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Here's the knot almost every founder hits. Things are working. Money is coming in. And then everyone around you starts chanting the same advice. Niche down. It sounds smart. It feels terrifying. Because the second you try it, it feels like you're about to fire the people funding your life. So I ran the question through The Room. I convened a council session inside Invisible Council AI with cognitive models of four people who have actually built fortunes on this exact decision. Alex Hormozi. Dan Kennedy. Dan Sullivan. Frank Kern. They did not politely agree. They collided. And the collision is where the gold was. Hormozi separated the two decisions everyone blends together. Kennedy reframed a niche as a farm you can dominate, not a smaller crowd to starve in. Sullivan made the call that your current clients are evidence, not your identity. Kern added the filter that changes everything. Pick the client you could win for even if you only got paid after they succeeded. The Third Mind that emerged from all four was simple and sharp. You don't announce a divorce to find a better date. You build a revenue-safe front door for the proven buyer while the old book of business quietly funds the transition. Tighter front door. Same cash register. This one is for any founder sitting on revenue they're scared to risk and a focus they're scared to commit to. Listen all the way through. The open question at the end is the one that decides whether your niche becomes a farm or a trap. What You'll Learn The two separate decisions you're accidentally blending, and why that blend is the source of the fear. Why cash flow is not the thing you protect at all costs. It's the thing that buys you time to get smarter. How to choose your ideal client from evidence instead of preference, using the clients you already have. Why a niche is not a smaller audience. It's a market small enough to dominate and rich enough to matter. The difference between revenue and complexity wearing a fake mustache. How to reposition without sending a single client a dramatic "we've evolved beyond you" announcement. The 90-day narrowing test that turns a scary identity change into a measurable experiment. The exact first move you can run this week with your last 20 clients and a spreadsheet. Chapter Markers (Times are placeholders. Map to your final audio in your host.) 00:00 — The founder's fear: niche down without blowing up revenue 00:00 — Hormozi: the two decisions you keep blending 00:00 — Pick the niche the evidence is pointing at, not the one you like 00:00 — "Your strategy is what you say no to" 00:00 — Kennedy: a niche is a farm, not a smaller crowd 00:00 — The fantasy demographic test 00:00 — Third Mind: the Cash-Flow Airlock 00:00 — Sullivan: your clients are evidence, not your identity 00:00 — The 10x Client Test 00:00 — Third Mind: the Two-Bank Niche Test 00:00 — Kern: pick who you could win for if you got paid last 00:00 — Kennedy vs Kern: ease versus richness 00:00 — Third Mind: the Revenue-Safe Front Door 00:00 — The Council Brief and your first move 00:00 — The open question: farm or elegant trap Lines From The Room (Pulled from the live council session. These are the cognitive models speaking inside Invisible Council AI.) The Hormozi model, on the real lever: "Your strategy is what you say no to. Not what you put in the Google Doc." The Kennedy model, on choosing wrong: "If the answer is no, you don't have an ICP. You have a fantasy demographic." The Sullivan model, on the trap of revenue: "Complexity disguised as cash flow." The Kern model, on the filter that matters: "Don't choose the ICP you can sell. Choose the ICP you can almost guarantee results for." The Third Mind, on the whole move: "You don't announce a divorce to find a better date." The Frameworks Named In This Session The Cash-Flow Airlock — keep serving the messy back room while the new front door only admits the proven buyer inside a conquerable farm. The Two-Bank Niche Test — deposit into the future bank while making zero withdrawals from the current bank. The 10x Client Test — if I had ten times more clients like this one, would the business get simpler, more profitable, and more energizing, or collapse under complexity. The Revenue-Safe Front Door — test the narrow ICP in media the legacy herd doesn't even consume, while the back room keeps proving appreciation to the people paying now. Your Move This Week Take your last 20 clients. Put them in a spreadsheet. Score each one on: Did they get a measurable result How easy were they to sell How profitable were they to serve How easy were they to fulfill Did serving them drain you or energize you Would you take them if you only got paid after they succeeded Would you want ten times more just like them The overlap is your first farm. Then write one sentence. "I help [specific person or company] solve [specific expensive problem] so they can achieve [specific outcome] without [specific pain]." If it doesn't exclude people, it isn't finished. Then point your next 90 days of new marketing at that person only. Back room keeps getting served. Same cash register.
Ever wrestled with teacher work life balance without giving up your summer? If the answer is yes (or a tired, edgy laugh), you're in the right place. This episode of The Secondary Teacher Podcast is for every middle and high school teacher who wants to show up to both the classroom and their real life—not just survive, but truly enjoy both.Host Khristen Massic kicks things off by laying bare the hard truth: if your planning system has you locked in teacher mode 24/7, the so-called “balance” is basically a myth. She shares a raw story about waiting years to have kids, only to find that those longed-for bedtime moments with them were constantly interrupted by thoughts of half-finished lesson plans and the eternal pile of grading. That's not the vision most of us sign up for—but it's devastatingly common.Here's the thing that's rarely acknowledged: for secondary teachers, especially the ones juggling multiple preps or building curriculum from scratch, the planning never takes a break. Your brain's stuck on overdrive because there's always something left to do, and there's no off switch when the system is broken. Forget about boundaries for a second—if your lessons require hours of fresh creativity every night, all the teacher tips in the world won't save you from burnout.Khristen cuts through the noise about “just set better boundaries” or “hack your productivity.” None of that actually fixes the root cause for most secondary teachers. She spells it out: it's the lack of consistent, repeatable planning structures that has you grading during the day, planning at midnight, and resenting bedtime stories. It's not you. It's the system.But what does the better way look like? Khristen gets practical. For her, the real turning point was building repeatable lesson frameworks—and ditching that endless search for yet another new idea. Suddenly, planning became lighter. Lesson planning stopped demanding every drop of her creative energy after sundown. She could finally be present for her kids, not just physically, but with her whole mind.If you've ever felt that tension—the guilt trip when summer's here and you're either doing nothing (and panicking in August) or filling your whole break with unpaid curriculum labor—you're not alone. Khristen speaks directly to multi-prep and elective teachers, pointing out that summer shouldn't mean endless, unpaid work. Instead, you need a foundation: one solid unit, one repeatable lesson shape, one organizational system that holds steady year-round.She draws a clear line: you do not have to earn a restful summer by doing everything ahead of time. What matters is building smart systems now so the rest of the year is manageable. Strategic, not exhaustive, planning wins—especially for teachers who have families to show up for, lives outside of school, or just want a summer afternoon off the clock.Here's what's possible: imagine walking into September not in survival mode, but calm and ready. You know your first unit. You've got a lesson structure to adapt, not a blank page. Your system works for you instead of forcing you to keep everything in your head. That changes what your evenings, weekends, and summers look like. (And no, you don't have to martyr yourself to get there.)This episode is for any secondary teacher who has ever felt the invisible weight of being everything to everyone, everywhere—including themselves. It's for those who build courses from scratch, balance multiple preparations, and have real lives and real people waiting for them after 3 p.m. It's a reality check with heart, packed with a call to shift from scattered, one-off planning to sustainable, life-giving routines.Ready to claim a teaching life that makes room for your actual life, too? Host Khristen Massic gives you permission—and a plan—to stop letting broken planning systems rob you of your best moments. Start with a foundation. Build repeatable classroom routines. Walk into the year lighter. Because balance isn't about doing more; it's about finally doing less—and doing it better.Break the cycle. Finish something that makes tomorrow lighter. School's out—let's keep it that way when you walk through your own front door.Too many preps and not enough time? Let's make your planning period actually work for you.Reserve your spot in the Unit Planning Lab here: https://khristenmassic.thrivecart.com/unit/?ref=podcast Planning for the next school year? If your day is organized by class period, your planning calendar should be too. Grab my Editable Class Period Calendar here: https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpodUnlock 20 time-saving strategies designed to keep your students engaged and your sanity intact with the free Simple Teaching Strategies Toolkit. Each strategy comes with detailed instructions, objectives, and a materials list, all editable in a convenient Google Doc. https://khristenmassic.com/toolboxGet the Planning Period Reset Toolkit—a free set of quick-start tools to help you protect your time, focus faster, and finally finish something… even during chaotic school days. https://khristenmassic.com/resetShop my Teachers Pay Teachers store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-Coach
Send us Fan MailThanks to J.S. for joining me to talk about her latest release, Love Me Through the Grief.Support J.S.:Read Love Me Through the Grief (on KU).Follow her on Instagram.WebsiteFor links to the books discussed in this episode, click the link here to take you to the Google Doc to view the list. For episode feedback, future reading and author recommendations, you can text the podcast by clicking the "Send us a message button" above. For more, follow along on Instagram @whereileftoffpod.
Photographer Rick Sammon shows how AI is transforming creative work and what happens when the Pope issues a sweeping 42,000-word encyclical on artificial intelligence and invites tech skeptics and true believers to weigh in? The Pope's AI encyclical: technology, ethics, and human dignity Amazing interior, controversial exterior: Ferrari's first electric car Even if you hate AI, you will use Google AI Search There's a new way to create Google Docs with your voice White House, Anthropic near deal for spy agencies to use AI Claude Mythos preview uncovers 10,000+ zero-day vulnerabilities in Project Glasswing Anthropic to release Mythos-class models to the public Chinese AI startup DeepSeek slashes price of flagship model Spotify and Universal Music strike deal allowing fan-made AI covers and remixes ElevenLabs's new music generation model can switch genres mid-track David Sacks's 11th-hour plea led to Trump's backtrack on AI executive order I'm tired of talking to AI In Memoriam: Don Newhouse Picks of the Week: KMart Muzak Infinite Jeffs isaiprofitable.com Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Guest: Rick Sammon Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/intelligent365 zscaler.com/security
Photographer Rick Sammon shows how AI is transforming creative work and what happens when the Pope issues a sweeping 42,000-word encyclical on artificial intelligence and invites tech skeptics and true believers to weigh in? The Pope's AI encyclical: technology, ethics, and human dignity Amazing interior, controversial exterior: Ferrari's first electric car Even if you hate AI, you will use Google AI Search There's a new way to create Google Docs with your voice White House, Anthropic near deal for spy agencies to use AI Claude Mythos preview uncovers 10,000+ zero-day vulnerabilities in Project Glasswing Anthropic to release Mythos-class models to the public Chinese AI startup DeepSeek slashes price of flagship model Spotify and Universal Music strike deal allowing fan-made AI covers and remixes ElevenLabs's new music generation model can switch genres mid-track David Sacks's 11th-hour plea led to Trump's backtrack on AI executive order I'm tired of talking to AI In Memoriam: Don Newhouse Picks of the Week: KMart Muzak Infinite Jeffs isaiprofitable.com Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Guest: Rick Sammon Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/intelligent365 zscaler.com/security
Photographer Rick Sammon shows how AI is transforming creative work and what happens when the Pope issues a sweeping 42,000-word encyclical on artificial intelligence and invites tech skeptics and true believers to weigh in? The Pope's AI encyclical: technology, ethics, and human dignity Amazing interior, controversial exterior: Ferrari's first electric car Even if you hate AI, you will use Google AI Search There's a new way to create Google Docs with your voice White House, Anthropic near deal for spy agencies to use AI Claude Mythos preview uncovers 10,000+ zero-day vulnerabilities in Project Glasswing Anthropic to release Mythos-class models to the public Chinese AI startup DeepSeek slashes price of flagship model Spotify and Universal Music strike deal allowing fan-made AI covers and remixes ElevenLabs's new music generation model can switch genres mid-track David Sacks's 11th-hour plea led to Trump's backtrack on AI executive order I'm tired of talking to AI In Memoriam: Don Newhouse Picks of the Week: KMart Muzak Infinite Jeffs isaiprofitable.com Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Guest: Rick Sammon Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/intelligent365 zscaler.com/security
Photographer Rick Sammon shows how AI is transforming creative work and what happens when the Pope issues a sweeping 42,000-word encyclical on artificial intelligence and invites tech skeptics and true believers to weigh in? The Pope's AI encyclical: technology, ethics, and human dignity Amazing interior, controversial exterior: Ferrari's first electric car Even if you hate AI, you will use Google AI Search There's a new way to create Google Docs with your voice White House, Anthropic near deal for spy agencies to use AI Claude Mythos preview uncovers 10,000+ zero-day vulnerabilities in Project Glasswing Anthropic to release Mythos-class models to the public Chinese AI startup DeepSeek slashes price of flagship model Spotify and Universal Music strike deal allowing fan-made AI covers and remixes ElevenLabs's new music generation model can switch genres mid-track David Sacks's 11th-hour plea led to Trump's backtrack on AI executive order I'm tired of talking to AI In Memoriam: Don Newhouse Picks of the Week: KMart Muzak Infinite Jeffs isaiprofitable.com Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Guest: Rick Sammon Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/intelligent365 zscaler.com/security
We finally wrapped up our massive country elimination bracket today, and you won’t believe who won. But things completely derailed when Producer Carl brought out a Google Doc exposing Clint's unhinged, cringe-worthy old Facebook statuses. From questionable luxury flexes to some seriously awkward throwback posts, Clint was left absolutely sweating in the studio. We also dive into the listener conspiracy theory about why Meg is barely getting any screen time on our video podcast. Trust us, you are not ready for this one!
