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Justin and Jason discuss the psychological impact of getting out of debt, the Gabriel Method and the Paleo Diet, the mystery boom, whether the freemium model will work for Pluggio, Justin’s entrepreneurial ups and downs, whether Pluggio is fundable, the pros and cons of red ocean and blue ocean strategies, the first episode of Divergence, the terrifying background of the man who ran a CIA assassination unit, how the super-rich are hiding at least $21 trillion in offshore tax havens, whether the Colorado shooter was crazy and the sociological impact of the event, the Russian research project that offers ‘immortality’ to billionaires, planning for episode 200, why Jason decided against taking the Coursera course Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computation, Scott Young’s MIT Challenge and the possibility of replicating an undergraduate education with only online courses, the negative network effect of having a college degree, and Colby’s enthusiasm for learning electronics.
Executive Producer: Scott Yewell
Jason, please do send an e-mail to Elon Musk. We’re holding you to account on this! 😉 Please, post a comment when you did.
Thanks for the episode guys. Not long until the big 2-0-0!
@ Justin – Re: Pluggio. A couple of constructive comments/questions. I am no expert and certainly admire what you have achieved with Pluggio.
What is Pluggio’s unique selling proposition/point (USP)?
What feature does it do that others don’t?
Who is the one target market for Pluggio?
I only ask I am not clear when I use Pluggio why it stands out from other tools?
You are gaining users – so you certainly have something to offer. Therefore maybe some more promotion is needed? What could you do on the marketing or PR side to gain some attention?
Maybe you can leverage the pluggio blog more to gain interest from twitter power users. You could share your knowledge to become an expert in the space. Kissmetrics, Buffer and SEOmoz have great informative blogs (that usually subtly showcase their product).
Good luck!
@Aleksander – Okay, okay, I’ll do it right now. 😉 I just have to guess his email addess – elon@spacex.com, elon.musk@teslamotors.com, etc. I guess we’ll see what happens, but I wouldn’t hold your breath on this one. 😉
@Aleksander – Well, I just sent Elon an email and it didn’t immediately bounce back, so keep your fingers crossed. 😉
@Justin: There’s nothing wrong about being late to the party and being a “me too”!
Google was a very late player in the search space, and everybody thought it was way too late for Apple to enter the phone market. If you look at “established players” who have failed at keeping their dominant market position, think Pan Am, RIM, Enron and Lehman Brothers.
Great podcast guys,
The whole idea of self education or any radical changes to education is so fascinating. The US is such an extreme case or high education costs that it really makes you expect changes to come from there. $600k for a family, just seems out of reach for many educated individuals. You could easily have two PHD parents that just don’t have near that much.
It’s such a big thing with so many bits and pieces that’s its hard to even visualize how it gets remade. What gets added, replaced and what gets left out.
One thing that I don’t see a replacement for is the commitment device element. An 18 year old can commit in advance to do this big 4 year thing. There is huge moral support for this commitment from peers, parents, etc. that it’s the “safest” big choice they’ll ever make. No one will criticize it. Now they allow themselves to be guided through courses. They move on to the next course even though they didn’t really understand the last one and mostly they catch up. A lot of the time they don’t believe a course is important or interesting. University degree is such a tangible step that they will overcome all these things.
If you have mountains of intrinsic motivation and belief in what you’re doing, you can pretty much overcome that stuff. You’ll work through boring material. You’ll defend your decisions. How many 19 year old Uni students have that kind of mentality though? How does home learning solve poor motivation?
Maybe you should get Rob Walling back on the show to give Justin a Pluggio pep talk! It would be interesting to hear his suggestions. It sounds like a relatively small investment would help you discover whether paid customer acquisition works and what the return is, which might make it easier to find bigger investors.
Also, my wife saw the TechZing web site for the first time this week. She said: ‘Wow, they need to get better photos of themselves. And the site looks really basic for technology show.’ I laughed, maybe time to spend some of the donation money!
@nethy – I agree that online education will need to overcome a number of significant challenges if it’s ever going to have a chance of disrupting higher education. But I’m scheduling an interview for next week with Scott Young of the MIT Challenge, so that might at least give us a little more insight into the issue.
@Richard – I’m with your wife! I have no way of proving this, but I’m convinced that the name “TechZing” (which I hate) and the site design (which is terrible) have together added a considerable amount of “drag” to the growth of the show. Too bad we didn’t get it right 200 shows ago. ;(
@Jason
I’ve noticed that you give a weekly update on your son Colby’s progress and interests but never talk about your daughters. Let’s hear something about them!
@Aaron – Being that they’re only 6 and 4 1/2 and aren’t remotely interested in anything geeky or technical I’m not sure what I could talk about that would be of interest to our audience. But, hey, why not. 😉
@Spark N Launch – Pluggio’s 3 USP’s are. 1) It is a marketing tool that can help increase the size of yoru audience. 2) It is a content discovery system that can help keep your audience paying attention to you. 3) It is a very clean, simple and uncluttered interface that can makes it easier to manage multiple accounts and keep up with conversations. Yes you are right about the PR that is something I am looking into very deeply at the moment.
@Alfie – You know I’ve heard that before but I keep forgetting how good a point that is. Thanks very much.
@Richard – That’s not a bad idea since he is being very kind and sending me a lot of advice by email already.
@Aaron – Good catch! 😉
@ justin – Thanks. Your new landing page does emphasise these points. Maybe they need the “how” explained? eg How do you increase your audience? Would like to know what PR ideas you are looking at.
@ Richard – Would love to hear Rob back on the show again. Although he is probably kepy busy on his own podcast show?
Justin the Mystery Boom may have been an exploding transformer. If you search YouTube you can see a bunch of them. Most of those videos though are being shot because the transformers are already on fire. I remember jumping out of bed after the 1994 Northridge quake and being on the street in time to see a couple of transformers explode one after another for no apparent reason. There was a flash of blue when they went off.
P.S. I use Twitterrific to manage my Twitter accounts on a Mac. I haven’t heard it mentioned on the show. http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific