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34: An Interview with Mathbot.com's JW Weatherman
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In this episode, we interview JW Weatherman of mathbot.com, and ask him about his product, why he made it, and what he plans on doing with it.
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This episode is sponsored by
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Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support
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Transcript
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This episode is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike 4.0 international license. For more information, visit creativecommons.org. Oh no, whatever shall we do?
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I mean, I guess you could go to the new website, http colon slash slash breaking math podcast dot a P P with no www for all you old timers. So breaking math podcast dot app. I mean, if you're into that sort of thing.
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00:02:24
Speaker
J.W.
JW Weatherman's Mathbot Journey
00:02:25
Speaker
Weatherman is a guest who has an interest in mathematical education and has made use of that interest in the form of creating the website mathbot.com, which teaches mathematical concepts in the form of games, which exploit play, the most primordial form of learning. Breaking Math, episode 34, an interview with mathbot.com's J.W. Weatherman.
00:02:48
Speaker
This is Jonathan. And this is Gabriel. And of course we have on JW. JW, thank you for being on. Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. I've been looking forward to this. So the first question I think I'm going to ask you is, what inspired you to create the website? Yeah, actually, I'm a software startup guy. So I had sold the software company and I
00:03:11
Speaker
I was out to dinner with my wife and she was, she has always been a math nut. I've always, you know, really enjoyed math from an early age.
00:03:21
Speaker
And so she was tutoring some kids in the neighborhood. And she was just really frustrated with the methodology of teaching that a lot of kids were experiencing. And so we spent our whole anniversary dinner just kind of geeking out, I guess, talking about all the ways that we would do it differently and how we could use software for that.
00:03:44
Speaker
And I think that was about three, maybe four years ago, and it's kind of been an obsession ever since. Nice, nice. I have quite a few questions that I wanted to ask you, especially for our listeners, about mathbot.com. And I think the question I'll start with is, for somebody who's never heard of mathbot.com and might be inspired when they get home from a drive or whatever to go check it out, what can they expect?
00:04:08
Speaker
Yeah, it's a website. You don't have to install anything, but you go out to mathbot.com and you just click play now. You have to create a username and password just because that'll allow us to keep track of what level you're on. And then you're immediately on a screen where you can give a robot commands to have him perform tasks. So the very first level is just walk forward once. So you have a little box down at the bottom that shows a guy walking forward one time.
00:04:38
Speaker
You drag that up into the command bar and hit play and you see that the robot works forward. So it's very simple, very easy to get started. But within a few levels, you're programming recursive functions with conditionals and doing some more advanced programming and really learning some pretty challenging concepts.
00:04:58
Speaker
And just to expand a little bit on what you said, just to paint a picture for our listeners, it's a grid that's maybe, what is it, like five by 10 grid. And you have a character that you need to get to a destination and you have certain commands that you could give that character.
00:05:14
Speaker
for example go forward and there's a rocket that you could put something like three go forward commands into and they can use the rocket as a command and it restricts the number of commands which makes it more difficult and I did have a question it is called mathbot.com does it teach all forms of math or just computer science? So actually that's a really good question because trying to define exactly what math is I think is something that if you've ever tried to do it you know it's a lot more challenging
00:05:41
Speaker
And one of the reasons that I like programming and math is that I really think they're the same thing. I think they're logical problem solving and using symbols or abstraction. So if you look at something like lambda calculus, which was invented in the 30s, it's brilliant because it completely breaks down the walls between what is programming and what is math.
00:06:07
Speaker
It is absolutely pure math. It's completely theoretical, but it allows us to write functional programs. And now all of the programming languages include lambda calculus because it's so powerful.
00:06:20
Speaker
So with Mathbot, what you're doing is you're programming the robot, but you're also programming the robot to solve puzzles. And those puzzles are also math puzzles. So you're using math to solve problems. You're using logic and reason to solve problems. But we're also selecting those problems to make sure that we hit all of the things that people are expecting when they're trying to figure out how math works. So it starts out with programming.
00:06:47
Speaker
And the reason that we do programming first is that we don't want anything to be rote memory or redundant because that's when things get boring. So something like addition, we want to introduce after it's clear to students how to program the robot to pick up blocks and move them around.
