeah.

Sometimes people will ask for the spotter’s help before they even get to the point of trying really hard. It’s like just the moment that it stops becoming super easy, they’re like, okay, look back at the example. When in reality, that is the moment when you are getting the most bang for buck out of recalling the information.

speaker-1 (00:52) The struggle during the active recall process is when you are strengthening the memory.

speaker-0 (00:58) Like, don’t look back at the reference right away. Like I want you to try to pull this from memory.

Coach the student not to actually look back at the reference unless they absolutely need to. Because that is a way that sometimes students kind of shoot themselves in the foot. ⁓

speaker-1 (01:13) They

shortchange the learning process. They shortchange it, right?

speaker-0 (01:17) Yeah. Or if they have like the, worked example up in another tab and then they’re looking at that while solving the problem. Like, is, that is the worst. Never, never do that.

(Short) Breadth-First Development

speaker-1 (00:00) It’s painful, but sometimes it’s good to do sort of a breadth first search instead of just like, hey, we’ve got some of the work, so let’s just build on that. We’re like, let’s go tackle these other things that are really, really different. That’d be a ton of work, but it forces us to generalize, to solve those concrete problems and then generalize it and pull it into the model, pull it into the UI, pull it into the user, the student experience, and so it all makes sense because.

If you go too far down the line and you have lots of users and lots of customers and your stuff, you just can’t break things again and go back. It’s it’s hardened. Like that’s where you put the road, that’s where the road is, right? Well, it’s like, well, it goes like, it’s too hard to like, you know, we’re gonna create a new highway through these, you know, through this subdivision. It’s a nightmare. So you just kind of try and figure that out early. the way you do that is you say, well,

here are all these things that we think we might want to do, or we do think we know we want to do, they’re different, it’s going to be painful, but let’s just bite the bullet and do it now. And it slows down visible progress, so perceivable velocity, product velocity, but like, why is it taking so long? like, cause we’re tackling all these really hard, massive projects that is going to pay off and we’re going to be able to release all these things. But.

speaker-0 (01:19) Playing the long game. We are just going in all directions that we think is worth pursuing.

speaker-1 (01:21) Play the long game.

You get a lot of things that are like between 60 and 90 % done. They’re just sitting there and you’re like, God, we just can’t finish with these other things because you do have emergency things going on. You do have bugs, scalability problems. have, you know, just like really important features have to roll out for a user segment. You know, like we, you know, the schools have been coming on and wanting all this stuff. It’s like, know, there’s so much stuff. You just can’t.

You can’t just blow it off. You gotta deal with it. And then it’s like, well, why isn’t this done? It’s like, you know, yeah.

How and Why to Become The Smart Kid

speaker-0 (00:00) We talk about the benefits of pre-learning the material before you go into a normal college course. Cause, it’s a roll of the dice, whether you’re going to get a decent instructor or not.

speaker-1 (00:08) There’s so much variance in the quality of instruction. You’re going to get some people,

great research mathematicians, but horrible pedagogues. it’s you and your group of study mates on these impossible problem sets. It’s more like a

framework for making you teach yourself as opposed to providing a real scaffolded learning experience.

There’s a problem set do it or not or don’t do it.

Grader might grade it, you might get it back two or three weeks later.

You can end up for some real crash and burn situations. If you already know it all, then it’s like, ah! All right,

speaker-0 (00:41) Not only does the pre-learning minimize your risk of that bad situation happening, but if you are blowing the class out of the water and interacting with the instructor, that’s setting you up. You get a, like amazing rec letter, guess who is up for whatever

opportunities that professor has in mind.

speaker-1 (00:57) you should apply for. We got a summer program. whatever. They’re like, ⁓ I got a kid. I got a

speaker-0 (01:02) You just

get a reputation for being the smart kid and it doesn’t matter if you’re being smart in real time or if you’re smart because you’ve already built up a large knowledge base. You’re just you’re a smart kid either way and you get the smart kid opportunities and that can compound into a virtuous cycle.

speaker-1 (01:18) I mean, that’s an incredible position to be in because, for any of us who’ve been like a math or physics major, and especially if you went to a place that had a lot of top-notch students,

you’re learning stuff for the first time and they are going at a breakneck pace and they are not playing games and they don’t get retakes and there are no study sessions, you know, it’s just boom, here you go. And then the average score is a 27 on the midterm. It’s like, jeez, you know, it’s brutal. And then you find out that like a bunch of the kids had actually, oh yeah, I took this at the state university when I was in high school. And you’re just like, what?

