EdTech leader, curriculum designer, innovator, creator, maker, teacher, youth fintech founder, father, husband, and Taekwondo Master.
SF Bay Area, CA
Joined September 2016
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Had a pretty rad time at #SpringCUE. I definitely didn’t bring enough lightsabers for my Lightsaber Laboratory session. Who would’ve thought Star Wars was this popular! 😂 Bringing enough for 100 sabers next year.
F1 needs to have a moneyball moment. There’s simply too many drivers on the grid that have overstayed their seats or haven’t delivered. The field size and quality of young talent is far too high. The odds that a rookie delivers is far too high lately.
Here’s what’s happening (and coming). California needs more housing but regulations make it costly. Builders don’t want to move forward at a loss with this risk. The state now bankrolls the extra 17% of the down payment. As a second mortgage, the primary lender gets paid out first if everything goes to hell. If property value tanks and buyers need to short sale or get foreclosed, the main lender gets their money back unless there’s a drop bigger than 20% in value.
The money the state put up as a second vanishes in part or in whole, but the bonds are still backed by the taxpayers so we still take the collective hit.
Also since many new home buyers are first time buyers these home prices will be inflated to account for a portion of these buyers having higher buying power or in some ways are forced into buying new construction since there’s no state backed loans for buying older homes. Effectively if you’re a first time buyer with a low down payment this is your only option and builders will price these homes accordingly.
However that home doesn’t retain that value. Once you own it you can’t command that same price you paid because now it’s not a new home and if you had to sell then the buying pool has less funding options. One could argue that your new home value drops immediately upon purchase.
Basically it’s a mess. Bureaucratic interference to pass money to new home builders as a result of existing regulations making it too costly to build at a profit in California, but dressed up as a benefit to young buyers. All at the expense of the taxpayer.
There should be an FIA rule that your team gets kicked off the grid the following year if you have this many DNFs. Aston Martin just plain embarrassing at this point.
It’s become increasingly clear to me that drivers in F1 fall into 3 categories.
1. The truly talented
2. The sponsor friendly known entities
3. The trust fund children
There’s far too much talent out there to have to live with 2 and 3. So many drivers in F2 or other series deserve chances they never get.
Just so I’m understanding this right, your crypto hardware wallets aren’t safe, your exchanges aren’t safe, there’s literally no recourse for theft/fraud, but this is what makes it great? Also there’s really no widespread utility? Crypto is the future for whom exactly?
Google Ads has been down way more than they make it seem. They’re just milking existing customers far more these days. Not everyone has realized how much AI has cannibalized search these days.
As someone who has personally spent $500k / mo+ on Google Ads for years, I can tell you with certainty:
This revenue growth in Search is artificial & extremely unhealthy for Google’s business long term
Search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries
Google’s response?