00:07:04
Speaker
so that when we give them something like 2 plus 3, they're going to program the robot to do that. Then when they see something like 5 plus 4, they're going to have to maybe modify their program or include it or improve it or make it a little bit more generic to address other cases. But there's not going to be just a redundant sort of solving the same problem without really learning anything new.
00:07:29
Speaker
And that allows it to stay fun, because we like to solve new problems. We like puzzles. But if we solve the exact same puzzle 50 times in a row, we don't like that at all. So I want to comment on my experience with MathBot. Full disclosure, I have had a bit of a programming phobia for a long time. And it's actually become apparent to me that in the industry I work with, there's actually a fair amount of people who have a bit of a programming phobia. I think it's just something from looking at a bunch of syntax.
00:07:59
Speaker
In any programming language, if you don't know what they do, it's so different from the way that we speak that it can be a little scary for somebody who's not really used to it, even though there's nothing to be afraid of. I had such a fun time with mathbot.com. I literally was programming, but it's not intimidating whatsoever. You're just making a little dude follow instructions, and it starts off very basic and gets better. So I liked that aspect a lot.
00:08:27
Speaker
Yeah, actually, not only just to say one quick thing, not only were you programming, but you're actually doing functional programming. And functional programming is the hardest kind of programming language to really get comfortable with. So once you're comfortable with being able to create functions inside functions and thinking of everything as a function, something like C++ is actually a little bit easier to deal with than something like Scala or Lisp, which is actually what we're using in the background.
00:08:55
Speaker
You don't see that. All you see is blocks and shapes and friendly objects. But all of the thinking that you're doing and all of the problem solving that you're doing and all of the creating functions, you're actually writing the same exact stuff. And soon we're going to expose a Lisp interface so that you can see the Lisp code that you've actually written. Because a lot of the feedback that we've gotten is it's too easy, even though people are doing really, really difficult stuff. So we're going to show them how nasty it can look.
00:09:23
Speaker
and how intimidating it can look, but mostly just to help them realize what they've accomplished. In my experience, I have nieces and nephews who are ages two, three, four, six, and eight. And I've taught grades kindergarten. I've taught first grade. I even taught fifth grade and sixth grade. And I'm going to say this, and this is meant as a very high compliment.
00:09:48
Speaker
from that first level you could have somebody who was in second grade or third grade and you know like They could figure out what to do and and start getting basic skills with with programming. So I think that's great
Future of Mathbot
00:10:00
Speaker
So you mentioned that you use Lisp in the background and I am one of those people who's a huge aficionado of Lisp and Lisp for people who don't know is one of the first programming languages that was invented. It was invented in the late 50s as a purely mathematical puzzle and then they got it to work on a computer. It's interesting because there's a mathematical concept that's the name of which is eluding me right now that uses a Lisp-like language to have a correspondence between algorithms and proofs.
00:10:29
Speaker
So if you make an algorithm that solves a certain thing, you have essentially proven the problem and it's used in a lot of automated proof solving. The question I have for you with that in mind is, are you going to go into the more nitty gritty aspects of Lisp once you expand the site?
00:10:46
Speaker
Yeah, our plans right now are to take, and when I say it's Lisp, it is Lisp, but there's stuff in Lisp that you can do that we don't enable. Right now, the way that we're trying to keep it is simple enough to where, you had mentioned macros just when we were off there for a minute. That sort of stuff, it gets really hard to represent graphically. So we know that we're going to take what we have right now, which is really easy to get up and running, and we're going to use that all the way through calculus.
00:11:15
Speaker
So eventually you'll be able to not type anything out. If you want, you can completely graphically program something that will put an object in orbit if you calculate the right trajectories and those sort of things.
00:11:28
Speaker
But eventually from there, what we plan on doing is just going full lisp, right? Either full lisp or maybe, I don't know, we're still debating it internally, whether we should do lisp or whether we should just do lambda calculus, even though it's a little bit ugly to look at, just to keep it more pure and a little bit, just to really push the limits and blur the lines as much as possible between math and programming. One of the things that you guys said a minute ago was that it was really easy to get up and running.
00:11:58
Speaker
We're all convinced that math and programming is by definition easy. And the reason for that is that it's just always one additional layer of abstraction. You can end up with really crazy, amazing things that are super powerful and calculations that would require, you know, many computers to work on them for months at a time to get to the answer.