What, you guys, wait, half you guys already taken this? This is bullshit. You know, it’s like, we’re in a Spanish class and you got like a bunch of the kids who actually speak Spanish at home. You’re like, why are you in Spanish one? Your Spanish is, I don’t really write it.

speaker-0 (02:09) It’s like you get gaslit into thinking you’re dumb and everyone’s just like learning so much faster than you and then the glass shatters you realize they already came in.

speaker-1 (02:19) Oh, you guys all got the cheat codes? Oh, great. The cheat code is learn the material before you take the course.

speaker-0 (02:23) Yeah.

The point of learning ahead of time is not to sit there bored in class. It’s so that you can actually grapple with the hardest problems and actually extract learning out of those in an efficient way. You can be the go-to person for everyone needs help with the class. You’re that person. You’re getting reps on teaching this material to your friends. You’re making connections You’re the,

front running for any opportunities that the professor has in mind, whether it’s research with them, one of their buddies, internship with a company they have a relationship with a fellowship, you just you never know what it’s gonna be. But if you’re the go to person for the subject knowledge, you just get pulled into all these interesting

advantageous opportunities that just compound one thing into another. Guess what? Got a great internship? Well, your next is probably going to be even cooler because now you have this experience that nobody else has.

speaker-1 (03:21) the it’s snowball effect. The compounding effect.

speaker-0 (03:25) Exactly. And this really buys you a lot of time to figure out what want to do.

You get ahead, you get opportunities, you have time. I can afford to go like, my soul is not connecting with this job. I’m going to go try this other thing that I’ve interested in. Do that for a bit, eventually things merge together into your little niche. And it just

buys you more time to find that because if it takes you too long to find that, then you never actually do find it because you have to pick something.

speaker-1 (03:50) Gotta pick a major, gotta pick a job, you know.

(Short) The Cheat Code is Learn The Material Before You Take The Course

speaker-1 (00:00) The cheat code is learn the material before you take the course.

speaker-0 (00:05) The point of learning ahead of time is not to sit there bored in class. It’s so that you can actually grapple with the hardest problems and actually extract learning out of those in an efficient way. You can be the go-to person for everyone needs help with the class. You’re that person. You’re getting reps on teaching this material to your friends. You’re making connections You’re the,

speaker-1 (00:57) the it’s snowball effect. The compounding effect.

speaker-0 (01:00) Exactly. And this really buys you a lot of time to figure out what want to do.

buys you more time to find that because if it takes you too long to find that, then you never actually do find it because you have to pick something.

speaker-1 (01:26) Gotta pick a major, gotta pick a job, you know.

(Short) What Most Online CS Courses Don't Teach

speaker-0 (00:00) quite a courses leave off versus the level that you have to be at to implement the stuff. It’s not an absurdly high level, but it’s just you need to be comfortable with some of this programming logic, not just the syntax.

speaker-1 (00:14) have to have a certain automaticity with it. It’s one thing it’s like, well, I listened to a lecture and I watched a video and I did a 15 minute project with dictionaries. great start, but you’re not, you have not even come close to reaching problem solving level automaticity with these skills.

(Short) Math Facts are like Free Throws

speaker-0 (00:00) helpful more practice math facts like bring them out of the problem solving context and drill them more frequently. Kind of like if you’re in athletics, you don’t just exercise your skills by playing games

There are some skills that you just have to be really, really solid on like shooting free throws. You don’t practice like shooting free throw during a game No, you actually go to the line and practice doing that. That’s kind of like, ⁓ math facts, automaticity practice.

