RE:Productivity

Christine sits down with Julie Newman, chief engineer for satellites at Impulse Space and mother of three, preparing to welcome a second set of twins. They talk about building an engineering career alongside a growing family, preparing for maternity leave, and the ways parenting can change how you approach work.

Julie discusses her book, Pull, Don’t Push, and why well-intentioned messages about STEM can discourage the girls they’re meant to inspire. The conversation ranges from AI tools and the value of interdisciplinary skills to the practical systems that keep a large household running, including color coding for twins.

They also get into book marketing, reading nonfiction without feeling obliged to finish every page, and bringing accurate engineering into children’s books. Plus: public speaking as a career skill, advice for women starting out in engineering, and why a turbopump might become a “turtle pump” when toddlers encounter rocket science.

Show notes

Guest & host

• Julie Newman, engineer, author, and STEM advocate
• Christine Corbett Moran, host of RE:Productivity, engineer, author

Books discussed

• Pull, Don’t Push: Why STEM Messaging to Girls Isn’t Working and What to Do Instead by Julie Newman. Julie explains how outreach can replace discouraging narratives with messages that connect engineering to what girls care about.
• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. Julie connects the book to her experience building valuable skills across disciplines.
• Rocket Science for Kids: An-Easy-to-Understand Guide by Russell Newman, illustrated by Laura Fearn. Technically accurate rocket science with watercolor animals, including the family’s “turtle pump” anecdote.

Engineering & career

• Julie’s path through SpaceX, NASA JPL, Boeing, Outpost, and Impulse Space
• Why skills at the intersection of disciplines can be especially valuable
• Public speaking, outreach, and writing as engineering career skills
• Maternity leave, career transitions, and advice for women entering engineering

Parenting & household systems

• Preparing for a second set of twins and five children under five
• Color coding and the logistics of a growing family
• Applying engineering skills to household organization
• How parenthood changes priorities and approaches to work

AI, reading & creative projects

• Using AI to manage email, refresh a website, and experiment with marketing
• Learning from side projects and bringing those skills back to work
• Audiobooks, nonfiction, and permission to skip unhelpful chapters
• Making science engaging and accurate for young children

Christine talks with Kate Darling, author of The New Breed and research lead for Robotics, Ethics & Society at the RAI Institute, about parenting in an era of AI and robotics. They cover Alexa upsells, AI tutors, YouTube rabbit holes, humanoid robot hype, school logistics, social media, kids’ books, and the gap between American and European parenting norms. They also cover Kate's recent hobby: romance novels and how to fit it all in between parenting, work, and life.

• Kate Darling: https://www.katedarling.org/

• The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals About Our Future with Robots: https://www.amazon.com/New-Breed-History-Animals-Reveals/dp/1250296102/

• RAI Institute ethics research initiative: https://rai-inst.com/resources/press-release/ai-institute-launches-ethics-research/
• Beast Academy: https://beastacademy.com/
• Scratch: https://scratch.mit.edu/
• Adafruit Circuit Playground: https://www.adafruit.com/category/965
• Claude Code: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code
• Mark Rober: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRober
• Blake Crouch, Dark Matter: https://blakecrouch.com/books/dark-matter/
• Netflix, This Is a Gardening Show: https://www.netflix.com/title/81902230
• David Rees, How to Sharpen Pencils: https://mhpbooks.com/books/how-to-sharpen-pencils
• Dog Man: https://pilkey.com/series/dog-man
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: https://wimpykid.com/
• Project Hail Mary: https://www.andyweirauthor.com/books/project-hail-mary-hc/project-hail-mary-el
  
• The Wild Robot: https://www.thewildrobotmovie.com/
  
• Pax: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/pax-sara-pennypacker
• Christine Corbett Moran: https://christinecorbettmoran.com/

Christine sits down with husband-and-wife duo Kara Linse Buckley (sports marketing, ex-Senior Advisor, U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee advisor) and Darragh Buckley (CEO at Increase, employee #1 at Stripe), parents of four in Bend, Oregon. They dig into designing a walkable life around two anchoring goals : easy enjoyable parenting and meaningful productive work, including a custom upcoming house move with kids' bedrooms small-by-design to push family into shared spaces. The conversation ranges across the "lawless place" of the school bus, an extra hour of bedtime math as a happiness hack for the eldest, Beast Academy and the Hard Math for Elementary School curriculum, and how the Federal Reserve quietly pulled off a Fedwire format change with no one noticing.