00:12:21
Speaker
But every single step in that formula is a very simple step. And there shouldn't be any reason that any of us with functional brains should be really intimidated by that because it's all just logic and it's all incremental logic. So you might not know, for example, what this function is doing, but it's just a box, right?
00:12:41
Speaker
And if you open up that box, there's just other boxes that are inside. And if you keep doing that with something like Lisp, you get down to two boxes, right? With Lambda calculus, there's literally just two different functions that are very, very simple that are combined together to create everything that is computable. So I think that one of the things that we're really committed to and believe is that math and programming is always easy unless you either have a bad teacher or you have bad curriculum.
00:13:10
Speaker
And I've been a bad teacher of math many times, so I don't mean to slam people, but it's not math that's hard. It's understanding somebody else that's not explaining it well that's hard. Yeah, and Lambda Calculus, we've mentioned this on the Facebook and just as an aside, I'm writing a book right now that explains three math problems in great detail. It explains the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution,
00:13:39
Speaker
for gases, how fast molecules are going, it explains the Pythagorean theorem from scratch, and it explains the y-combinator and lambda calculus. The problem I had with explaining lambda calculus is really the y care about it, because there's so many reasons to actually care about it, but you have to really build that up carefully. And I think it's interesting that your approach with the robots allows you to dive right into that.
00:14:09
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a big part of what we're trying to do is help people understand that problem solving is a really important part of mathematics. If we were to use an analogy, if I was to say, hey, I want you to learn how to use a saw, and I'm going to give you a two by four, and I just want you to cut one inch squares off of that into the two by four, and I want you to do that all day long.
00:14:32
Speaker
At the end of the day, you're going to know how to use a saw, but you're going to hate your teacher and you're going to hate the whole experience. And I think that's how most people learn math. They're given a process and a procedure and they're told to follow that process and procedure. And there's no pleasure and there's no joy in that. What we're trying to do is say, here's a problem. Here's a challenge. Here's a here's a difficulty. And you can solve it however you want. And you're going to because you're hardwired to enjoy puzzles like all humans, you're going to work that puzzle over in your head a little bit.
00:15:02
Speaker
You're going to come up with some ideas. You're going to try some things that work and some things that don't work. But at the end of the day, you're going to solve the problem. And that means that you're going to get a chemical reward for that because we're hardwired to get a dopamine hit when we solve a problem. And that would be more like saying, OK, look, here is a saw, here's some lumber, and we want you to build a chair. And even if you don't build the best chair in the world, it's going to be far more satisfying to actually solve that problem.
00:15:30
Speaker
And incidentally, you're going to learn how to use a saw. You're going to learn how to cut. And that's how mathematics should be learned, incidentally, in pursuit of solving a real problem.
00:15:42
Speaker
I do have to point out that you mentioned chairs, just like our last interviewers. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if you got that. Yeah, chairs are a recurring theme in this podcast. Anyways, so I had a question for you. I'm trying to think about our demographic of listeners, many of which maybe say homeschoolers or homeschool parents that are teaching their kids or even teachers in any sort of public school or private school system.
00:16:09
Speaker
Earlier in this interview, you had mentioned calculus with MathBot. That made me want to ask you, are all levels of math incorporated into MathBot from pre-algebra to algebra, algebra 2, geometry, calculus, and all the skills and sub-skills within them?
00:16:29
Speaker
I mean yes and no. I would say yes in the sense that if somebody works through all the levels that we have in Mathbot, not all of them are released because the trick is it's one thing to build all the levels, but we really have to do a lot of user testing. I mean the experience that you had is
00:16:48
Speaker
exactly what we're shooting for. And that just requires a lot of iteration. It requires a lot of, we think this level's perfect, put it out, have 500 people play it and realize that we're scrapping it and we're gonna redo it. So right now you have levels that are all the way through recursive programming with conditionals. Those are released and out in the wild. I think probably within the next week or so we'll have addition.
00:17:14
Speaker
And that might sound really simple but it's not it's not addition in the sense that you're, you know, looking at a screen that says one plus two and you're writing down three. It's addition in the sense that
00:17:27
Speaker
There's a place where you need to put three objects, or you need to put one plus two objects, and you need to teach the robot how to do addition. So it's a level of cleverness that's required that's beyond addition. But you learn addition incidentally in that process, if you don't know it already.