Ever feel like you're stuck on a hamster wheel of lesson planning, collecting more resources than you'll ever use and never quite landing on a structure that actually makes life easier? If you're a middle or high school teacher juggling multiple preps, listen up. This week on The Secondary Teacher Podcast, host Khristen Massic is delivering exactly what you've been looking for: the introduce, practice, produce framework for lesson planning. If you've ever typed “planning framework for secondary teachers” into Google at midnight, desperately searching for order in the chaos, you're in the right place.Let's call out one of the big traps right away—overbuilding in the summer, obsessing over hooks, or grabbing shiny resources hoping they'll solve your planning headaches. Host Khristen Massic knows that empty resource collecting (without structure) just leaves you piecing together disconnected lessons and second-guessing every move. She's been there—so it's time to ditch the random and embrace a better way.The introduce, practice, produce framework is not some theoretical concept; it's a concrete, repeatable structure for every course on your schedule. Start with “introduce”—not just throwing content at students, but crafting that hook, sparking genuine curiosity, and making sure students actually want to be there. Khristen shares how her own mindset changed after workshops on student engagement, but the breakthrough came when she realized the hook is only the beginning.After the spark comes “practice”—that messy middle ground where students interact, try, discuss, and explore the concept, but aren't yet flying solo. It's not about independent work or grades. It's about building understanding with guidance, through labs, collaborative problems, or teacher feedback. Khristen notes this is where most secondary teachers—especially CTE and elective teachers—are already doing good work, often without naming or replicating the structure.Then comes “produce”—the phase where students prove what they know, whether it's a project, presentation, prototype, or even a quick exit ticket. Produce isn't just about summative assessment; it's your chance to collect real evidence of learning, big or small. For multi-prep teachers, this repeatable sequence means you can stop reinventing the wheel for every period and start looking at your courses and lessons through the same lens.A killer insight from Khristen: most teachers already have repeatable routines in one class (think consistent lab report formats or project flows), but rarely think to transfer that structure system-wide. The magic spark? Recognizing that the planning rhythm—introduce, practice, produce—works across content areas, grade levels, and even your busiest schedules.The result? Classroom routines become predictable and effective. Students know what to expect, you spend less time explaining “what are we doing today,” and your cognitive load goes down. Planning starts feeling lighter, not heavier. That's work life balance in the secondary classroom—efficiency and sanity, not burnout and survival mode.This episode is for all you teachers who are tired of operating in silos, exhausted by decision fatigue, and ready for a system that helps the lesson ideas you already have finally flow. Khristen is clear: you don't need more lesson ideas—just a way to organize and repeat what already works.Whether you're building from scratch as a CTE teacher, handling multiple preps, or desperate to stay out of summer overbuild mode, this framework travels. You build the structure once, then swap out content as needed. That's working smarter, not harder, with teacher tips you'll actually use.If you're ready to make your teaching sustainable, not just survivable, and create classroom routines that serve both you and your students, tune in and grab the introduce, practice, produce framework. Apply it to every prep, every unit, and every lesson.Tired of chaos? Build your flow, protect your sanity, and teach like you mean it. See you in the (lighter, smarter) classroom.Too many preps and not enough time? Let's make your planning period actually work for you.Reserve your spot in the Unit Planning Lab here: https://khristenmassic.thrivecart.com/unit/?ref=podcast Planning for the next school year? If your day is organized by class period, your planning calendar should be too. Grab my Editable Class Period Calendar here: https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpodUnlock 20 time-saving strategies designed to keep your students engaged and your sanity intact with the free Simple Teaching Strategies Toolkit. Each strategy comes with detailed instructions, objectives, and a materials list, all editable in a convenient Google Doc. https://khristenmassic.com/toolboxGet the Planning Period Reset Toolkit—a free set of quick-start tools to help you protect your time, focus faster, and finally finish something… even during chaotic school days. https://khristenmassic.com/resetShop my Teachers Pay Teachers store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-Coach
Photographer Rick Sammon shows how AI is transforming creative work and what happens when the Pope issues a sweeping 42,000-word encyclical on artificial intelligence and invites tech skeptics and true believers to weigh in? The Pope's AI encyclical: technology, ethics, and human dignity Amazing interior, controversial exterior: Ferrari's first electric car Even if you hate AI, you will use Google AI Search There's a new way to create Google Docs with your voice White House, Anthropic near deal for spy agencies to use AI Claude Mythos preview uncovers 10,000+ zero-day vulnerabilities in Project Glasswing Anthropic to release Mythos-class models to the public Chinese AI startup DeepSeek slashes price of flagship model Spotify and Universal Music strike deal allowing fan-made AI covers and remixes ElevenLabs's new music generation model can switch genres mid-track David Sacks's 11th-hour plea led to Trump's backtrack on AI executive order I'm tired of talking to AI In Memoriam: Don Newhouse Picks of the Week: KMart Muzak Infinite Jeffs isaiprofitable.com Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Guest: Rick Sammon Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/intelligent365 zscaler.com/security
Photographer Rick Sammon shows how AI is transforming creative work and what happens when the Pope issues a sweeping 42,000-word encyclical on artificial intelligence and invites tech skeptics and true believers to weigh in? The Pope's AI encyclical: technology, ethics, and human dignity Amazing interior, controversial exterior: Ferrari's first electric car Even if you hate AI, you will use Google AI Search There's a new way to create Google Docs with your voice White House, Anthropic near deal for spy agencies to use AI Claude Mythos preview uncovers 10,000+ zero-day vulnerabilities in Project Glasswing Anthropic to release Mythos-class models to the public Chinese AI startup DeepSeek slashes price of flagship model Spotify and Universal Music strike deal allowing fan-made AI covers and remixes ElevenLabs's new music generation model can switch genres mid-track David Sacks's 11th-hour plea led to Trump's backtrack on AI executive order I'm tired of talking to AI In Memoriam: Don Newhouse Picks of the Week: KMart Muzak Infinite Jeffs isaiprofitable.com Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Guest: Rick Sammon Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/intelligent365 zscaler.com/security
Hey Doc —I finally had to sit down and record this episode because I keep talking about NotebookLM to everybody. My Facebook friends. My sisters. Random physician moms who probably just asked me one innocent question and suddenly got a 20-minute TED Talk about AI
You've got the message. You know who you're talking to. So why isn't the marketing working?That's the exact question Adam Roach and Jess Webber dig into in Part 4 of the Maslow Mountain series. This is the episode where the internal work you've done on messaging finally has to go public, and it turns out that's where most coaches hit a wall they didn't see coming.The conversation starts with a distinction that sounds simple but cuts deep: marketing versus performing. If you've been tweaking your message to fit the room, adjusting your language based on who's watching, or changing what you lead with depending on the platform, that's performance. Marketing is something different. It's a clear, consistent message people start to associate with you before you ever show up. It's reputation built in advance. And the gap between those two things is costing coaches real opportunity every single day.Adam and Jess also get into the owned versus borrowed media question, and they're not gentle about it. Borrowed media, your social platforms, your Instagram followers, your TikTok audience, works until it doesn't. You don't own any of it, and one algorithm change or account suspension can erase years of effort overnight. The more durable play is building something you own, getting consistent there first, and then using borrowed platforms to invite people into it, not the other way around.What you'll learn in this episode:Why most coaches are performing instead of marketing, and exactly what the difference looks like in practiceThe "see vs. seek" framework: why you want people actively looking for your solution, not just noticing you existWhy you get tired of your marketing before your market does, and what to do about itThe owned vs. borrowed media strategy ILC uses to control their marketing machineHow Adam and Jess grew ILC's email open rates from under 20% to nearly 67% by fixing message-to-avatar alignmentWhat a lead magnet actually needs to do (and why a simple Google Doc outperformed a professionally designed one)How to build marketing that keeps running even when you're not in the roomThe big idea here is the machine. When your messaging is accurate, when it lands with the right avatar at the right place on the mountain, marketing stops being something you have to push. It starts being something that pulls people toward you while you're doing everything else. That's not a dream state. Adam and Jess are living it right now, and they show the receipts."You want people to seek you versus just see you. And that's a big difference." — Adam RoachResources Mentioned:ILC Community + New Lead Magnet: ilovecoachingco.comUpcoming Sellable Offers Challenge: ilovecoachingco.com/challengeInstagram: @ilovecoachingco / @adamrroach / @thejesswebberYouTube: youtube.com/@ilovecoachingcoTimestamps:[00:00] Intro + Series Recap (Parts 1–3)[03:11] Marketing vs. Performing: What's the Difference?[05:39] See vs. Seek: The Framework[07:06] Why Coaches Quit Marketing Too Soon[09:02] Owned vs. Borrowed Media[13:18] The Dangers of Building Only on Social (Real Story)[15:34] ILC's Email Data: Open Rates from Sub-20% to 67%[18:54] How to Build a Lead Magnet from What You Already Do[23:39] The Machine: Marketing That Runs Without You[27:03] ILC's New Lead Magnet + Sellable Offers Challenge Teaser[28:04] Sneak Peek: Episode 5 — The Avatar ProblemReady to stop guessing and start growing? The ILC community is where coaches build businesses they're actually proud of. Head to ilovecoachingco.com to check out the new lead magnet and the upcoming Sellable Offers Challenge.
Hey guys, so I posted a carousel on Friday night breaking down my funnel and honestly the DMs have been wild.The part that shocked people the most? I sell 40+ courses every month with no ads and no launches. People just find them and buy.So I'm walking you through the whole thing in this episode.How I go from a post on Instagram to a $7 course sale to people buying again and again. The customer ladder. The Google Doc method for the mastermind. Why 72% of people actually finish my courses and come back.The mechanics are simpler than you think, and I promise 90% of you are missing step one.Come listen. I think this one's going to be useful
Let's talk about a trap too many secondary teachers fall into: trying to build a better classroom by collecting endless resources. The keyword phrase “secondary teacher strategies for building courses from scratch” is everywhere—yet most of us have been taught the wrong lesson. Host Khristen Massic gets real about why having a mountain of lesson links, library folders, or shiny PDFs doesn't set you up for a lighter tomorrow. In fact, it can dig you deeper into the multi-prep overwhelm that haunts every middle and high school teacher.Here's the deal: planning in isolation, course by course, is a fast track to burnout. Khristen shares how she'd focus intensely on one class—building out that gorgeous gallery walk for first period, for example—only to have the next period hit and realize she had nothing prepped. Sound familiar? That feeling of always being behind somewhere isn't because you're not working hard enough. It's because you're treating every prep like its own universe, with your brain scattered to the four winds.What sets thriving teachers apart—especially those balancing multiple preps—isn't epic resources. It's repeatable systems. Intentional structure. Khristen's own turning point? She ran out of energy and recycled the same activity from one period to the next, not as a cop-out, but out of necessity. The shocker: the structure worked. Students got it. She could adapt on the fly, because the basic framework was solid.This episode digs into why secondary teachers have been set up for this hamster wheel of endless planning. You probably learned to fill out a single-class lesson template in your credential program, with no clue how to think across three, four, even nine different preps. Khristen saw the contrast up close when elementary-trained teachers brought their tight routines and predictable flows into her building's sixth-grade hall. The difference? Structure as instruction. The elementary mindset doesn't just cover content; it smooths the whole learning day, so kids (and adults) aren't always guessing what comes next.If you're teaching multiple preps or electives, it's time to put systems at the center. Instead of asking what your next class needs, start with what structure you're going to use—and see how it can travel across different subjects. A gallery walk here, a discussion protocol there. The content changes, but student expectations stay locked in, and so does your sanity. That's not lazy; that's systems thinking.Khristen lays out three shifts to make planning manageable for the secondary classroom. First, stop planning by course and start planning by structure. Second, mine your own work for overlap before inventing anything new for a single class. Third, build out a consistent lesson flow once, then just drop the content in each time. You save your brain for real instructional moves, not endless logistics.Middle and high school teachers with multiple preps—you know who you are—this approach is made for you. No more feeling like you're starting from scratch every morning. You don't need to fill your life with more resources; you need a handful of solid, adaptive routines and the confidence to repeat them. Repeatable structures are the heart of true teacher work life balance. Your best teaching won't come from reinventing the wheel or scrambling for the next big idea. It'll come from knowing your structures, trusting them, and letting them do the heavy lifting.This episode's got your back if you're tired of feeling stretched, if you're juggling prep after prep, and if you're ready to make planning lighter for good. Host Khristen Massic pulls no punches—secondary teacher strategies for building courses from scratch is about system, not hustle.If you want to stop drowning in resources and start thriving with real, repeatable systems, this one's for you.Shut the laptop, trust your structures, and dare to make tomorrow lighter.Too many preps and not enough time? Let's make your planning period actually work for you.Reserve your spot in the Unit Planning Lab here: https://khristenmassic.thrivecart.com/unit/?ref=podcast Planning for the next school year? If your day is organized by class period, your planning calendar should be too. Grab my Editable Class Period Calendar here: https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpodUnlock 20 time-saving strategies designed to keep your students engaged and your sanity intact with the free Simple Teaching Strategies Toolkit. Each strategy comes with detailed instructions, objectives, and a materials list, all editable in a convenient Google Doc. https://khristenmassic.com/toolboxGet the Planning Period Reset Toolkit—a free set of quick-start tools to help you protect your time, focus faster, and finally finish something… even during chaotic school days. https://khristenmassic.com/resetShop my Teachers Pay Teachers store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-Coach
Email doesn't have to feel like a blank Google Doc staring into your soul.In this episode, Allison chats with Liz Wilcox, the Fresh Princess of Email Marketing, about how to write emails that actually get opened, read, replied to, and yes, even clicked on.Liz breaks down why your emails don't need to be overproduced or packed with “value” to work, and why the best email content often starts with real-life moments, simple conversations, and a little personality. Because the goal isn't just to close a sale, it's to open a conversation.TAKEAWAYS:Your emails don't need to be complicated to be effective. Liz shares how showing you're invested, becoming relatable, and staying top of mind can help your subscribers actually care about what you send.The “Email Staircase” framework helps you move people from follower, to friend, to customer by building trust through personality, vision, and values.Being relatable doesn't mean everyone has to love the exact same things you do. When you share specific pieces of your personality, your audience can connect with the feeling behind them.Replies are not a distraction from your business, they can be a money-making activity. Conversations in the inbox give you real market research, better sales copy, and clearer insight into what your audience actually needs.If your subscribers stay “friends” but never become customers, you may not be selling enough. Liz gives a refreshing reframe on selling more often without making it weird.LINKS YOU MIGHT FIND HELPFUL: Check out the blog post that accompanies this podcast episode for more details and resources.Get access to the singular email (and a fill-in-the-blank template) that was directly responsible for selling over $80,000 worth of courses, memberships, and digital products in 2025 by clicking here.Snag Liz's Welcome Sequence TemplatesVisit Liz on her websiteCONNECT WITH ALLISON:Follow Allison on InstagramDID YOU HAVE AN 'AH-HA MOMENT' WHILE LISTENING TO THIS EPISODE?If you are ready to take action from listening to this episode, head to Apple Podcasts and help us reach new audiences by giving the podcast a rating and a review. Music by: www.bensound.comLicense code: 8G1GJZZDCLKGU9NRArtist: : Benjamin Tissot
When schools hand children Chromebooks, iPads, Google accounts, and Microsoft Teams access, what's really happening behind the screen?In this eye-opening conversation, Titania Jordan joins Nicki Petrossi to reveal alarming new data from Bark Technologies's monitoring of school-issued technology used by millions of students across the U.S.The findings are staggering:12% of children encountered cyberbullying 3.74% encountered instances of depression7.46% encountered discussion or content related to suicidal ideation, imminent suicide or self-harm39.83% of students encountered violent content22% were exposed to drug-related content10.77% encountered sexual content11.64% encountered medically-concerning content2.69% encountered hate speech0.23% encountered body image content1.79% encountered anxiety-related contentThey discuss how students are using Google Docs like disappearing-message apps, why schools are struggling to keep up, and what parents can do right now to better protect their children.This episode is a wake-up call for parents, educators, school administrators, and policymakers about the unintended consequences of putting addictive, poorly protected technology into children's hands.Get Bark for Schools (for free!)Get the Bark PhoneParents Templates and Resources at Tech-Safe Learning
Collecting resources can feel like responsible planning, especially when you are a multiple prep teacher with no curriculum map, no textbook, and a folder full of standards. But more saved ideas do not always mean more clarity. Sometimes they become another pile of decisions waiting for your teacher brain.This builds on the planning series so far: reducing summer overplanning, choosing the first unit, and naming the gap between standards and curriculum. Now the focus is the trap secondary teachers fall into when building from scratch: mistaking collecting for building.Teacher planning is not the same as saving slide decks, Pinterest ideas, or TPT activities. Resources can support instruction, but they cannot replace a lesson flow, a unit goal, or a structure students can move through. For a multiple prep teacher, resources add to workload when there is no system for deciding where they belong.The shift is gently rebellious but necessary: stop asking, “What else can I find?” and start asking, “What do students need to be able to do?” That question turns resource hunting into purposeful planning and protects teacher productivity because you stop opening new tabs and start using what fits.These secondary teacher tips are simple, not shallow. Build the unit goal first. Create the lesson flow before filling it in. Use a repeatable structure so your resources have a place to land. Before saving one more idea, check whether you already have something useful.For elective teachers building courses without a roadmap, the answer is not more materials. Often, it is a clearer structure for what is already in your drive. That is how a multiple prep teacher stops drowning in options and starts building something teachable.Sign up for the Unit Planning Lab Waitlist if you are ready to stop collecting and start creating a unit structure that makes tomorrow lighter.Too many preps and not enough time? Let's make your planning period actually work for you.Join the Unit Planning Lab Waitlist here: https://khristenmassic.kit.com/2d1289fa68Planning for the next school year? If your day is organized by class period, your planning calendar should be too. Grab my Editable Class Period Calendar here: https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpodUnlock 20 time-saving strategies designed to keep your students engaged and your sanity intact with the free Simple Teaching Strategies Toolkit. Each strategy comes with detailed instructions, objectives, and a materials list, all editable in a convenient Google Doc. https://khristenmassic.com/toolboxGet the Planning Period Reset Toolkit—a free set of quick-start tools to help you protect your time, focus faster, and finally finish something… even during chaotic school days. https://khristenmassic.com/resetShop my Teachers Pay Teachers store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-Coach
Episode description: GenX is elite at overcomplicating making money. A Millennial gets a side hustle idea and is live by Sunday. A Gen Z is already filming the TikTok. A GenXer opens a Google Doc, then a spreadsheet, then researches LLC structure, then...