Manufacture revenue growth via short-sighted, highly extractive, customer-hostile tactics. I.e. charge advertisers more for lower quality clicks, including clicks they do not want and explicitly did not approve Google to charge them for
A few examples to illustrate:
For all of its history until recently, Google operated on a 2nd price auction model
I.e. if you bid $5 CPC and the next highest bidder bids $1 CPC, Google charged you $1.01 for the click (one penny more than the 2nd highest bidder) rather than the $5 you bid
This was a genius move by Google early on as it incentivizes advertisers to input their true maximum willingness to pay rather than trying to play the game of bidding low and constantly adjusting to try to stay just ahead of the next highest bidder while still not paying too much
However recently, Google silently deprecated the 2nd price auction and began charging advertisers as much as their bid and budget caps allow, regardless of what anyone else is bidding
It’s a short-sighted cash grab at the expense of the long term health of the advertiser ecosystem
Making thing worse, Google also recently nerfed keyword targeting precision
Google previously had precise keyword targeting settings that allowed advertisers pick individual search phrases to bid on, defined down to the character w/ exact match or phrase match targeting
This was one of the core features that made search advertising magic, enabling advertisers to run extremely precise campaigns based on exactly what their target customer typed
But now, even if you bid on a specific term or phrase using the strictest exact
-match targeting settings, Google will show your ad across 1000’s of unrelated keywords, labeling them as as “exact match (close variant)”
The definition of “close variant” means whatever they want it to and changes constantly. The result is advertisers get billed for clicks that are totally irrelevant to their business and that their targeting settings explicitly forbid Google from targeting. Google does it anyway and there’s no ability to turn this off
So now exact match is broad match, and broad match is just meaningless spam
This is all very bad for advertisers, but for Google, it allows them to show your ad and bill you for clicks across 1000x more searches that were previously going unmonetized (mainly because they’re garbage queries no one wants)
This is how you grow revenue atop declining search volumes
Lastly, and perhaps most egregiously, Google quietly stopped respecting budget caps by a factor of 2x. For example campaigns we’ve been running for years with $1000 daily budget caps suddenly began spending $2000+ per day
And the extra spend is entirely on the garbage keywords Google arbitrarily throws in as “exact match (close variants)” which have no value to our business, but can’t be turned off
Google offers no refunds nor any recourse for overspend or spend on keywords you explicitly did not target
These are not the actions of a healthy business. These are the actions of company whose core business is in decline but desperately needs to pump quarterly earnings so Wall Street will continue to fund insane capex while hopefully looking through their rapidly deteriorating negative free cash flow
Google operated a benevolent monopoly for the better part of 25 yrs
Meaning the value Google captured from Search was but a small fraction of the value it created, and that spread produced a potential energy that justified expectations of high earnings growth far, far into the future
This is now no longer the case
At the alter of AI capex, Google is sacrificing the golden goose
I don’t know what worries me more, $GOOG -10% after hours drop on the cannibalization of web search by AI, or the fact that they can’t effectively monetize AI. It seems AI’s rapid solutions and outputs leaves little room for Ad revenue.
All these new MacBook Pro releases are just confirming that my buying an M5 1TB MacBook Air on sale just before the price hike was announced was great move!
We love @_MathAcademy_ and we think your school will too! Apply for a grant for math academy or other innovative learning software solutions at grants.Curriki.org
Will this App change the way you teach Math?
In this short, we look at Math Academy, an AI-powered math platform with content from 4th grade through university-level math. What stood out:
1. The AI algorithm assesses each student's level. It's not a simple math assessment platform.
2. After a miss, it asks if it was a silly mistake, then serves a new variation or a lesson.
3. Students can, in some ways, teach themselves with really great content.
Math Academy is an approved Curriki partner, and we've already given several grants to schools to deploy it.
Full review on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=jircf1AU…
Read the full review: grants.curriki.org/math-acad…
Apply: grants.curriki.org
#AIinEducation #EdTech #MathEducation
Jonathan Brusco retweeted
Will AI change your students' careers?
We reviewed Orchard, an AI-driven career and college platform for schools. Here is what it does:
1. Explore: dive deep into any career path, ask the AI questions, and see which colleges fit.
2. Plan: save a career, build an action plan, and use a money planning tool to see what the path realistically looks like.
3. Learn (soon): courses and training so students can get better prepared.
Why it matters: college counselors are often asked to guide dozens, if not hundreds, of students. They can't do that effectively on their own. Orchard is much more than a wrapper around AI.
@orchardcareers is an approved software partner with Curriki, so your school can apply for a grant for Orchard today.
Full review: youtube.com/watch?v=CEFI5WwJ…
Read the full review: grants.curriki.org/orchard-c…
Apply: grants.curriki.org
#AIinEducation #EdTech #CareerReadiness
Absolutely my favorite course so far! Built from my 10+ years in makerspaces. Real practical use cases of AI in STEM and PBL.
What if AI could take the planning burden off your next PBL unit?