00:17:45
Speaker
And we have all of those levels beyond addition through calculus, but they need to be refined a little bit more so that we can release them. What I tell people is that if you get started now, we'll probably be able to stay ahead of you. So if you're a kid that's 10 years old and you want to learn math and programming, chances are by the time that you're really ready to program the robot to solve a division problem, we'll have that out. Exponents follow after that.
00:18:13
Speaker
The general curriculum goes from addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponents, and then we do go on to algebra and eventually through calculus. We don't really have anything on geometry yet, which is ironic since the big inspiration for this whole project was also Euclid's Elements, but we do plan to put that in there where it's appropriate.
00:18:37
Speaker
Overall though, we're not all that concerned about trying to check all the boxes that might be on the SATs or something else because what we really want to do is have a really logical, in the same way that Euclid did, have a really logical buildup through some really advanced concepts. And if a student gets that, they'll be able to figure out anything that we didn't cover because they'll have the skills.
00:19:02
Speaker
It's, I think, very important to instill autodidacticism in people. And I did have a question about the addition. Are those piano-type addition, or is it like church-turing numerals?
00:19:15
Speaker
Actually, what we're doing is more like math you see or the sort of the visual math craze that came from Singapore math in that in a lot of the testing that we did, we found that kids pick it up pretty well if they have like physical objects. And they also pick up the different levels of or the different
00:19:37
Speaker
values of numbers. So, you know, 1, 10, 100 place, the different place values. Really quickly, if you just give them an object that you say there's 10 in this, or there's another object that has 100.
00:19:49
Speaker
So the way that it works is you have boxes on the screen that have different numbers and the robot needs to go, let's say it was 13, he'd pick up three number one boxes and one 10 box and that would be the first number that he's working with. So it's kind of this weird combination of sort of having a stack in computer programming and having a stack of blocks that represent the numbers.
00:20:16
Speaker
I had listened to a few other podcasts that you were on and you had talked about some of the incentives with Mathbot.
Incentives in Education: Bitcoin & Criticisms
00:20:23
Speaker
Do you care to talk about that right now? So yeah, one of the other things that we think is really important is incentives. So right now we know from a lot of studies that have been done that if you reward kids for accomplishing tasks, they have a better experience and they accomplish more tasks quicker. And we saw that actually with some early user testing that we did with Mathbot where
00:20:46
Speaker
We would go to a convention or a place that was selling curriculum or something where there's a lot of kids. We'd walk around with iPads and have a lot of people play the game. And it became pretty obvious to all of the people that were doing that UX research that once the problems got challenging, if there was no reward system, then the kids had a tendency to check out.
00:21:07
Speaker
it's very hard to compete with something like Angry Birds or the latest first person shooter and still have a challenge and actually have to work your mind. Because we do offer sort of the chemical rewards of problem solving, but something like Angry Birds offers that plus there's no work. So it's really not a fair playing field. But the parents or the folks that were doing really, really well with their kids during user testing of the early version of MathBot
00:21:37
Speaker
were the ones that said, I tell you what, if you can get through recursion, I'll buy you an ice cream. Or I'll be really impressed if you could do this. So there was an external motivation outside of the game that really made the difference. And what we realized from that is that if we could do something like, for example, have an algebra course, and maybe the algebra course is $50 and a parent or a grandparent or just a good neighbor
00:22:04
Speaker
would pay for that for the student, then what we can do is we can take 45 of that and give it back to the student, maybe a dollar or two at a time as they master different topics to create that external incentive. And we plan to do that with Bitcoin just because, not because we are huge fans of Bitcoin, but the main reason that we're doing it is that there's just no other way to do it with credit cards or anything like that. It would be totally impractical.
00:22:29
Speaker
Wow. And actually, I think, Jonathan, you and I may have been thinking alike on this. So that's really, I was going to say, really cool. But I'll say, that's very interesting. Because I know that that's certainly innovative. I honestly have not heard of, I've heard of a lot of discussion about motivating people. And I think this is the first time I've heard of people actually directly saying with cash, like, you actually get paid for doing it. So I'm curious.