Having standards does not mean you have curriculum, and elective teachers know that gap better than most. A course name, a standards list, and a blank planning page are not a roadmap. They are a starting point, and being expected to turn them into sequence, pacing, assessments, and instruction is not “just planning.”This builds on the first two conversations in the series: reducing the pressure to plan before August, then choosing the first unit with leverage. Now the focus shifts to the structure so many CTE teachers and career technical education programs are not handed. Standards tell you what to teach, but they do not show students how to move through it.That missing structure is where teacher workload explodes. These courses often require curriculum design while teachers are actively teaching, especially for a multiple prep teacher juggling several preps at once. That is not a personal organization problem. It is two jobs layered together.The shift is to stop treating the standards list like a curriculum map. Strong teacher planning starts by finding the foundation, separating big rocks from supporting standards, and building a repeatable lesson structure before creating every individual lesson.For elective teachers, the content is rarely the hard part. You know your field. The hard part is turning that knowledge into a course students can actually move through. That is why secondary teacher strategies need to begin with sequence, pacing, lesson flow, and sustainable systems.Real teacher productivity comes from reusable structure, not constantly reinventing materials. Elective teachers are not failing at planning. They have been asked to do curriculum design work without curriculum design systems. Grab the Secondary Unit Planning Calendar to start turning your standards into a structure that helps you finish something that makes tomorrow lighter.Too many preps and not enough time? Let's make your planning period actually work for you.Join the Unit Planning Lab Waitlist here: https://khristenmassic.kit.com/2d1289fa68Planning for the next school year? If your day is organized by class period, your planning calendar should be too. Grab my Editable Class Period Calendar here: https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpodUnlock 20 time-saving strategies designed to keep your students engaged and your sanity intact with the free Simple Teaching Strategies Toolkit. Each strategy comes with detailed instructions, objectives, and a materials list, all editable in a convenient Google Doc. https://khristenmassic.com/toolboxGet the Planning Period Reset Toolkit—a free set of quick-start tools to help you protect your time, focus faster, and finally finish something… even during chaotic school days. https://khristenmassic.com/resetShop my Teachers Pay Teachers store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-Coach
Knowledge Project: Read the notes at at podcastnotes.org. Don't forget to subscribe for free to our newsletter, the top 10 ideas of the week, every Monday --------- Winston Weinberg is the CEO and co-founder of Harvey, the AI platform built for the legal industry. In this episode, Winston explains how AI is reshaping legal work, why judgment becomes more valuable as routine work gets automated, and how to build the prioritization muscle required to move faster, stay focused, and make better decisions when everything is changing. He also shares the operating principles behind Harvey's growth: make decisions faster, treat most choices as two-way doors, use stress to build resilience, prioritize the one thing that matters most and the Google Doc that drives it all. Harvey began with a simple test: take real legal questions, run them through GPT-3, and ask experienced lawyers whether they would send the answers with zero edits. On 86 out of 100 questions, three out of three attorneys said yes. This is a conversation about AI, law, speed, resilience, and building in a world where the bar keeps getting higher. ------ Timestamps: (00:00:00) “The List” that Powers Winston's $11B Business (00:02:20) How to Say “No” Like a CEO (00:07:26) The 3 Principles for Strong Decision-Making (00:08:18) How Harvey is Changing the Legal World (00:11:36) One Cold Email to Sam Altman that Changed Everything (00:12:56) The Demo Strategy that Shocked Investors (00:17:55) Advice Winston Didn't Take (00:19:34) The Deal that Almost Killed Harvey (00:21:56) How to Build Resilience to Failure (00:24:00) How Winston Hacks His Stress (00:29:36) The Key to Creating a Sense of Urgency on Your Team (00:31:29) The Kinds of People Not to Hire at Startups (00:35:09) How to Screen for Resiliency in Interviews (00:41:49) Winston's Advice for Law Students (00:45:28) Would AI Make a Better Lawyer than a Human? (00:48:54) The Future of Agent-Powered Law Firms (00:49:14) Will AI Cause Law Firms to Shrink? (00:52:45) Can AI-Only Law Firms Exist? (00:54:52) Why Legal Costs Aren't Going Down (00:56:48) Three Principles All Entrepreneurs Need to Follow (01:00:54) How Winston Defines Success ------ Newsletter: The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it's completely free. Learn more and sign up at fs.blog/newsletter ------ Follow Shane Parrish: X: https://x.com/shaneparrish Insta: https://www.instagram.com/farnamstreet/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shane-parrish-050a2183/ Follow Winston Weinberg LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/winston-weinberg/ Harvey: https://www.harvey.ai/blog/author/winston-weinberg ------ Thank you to the sponsors for this episode: +CoinShares: Delivering Reason to Digital Asset Investing. https://coinshares.com/ +Granola AI, The AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings: https://www.granola.ai/shane Check out the Granola Notes. HeyGen is a message-first AI video platform that helps people and AI agents turn ideas into professional video in minutes. Try for free at https://www.heygen.com/ Join the salty rebellion: https://drinklmnt.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Exciting Conclusion of the Treefrog Trilogy(TM)In this episode, Pete meets up in downtown Montréal with a special guest that many of you in the ProbablyWork network know. He then gets a surprise phone call from none other than Kinda Sorta Friend of the Show Treefrog, which leads him to discuss the work he has been doing on himself since December 11th, 2024. There is finally a segment with another guest that involves fruit punch and Marxism? I dunno man, you'll just have to listen.The Marxist Artichoke Heart Apocalypse is here, send it to someone who works for a living: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jvihZCB-oiwt_Bwde1dZoWljsACY09IlgudHumtLpsg/edit?usp=sharingThe usual Google Doc is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dEQw-C86cqJ8IDIkNafiABIj4VeCeGGMkIkJ5delatE/edit?usp=sharing
If you want to scale your real estate or coaching business from $5 million to over $10 million, organic reach alone isn't going to cut it. In this special episode, Brent Daniels sits in the hot seat at a live Coaching Inc. event, interviewed by Storyteller Jet, to drop massive knowledge bombs on scaling through paid traffic and content creation.Plus, if you are stuck at $5K to $10K a month, Brent gives you the undeniable blueprint to hit six figures: get over your fear of other people's opinions, stop being selfish with your knowledge, and start livestreaming. If you want to leave a legacy of teaching and impact, this episode is your masterclass. Be a part of the TTP training program now.---------Show notes:(0:00) Beginning of today's episode(1:24) Brent's origin story and how Rich Dad Poor Dad inspired his entrepreneurial journey(2:20) Evolving from wholesaling and coaching to running a high-level Google Ads agency(4:29) Breaking down the "Alex Hormozi" content multiplication strategy(5:38) Why Meta rewards fresh creatives and why you need 30 to 40 new ads every month(7:03) Using a Video Sales Letter (VSL) to pre-qualify your inbound leads(9:25) How enforcing a minimum ad spend ($5,000/mo) protects your sales team(13:38) Biggest mistake entrepreneurs make when outsourcing their Google Ads to consultants(18:16) Stuck at $5K to $10K a month? Why you need to start livestreaming 10 hours a week(20:00) Overcoming the fear of judgment and accents to build a massive audience online(23:08) Using Zoom and a live Google Doc to control discovery calls(25:27) Why slowing down a prospect by taking live notes helps you gauge if they are a good fit(26:36) How Tom Kroll helps entrepreneurs find their true "why" and avoid burnout(29:51) Why overcoming your fear of judgment is the key to leaving a lasting legacy----------Resources:Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert KiyosakiAlex HormoziMyron GoldenTom KrollJoe McCallJeremy HaynesEcamm LiveStreamYardHubSpot@realbrentdaniels on InstagramTo speak with Brent or one of our other expert coaches call (281) 835-4201 or schedule your free discovery call here to learn about our mentorship programs and become part of the TribeGo to Wholesalingincgroup.com to become part of one of the fastest growing Facebook communities in the Wholesaling space. Get all of your burning Wholesaling questions answered, gain access to JV partnerships, and connect with other "success minded" Rhinos in the community.It's 100% free to join. The opportunities in this community are endless, what are you waiting for?
