• Mackenzie said that when she visited the School 2.0 website, she felt super intimidated
  • "There's no way I could go to this"
  • The section with our projects intimidated her most. Over dinner she asked me if everyone from the wheelchair project ended up going to School 2.0
• Max is so funny and inhuman
  • He wasn't there for my presentation and I never saw him interact with the rest of the team
  • There seemed to be a huge cultural difference between Max and his team. Max is super opinionated and weird, but everyone else was normal and had no opinions
    • Perhaps that's what this team is: people with technical talent following a person with vision.
    • It seems easy to hire academics and professors. The people there all said their academic jobs had been meaningless**my interpretation and isolating
      • One person was invited to come on site for 4 days, and he said that after day 1 he knew he wanted to join. Why? Because he saw how cool it was to have a team
  • He also seems to trust his team — when we had our 1:1, he said "I don't have any questions for you, it's up to Alan"
  • I asked him what he learned in the past week
    • He said he thought there was no such thing as a secret — all the information is out there: the market, the laws of nature. So he was always dismissive when people claim they had a secret and thought it was a red flag**David said this too (i.e. stealth companies). But then he said he found his first real secret, and started seeing that everything is run on secrets. Over the past 3 years he's started to see every industry as a place full of secrets and doesn't trust the news anymore
      • with Science, he says he's now sitting on 3 or 4 real secrets
      • tbh this feels a bit like bullshit but ¯_(ツ)_/¯
  • If you know physics, you can create "existence proofs" — once you know something can exist, then you can feel confident trying to figure out how to make it exist
    • Max says he learned this from Elon
    • I asked if he knew physics and he said yes
    • I asked for an example
      • Micro OLED technology has been sold for $1B+ to companies like Apple and Google, so everyone assumes there's something super complicated about making Micro OLEDs and Max was worried that they wouldn't be able to bid for the technology
        • he looked at the actual specs, the "arrangement of atoms", and decided it wasn't actually that hard to make
        • within 2 weeks, the team built an OLED display in-house
• Everyone on the team was looking forward to "next Tuesday, when we do our first rabbit surgery"
  • Jennie described her role as "doing 3 postdocs at once"
  • they built an OR (operating room) right in the middle of their office — yes, in between desks! — and everyone helped build it
• Mackenzie says Laura's mom is really really nice