Jonathan Brusco has spent over a decade designing makerspaces and teaching in project-based learning environments. In The AI-Assisted PBL Classroom, he shows educators how to use AI as a real design partner, with every resource tested in actual classrooms.
In 5 short modules (about 90 minutes), you'll learn to:
- Build engaging lessons with prompt funnels and a two-step process
- Design projects around the materials already on your shelves
- Write custom narratives and level challenges for any grade
- Create process rubrics and AI simulations to test ideas early
- Turn student journals into videos and newsletters for families
You'll walk away with a ready-to-teach PBL unit and the prompts to run it again next term.
Free for teachers 👉 curriki.org/courses/ai-assis…
#AIinEducation #ProjectBasedLearning #Makerspace
If you were wanting the latest AI learning tools in your classroom but don’t have budget, this is your chance!
Our Fall 2026 Grant Cycle is now live.
Curriki AI Grants fund K-12 schools so they can bring AI learning tools into their classrooms. Every tool we fund is reviewed for equity, privacy and student impact.
Grant impact so far:
• 83 schools supported
• 15 US states reached
• 42,590 students supported
• 3,122 faculty impacted
• 16 unique software tools
Ready to apply? You'll need two things:
1. A valid quote for a Curriki Approved software tool
2. Your certificate from our new Grant Application Course
Apply now: grants.curriki.org
#AIinEducation #EdTech #EducationGrants
There should be a limit to how much any school, church, or .org should have as tax exempt organizations. It should be a function of budget, expenses, and aid given. Tired of charities that only give <5% of their assets, or schools that charge $100k/yr when their endowments can pay for every student for several decades.
Harvard hoards $55.7 billion while the top 10 college endowments hold $320 billion combined.
All of it tax exempt, all of them still charging six figure tuition, lobbying for more federal cash, and running as indoctrination centers.
These are wealth hoarding hedge funds that hand out degrees.
Strip the tax exemption and force them to spend it or lose it.
I cannot believe the amount of people trashing this on social. This is likely $10B given directly to America children in a manner that connects them to real ownership and innovation. My aunt gave me one share of Intel as a child. It was way more powerful than the $110 underlying value.
Do you all hate billionaires so much that you’d criticize them giving away billions? Had they given that same money to the government it would just be wasted away or laundered through fake charities to political campaigns.
People crying that the Tesla Roadster is impractical and won’t ship aren’t getting the point. This isn’t about that. Sometimes you build things just to see if you can. This is that at scale. Companies that do this are the ones that change the world.
Real life flying supercars! Only capitalism can deliver this kind of innovation. No socialist or communist individual or state will ever come close. This only happens when people build things just to challenge the impossible. I take back every criticism of Tesla.
Nobody understands inflation. The average consumer thinks that prices should have fallen after COVID. Prices never fall outside of singular sectors or industries with unique external factors. Better prices just means less inflation than before (2% instead of 8%).
Jonathan Brusco retweeted
Well here we go. Launching @_MathAcademy_ at Windsor Middle School in CA.
Stoked for the 31 7th/8th grade students & families who opted in.
Huge thanks to @Curriki for making this possible.
Documenting the journey. Launch sequence initiated!
Last grant cycle we supported 41 school grants for @_MathAcademy_ @magicschoolai @waygroundai @orchardcareers @LevebeeApp @IXLLearning @briskteaching @Alphaschool and others. Don’t miss this opportunity to get the most innovative learning software deployed FREE to your students.
📅 Save the date: our new grant cycle opens October 23!
Is your school ready to bring AI into the classroom but missing the budget? Curriki AI grants help schools fund AI educational software for their teachers and students.
✅ Applications open October 23
✅ For schools that need financial support for AI educational software
✅ Get notified the day the cycle opens
👉 grants.curriki.org
Know a principal, tech coordinator, or teacher who should see this? Tag them below 👇
#AIinEducation #EdTech #K12