Special discounts up for AIE Melbourne (LS discount) and AIE World's Fair (group discounts up to 25% - CFPs still open for Autoresearch and Vertical AI) Cya there!Abridge did not start as an “GPT wrapper”. It was founded in 2018, years before the Cambrian explosion of AI application layer companies. OpenAI launched ChatGPT publicly on November 30, 2022 and by then, Abridge had already spent years doing the unglamorous work of building trust for one of the highest context, most important workflows in healthcare: the conversation between a patient and a clinician.Abridge's original wedge was clinical documentation. Listen to the visit, generate the note, reduce the clerical burden, and let clinicians spend more time with patients instead of the EHR. By focusing on how doctors actually document, how health systems actually buy, how EHR integration actually works, how clinicians verify outputs, and how missing context during a visit turns into downstream friction across billing, prior authorization, quality, and follow-up, the adoption of LLMs became a force multiplier on a workflow already optimized for sensitive context gathering.The company has scaled fast: Abridge says it is projected to support 80M+ patient-clinician conversations this year across 250 large and complex U.S. health systems, with support for 28+ languages and 50+ specialties. It raised $300M at a $5.3B valuation in June 2025, after a $250M round earlier that year.Today, Janie Lee and Chaitanya “Chai” Asawa of Abridge join us for another crossover pod with Redpoint's Jacob Effron (who is on the board of Abridge) to dive into how Abridge is building the clinical intelligence layer for healthcare starting with ambient documentation, then expanding into clinical decision support, prior authorization, payer/provider/pharma workflows, and eventually real-time agents that act before, during, and after the patient conversation. We go inside the product, data, infra, evals, workflow, privacy, and org design choices behind bringing AI into one of the highest-stakes enterprise environments from 100M+ medical conversations and specialty-specific evals to real-time alerts, EHR integration, de-identification, clinician-scientist teams, and why healthcare may solve some of the hardest AI problems first.We discuss:* Why Abridge started with clinical documentation, “pajama time,” and saving clinicians 10–20 hours a week* The transition from ambient scribe to clinical intelligence layer: save time, save money, and save lives* Why conversations between patients and clinicians may be the most important workflow in healthcare (patient visit summary feature)* Chai's “healthcare-coded Glean” framing: context is king, but healthcare raises the stakes on safety, evals, and rollout* Why Abridge wants AI to feel like “air conditioning”: always in the background, but only interrupting when it truly matters* The prior authorization example: turning a denied MRI weeks later into real-time guidance while the patient is still in the room* Why payer policies, EHR data, medical literature, and hospital-specific guidelines make the problem hard, and also create the moat* How Abridge thinks about ambient form factors: mobile, desktop, in-room devices, nursing workflows, multimodality, and future AR* The multi-sided healthcare customer: CMIOs, CFOs, CIOs, clinicians, patients, payers, and pharma* The hardest AI problem at Abridge: high-quality, low-latency, low-cost real-time support in a high-stakes clinical setting* When Abridge uses frontier models vs proprietary models, and why its unique data from medical conversations matters* Why “every agent is a coding agent underneath,” and how the EHR can be thought of as a filesystem for healthcare agents* How Abridge approaches personalization across individual doctors, specialties, and health systems* Why “AI slop” is AI without context, and how edits, memories, and clinician preferences create a data flywheel* Abridge's eval stack: LFDs, LLM judges, in-house clinicians, third-party evaluators, specialty-specific evals, and progressive rollout* HIPAA, PHI, de-identification, one-way anonymization, customer contracts, and learning from healthcare data safely* What changes when you operate at 100M+ conversations: reliability, cost, post-training, model routing, and infrastructure optimization* Why the same clinical conversation can serve doctors, patients, payers, pharma, and future clinical-trial workflows* How Abridge works with EHRs, and why deep interoperability is table stakes for clinician adoption* Why healthcare AI has regulatory tailwinds, why 80/20 does not work here, and why high-stakes domains may drive AI forward* Why Abridge embeds “clinician scientists” into product and eval teams* What Chai learned from Glean about search, quality, and durable AI infrastructure* Why the future of AI infra may look like context layers, event-driven systems, Kafka, Temporal, sockets, CRDTs, and tools built for humans* Why Janie changed her mind on “PRDs are dead,” and why crisp written clarity matters more in complex AI products* How Abridge uses Claude Code, Cursor, and coding agents internallyAbridge:* Website: https://www.abridge.com/* X: https://x.com/AbridgeHQJanie Lee:* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janiejleeChaitanya “Chai” Asawa:* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/casawaTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction and what Abridge does00:02:05 From ambient documentation to clinical intelligence00:04:04 Clinical decision support and context as king00:06:57 Alert fatigue, proactive intelligence, and prior authorization00:12:36 Ambient AI form factors and healthcare customers00:16:59 The hardest AI problems in healthcare00:18:26 Frontier models, proprietary data, and model strategy00:21:07 The EHR as a filesystem for agents00:24:03 Personalization, memory, and clinician preferences00:30:40 Evals, LLM judges, and progressive rollout00:36:47 HIPAA, de-identification, and privacy00:39:21 100M conversations and operating at scale00:44:10 EHR integration and the clinical intelligence layer00:46:39 Healthcare regulation, latency, and high-stakes AI00:50:11 Clinician scientists and long-tail quality00:53:04 Lessons from Glean and durable AI infrastructure00:57:03 The future of agentic healthcare workflows00:57:34 PRDs, product clarity, and building serious AI products01:03:11 AI coding tools at Abridge01:04:06 OutroTranscriptIntroduction: Abridge, Clinical Intelligence, and the Latent Space x Unsupervised Learning CrossoverSwyx [00:00:00]: Okay. This is a special crossover Latent Space Unsupervised Learning pod.Jacob [00:00:07]: Very excited to do this.Jacob [00:00:08]: At this point, we get together once a year.Swyx [00:00:10]: Once a yearJacob [00:00:11]: And this is a fun occasion to get to do it on.Swyx [00:00:13]: I really wanted to talk to Abridge but I felt very underqualified because healthcare is not something we cover very intensely. It just so happens that Redpoint's our big investors and supporters of Abridge.Jacob [00:00:27]: Anytime you want to have a portfolio company on your podcastJacob [00:00:29]: Please, by all means.Swyx [00:00:31]: So we'll introduce our guests. Chai and Janie, welcome to the pod.Janie [00:00:34]: Thanks for having us.Chai [00:00:35]: Thank you.Janie [00:00:35]: We're excited to be here.Chai [00:00:36]: Thank you.Swyx [00:00:36]: So for listeners, what do you guys do, just to situate you guys in the company?Janie [00:00:42]: Abridge is a clinical intelligence layer for health systems. We really started with documentation and building for clinicians and as we think about reducing the burden that clinicians have, they're spending 10 to 20 hours a week on documentation. There's a massive doctor shortage in the country. We also think that conversations between patients and clinicians are probably the most important workflow in healthcare. It's where care is given and received but if you think about the 20% of our GDP that goes towards healthcare, almost everything is a derivative of that conversation, whether it's the claim, the payment, the actual diagnosis given, the treatment. And we've started with a conversation to reduce the burden for doctors on documentation but we're really excited about the path ahead as we become this broader clinical intelligence layer.Chai [00:01:34]: I'm Chai. I work on clinical decision support at Abridge.Swyx [00:01:37]: Yes.Chai [00:01:37]: And so as Janie said, we're uniquely situated where we started off with the clinical note. What I'm really excited about and where we're expanding towards is what are all the things you can do before the conversation, during the conversation and after the conversation if you did have access to all the context about patients, payer guidelines, medical literature and put that together and to serve, how healthcare could look fundamentally different.Swyx [00:02:01]: And that's the context engine that you guys have?Chai [00:02:04]: Yes.Swyx [00:02:04]: Is that what it's called? Okay.Swyx [00:02:05]: So historically, as I understand it, the company started in 2018. A lot of people would be familiar with the AI voice notes form factor that doctors would be “Well, do you consent to being recorded?” It replaces handwriting and what have you. But it sounds like more recently there's been a big transition in the company. Tell me about the broader transition.From Documentation to Clinical Intelligence: Save Time, Save Money, Save LivesJanie [00:02:26]: So from a transition perspective, we really think about our journey as The first act was: how do we help save time? And that's where a lot of that original product was.Swyx [00:02:37]: By the way, one of those interesting statsSwyx [00:02:39]: On your landing page was, doctors spend time after hours.Janie [00:02:43]: They call it pajama time.Swyx [00:02:44]: Why is that pajama time?Janie [00:02:46]: Doctors after work in their pajamasSwyx [00:02:48]: In their pajamas. OhJanie [00:02:49]: At home are just writing and catching up on their notes every day.Janie [00:02:53]: Some of our favorite customer love stories, we have a Slack channel called Love Stories. We have clinicians telling us, “Abridge has helped us, from retiring early or we're now finally able toJanie [00:03:06]: go home and eat dinner with our kids for the first time.”Chai [00:03:08]: Save the marriage in some cases.Swyx [00:03:10]: One of the quotes was “We're not divorcing anymore.”Swyx [00:03:12]: I'm asking, “Why?”Swyx [00:03:14]: Because they're working too much.Janie [00:03:16]: But, in terms of where we're going and where we're expanding, we really think about our second and third acts around how do we help health systems save and make more money. Health systems are operating with record-low operating margins. It's getting harder and harder to serve patients and they have regulatory, some tailwinds but also a lot of headwinds coming their way and AI is ripe for helping on the saving and make-more-money piece. And then ultimately, how do we help save lives? The fact that our software and our product is open millions of times a week before, during and after a patient walks in the room, gives us massive opportunity with products like clinical decision support, which Chai is building but so many others to improve patient outcomes and probably one of the most important workflows and problems to be going after right now.From Glean to Healthcare: Context Is KingJacob [00:04:04]: One thing that's interesting, Chai, is you came over to Abridge from Glean and clinical decision support, which for our listeners is, in the context of a visit, helping a doctor figure out the right type of care. It's really a search problem in many ways, going through lots of different data sources. Very analogous to your previous role as one of the earliest engineers over at Glean. I'm sure a lot of our listeners are curious what's similar about the problems that you're going after now and what feels different, now that you're in healthcare.Chai [00:04:33]: Very similar. Taking a step back, with every wave, there's a lot of very similar patterns that happen across different products. A lot of social networking products look the same. A lot of credit-based products look the same. And we're seeing that very similar in the agent era with many companies, of course, in Redpoint's portfolio and so forth. And the key insight between both companies is that you have amazing models but context is king. Context is what puts them to work. So I see it in a lot of ways, a lot of similarities in this is a healthcare-coded version of Glean but the differences are really interesting. A couple things that come to mind. First and foremost, the rigor of the setting we're in. The downside risk is extremely high here in healthcare. It can be fatal in some cases. You prescribe something that the patient is allergic to for example. Whereas at Glean, it's “Oh, you got the question wrong.” It wasn't the end of the world in most cases. And so what does that mean? That shapes our evaluation strategy, both offline evaluation, progressive rollout and there's a lot more we could go into there. Second thing that comes to mind is, vertical versus horizontal. In both cases, there's a large variance but when Glean is, it's a much more horizontal company, there's a variance of personas, companies that you're working with. We also have a variance of personas, different types of specialties, different hospital systems. But the variance is a little more narrow. So from a product perspective, you're able to focus far more, especially when you have a maturing technology and you're building new products that never existed before. It lets you go after them much more easily and especially in healthcare where so many problems were solved with labor and process, that it's extremely ripe for AI to keep helping augment and enable. And the final thing that's really interesting, Abridge specifically compared to many other companies in the AI area, is the modality we started with where we're ambient and we're always listening in the background. And many more AI products will go that way but it's how we started. And that's the greatest form of AI we can create, AI that's seamless. You're not looking at your screen. It's always there. It's always helping you out and being proactive. The Jarvis vision that, every hackathon I went to over the past decade, there was always a Jarvis competitor. But Abridge very much started from the opportunity and continues to go that way.Ambient AI and Alert Fatigue: When Should the Product Interrupt?Jacob [00:06:57]: One thing that is super interesting then from a product perspective is you have this always-on seamless in the background and then you have to decide when you break the wall almost and say, “Hey, clinician, you might not have thought about X,” or whatever it is that you want to do. And in healthcare traditionally there's been this idea of alert fatigue and a million pop-ups and then a doctor just ignores all of them. It's probably a pattern that a lot of builders are thinking through now. How do you think about the right way to intervene or to pop up in a doctor visit?Janie [00:07:26]: It's such a good question. Alerts are notorious in healthcare specifically. Over 90% of alerts are ignored. The first and most important thing is context is everything, as Chai alluded to and I also think about how do we go from being reactive alerting to really proactive intelligence at the point at which it matters most. One thing we like to say is we want our product to feel like air conditioning. It should be in the background just making things better and if there is something that has great clinical risk and we're acutely aware that intervening now and not later is incredibly important, we should decide to act. But if you think about proactive versus reactive, instead of alerting a clinician during a visit when they're with their patient having a pretty serious and sensitive conversation, how do we prep a clinician before they walk into the room with that patient? And so historically, clinicians might have to manually go through charts with a patient that they've had over the course of months or years and they'll try to suss out what are the things they should be doing. You can imagine a world with Abridge. We'll summarize all of the most recent context for you, tell you based on the reason for a visit the patient is coming in for the types of things you should be discussing. And so you're going into that conversation prepped rather than walking in cold to that patient visit and then having this product interrupt you five or 10 times throughout the visit. And there might be times where it's really important to interrupt. We have a product called Prior Authorization and so this is when you may go into a doctor's office with knee pain. They'll prescribe you an MRI and so many of us have had this experience before, where in four weeks you'll get a call saying, “Hey, Sean, that MRI that you were prescribed wasn't approved and why don't you come back in? We'll figure it out.” In a world with Abridge, we might choose to quietly but still alert a doctor in that visit. And alert is probably not even the word we would want to use. Before a patient leaves, we would want to tell the doctor, “Hey, Doctor, before Sean leaves, you should ask him, has he had physical therapy and has his pain lasted for more than six weeks? Because the Aetna plan that he's on in California requires six things. We've already confirmed four of them have been met ‘cause we have all the context. But these two last criteria, if you can address with Sean before he leaves the room, we could guarantee that your MRI is approved before you leave.” And so when you think about clinical usefulness, impact to the patient, there are instances in which if we can catch a doctor while the patient is still in the room, as we think about save time, save money, save lives, we get to check all of those boxes. But when doctors have 15 minutes between visits, we have to be really thoughtful about when it matters.Prior Authorization: Reducing Latency in CareChai [00:10:23]: There's this interesting product opportunity AI has is reducing latency in the world. For example, prior authorization is an example of where care gets delayed and so great AI can reduce that. And the problem with alerts before partially is a technical problem: the quality of your alerts really matters. They're going to get ignored if you get alerts that... Similarly in engineering, where they're noisy alerts that you can't act on. But if you can make really high-quality alerts with both the context, as Janie said, and really high-quality models, then you can create a whole other game.Janie [00:10:53]: And I really like that experience because it starts to tease apart, what makes this so hard and unique. One, to make that prior authorization example possible, think about all the data that you need to have. You need to integrate with the electronic health record to know all of the patient context. Do we have access to your previous labs, previous imaging? And then to match you and to know that you're on Aetna, we have to collect all of the different payer policies and they vary by state. Some of these payer policies live on websites. Some of them live in unstructured 50-page PDF files.Jacob [00:11:31]: I thought this episode wasJacob [00:11:31]: To make sure we didn't scare people from healthcare.Janie [00:11:34]: But when you think about the things that make it hard, it also gives you the moat.Janie [00:11:39]: And then the second is the AI and the model quality we need to be able to hang our hat on. And so the bar, similarly when I worked at Opendoor, I worked on pricing models. Every outlier wiped out the margins of 30 and so similarly here in healthcare, the bar for accuracy is so high. And then I'd say the last is workflow is everything. If insurance companies deploy AI, it typically happens too late and this is when you have the notorious comical examples of AI just fighting each other when it's too late. But if we can pull forward the use of both the AI but also the ability to solve problems when the patient's in the room, you can start to collapse what typically takes weeks or months after your visit, ideally down to minutes or real-time. And it's where healthcare is both very difficult but also extremely rewarding if you can crack it.Product Form Factors: Mobile, Desktop, In-Room Devices, and ARSwyx [00:12:36]: Just to get some baseline on the form factors, because I've seen some videos on your website and stuff. You guys talk a lot about ambient AI. Is it primarily on the phone? Is there any other form factor that people get Abridge in? Is there an Abridge room setup where it's always on? I don't know.Jacob [00:12:55]: An Abridge podcast studio.Janie [00:12:58]: Primary form factor is mobile and desktop. UsuallyJanie [00:13:00]: Clinicians are walking in and out of rooms with mobile but at the end of the day, when they're closing out their notes or wanting to prep for the day ahead, they might use desktop. We have been having a lot of really interesting partnership conversations with a lot of these in-room device companies as you think about the power of multimodality and even more data, as you think about all of what is not captured today. It is fascinating to think about, especially even as we go into building and scaling our nursing product. It's one where nurses constantly, as they're walking in to check in on a patient for two minutes or maybe even 30 seconds,Janie [00:13:43]: Starting an Abridge experience is probably going to take longer than the visit. And so what can we do with in-room devices that are always on starts to raise really interesting and fun product questions.Swyx [00:13:54]: I was thinking, the way in tech companies we have all these Google MeetSwyx [00:13:58]: And other things, we might as well set up entire rooms with just Abridge tech.Chai [00:14:02]: Very much. AR glasses