(Short) Lots of Kids Don't Know Their Math Facts

speaker-1 (00:00) lot of students come to us in pre-algebra and algebra and they don’t know their multiplication tables. And they’re not very good at fractions. And that is very common. Schools not doing a very good job of that.

they’ve drank some cool aid. like, we don’t have to memorize anything anymore. It’s like.

speaker-0 (00:16) Yeah, that’s totally false.

speaker-1 (00:17) That’s a whole nother discussion. It’s totally wrong. It’s like, you don’t have to practice your free throws. You’ll just like, you just know it, you know, just go play basketball. It’s like, what are you talking about? It’s so dumb.

(Short) Instructional Quality is a Roll of the Dice

speaker-1 (00:00) so variance in the quality of instruction. even if you go to an elite school, You’re going to get some people,

great research mathematicians, but horrible pedagogues. really it’s you and your group of study mates and that who kind of go, hey, let’s all work together on these impossible problem sets. you basically teach yourselves, It’s more like a

framework for making you teach yourself as opposed to a real scaffolded learning experience.

(Short) Getting Gaslit Into Thinking You're Dumb

speaker-1 (00:00) for any of us who’ve been a math or physics major, and especially if you went to a place that we had a lot of top-notch students,

speaker-0 (00:49) It’s like you get gaslit into thinking you’re dumb and everyone’s just like learning so much faster than you and then the glass shatters you realize they already came in.

speaker-1 (00:59) Oh, you guys all got the cheat codes? Oh, great. Okay, okay, okay. Now I get it. I get it. But anyway, the cheat code really is you’re saying, what’s the cheat code? The cheat code is learn the material before you take the course.

speaker-0 (01:02) Yeah.

(Short) The Point of Learning Ahead of Time

speaker-0 (00:00) The point of learning ahead of time is not to sit there bored in class. It’s so that you can actually like legitimately grapple with the hardest problems and actually extract learning out of those in an efficient way. You can be the go-to person for everyone needs help with the class. You’re making connections You’re

front running for any opportunities that the professor has in mind, whether it’s research with them, research with one of their buddies, whether it’s internship with a company they have a relationship with a fellowship, you just you never know ⁓ what it’s gonna be. But if you are the go to person for the subject knowledge, you just get pulled into all these interesting

advantageous opportunities that just compound one thing into another. Guess what? Got a great internship? Well, your next internship is probably going to be even cooler because now you have this experience that nobody else has.

speaker-1 (00:49) it’s snowball effect. The compounding effect.

The Secret To Success in Life is Consistent Effort

(Teaser) Intuition is Earned Through Repetition

speaker-1 (00:00) cause people are like, ah, I don’t want to do so many problems. just want like a conceptual thing. I want an intuitive understanding. It’s like, Intuition is the

through failure, through suffering, through trial and error. That’s where your intuition comes from. You don’t wanna suffer, well you don’t get intuition. you know, obviously you wanna limit the suffering, like let’s just do the things and go through repetitions and say, okay, trial, okay, okay, right, I made a mistake there, right, okay, right, I see how this works. You do enough of the reps, whether it’s shooting free throws or…

One of the Worst Mistakes You Can Make While Studying

speaker-0 (00:00) One thing that I have seen students, even adult students do a lot is look back at the reference too often, like thinking that it’s free to look back at the reference. When in reality, if you are trying to recall something from your head

speaker-1 (00:25) Yeah, so you’re weightlifting and you’re like, I can’t get it and the guy behind just lifts it up for you like, okay. He didn’t really lift the weight.

speaker-0 (00:30) Well, yeah.

speaker-1 (00:51) The struggle during the active recall process is when you are strengthening the memory.

speaker-0 (00:57) Like, don’t look back at the reference right away. Like I want you to try to pull this from memory.