They get into kids learning to code, cursor and Replit unleashing creative explosions (Space Invaders clones, a chemistry-meets-math game), the tension between teaching kids to type vs. voice-driven AI workflows, and the inevitable question of when your child will out-sysadmin you. Plus: an unintentional capitalism unleashing via pesos in a Mexican market, Monopoly variants without sub-$100 settlements, the books making the rounds in their book clubs, and how parenting changes your brain.

Books:

• Heart the Lover by Lily King
• The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (the "crotchety" letter-writing protagonist)
• Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (trad-wife time-travel novel; Anne Hathaway optioned the film rights)
• Famesick by Lena Dunham
• The Woman in Me : Britney Spears memoir
• God of the Woods by Liz Moore (mentioned as a book to skip with postpartum hormones)

TV

• For All Mankind (Apple TV+): new Mars season

Kids' tech & education

• Beast Academy (Art of Problem Solving)
• Hard Math for Elementary School by Glenn Ellison
• Scratch (MIT visual programming)
• Replit
• Google Colab (Jupyter notebooks for Python)
• Cursor
• Claude Code
• Logo programming language

Finance & engineering

• Increase: Darragh's company
• Fedwire: the U.S. wire system
• Patrick McKenzie's Bits About Money newsletter and Complex Systems podcast

Places & community

• Edge Esmeralda: the popup village in Healdsburg, CA where the eldest demoed his Chem-Mash Lab game
• Bend, Oregon: where Kara & Darragh have built their home, optimized for walkability

Games

• Squatter: the Australian Monopoly-adjacent game in Christine's closet
• Monopoly: no introduction needed!

Christine sits down with Aline Lerner, founder and CEO of Interviewing.io, for a wide-ranging conversation on parenting, productivity, and the strange in-between space where life and work blur. Aline shares her first-ever Claude Code project, a LinkedIn browser extension to surface meaningful connections, and Christine gives a deep tour of her Open Claw household setup, complete with a Mac mini, a Slack-driven AI agent named Nova, that lets the AI handle birthday party shopping, gardening orders, and recurring doctor appointments.

The conversation moves into the trade-offs of schooling gifted kids in California versus magnet programs Aline grew up with in 1990s New York City, calibrating realistic risk (sharks vs. cars vs. small aircraft), and the meritocratic brutality of professional kitchens. Aline shares her unexpected love of Below Deck and Catfish as practical anthropology, useful, it turns out, for catching fraudulent job candidates. The episode closes on raising kids who aren't assholes despite growing up with more privilege than their immigrant parents had, and on hedging your sources of meaning across both family and work.

Summary

Christine sits down with Brittney Gallagher, co-founder and Board Chair of the AI Objectives Institute and team member at AI watchdog The Midas Project. They cover parenting, hobbies, and current events such as cold-turkey potty training, gaming and role-playing, an Expeditionary Force audiobook binge, gardening from orchids to edible flowers, and how much Replit and Scratch to allow a 7-year-old. Then a sober look at this year's AI policy landscape: open-source Chinese models catching up, super PACs spending $125M to defeat Alex Bores over the RAISE Act, and whether you'd board a plane with a 3% chance of crashing.

Show Notes

Guest & Host

Brittney Gallagher, Co-founder & Board Chair, AI Objectives Institute; Team Member, The Midas Project

Christine Corbett Moran, VP of Engineering at Horizon3.ai

Games & Media

• Disco Elysium (and Kim Kitsuragi)
• Expeditionary Force by Craig Alanson
• UFO 50 and Party House
• Dominion
• Don't Worry About the Vase by Zvi Mowshowitz

Kids' Tech & Education

• Khan Academy Kids
• Replit
• Scratch
• Edge Esmeralda

AI Safety & Policy

• The Midas Project
• "The reporters at this news site are AI bots. OpenAI's super PAC appears to be funding it." (Model Republic), the viral investigation Brittney references
• AI Objectives Institute
• California SB 53
• New York's RAISE Act and Alex Bores, targeted by Leading the Future super PAC
• Alibaba Qwen and DeepSeek

In this episode, Christine Corbett Moran hosts Joyce Yan, a software engineer and new mother, to discuss balancing parenthood and a tech career, the impact of AI on software development, and her personal projects like the Fertility Forecaster website (https://fertilityforecaster.com/). They explore postpartum experiences, AI tools in coding, and the future of work and parenting.

