RE:Productivity

Christine Corbett and Casey Handmer

Casey Handmer and Christine Corbett Moran are Ph.D. physicists working and co-parenting together. Re:Productivity is about making progress on life and children and life with children.

  1. 1D AGO

    2026-W19 Kara Linse Buckley and Darragh Buckley: Easy Parenting & Meaningful Work

    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 KingThe 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 DunhamThe Woman in Me : Britney Spears memoirGod of the Woods by Liz Moore (mentioned as a book to skip with postpartum hormones)TV For All Mankind (Apple TV+): new Mars seasonKids' tech & education Beast Academy (Art of Problem Solving)Hard Math for Elementary School by Glenn EllisonScratch (MIT visual programming)ReplitGoogle Colab (Jupyter notebooks for Python)CursorClaude CodeLogo programming languageFinance & engineering Increase: Darragh's companyFedwire: the U.S. wire systemPatrick McKenzie's Bits About Money newsletter and Complex Systems podcastPlaces & community Edge Esmeralda: the popup village in Healdsburg, CA where the eldest demoed his Chem-Mash Lab gameBend, Oregon: where Kara & Darragh have built their home, optimized for walkabilityGames Squatter: the Australian Monopoly-adjacent game in Christine's closetMonopoly: no introduction needed!

    51 min
  2. 05/29/2025

    2025-W22 Leadership, Learning, and Large Projects

    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

    2h 43m

About

Casey Handmer and Christine Corbett Moran are Ph.D. physicists working and co-parenting together. Re:Productivity is about making progress on life and children and life with children.

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