and related form factors are also relevant: how do we bring the information to the clinician in real-time without a screen, while still letting them focus on the patient?Swyx [00:14:18]: Do you think they want that? I'm skeptical of AR, but I'm curious what you've tried.Chai [00:14:26]: Admittedly, it's not a near-term product roadmapChai [00:14:29]: By any means. I'm being far-fetched.Jacob [00:14:31]: There's some sick AR stuff for surgeries.Swyx [00:14:33]: Really?Jacob [00:14:33]: When people are trying to visualize, you're about to make an incision but you want to see, what the cut might look or what the body might look like inside and they can layer in imaging.Swyx [00:14:43]: That's cool.Chai [00:14:45]: At some point in the future.Janie [00:14:46]: But there are a lot of our largest customers and at the largest health systems integrating already and so even as we think about building into it, unlocks a lot of product capabilities.Swyx [00:14:57]: And just to establish the terminology. Sorry, and I know I'm asking basic questions somewhat for myself but also for the audience who might beHealth Systems, Buyers, Clinicians, Patients, and PayersSwyx [00:15:05]: Less integrated. When you say health systems, it's like the Johns Hopkins, the Kaiser Permanentes.Janie [00:15:09]: Mayos, the Kaisers of the world.Swyx [00:15:10]: These are your customers, right? And the outcome that you deliver for them is happier doctors, reduced cost of processing, reduced mistakes. It's weird in a sense that I feel like there's also, a secondary customer, the customer of the customer and I don't know if you — do you think about it that way?Janie [00:15:28]: The other interesting and complex part of building product is we have our buyers, who are the chief medical information officersJanie [00:15:39]: The chief financial officers, the CIOs of these large health systems. Our users today are clinicians but if you think about who downstream is impacted, it's patients. And so as we build, with every product in mind, we think about who we're building for, who the secondary user is and what does that mean either in terms of experience, security compliance, ROI that we have to make tangible. And so like you said, time savings is one of them. But for CFOs, they care a lot more than just time savings. We have to show for every dollar you put into Abridge, because you have more compliant documentation or because you have fewer queries coming from your billing team, we save or add real dollars to your bottom line or top line, are things that we're constantly thinking about because of the dynamic across all three sets of users.Chai [00:16:32]: There's a whole other axis too with the payers and pharmaChai [00:16:35]: as well. Connecting all these three big stakeholders in healthcare isSwyx [00:16:39]: Do the payers ever see your data? Sorry, the payers meaning the insurers, right?Chai [00:16:44]: Yes.Swyx [00:16:44]: They also see Abridge data?Chai [00:16:47]: NoSwyx [00:16:47]: Like the direct integration to you guysChai [00:16:48]: They wouldn't see the raw Abridge data but when you're working together on something like prior authorization, whatever information they need, we'd communicate to them.Jacob [00:16:59]: That's cool. I would love to dig into the AI side. You still have a lot of problems on the AI side. And so maybe to start at the highest level, what's one of the hardest problems you have to solve in AI at Abridge today?The Hardest AI Problems: Quality, Latency, and CostChai [00:17:11]: To make things simple, let's take, building off the prior auth example. So one thing Janie talked about is okay, this data is all over the place and there's this combinatorial explosion of procedures, payer policies and even sometimes different health systems. There can be some cross-product of all of these different considerations you have to take into account. But what's really hard about this problem is doing it real-time in the conversation. So, in any AI product, usually the three KPIs you care about are quality, latency and cost. Now, what we're saying is we want you to do this real-time in the conversation, guiding the clinician. How do we do it in a way that does not break the bank? But we're using — But we also need very intelligent models because you're working with this cross-product of data and this, all this context layer as well. So you need high intelligence and high-quality because you don't want the alert fatigue but you also need to be fast and cost-effective. And so that's where a lot of clever engineering goes. It's okay, without getting into all the details here, can you model these policies in some intermediate representation or other things that you can do that can make this problem tractable? And of course, the Pareto frontier is always changing but we are also trying to do this now.Model Strategy: Third-Party Models, Proprietary Data, and Medical ConversationsJacob [00:18:26]: What implications has that had for what you take off-the-shelf and say, “ what? We don't need to be world-class at X. We'll just take this from the model providers or from some infrastructure player,” and what you're “No, this is where we spend most of our time focused on”?Chai [00:18:38]: This is, the fun challenge in AI?Jacob [00:18:42]: It changes every three months? SoChai [00:18:42]: Of course, with the shifting landscape, we try to be extremely thoughtful on predicting the trends of where third-party models are going and where we can uniquely go. And, sometimes when you talk about AI models, we're the models are just going to get infinitely better. But I don't think... It may be in the grandness of time you could say that but, within every month, every quarter, there's specific ways they're getting better. They're training on a lot more, coding data to be better coding agents, for example. And soChai [00:19:14]: We have to think about where are the things that won't — unique data that we're uniquely training on or to step back a little, where is a proprietary model bringing advantage to us is if it can give higher quality or lower cost and latency for similar quality, very similar to many other companies. And when we can do that is when we have proprietary data. So, for example, we have on the order of eighty million or hundreds of millions now getting close to of medical conversations.Jacob [00:19:44]: It's insane.Chai [00:19:45]: This is a unique data set. And this data set, it's very interesting because this data set is effectively a large part of the trace between the patient and the provider. That's where the quote-unquote debugging happens in healthcare. We have these traces at scale, as in as, our CEOs even called it, an exhaust that comes out of our product. And so when you have these traces, that's how you can train better agents on certain use cases, whether it's your transcription diarization use cases or so on or like note generation models and we can do that much cheaper and faster. But we're always also working with these third-party model providers. We closely collaborate with them and that's how we predict where the trends are going. The thing that I think about a lot is that, I know that the model providers are going to train much more on agentic workflows and so forth, so that's great, so that you have a better agentic harness. But the other thing that's interesting is that the model providers, because a large class of the consumer model providers is healthcare queries, that they might, optimize to train a lot of healthcare data to encode the knowledge in its weights. And this is just a great thing for us as well, where the off-the-shelf models can keep bett-getting better at general healthcare information, such that what our strategy is, we have a constellation of models, we can use something for this, that and, we only care about, at the end of the day, the best product experience.EHR as File System: Agentic Workflows and Real-Time InterfacesJacob [00:21:07]: And, you have, overall capabilities improving. I'm curious, as these models get better, is there something you look at and you're “, three months ago, we really couldn't do that but God, the the latest models really allow us to do it”?Chai [00:21:19]: So here's something interesting that I've, been toying with. So all models are... This wasn't super obvious a year ago but now it's become clear and clear that almost every agent is a coding agent underneath the hood? So you give it whatever file system, it can write its own code and so forth. So when you think about within healthcare and the use case that we have, you can think of the EHR effectively like a file system. It's just — it's a storage of all this information. It's a lot of information there that cannot fit into the context window, at least of today's models and you want to use that context effectively for all these product use cases we're talking about. And so if you have better agents that can, manipulate data, read that data, treat it as a file system as we see they're going and we know model companies are investing this way, then that very directly benefits us.Swyx [00:22:09]: Yeah. Okay, cool. Again, just establishing basic things. But we're going back to the model stuff. I'm really interested in double-clicking more on the real-time, element, which is pretty important for both of you. Is it — Is real-time just batches of every one minute, every five minutes? Is that how we do it? Or is there some more native, genuinely real-time in the sense that OpenAI has a real-time API or Gemini has a real-time API?Chai [00:22:35]: Yeah. Yeah. So today it is more on the on the batch basis but there's interestingChai [00:22:41]: Prototypes that we have that we're still not fully, full time, voice in text out or in that sense. But, can you trigger your models, your agents or agentic workflows, depending on the right times in the conversation?Chai [00:22:58]: And so you can imagine, different techniques to bring this latency down and, you want to bring the feedback loop down as much as you can. And so a lot of clever engineering there without fully... Maybe one day we'll do full voice in and text out, train a model to do something like that.Swyx [00:23:15]: You do — People don't want voice in voice out?Chai [00:23:18]: Now we aren't creating experiences that are, during the conversation, inter — It's almost likeSwyx [00:23:25]: Might be too disruptiveChai [00:23:26]: Too disruptive until, who knows, maybe eventually you could have full voice agents once we — the quality and we improve the comfort of the technology. But right now gra — that change is much more gradual and it's more text focus, text out.Janie [00:23:42]: And so much of currently what our product is trying to do is allow a clinician to focus on their patient and maybe at some point but right now patients, clinicians don't want a third voice, at least in a literal voice in that room. And so how do we be there with all the contacts and information ready at hand when there's the right moment?Personalization: Individual Doctors, Specialties, and Health SystemsJacob [00:24:03]: Jenny, one thing I'm curious about is how you think about, personalization in the product. I imagine, every doctor is a special snowflake in their own way, has their own way they like to do things. There are probably a bunch of different approaches you could take to doing that, both within the model layer itself but then also just with clever prompting or engineering. How do youJacob [00:24:20]: Deliver on that?Janie [00:24:21]: It's such a good question. Personalization is massive for us. We think about personalization at three levels. The first is at the individual, the second is at the specialty level and then the third is at the health system or the organization level. To your point, there are a lot of individual preferences. You-When a note is produced, it almost is a reflection that is so deeply personal of a doctor's work and how they give care. And so do they have preferences on things like style? They might want bullets versus paragraphs, really concise versus comprehensive. They also might have phrases that they really like to use or the templates that they want every note to be structured. And, we see it in our feedback all the time. We want two spaces in between sentences or I refuse to use this tool. And so that's something that we've had to build in. And the tricky part is how do you make sure that stylistic preferences don't interrupt accuracy and quality and that's something that we've really had to refine and hone over time. Second is at the specialty level. A cardiologist note or workflow is going to look very different from a dermatologist workflow.Jacob [00:25:32]: I assume cardiology notes are the highest stakes for you guys, given your CEO is a cardiologist.Jacob [00:25:36]: It's “Oh my God, make sure we get this one.”Janie [00:25:37]: Shiv, our CEO, is still a practicing cardiologist. He rounds once a month. And so, first call when we want just quick and easy user feedback too.Janie [00:25:46]: But, specialties require a lot of personalization, both in terms of what does the product look and so we make sure that as new users onboard, we catch that and the product proportionally reflects that. But also on the back end, evals at the specialty level, they are hard-earned to calibrate and get. What does a really great dermatology note look like? What makes it complete? What makes it compliant and billable is very different than a primary care doctor. And so it's not just about what does the product experience look but on the back end tuning and really deepening our understanding for the specialists. What does great output look like? And that's, a problem that we need to calibrate internally, externally, online, offline but, takes lots of cycles but is necessary in a high-stakes environment. And then at the health system level, for products like clinical decision support, you have health systems who've spent years or decades refining their best practices and they want to know, “Hey, we love your clinical decision support product but how do we embed our own hospital guidelines into them to inform clinicians before, during or after a visit what brest — best practices should look like?” And as you think about, deepening moats as well, when health systems, trust us with that data, allow us to productize it and directly into the clinical workflow, makes us a really great partner to health systems who want to build something that truly meets their needs, their practicing guidelines.AI Slop, Memory, and Product Data FlywheelsChai [00:27:23]: And I want to add onto that. The for the clinical documentation problem, it's very similar to AI writing that doesn't feel like your own and then we call that slop. But the way I describe one framing of slop is like AI without context. But we have all that context and both the clinicians, can have it and can guide it. And so part of the other interesting exhaust for us is, memory is, one of these new systems recordsChai [00:27:49]: Almost.Janie [00:27:50]: And we also have all the edits people make on our product and when you think about a data flywheel and how we get better over time becomes really powerful as a mechanism to just going deeper in personalization.Jacob [00:28:04]: It's interesting. I love this idea of working with systems on the guidelines they built up over a long time. I feel like so many of the best AI app companies today are... The question is: How do you take the expertise that a law firm or a bank has built up over many years and then add that as context and also a special sauce over, a an AI tool? And so seems like y'all are really doing that very effectively.Janie [00:28:24]: We're now starting to have our customers ask, “What are other customers doing?”Janie [00:28:28]: “And how are they doing it?”Janie [00:28:30]: And as we think about having visibility across such a large set of care being delivered right now, a really interesting place we could also partner.Swyx [00:28:40]: I'm just curious. I — This may be a nothing question but, how different are health system guidelines from each other? Don't they all converge to the same thing? And if not, where do they differ?Chai [00:28:52]: At a really high level, they're going to talk about very similar things but the difference is probably in some more of the details. “Oh, you should refer to specialists only when XYZ conditions are met,” or so forth and maybe different organizations have different practices and guidelines around that. But high level, talking about similar things but the details are what, of course, that shapes the context and the decisions you make.Swyx [00:29:15]: And this all goes into the context engine and it might affect the notes but maybe not.Chai [00:29:21]: The — For these local pathways, we're definitely thinking about it a little more for our clinical decision support product.Chai [00:29:26]: So yeah.Swyx [00:29:27]: Which is your stuff, yeah.Swyx [00:29:28]: And then the memory which you raised, let's just tell us more about that. What have you tried in memory? What's the structure of the memory? What works? What doesn't work?Chai [00:29:38]: There's, of course, many different ways you could do memory, where it's okay, can you bake it into the model weights or can you do it in some external store? For us, what's interesting is, of course, when you think the models are rapidly changing, whether it's in-house or third-party, baking into the model weights, sometimes you worry that it could be a little throwaway. And so, how do you... You need to find a way that you decompose the problem, the preferences from the underlying models and so forth. The thing we're right now most both that's easiest to start with and we're excited about is having, a separate store for memory, where you have, for example, a memory sub-agent that's, working in the background, figuring out what are the important parts of the clinician's actions that we want to remember for the long term. And then you can also imagine, other things where in the — you have background jobs that are running that are collating these, memories similar to Sleep, of course and what other pattern, patterns products do as well. Learning over all these action, all the action data we have, again, note edits, the conversations they did and the actual transcripts.Evals: LFD, LLM Judges, and Clinical SafetyJacob [00:30:40]: What about evals? How in the world do you... It is such a complex product surface area. We would love to hear you riff on that and also how has that evolved? I'm sure you've gotten better at it, so any learnings along the way.Janie [00:30:50]: From an evals perspective, we, from day one when we build any new product or feature, we think about, what does good look like? And there are table stakes things like clinical safety but then you start to get deeper into what does good quality look like. And when you go into something like our core product, there's stuff like style and completeness and there's things like does this note become something that can be billable, which is very high stakes for a health system. We have a number of ways in which we get confidence for this. We have, internal in-house clinicians who do what we call an LFD process to give us our very first pass at is this or isn't this a good enough output, look at the effing data.Jacob [00:31:41]: LFD?Chai [00:31:42]: That's why I was smiling. I was “Is Janie going to mention what it stands for?”Jacob [00:31:46]: I was not... There's like a million acronyms.Jacob [00:31:48]: How am I supposed to know that I don't? So “Oh yeah, of course, an LFD.”Swyx [00:31:51]: I've never heard of LFDs.Chai [00:31:53]: It's a bridge for sure.Janie [00:31:55]: I got through three days and then I had to ask someone.Janie [00:31:58]: I thought it was just me that didn't knowJanie [00:32:01]: It's our internal process.Swyx [00:32:02]: But look at the data as a meme in ML, ‘cause you tend to not look at it. You just want to look at number go up.Chai [00:32:06]: Exactly.Swyx [00:32:07]: But yes.Janie [00:32:08]: But so, we make sure we look at the data and then as we think about all of the components of good output, we, one, create LLM judges across all of these and we make sure with annotated data and either internal or external evaluators, we feel like these judges are calibrated. And then depending on the stakes, we also work with in-house and third-party evaluators across all of these before we ship any big change. And the goal is, in terms of evolution, how do you go from this process taking months, down to weeks, down to days? Some of it is, a true science and ML problem. A lot of it's also just, hard operational work. Have you planned ahead in terms of what you need? Have you really optimized the capacity that you need across all of the different specialties you need? Have you gotten a really good sense of which third parties are great to work with for what use cases? This takes a lot of domain, expertise and, lots of mistakes and errors in figuring that out. And so as much of it is an ML problem, so much of it has also been operational gains that are hugely important, where domain-specific expertise is everything.Specialty-Level Evaluation and Progressive RolloutsJacob [00:33:23]: But it's funny, ‘cause I feel like people talk about healthcare like it's one giant market and the reality isJacob [00:33:26]: It's, dozens and dozens of sub-markets. And so it feels like in your evals you have to build that up across the board, probably.Swyx [00:33:34]: And is specialization the primary cardinality at... That's the word that comes to mind.Janie [00:33:40]: Sometimes, depending on the product or the use case. And so if we're making a note improvement or feature for a particular specialty, definitely but we have products that are for nurses. We have products that, are really aimed at making the document or the output a lot more billable. And so we'll want to work with coding teams and not necessary clinicians. And so likeJacob [00:34:05]: Coding meaning healthcare coding.Janie [00:34:06]: Yes. Yes.Jacob [00:34:07]: NotChai [00:34:07]: Yes. I see you.Swyx [00:34:07]: Other kinds.Janie [00:34:09]: But is this output proportional to the work that was delivered? Is there sufficient documentation to justify the amount that a health system may end up charging? And so, specialty sometimes but also domain, very different across all of the different products that we're working for. And building out that network is, not easy and is where a lot of our operational investments have gone into.Chai [00:34:35]: And I view a lot of analogies to self-driving cars here, where, part of it is we really want progressive rollout of features to test in the real world is this useful? Is this going to work? One big difference compared to past lives is before I'd build a product, maybe I'd alpha it and then I'd like GA it the next week, ‘cause I'm “Go, move fast, ship,” and whatnot. But the mentality is like you... I want to make contact with the reality as quick as possible but I want a progressive rollout. Because as much as I get as large of an offline eval set, I want the distribution of that to match real-life distribution. And over time, by rolling out early, similar to Waymo has a tagline, “The world's most experienced driver,” another thing that can, at least linearly increase for us is, both the size of our evaluation offline and online, that and it all feeds back.Janie [00:35:25]: Something that's been earned over time, speaking of evolution, is just the trust we've gotten with customers. Historically, a lot of these health systems, when they bring on new vendors, their release cycles are quarters, sometimes twice a year. We've gotten our customers onto monthly release cycles, which is pretty fast for health systems but what is more exciting over the last, call it, few quarters, has been, a subset of our customers have said, “We want to innovate with you. We trust you,” and we have a pretty, decent chunk of our customers who say, “We'll develop with you outside of these monthly release cycles. We have a higher tolerance. We know that the stakes are very high but we want to be the first ones using these products, giving you feedback.” And so for a pretty substantial set of our customers, we've been able to convince them to be able to ship, in this gradual way before GA. Something we talk about a lot internally is, trust is earned in drops, earned in buckets and so we still can't do what I used to do when I worked at Loom. We had 30 million users. I'd just be, rolling out experiments left and. The bar is still quite high for iterative rollout but because of the trust we've earned, we're able to learn at pretty high volume very quickly.Privacy, HIPAA, and De-IdentificationSwyx [00:36:45]: Your scale is still pretty huge.Swyx [00:36:47]: One thing I want to... We were going to go into scale? In a sec. One thing I wanted to call up, follow up on evals, which, again, just coming from a generalist engineer point of view, just thinking through what would people be scared of in doing this, the privacy and HIPAAJacob [00:37:00]: Elements of this. I have zero experience in that. What do you have to do? What is surprisingly not that bad?Chai [00:37:06]: So one thing that's really important here from a compliance perspective is very much that any of the data we use needs to be de-identified, any real-world data we use as a basis of online eval sets we're learning from. And so you have to — And there's, very clear, government guidelines, what counts as PHI. And so we've even have built models that can take, for example, a clinical transcript and remove all the key PHI indicators and so you have a scrubbed/de-identified version. And then once you... And so one thing that's important is first you've got to get confidence in that model in the first place? And prove that out. Because, now you have, multiple probabilistic systems on top of each other.Chai [00:37:46]: But once you have that, then you can train on it use it for evaluation and so forth, provided one of the cool things also that you can do from a business side is the right data contracting as well with your partners.Jacob [00:37:57]: Is the anonymization one way? Once it's done, you cannot undo it? Or is there someoneChai [00:38:01]: YesJacob [00:38:02]: Who holds the master key that can... Yeah, okay. So it's one way.Chai [00:38:05]: It's one way. Yeah.Jacob [00:38:06]: That's how it works. I just wanted to... Because, there's a lot of this, learning from feedback and everything that, you would want to debug more but you can't because you just physically don't allow yourself to.Janie [00:38:17]: Some of it's also written in our customer contracts in terms of who can or can't access PHI data, how long do we retain it,Jacob [00:38:27]: Very goodJanie [00:38:27]: Before it gets de-identified. And so we have a pretty high bar for who can access that PHI data, just to make sure that we always respect our customer data and privacy. But that's something that we partner with our customers on too, to make sure that as we want full, as close to precision as possible in that qualityJanie [00:38:48]: We can still use it.Jacob [00:38:50]: But it'll be fascinating to see how that space evolves? Because you think about, I used to work at a company that, did a lot of healthcare data in the cancer space and if you asked, the average cancer patient, “Hey, do you want people, do you want other patients to be able to learn-”Chai [00:39:03]: Take it.Jacob [00:39:03]: “... Learn from your experience?”Chai [00:39:04]: Take it all.Jacob [00:39:05]: They're “Please.”Jacob [00:39:06]: “I'd love, nothing more than for other people to be able to learn fromJacob [00:39:10]: The experience that I had.” And so in the past it was a lot harder to do that learning. But with this technology, that might really be practical and so it'll be fascinating to see how that continues to evolve.Chai [00:39:21]: There's so much in our data set of 100 million conversations.Chai [00:39:26]: You can imagine things like insights that you can give to the clinician. How could you, oh, how could you have reacted to this? In coaching or insights around, which treatments are effective or, like... Because you have this, again, this data source that was never captured before but that's, where, intuition or experience is created from, going back to this idea that the conversation is the agent of truth.Operating at Scale: Reliability, Cost, and Token EfficiencyJacob [00:39:46]: Back to the 100 million conversations, I feel like you have this insane scale that maybe only a few other AI app companies have and everyone else dreams of. So not everyone has had to confront this yet but maybe just talk about some of the challenges of operating at that scale and what, our listeners have to look forward to if they ever get to this level of scale.Chai [00:40:05]: At large and larger in scale, so of course there's a general, infrastructure reliability. When you... In any given startup, you're building the plane while it's flying. So there's some notion of that. But what gets interesting on the AI and ML side for sure is this, as you get at more and more scale, so one, you have the data to first and foremost do this. But, you start thinking about costs or infrastructure in a whole different way at scale versus, a prototype.Chai [00:40:34]: You can use the most expensive model, you can burn as many tokens as you want but when you're doing 100 million conversationsJacob [00:40:41]: Token max on leaderboards are less upsetting than that context.Chai [00:40:45]: . When you're doing that and so that comes for we have the data and we also have the team that's able to post-train based on this and you can optimize for efficiency, especially in areas where you believe that maybe a lot of the quality headroom is less so and you don't expect the other off-the-shelf models to go that way, such that you want to do, efficiency maximization, in terms of compute and tokens.Jacob [00:41:08]: I feel like you guys live in the future in some way where most use cases today are really just in use case discovery mode, where it's “God, I really hope I can find something that can get to scale,” and so you're always going to use the most powerful model. And then the few things that do get to this level of scale, you start to do those optimizations.Chai [00:41:22]: It's a natural trajectory where it's like zero-to-one, we're not talking about any of these optimizations.Chai [00:41:26]: But when maybe we're in the one-to-100 or so forth, then we're in optimization mode and, what works out really well is you've got all this data from zero-to-one that lets you do this.What Comes Next: The Conversation as the Shared Healthcare PlatformJacob [00:41:36]: That's fascinating. I feel like one thing that's so interesting about the Abridge footprint is that you're in the doctor-patient visit in real-time. I always like to say, there's like probably 50 years' worth of product you could build on top of that. What gets each of you, I don't know, what are you most excited about building, either in the short term or medium term or even, long down the line?Janie [00:41:53]: Something that I get really excited about is that the same conversation can serve so many stakeholders. If you think about the conversation, a doctor needs to know what is the documentation, how do I make sure that this fully represent the care I gave? A patient needs to know, “What the heck just happened? This was really overwhelming. What are my next steps?” A payer needs to know, was this the proper and appropriate care given? A pharma company might want to know why isn't this drug being properly used or is there a good candidate for this clinical trial that I'm about to run? And where I get excited is that our product and our platform and our infrastructure can be the same product across all of those things and start to what's today, separate, very expensive, complex systems that serve each one of these stakeholders in very different ways, start to collapse all of that into a singular platform that enables not just more efficiency across the board but also better outcomes for everyone. And, all of us experience healthcare in probably very painful ways and knowing that there is a world in which we can simplify a lot is really exciting to me and it all starts with the conversation.Chai [00:43:15]: It's interesting. Of it very similar to going back to the KPIs that any AI product cares about. How do you increase quality of care? How do you reduce latency to care? And how do you reduce costs? Which is a huge, in healthcareJacob [00:43:28]: They call it the triple aim in healthcare.Chai [00:43:30]: But very similar to building AI products and the thing that really excites me is when we talk about that latency piece, we talked about one example earlier of prior authorization, can you reduce the latency to care? But you can imagine so much more. Oh, as soon as the lab value gets updated, do you have like a background agent that, kicks off and uses all the context to be “Oh, hey, the patient should do this next,” for example. And of flagging that to the clinician who's always in the loop but reducing that latency, to care. And then you can imagine this is much further down the road but it's like even connecting that to the direct patient and the consumer. And so how can you, how can you build a bridge to all of these things?EHR Partnerships and the Clinical Intelligence LayerJacob [00:44:10]: Very cool. The connections piece is just an ever-growing thing. And one of the key partners is the EHR and I wonder what that relationship is like. Will they, look at this as, something that is valuable enough that they want to own someday?Janie [00:44:29]: Our partnerships with the EHR is, we know that we have to be extremely close partners with all the EHRs who we partner with. Being able to not only pull and push all of the data into the right places is, not only table stakes, if we can't do that, health systems don't want to use us. The second and the reality of today is clinicians spend a lot of their days in the EHR. So much of what allowed us to win in the largest health systems was pretty direct and, very close partnerships with some of the largest electronic health records that allowed us to pull and push data with APIs that weren't ready out of the box. And clinicians want to save clicks. Anytime we introduce a new product that, adds two clicks for them in their day, they're “We're not going to use it.”Janie [00:45:21]: They have 15-minute back-to-back appointments with their patients. They're spending, hours during pajama time doing documentation. Every second and every minute counts and so we really think about being deeply integrated into the EHR as also table stakes to getting real usage and adoption. And anything that we build or introduce, we really talk about earn the right internally a lot, which is we have to provide so much value or save so much time that people will use us. But those are the two things that are close to us, is we know that the product won't be used unless it is deeply interoperable.Chai [00:46:01]: And strategically, to your point, it's like what does EHR want to own versus us? EHRs are really focused on the clinical workflows and so forth but some of the things that we're talking about here, I do these traditionally are outside of the domain where it's oh, connecting pairs and providers together with provider policies or the clinical trial matching, as Janie brought up. And so these are, entirely — we position ourselves as building this entirely new intelligence, clinical intelligence layer across, again, providers, pharma and, payers.Chai [00:46:33]: And so that's a it's a whole different ballgame that we try to playChai [00:46:36]: In combination with them.Jacob [00:46:37]: But it's like a different layer of scope.Healthcare AI Regulation, Technical Depth, and What Changed Their MindsJacob [00:46:39]: I'm curious, you are both relatively newcomers to healthcare. People have these, there's lots of futuristic healthcare AI takes of “Oh, everything will look different.”, now that you've been in healthcare for a bit, you live at the edge of AI, what have you, changed your mind on around this, as you think about what healthcare looks like in ten, 20 years? Any updates to your mental model from the time being close to the problems?Chai [00:47:02]: One thing that IChai [00:47:04]: Was hesitant about before and it's a common thing when I'm trying to recruit engineers that people ask me around, is definitely oh, healthcare, heavily regulated space. And it is, rightfully so. You want to keep, the patients at the end of the day safe. But one of the interesting things that, is a that surprised me how much it is coming to the company is there's a lot of really favorable regulatory tailwinds as well. Where you think about, government really wants interoperability between all these systems that we talked about and so agents can access this information. The government just in January, the FDA released updated guidance on clinical decision support, what I work on in such a way that they used to have guidance from like 2022 that required you to have, mention all these options and do all these other things but it's a very forward and forward-looking way. And so for me, what's been really cool to work on is this, there's this very special moment both in AI in general, we all know that but there's a special moment also regulatory in healthcare as well.Janie [00:48:05]: One thing I would call out is for the very reasons things are higher stakes or, potentially considered more difficult in healthcare, it's where some of the hardest AI problems will get solved first, just because the bar is so high. When I first joined, I was “Oh, this is where we'll be on the tail end of where, all of the AI innovation will be able to be applied.” But when you think about, zero error evals or multi-step workflows that have really low tolerance, a lot of the innovation will happen here just because we have to or else we can't ship.Jacob [00:48:42]: ‘Cause like in other domains, you'd much rather just solve the 80%-is-good-enough problems firstJanie [00:48:46]: 80/20 doesn't work hereChai [00:48:48]: And building off that, traditionally, there was a bit of stigma that, oh, healthcare companies are not that interesting from a technical perspective or I've seen that or faced that myself. But these are really hard and fun problems from a pure technical perspective beyond just the impact. How do you bring the latency of this thing down and make it really high-quality?Reducing Latency: Clinical Workflows, Agents, and Implementation RealityJacob [00:49:07]: How do you bring the latency of things down?Chai [00:49:10]: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So okay, let's answer the latency question. And maybe hopefully not too redundant with some of the things I've said earlier but some part of it is with any latency, you have to like what is, what is really your bottleneck. In a lot of workflows, it's sometimes it's the model itself. And so that's where like our data flywheel, our post-training team and so forth come in so that can you make the models far more efficient. So that's one aspect of latency. But there's whole other aspects of latency where it's okay, on top of that, if you use a constellation of different models, can you use — can you first use like a — it's like thinking fast and slow. Can you use a cheap, fast model that triages and hands it off to a larger model where you get more intelligence and so forth and so all theseChai [00:49:56]: Clever tricks to make it work.Chai [00:49:58]: And by the way, we are totally — we also realize that the parameter frontier is changing and so these tricks will — may not get us to where we want to be in five years but we need to if we want to build a useful product right now.Jacob [00:50:11]: Should we go to the quick-fire or you want to ask more about Abridge? We can stuff everything that's not Abridge into the quick-fireSwyx [00:50:16]: I don't mind. I was — I feel like Janie was on the topic of more long tail stuff, which isSwyx [00:50:21]: Not the eighty/twenty thing and that really matters. And I'll —, if you have any tips or cool stories or just general approaches that have worked for you that's interesting to dig into.Janie [00:50:32]: One of them is even just how we staff our teams looks different than a traditional software engineering team, I'd say.Swyx [00:50:40]: Let's go.Clinician Scientists, Edge Cases, and Evals at ScaleJanie [00:50:41]: We have a bunch of folks with different roles who are clinicians and so we have this role called the clinician scientist and I heard one of our leaders refer to them as mutants recently. But they are people who've had clinical backgrounds, so MDs typically, who are also deeply technical, somewhere, on the spectrum of like a full stack engineer all the way to like extremely scrappy prompter. But having each of these people embedded within our teams instantly raises the bar for everything that we build because not only are they determining, is this product clinically useful but they're deeply embedded in our whole evals process. And so when we talk about LFDs, when we talk about what is our actual evaluation criteria, you don't want Chai or me creating what those are because we don't have clinical background. But is probably unique to Abridge but has been game changing. And when you think about where the puck is going, you have people build with clinical backgrounds who are technical and where AI tools are going, they just becomeJanie [00:51:53]: More and more, critical and like the killers of the team. And so that's one. And then the second is just the scale at which we do evals to catch that long tail up front before anything ever gets into production is something that we've pretty much like really started to fine-tune, both from a scale but when do we know we need to get several hundred versus several thousand offline responses, what helps us make that quick decision and make this less of an art and as much of a science as possible. But that's also been something we've had to tune over time.Swyx [00:52:27]: And you have partners who opted in to give you those evals.Janie [00:52:31]: So we work either internally or with third-party for offline evals and then we have customers who also agree to give us, whether it's like thumbs up, thumbs down to like choose this or that, a lot of data to get us to what is as close to fully confident as possible.Swyx [00:52:51]: The term that comes to mind isSwyx [00:52:53]: Like active learning on things where you're weak. I feel like it's a lost artSwyx [00:52:58]: Is a lot of the polish that comes into doing something like this.Janie [00:53:02]: Really.Chai [00:53:03]: Hundred percent.Lessons from Glean: Technical Foundations and AI App InfrastructureJacob [00:53:04]: Maybe, on a totally unrelated note, Chai, you had a very, storied run at Glean b
Send us Fan MailThanks to Authors Katie Bailey and Leah Brunner for joining me to talk about their latest release, Rival Season. Support Katie and Leah:Rival Season by Katie Bailey and Leah Brunner (Book Two)Rookie Season by Katie Bailey and Leah Brunner (Book One)Katie's WebsiteLeah's WebsiteFollow Leah on InstagramFollow Katie on InstagramBooks mentioned:Bourbon & Proof by Victoria WilderFrom Lukov with Love by Mariana ZapataKulti by Mariana ZapataThe Bodyguard by Katherine CenterThings You Save in a Fire by Katherine CenterAll the Other Mothers Hate Me by Sarah HarmanOther mentions:Booked With the EmilysSlow Burn Books (Bookstore)Romancelandia (Bookstore)Love and Romance EventFor links to the books discussed in this episode, click the link here to take you to the Google Doc to view the list. For episode feedback, future reading and author recommendations, you can text the podcast by clicking the "Send us a message button" above. For more, follow along on Instagram @whereileftoffpod.