00:22:59
Speaker
It wasn't my idea, actually. So this idea of rewarding people with with cash or Bitcoin or ice cream, because you can use cash to turn it into ice cream. Unfortunately, we can't deliver digital ice cream or that probably bad for their teeth anyway. Yeah.
00:23:16
Speaker
But there was actually several studies, and I'll send you a link after the show, where public schools did this in inner cities where they would say, we'll give you $50 for every A and $30 for every B in some of the worst neighborhoods in the United States. And the test scores went up considerably, changing nothing else but just that. And it makes sense that it would, if you think about the fact that
00:23:42
Speaker
There's only a couple different things going on with any task, any human action that we take. There's the difficulty of it. And then there's the reward afterwards. And so if you're an inner city kid, there's a certain reward for getting an A. And there is a certain difficulty for that.
00:24:00
Speaker
But if you increase the reward, right? If it's not only do you get the satisfaction and some recognition and maybe your parents are impressed, maybe they aren't, but on top of that, you get enough money to where if you get a couple A's, maybe you can buy the pair of tennis shoes that you really want. It makes sense that we would expect more effort because there's more of a reward.
00:24:19
Speaker
And I could also see with your system, especially there being a social pressure, like let's say the parent buys their child, you know, the pro program, they know that 45 of those $50 or whatever the ratio is are going to the kid. So they're going to be like, Hey, why don't you have a, why don't you have candy today? Didn't you do your math or I don't know. I can see that happening. Yeah.
00:24:41
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, when the kid asks, hey, can I go to the movies? The answer might be, I don't know. Can you afford to go to the movies? Did you earn your money yet? Cool, cool, yeah. I got to hand it to you. I think innovation like that, that's really cool. That's really cool. Just out of curiosity, has there been anyone who's offered any criticism of that idea, both with the original study or the one that you brought up?
00:25:03
Speaker
Yeah, the criticism is generally that, I mean, I think it's really bad criticism, and I actually tend to think that it's motivated, that it's got some ill motives, because it's such a poor argument. But the argument is something along the lines of, if you pay somebody to do something, then they won't do it for the inherent love of it or the intrinsic love of it, and so then they will not love it. So I guess the argument would be,
00:25:32
Speaker
If you paid a kid to get an A on a math test, and then he got an A on the math test and got paid, and then later maybe stopped paying him, or just even in the very act itself of paying him, he would love getting an A less.
00:25:50
Speaker
Because he was paid to do it, but it's really silly I mean if you applied that to computer programmers that are above 18 We would have a lot less computer programmers in the world and there'd be a lot fewer people that become passionate and love Programming because they've become good at it because they were paid to become good at it So I don't know why there's this you know this mythical line between Adults that are 18 years old that are doing jobs and solving real-world problems and you know
00:26:18
Speaker
people that are under 18 learning to solve difficult tasks and expecting some kind of recognition and reward for it. So JW, you seem to enjoy programming and have a passion for it. What is your least favorite and most favorite programming languages and to a lay audience, why?
00:26:39
Speaker
Uh, gosh, I don't really have any least favorite programming language.
JW's Programming Preferences
00:26:43
Speaker
I, I, uh, maybe, maybe JavaScript, uh, even though it's really, really popular, it's just looks ugly to me, but that's a kind of a, I, a lot of people will say that's a, that's kind of a poor criticism, but math is a very artistic experience, uh, programming as well. So.
00:26:58
Speaker
it makes sense that it would be somewhat subjective. So I'll say JavaScript is my least favorite. I really like Lisp. I think Lisp is my favorite. I love the elegance of the parentheses.
00:27:11
Speaker
I think I agree with you very much on Lisp, although I am a huge fan of JavaScript because to me it just feels like Lisp disguised as C. I guess there is TypeScript. So one of the things that there's a couple of interview questions that I like to ask to all of our guests in STEM.
Pop Culture & Personal Anecdotes
00:27:30
Speaker
And I get some really interesting answers. Do you have a favorite sci-fi, either book, novel, story, or whatever?
00:27:38
Speaker
Yeah, actually, I share this love of Rick and Morty with you guys. That show has got me completely addicted. I think I've watched every episode at least twice now. OK. In that case, I have a couple of follow-ups. So my wife is typically not a fan of very crass TV. However, there's an episode that she absolutely fully endorses. That episode is the one something Rick-ed this way comes, in which the devil shows up and sets up shop. I don't know if you would call that one from season one.
