TechZing

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 <wbr />expertise, Jason's idea of teaching the Catalyst kids basic command line skills and why it may make sense to abandon the Catalyst IDE, the incredible rise in the Telsa stock price and the Tesla autopilot project, the self-driving car intersection simulation, the simulation software that shows Elon Musk&#8217;s Hyperloop is likely to work, how Alien bugs were discovered in the Earth&#8217;s atmosphere, the hell that is the iOS developer center, the idea of segmenting AnyFu between premier and standard level experts and the possibility of bringing on a business / marketing partner, the segment on This American Life that mentions Jason's high school, how to increase your luck surface area by writing about increasing your luck surface area, how the CIA has been arming and training rebels since late 2012, the Pentagon&#8217;s desire to get in on the actions, AIPAC&#8217;s push for war and why the US ultimately backed down, Jason's @ tweet to his congressional representative, the famo.us Javascript rendering framework and how China brainwashed American POWs using a classic sales technique.

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.