Choosing the first unit to plan should not feel like a guessing game, but for many secondary teachers, that is exactly where the spiral starts. These teacher tips are for the moment when every course feels urgent, every standard looks important, and your summer turns into reorganizing instead of finishing.After episode 334 challenged the idea that you need to plan everything before August, this conversation gets practical: start with the first domino. Strong teacher planning is not about following the standards list in order. It is about choosing the unit with the most leverage.That matters even more for a multiple prep teacher who cannot afford to rebuild every course from scratch. Khristen chose the engineering design process over the “first” listed CAD standard because it gave students a hands-on reason to stay, created a foundation for the year, and reduced disconnected reteaching later.This is where the right teacher tips change the work. Look for the concept students will return to again and again. Look for the standard with the highest instructional value. Look for the unit that can help you build repeatable lesson structures, so teacher productivity comes from systems, not longer hours.For elective teachers, the first unit is not just a curriculum choice. It is a retention choice. Students are still deciding whether your class is worth their time, and leading with engaging, relevant work is not watering anything down. It is smart sequencing.The goal is not to build a perfect course before school starts. The goal is to finish one strong unit that makes the next one easier. These secondary teacher tips will help you plan with more clarity, protect your summer, and stop treating overwhelm like proof that you are prepared.Grab the free secondary teacher planning calendar in the show notes, and choose the first unit that will make tomorrow lighter.Too many preps and not enough time? Let's make your planning period actually work for you.Join the Unit Planning Lab Waitlist here: https://khristenmassic.kit.com/2d1289fa68Planning for the next school year? If your day is organized by class period, your planning calendar should be too. Grab my Editable Class Period Calendar here: https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpodUnlock 20 time-saving strategies designed to keep your students engaged and your sanity intact with the free Simple Teaching Strategies Toolkit. Each strategy comes with detailed instructions, objectives, and a materials list, all editable in a convenient Google Doc. https://khristenmassic.com/toolboxGet the Planning Period Reset Toolkit—a free set of quick-start tools to help you protect your time, focus faster, and finally finish something… even during chaotic school days. https://khristenmassic.com/resetShop my Teachers Pay Teachers store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-Coach
May 13, 2026 There's a missing piece in most farm marketing funnels, and it lives after the sale. If your customers feel overwhelmed, unsure what to do, or like they're "failing" with your product… they don't come back. In this episode, I'm breaking down the concept of a Success Path -- the intentional roadmap you build to guide your customer from confusion → confidence → transformation. When you build this well, you don't just create repeat buyers… you create loyal fans who trust you, stick with you, and tell others. What You'll Learn: What a Success Path actually is (and why it's the most overlooked part of your funnel) The key elements every success path needs: Why teaching matters (and the kinds of skills your customers need to succeed) How to think like a guide: building frameworks, processes, and "curriculum" for your customers The power of normalizing roadblocks—and how it keeps people from quitting Why community and belonging are retention superpowers Once you see the path, you can start building resources around it: Simple how-to videos (YouTube, social, website) PDFs, checklists, and quick-start guides Recipes, tutorials, and tool lists A "home base" (Google Doc, Google Sheet, or webpage) to organize everything Evergreen content you can reuse year after year Over time, this evolves into a repeatable system that moves customers from the point of first purchase through all the items in your product ladder (and creates super fans). This episode will show you how to get started with this key element in your sales process. It's SO GOOD! Helpful Links & Resources
Winston Weinberg is the CEO and co-founder of Harvey, the AI platform built for the legal industry. In this episode, Winston explains how AI is reshaping legal work, why judgment becomes more valuable as routine work gets automated, and how to build the prioritization muscle required to move faster, stay focused, and make better decisions when everything is changing. He also shares the operating principles behind Harvey's growth: make decisions faster, treat most choices as two-way doors, use stress to build resilience, prioritize the one thing that matters most and the Google Doc that drives it all. Harvey began with a simple test: take real legal questions, run them through GPT-3, and ask experienced lawyers whether they would send the answers with zero edits. On 86 out of 100 questions, three out of three attorneys said yes. This is a conversation about AI, law, speed, resilience, and building in a world where the bar keeps getting higher. ------ Timestamps: (00:00:00) “The List” that Powers Winston's $11B Business (00:02:20) How to Say “No” Like a CEO (00:07:26) The 3 Principles for Strong Decision-Making (00:08:18) How Harvey is Changing the Legal World (00:11:36) One Cold Email to Sam Altman that Changed Everything (00:12:56) The Demo Strategy that Shocked Investors (00:17:55) Advice Winston Didn't Take (00:19:34) The Deal that Almost Killed Harvey (00:21:56) How to Build Resilience to Failure (00:24:00) How Winston Hacks His Stress (00:29:36) The Key to Creating a Sense of Urgency on Your Team (00:31:29) The Kinds of People Not to Hire at Startups (00:35:09) How to Screen for Resiliency in Interviews (00:41:49) Winston's Advice for Law Students (00:45:28) Would AI Make a Better Lawyer than a Human? (00:48:54) The Future of Agent-Powered Law Firms (00:49:14) Will AI Cause Law Firms to Shrink? (00:52:45) Can AI-Only Law Firms Exist? (00:54:52) Why Legal Costs Aren't Going Down (00:56:48) Three Principles All Entrepreneurs Need to Follow (01:00:54) How Winston Defines Success ------ Newsletter: The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it's completely free. Learn more and sign up at fs.blog/newsletter ------ Follow Shane Parrish: X: https://x.com/shaneparrish Insta: https://www.instagram.com/farnamstreet/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shane-parrish-050a2183/ Follow Winston Weinberg LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/winston-weinberg/ Harvey: https://www.harvey.ai/blog/author/winston-weinberg ------ Thank you to the sponsors for this episode: +CoinShares: Delivering Reason to Digital Asset Investing. https://coinshares.com/ +Granola AI, The AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings: https://www.granola.ai/shane Check out the Granola Notes. HeyGen is a message-first AI video platform that helps people and AI agents turn ideas into professional video in minutes. Try for free at https://www.heygen.com/ Join the salty rebellion: https://drinklmnt.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
If teacher planning has started to feel like a summer-long apology for not being “ahead enough,” it might be time to question the whole system. Because the goal was never to build an entire year before August. The goal is to create a starting point that actually reduces your teacher workload once real students, real pacing, and real classroom needs show up.For secondary teachers, especially anyone managing more than one prep or building courses without a boxed curriculum, planning can feel like the only way to create control. But overplanning often steals your summer and still leaves you rebuilding in the fall. Better teacher planning is not about doing more in June. It's about choosing the right pieces to build first.This conversation reframes what preparedness can look like for the multiple prep teacher who is tired of reinventing every lesson, every unit, and every system from scratch. You'll hear why a single strong starting unit can serve you better than a half-finished year of plans, and why repeatable lesson structures are one of the most practical secondary teacher strategies for reducing decision fatigue.The real shift is simple but not always easy: stop planning for an imaginary perfect school year and start building for the one you'll actually teach. That means using one reliable lesson flow, one maintainable organization system, and one clear unit to anchor your first weeks back.Teacher productivity does not come from filling every minute of summer with curriculum work. It comes from creating structures you can trust when the year gets busy. And teacher work life balance is not something you earn after everything is finished. It is something you protect by refusing to overbuild plans that may not survive September.This is the first conversation in a summer planning series designed to help secondary teachers plan with more clarity, less overwhelm, and a lot more respect for their actual lives.Too many preps and not enough time? Let's make your planning period actually work for you.Join the Unit Planning Lab Waitlist here: https://khristenmassic.kit.com/2d1289fa68Planning for the next school year? If your day is organized by class period, your planning calendar should be too. Grab my Editable Class Period Calendar here: https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpodUnlock 20 time-saving strategies designed to keep your students engaged and your sanity intact with the free Simple Teaching Strategies Toolkit. Each strategy comes with detailed instructions, objectives, and a materials list, all editable in a convenient Google Doc. https://khristenmassic.com/toolboxGet the Planning Period Reset Toolkit—a free set of quick-start tools to help you protect your time, focus faster, and finally finish something… even during chaotic school days. https://khristenmassic.com/resetShop my Teachers Pay Teachers store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-Coach
Is Microsoft Office on its last legs? Here's why I think it might be time to move on...
Everything got a bit more powerful this week.