00:28:09
Speaker
It's one of my favorites, man. 11, 100%. So my question for you would be this. If you were to try to sell somebody on Rick and Morty and get them interested in it, which episodes would you suggest and why?
00:28:19
Speaker
Oh, man, it's it's tough because it is so crass. But that would definitely be up there. Let me let me think of. Gosh, I think I think the first one because it really got me hooked on the first one. And I can't even remember exactly what the storyline is. But yeah, that's part of the problem with binge watching is I can't remember any individual episode.
00:28:41
Speaker
But from that episode that you're referencing, my favorite part by far, and maybe my favorite part of all of the episodes is in that one. And that's where Rick is asked to fill out the employee health benefit form. And he just says, oh, I'm bored. Everybody out and just pours gasoline all over everything and throws a match. I've wanted to do that. It's so many businesses that was very cathartic.
00:29:07
Speaker
One of the other questions that I'd like to ask you is do you have any favorite math formulas?
00:29:12
Speaker
I do. So I'll give you the formula, and then I'll let you guys think about it and see if you can figure out what it is. It's probably pretty obvious. But it's area equals 0.785 times the diameter squared. Area of octagon? Actually, the way that this, the reason this is my favorite formula is that my 14-year-old discovered it when I think he was eight. And he discovered it by going through Euclid's elements.
00:29:41
Speaker
just one exercise at a time. And it's actually pi. He discovered pi on his own. 0.785 is one fourth of pi. So 3.14 repeating, whatever. But the way that he did that is he had to, I can't remember what problem it was, but the problem in Euclid's elements that he had to solve was to figure out the ratio of a circle inside a square that intersects just on four points.
00:30:08
Speaker
And he came up with that. And I didn't know what it was at first. I had the same reaction. I was like, no, this is not right. Pi should be in here somewhere. But then when he showed it to me drawn out, I realized what was going on, that it's really just pi r squared written a different way. But I'll never forget 0.785 after seeing him discover it in that way.
00:30:30
Speaker
I think that discovering math things is really, it teaches you love of math from an early age. I remember in second grade, I figured out the whole, you know, n times n plus one over two is the sum of one to n. And it was so fun. I went down so many wrong roads. I did trial and error and it took me a while to figure it out. And it was a great learning experience.
00:30:55
Speaker
So here on Breaking Math, we have a lot of connections who are teachers and involved in the public education system, and we promote a certain view of that, not exactly the view that
00:31:11
Speaker
educational system itself has but definitely a separate, to be frank, a different view than you've shown on your Twitter and we thought it'd be good to allow you to explain real quick some of your views in case some of our listeners come across your Twitter.
00:31:28
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in general, I think that kids are much better off at home with their parents. You can put me in the home school category. But most of that is just for emotional support and brain development outside of study. And I also am not a big fan of the public school system. But I don't want to give those guys any more grief than they deserve. I'm not a big fan of the private school system either, which I think mirrors it and oftentimes isn't better and sometimes is even worse.
00:31:58
Speaker
And I think personally, I think it's because of a monopoly. I think that when there is a monopoly service, the service is low quality and the cost is high.
00:32:11
Speaker
I think that's a basic economic truth. And so I'm not a big fan of that system. That said, at the end of the day, I'm just a software guy building software. My motivation might be to defund public schooling or to prevent the state from having as big of an influence on all of our lives as it does. But at the end of the day, it's just software. You can use it if it makes your life better.
00:32:36
Speaker
Or you can ignore it. So the reason that my Twitter feed might seem aggressive to a lot of people is that I'm an anarcho-capitalist. And what that means is that I don't think that the state is a good entity. I think that it claims a monopoly of violence over a geographic region.
00:32:53
Speaker
And so essentially, it's a mafia. Now, I happen to live in the United States where the mafia is more generous than maybe the modest the mafia in Venezuela is right now. But fundamentally, I don't I don't think that that's a good or useful institution. And so
00:33:13
Speaker
Part of my motivation in creating MathBot is to remove math education from the state because I think that when the state claims a task, it does it poorly. It creates all kinds of negative incentives and has all kinds of negative side effects. And I would like to see that end.