The discussion goes into the nuances of second-time parenthood, societal expectations, and the cultural narratives around having children.

key topics

• Balancing parenthood and a tech career
• AI tools revolutionizing software development
• Postpartum experiences and recovery
• Building and deploying a fertility app with Claude Code

• Breastfeeding experiences and lactation support
• Impact of cultural narratives on parenting decisions

Links:

• Fertility Forecaster website (⁠https://fertilityforecaster.com/⁠)

keywords: parenthood, AI in coding, postpartum, software engineering, fertility app, work-life balance, AI tools, postpartum recovery, tech industry, personal projects postpartum recovery, breastfeeding, family life, career motivation, second-time parent, cultural narratives, fertility crisis, parenting tips

In this wide-ranging episode, Casey and Christine dive deep into leadership transitions, complex systems, and the art of managing large-scale projects. Christine discusses her new role as Head of Engineering at a Series D startup, managing 60+ people and Casey discusses the counterintuitive challenges of scaling teams. Christine shares her synthetic biology progress, building an orbital shaker from scratch and exploring the intersection of hardware and biotech. The conversation spans from ancient Roman infrastructure projects to modern space exploration, touching on hiring challenges, the value of going to primary sources, and why some historical civilizations came tantalizingly close to industrial revolution but never quite made the leap.

Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger

Now It Can Be Told about the Manhattan Project

What Got You Here Won't Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith

Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim

Radical Candor by Kim Scott

Playground - Contemporary science fiction novel about seasteading and AI

Climbing Gold - Alex Honnold's podcast (featuring Vitaliy Musiyenko’s Sierra traverse story)

Conversations with Tyler - Tyler Cowen's interview show

Lex Fridman Podcast - Episodes with Jeff Wasserstrom (China scholar) and Tim Sweeney (Epic Games)

The Complete History & Strategy of Standard Oil (Part I) (Acquired)

Founders Podcast - Episodes on Jeff Bezos shareholder letters, Jim Simons, John D. Rockefeller, and Estée Lauder

How Andreessen Horowitz Disrupted VC & What’s Coming Next (Ben and Marc Discussions)

The DER Task Force - Distributed energy resources podcast (Jesse Peltan episode)

Main Engine Cut Off - Space industry podcast T+303: The Trump 2024 Transition (with Mark Albrecht)

The Almost-Industrial Revolutions of Rome and China 

Cost of Glory - Ancient history podcast (Julius Caesar series)

Circuit Playground Express - Adafruit electronics learning board

Ada Fruit Orbital Shaker Tutorial - DIY lab equipment project

Thinking by My Wits - Website featuring Scholar Alex Jones's literary works

In this episode, Casey recounts his recent trip to Australia to visit family and friends, while Christine shares her experience running a lemonade stand fundraiser for their children's preschool. They discuss ongoing technical and creative projects, explore the challenges of educational systems for exceptionally bright children, and reflect on various books they've been reading. The conversation weaves through topics of metallurgy, neurodiversity, programming languages for kids, and the future of space exploration.

Neurotribes 

Exceptionally Gifted Children 

Superconvergence 

Now It Can Be Told 

Secret Coders

Founders Podcast: Michael Dell

Complex Systems: Fixing Government Tech With Mikey Dickerson 

Complex Systems: Power In Local Government

Adafruit: Orbital Shaker

Summary

In this week's episode, Casey and Christine discuss their weekend family adventures, including picnic table remodeling, bike maintenance, and trips to the local airport and climbing gym. They explore their experiences with AI toys for children, microwave modification projects, and dive into deeper conversations about human intelligence, biology experiments, and aging research. The discussion ranges from reflections on their honeymoon in Cuba to thoughts on economic growth, education, and the potential of technological advancement to solve fundamental human problems.

Links

Asterix comics - Comics that Casey enjoyed as a child and now reads with his children

Now It Can Be Told by Leslie Groves - About the Manhattan Project

The Prodigy's Cousin - Book about links between autism and childhood prodigies

NeuroTribes - Book about autism

Acquired podcast episode on Epic - Healthcare software company

Gompertz mortality law

Dino - Magical Toys [AI powered toy]

Paperclip Maximizers and Squiggle Maximizers

Bronze Sword Replication Project - Inspired by a 3,400-year-old bronze sword found in South Central Germany in 2023

Lost PLA Method - Similar to the lost wax method for metal casting

Cybertruck Experience - Family rented and drove Tesla's Cybertruck

Glowing yeast experiment

CRISPR experiment

DNA athleticism gene testing

Voyage of the Southern Sun - Book by Michael Smith about flying around the world in an ultralight aircraft

Like War - Book about social media's impact on global politics and warfare

Abundance by Ezra Klein - Audiobook being listened to by hosts

Acquired Podcast - Episode on Meituan

Radiohead - Music being enjoyed in the biology lab

Heracles and the Trojan War - Historical/mythological reference point for the bronze sword era

Non-alcoholic beers - Athletic Brewing, Partake, and Sober Carpenter brands mentioned