00:33:34
Speaker
JW, is there anything that you'd like to plug, obviously mathbot.com, but any signing off remarks, anything you'd like to say to our listeners?
00:33:45
Speaker
Yeah, so mathbot.com is where you can find the app. It's really easy to find and play. If you want to get a hold of me, the best way to reach me is on Twitter at JW Weatherman underscore. And I want to make it really clear that you don't have to be an anarcho-capitalist or think that what we're doing is, or what our motivations are,
00:34:09
Speaker
are ideal to use the software if it's useful software and helps you teach your kids math. I hope you guys use it and enjoy it and you can discard my political views.
00:34:20
Speaker
Wonderful. And actually, so I'll just go ahead and tell a quick story. So as I was looking at your Twitter feed and, you know, in my background, I'm sorry, my dog math dog is letting us know her thoughts. One second. So sure. So anyways, first of all, I'll go and preface this best thing. I have thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed this interview and learning about the product and about your motivations now.
00:34:43
Speaker
Yeah, as a former teacher, I worked in the public school systems. My experience has been I met so many teachers who pour their blood, sweat and tears within the system to work very hard for what I consider to be very noble, noble desires, you know, to to educate people. And I thought, you know, I just I guess I never really took a critical look at public schooling. I just saw it as, you know, it has its faults as does anything like a public police department or a fire department or other public services.
00:35:13
Speaker
But my experience from a personal level was knowing the work that people put into it. So when I first read your Twitter account, JW, I was almost, my job was almost dropped because I was like, this is coming really, really, this is really, really hard against the public school system.
00:35:33
Speaker
Now, as an adult, this is something that I probably wouldn't do in my college days. As an adult, as you had just mentioned, I can fully appreciate the product of Mathbot and, for instance, completely disagree with your Twitter. Again, I haven't even decided if I completely agree or disagree because I haven't really dissected it.
00:35:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think, you know, you don't have to agree, you can agree or disagree with someone's product. And you know, you can evaluate somebody's product separately. So I just wanted to point that out. And it's for that reason that, of course, we have no problem with you coming in on our show and even giving us an introduction to anarcho-capitalism. And we can either decide to, you know, support it or completely disagree with it, you know. But math.com remains a good product. Yeah.
00:36:20
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. And actually, it's an open source project. So one of the other things that you could do is you could say, this is a good product, but I don't want to support JW and his crazy views that we need to have competition in education and that the state is a bad idea to take that monopoly. So you could actually fork the code, take all the work that all of us have done, and create a pro government
00:36:46
Speaker
you know, common core version of math bot, whatever, and I would be totally fine with that. Because at the end of the day, there's a lot of kids, if you were a public school teacher, if you look back on it, I think with a critical eye, you could probably identify a lot of kids that were mistreated, that are mistreated by their peers, and they were not protected by the adults that were in the environment. The adults that were there were not even capable, and half of the time not intelligent enough to figure out what's going on and deal with it. Even if they were good people,
00:37:13
Speaker
they didn't have the power to do the right thing in an environment with a bunch of kids that are mistreating each other, right? So if I stack everything in the favor of the most virtuous person, I still want to end that institution because I still know what it does to people. And I still know that seven, eight-year-old kids need to be at home with mom or spending a lot of time with dad. And being in an institution that is barely a glorified prison is not something that I support.
00:37:46
Speaker
Warning. Spoilers ahead. My favorite episode is when you find out that Rick is actually an intergalactic terrorist and he he takes over and destroys the Galactic Empire. I think that is the first episode of season two. I remember right.
00:38:07
Speaker
I think you're referring to the first episode of season three, if I'm not mistaken. I think the previous episode is called The Wedding Squanchers. See, I could do an entire podcast on Rick and Morty. Yes, yes. In The Wedding Squanchers, he's arrested. And then in that first episode, he breaks out of prison and he completely destroys all of the galactic society, not through a bomb or a terrorist threat. What was it he did? How was it that Rick ended up completely destroying the Galactic Federation?
00:38:37
Speaker
So he changes the value of the galactic dollar from one to zero. It's brilliant. So basically, the Intergalactic Federal Reserve database is hacked by Rick, which makes sense because it's a centralized fiat currency. And as a result of that, all of the government employees start realizing that they have no incentive to do anything, and everything completely falls apart.