If you woke up to a cyber attack that knocked out Canvas and left you scrambling, this episode of The Secondary Teacher Podcast has exactly what you need. Host Khristen Massic dives straight into what to do when you have to plan lesson plans without technology when Canvas is down. You don't get theory or platitudes—you get real talk and next-steps for teaching when the digital rug is yanked out from under you, especially if you're a secondary teacher staring down multiple preps and a blank screen.Most teachers have been told, “just put it all online.” Now, suddenly, none of that stuff is accessible—courses, assignments, the whole gradebook, poof! It's easy to feel like you did something wrong or you're the only one unprepared, but Khristen Massic isn't having any of it. She makes it crystal clear: this isn't on you. The system failed. And pretending to rebuild your entire Canvas content overnight? That's a rookie mistake she's here to help you avoid.So what do you do today, when all your assignments, instructions, and grades are trapped in cyberspace? Host Khristen Massic keeps it grounded: simplify. Instead of panicking and trying to Frankenstein your online world back together, she suggests embracing a few simple, low-tech moves. If students can work on something, let them keep going old-school, share whatever directions you've got saved on Google Drive or even print out a copy. And if you don't have it? Khristen says to level with your students—honesty calms the room a hell of a lot faster than frantic busywork.She recalls her own rookie moment: running a computer-based robotics class when the power cut out for four hours. Sitting in a dark room, the class devolved into a passionate debate about Lord of the Rings accents. Meanwhile, other teachers just rolled right into review games and classroom discussions. The lesson? You don't need a high-tech backup plan; you just need a few analog tricks ready to roll when things go south.Khristen then takes on the hardest stress points: how to grade and how to handle final assessments when Canvas is down. If your district's student information system syncs with Canvas, your current grades might be safe. Everything else? Time to get scrappy—try Google Forms or email submissions, not elegant but functional. For final assessments, ditch the rebuild. She shares three battle-tested backup options: student self-assessment interviews, choice-based essays with rubrics, or live demonstrations and presentations, especially for hands-on classes. Each of these lets you keep grading real and human, even when the tech fails.If you're used to the safety net of auto-grading and instant uploads, this can feel overwhelming. But as Khristen points out, middle and high school teachers are no strangers to chaos. The teachers who pull this off aren't necessarily the techiest—they're the ones who give themselves permission to simplify and stay present with their kids, even if that means repeating a lesson plan or focusing on a single discussion.This one's for the multi-prep secondary classroom teachers who've spent years building digital empires and suddenly find themselves back at square one. You're not less prepared. You're just adapting (again), and you're in damn good company.Listen, if the only thing you accomplish today is keeping the room steady and giving your students a way to show their work, that's a win. Host Khristen Massic ends with the message every teacher needs when the system goes haywire: show up, be honest, simplify, repeat. That's how you get through days like this with your sanity—and your work-life balance—intact.Let the internet stay down—you're still in control of your classroom.Too many preps and not enough time? Let's make your planning period actually work for you.Planning for the next school year? If your day is organized by class period, your planning calendar should be too. Grab my Editable Class Period Calendar here: https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpodUnlock 20 time-saving strategies designed to keep your students engaged and your sanity intact with the free Simple Teaching Strategies Toolkit. Each strategy comes with detailed instructions, objectives, and a materials list, all editable in a convenient Google Doc. https://khristenmassic.com/toolboxGet the Planning Period Reset Toolkit—a free set of quick-start tools to help you protect your time, focus faster, and finally finish something… even during chaotic school days. https://khristenmassic.com/resetShop my Teachers Pay Teachers store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-Coach
You know that moment when the last weeks of school hit, and you see your students checking out—mentally, physically, or both? The challenge of end of year activities when students check out feels all too real in the secondary classroom, especially for teachers balancing multiple preps. If you're stuck between throwing on a movie no one really cares about or assigning meaningless busywork, you are not alone. The truth is, those strategies don't serve you or your kids—not when the school year's natural chaos takes over and normal routines shred themselves.Host Khristen Massic calls it like it is: teaching bell to bell is a pipe dream when half your class is at assemblies, half are done early, and the rest are still catching up. It's not a planning problem. It's that the secondary classroom at the end of the year has its own rules—and expecting normalcy is a setup for burnout. Instead of fighting the chaos, you need teacher tips built for this exact season.So what's the better way? Khristen lays out three end-of-year activities that hit the middle ground—not all rigor, not all fluff—and actually fit this wild stretch. Think of it as survival mode with purpose. Whether you're running a CTE class with hands-on mess or any elective with mixed grade levels, these are built for you—no need to rebuild your curriculum just to limp across the finish line.First up: whole-class games that actually keep everybody engaged, not just the students who want to perform. Forget leaving half the class gaping at a peer up front; go for activities where everyone participates at once, like quick review games with whiteboards or team-based error-spotting challenges. One story Khristen shares: she loves using games like Taboo and Scattergories, twisted to fit any content area, because they ramp up energy without asking for a full-on lesson overhaul. Set a timer, lay down your ground rules, and get going—fast rounds, high engagement, then back to calm.If games don't fit your groove, reflection is your golden ticket. Think five-minute prompts that help students process what they actually learned this year. What worked? When did they zone out? What skills did they pick up since September? Khristen champions snappy written responses, partner talks, or a tight whole-class dialogue with a cap on time—so you all get the insight without dragging it out. The magic here? You keep the reflections for yourself. They're not just for students; they give you real teacher time management data you'll want when planning next year's routines.Then there's the third option for wrapping up the year strong: invite students to rebuild part of your course. Hand over the reins (with guardrails)—let them suggest changes, but only if they can back it up with what to keep and why. Go specific: have them rewrite directions, improve a rubric, or draft a help sheet they wish they'd had. Khristen insists these rebuild sessions are not just venting but focused on what genuinely helps; it's student-driven feedback that makes your secondary classroom smoother for next year without you flying solo.This episode's teacher tips are for any middle or high school teacher staring down an unpredictable ending to the year, especially if hands-on spaces, mixed level groups, or constant schedule changes have you questioning if you're even doing it right. Khristen delivers this with the style of someone who's been in the trenches—as an engineering teacher herself she's felt how the whole CTE classroom ecosystem gets upended every May.So what's the bottom line? Don't force a normal system onto an abnormal week. Pick one approach—a purposeful game, a quick round of reflection, or let students help you rebuild—and own it. You don't have to create the best lesson plan ever; you just need to finish well, for both you and your students.Share this one with a colleague who's surviving these last weeks or tag Khristen Massic so you're not in the end-of-year teacher struggle alone. Wrap it up, land the plane, and remember—chaos doesn't need to mean giving up on what works for you and your students.You've got two weeks left—make them count without losing your mind. Onward, rebels.Too many preps and not enough time? Let's make your planning period actually work for you.Planning for the next school year? If your day is organized by class period, your planning calendar should be too. Grab my Editable Class Period Calendar here: https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpodUnlock 20 time-saving strategies designed to keep your students engaged and your sanity intact with the free Simple Teaching Strategies Toolkit. Each strategy comes with detailed instructions, objectives, and a materials list, all editable in a convenient Google Doc. https://khristenmassic.com/toolboxGet the Planning Period Reset Toolkit—a free set of quick-start tools to help you protect your time, focus faster, and finally finish something… even during chaotic school days. https://khristenmassic.com/resetShop my Teachers Pay Teachers store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-Coach
Send us Fan MailCome see me at the GetLit Bookfair on Sunday, May 3rd at TUPPS Brewery in McKinney, Texas from 11:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.Books Mentioned:Yours, Unexpectedly by Rachel LewisFoolishly Yours by Rachel LewisThe Expiration Date by Leslie McElroyNever Been Shipped by Alicia ThompsonHappy Ending by Chloe LieseThe Appies Series by Emma St. Clair and Jenny ProctorRival Season by Katie Bailey and Leah BrunnerThe Friendship Fling by Georgia StoneBrawler by Lauren GroffDating After the End of the World by Jeneva RoseNow You Owe Me by Aliah WrightDaisy Darker by Alice FeeneyOther Mentions:I will be Pearl's Books in Fayetteville, Arkansas on Sunday, June 7th from 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.Book BeauBookshop.orgLibro.FMBooks Purchased:Release Me by Tahereh MafiThis Ain't Our First Rodeo by Liara TamniLessons in Falling by Christy SchilligStill Into You by Erin ConnorBetter than Revenge by Kasie WestUnbound by Peyton CorinneHeaFor links to the books discussed in this episode, click the link here to take you to the Google Doc to view the list. For episode feedback, future reading and author recommendations, you can text the podcast by clicking the "Send us a message button" above. For more, follow along on Instagram @whereileftoffpod.
Sourcing frustration is usually diagnosed as a volume problem. Not enough candidates in the funnel. Not enough searches. Not enough outreach. Steven Lu thinks it's the opposite problem. Steven is the co-founder and CEO of Pin.com and the founder of Interseller, a recruiting outreach platform that helped place over 40,000 candidates before being acquired by Greenhouse in 2021. After two years inside Greenhouse studying the top of the recruiting funnel, he launched PIN to solve a specific, persistent problem: the candidates most worth finding are the ones current sourcing tools miss. In this episode, Steven explains why 30% of top talent is essentially invisible in LinkedIn searches. He breaks down how PIN's shadow resume technology rebuilds candidate profiles from external data to surface people who've never described themselves online. He also shares the outreach approach that generates 30 to 40% response rates, the exact sequence he recommends (3 emails and 2 LinkedIn touches), and the four most common mistakes that quietly destroy deliverability. The bigger picture matters for every recruiter working in an increasingly noisy market. The era of high-volume outreach is coming to an end. Email providers are measuring engagement signals. Spam filters are getting sharper. The recruiters who win over the next two or three years will be the ones who source fewer candidates, make each one count, and treat every outreach like it's going to the one person who can fill the role. This is a practical conversation about what's changing in sourcing and how to address it. In this episode, you'll learn: Why the most qualified candidates rarely appear in standard keyword searches How PIN's shadow resume makes unfindable candidates findable What PIN's autopilot mode does and how to set it up with just two inputs Why you should cap your outreach sequence at five steps The four most damaging outreach mistakes recruiters make Why including a Google Doc link beats pasting the job description every time How to structure omnichannel outreach across email and LinkedIn Why the top 1% of billers operate from a very short candidate Rolodex Episode highlights: [3:49] From Interseller to Greenhouse to PIN - Steven's journey [9:34] The talent curve: why top candidates don't show up in search [13:36] PIN's North Star KPI: 7 out of 10 candidates accepted [27:32] Autopilot mode: 50 candidates sourced for you every weekday [37:34] Why volume sourcing is running out of road [44:57] The four outreach mistakes killing your response rates [49:50] The 5-step sequence Steven recommends [1:04:12] How the top 1% of billers think about their candidate pipeline Guest bio: Steven Lu is the co-founder and CEO of Pin.com. He previously founded Interseller, which helped place over 40,000 candidates before being acquired by Greenhouse in 2021. He spent two years at Greenhouse before launching PIN in December 2024. Steven is based in Brooklyn, New York. Connect with Steven: Pin.com - book a free demo or start a free trial Connect with Mark: Free 30-minute strategy session: recruitmentcoach.com/strategy-session Mark on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mwhitby Follow on Instagram: @RecruitmentCoach
How Denton Ryan Builds a Defensive Game Plan with Coach Will CockerillDenton Ryan DC Will Cockerill is back on the pod. In two seasons as the defensive coordinator at Ryan, he has gone 25-5, finished number one in scoring defense in the Dallas area at just over 12 points per game, and posted a 70 percent third down stop rate back to back. This episode is not about scheme. It is about the process of getting 16-year-olds to execute at a high level from one Friday night to the next.Coach Cockerill walks through his entire weekly system: the post-game summary he sends to his head coach Saturday morning, the position-specific Google Docs that structure his Sunday staff meeting, how he scripts and sequences practice Monday through Thursday, how he organizes film in Huddle for players and coaches, and how he builds a call sheet that leaves nothing to chance on game night. Kyle and Matt break it all down with him.If you are a coordinator trying to build a more organized weekly structure, this one is required listening.0:00Introduction and welcome back to Coach Will Cockerill, DC at Denton Ryan2:0016 years in Texas, a 25-5 record as DC, and the three keys to success at any program5:30Defensive metrics, stop rate, havoc rate, third down efficiency, and the Sons of Ryan identity9:09Game planning philosophy: target their best, attack their weakest lineman, make them go left-handed12:00The Friday night to Saturday routine: grading, player stats, and the game summary to the head coach15:30The defensive awards system: BGO, Honey Badger, Ball Hawk, and building the templates to save time19:54How the sideline trash can dunking tradition changed their takeaway numbers21:00Saturday scouting: bucketing run schemes as zone or gap and how that simplifies the whole week26:00The staff Google Doc: four position-specific questions that structure the Sunday meeting before anyone walks in31:00Sunday staff meeting, finalizing the scouting report, and getting it on Huddle and the facility TVs34:00Monday practice: helmet only, tackle circuits, bread and butter run scheme, and team tempo39:00Tuesday is third down day: scripting every situation with the opponent's actual plays44:00Wednesday is red zone day: scripted from plus 20 to inside the five, and scouting next week starts now48:30Thursday: trick plays, situational football, and finalizing the call sheet52:49The WAR Cut-Up explained: Winners Are Relentless, a three to five game sample, and how film is shared in Huddle57:57Call sheet breakdown: fronts, movements, hash-based tendencies, and built-in answers before Friday1:03:00Why Coach Cockerill says process and teaching matter more than scheme1:11:10Unique program differentiators, short practices, giving players the answers all week1:13:51Community, purpose, and what it means to coach kids who need you1:14:49The pancake brigade and why nutrition is the next real competitive edgeThis episode is brought to you by Sideline HQ, the easiest way to manage your program's equipment. Stop losing gear and start tracking it from your phone. Check it out at sidelinehq.co!Subscribe for new episodes every week at www.boarddrill.com.
You can be surrounded by a sea of teachers and still feel absolutely alone. That's the hard truth at the heart of this week's episode of The Secondary Teacher Podcast. If you're searching for the real story behind “the hidden loneliness of multi-prep teaching,” host Khristen Massic is calling it out—plain, raw, and with a fighting spirit. This is for every secondary teacher juggling multiple preps, CTE classes, electives, or singleton roles. That feeling of showing up every day and still being unseen? It's not in your head, and it sure as heck isn't your fault.Too many middle and high school teachers walk into faculty meetings hoping for support, only to realize the systems around them aren't built for what they do. You sit through talk about curriculum pacing and collaboration models designed for the big core subjects, while your reality—lab setups, electives, or the one-of-a-kind CTE course—gets overlooked. Host Khristen Massic shares a gut-level honest anecdote about sitting silently in meetings, thinking, “None of this applies to me.” It's not that colleagues are unkind. It's the structure itself, and you end up translating every tip or strategy to fit your classroom, often feeling like you're doing extra invisible labor that no one recognizes.The episode digs into how professional learning communities and district-wide collaboration often leave singleton or multi-prep teachers out in the cold. The expectation is that every teacher can easily collaborate with a team teaching the same subject, make real-time tweaks based on shared data, or co-design assessments. But when you're the only one teaching your subject—maybe in your building, maybe in the whole district—those “collaboration” teacher tips can feel like a joke. You're not able to meet with a group for feedback when you are the group.Khristen gets real about how exhausting it is to keep modifying advice, curriculum resources, or faculty meeting takeaways into something you can actually use in the secondary classroom. That extra workload? It's invisible labor, and it gets lonely. If you're tired of trying to make yourself fit into systems that never seem to work for multiple preps, you need to hear this: you're doing harder work. And it matters.But here's where the script flips—a better way, born out of experience and a whole lot of rebellion against doing things the “expected” way. Khristen gives permission to stop forcing yourself to collaborate or run your classroom like the core content teachers. If the system can't (or won't) give you what you need, go find it elsewhere. There's power in seeking out other multi-prep or singleton teachers, especially online, where you can build your own support network. Sometimes that community may be miles away or in different districts, but they get it. They don't need you to explain why your routines look different or why you can't use the standard pacing guide.You'll leave this episode knowing you can stop feeling guilty for not collaborating the “right” way. You get to design systems, classroom routines, and supports that work for your reality. For example, Khristen talks about how she stopped depending on meetings to magically address her needs and, instead, found meaningful connection online with other teachers walking the same path. Adaptation isn't weakness—it's how secondary teachers like you keep showing up and making it work, day after day.The episode doesn't sugarcoat it—it's still hard to be the only expert in your subject, shouldering all the prep and decisions alone. But just because you're structurally isolated doesn't mean you're not a damn good teacher. Host Khristen Massic makes it clear: you're not failing if you don't fit the core content mold. In fact, the fact that you're still in the fight, building relationships with students and keeping your classroom afloat, says everything about your tenacity.If you're a middle or high school teacher—especially a multi-prep, singleton, or someone teaching electives and CTE classes—this one is for you. Drop the guilt, name the loneliness, and go find your people (even if it's not in the teacher's lounge). You're seen and valued, and you are absolutely not alone in being alone.So share this episode with every teacher who's ever felt invisible, tag host Khristen Massic on Instagram, and remember—you get to write your own playbook in the secondary classroom. Keep teaching against the grain.Nobody else gets to define how you thrive.Too many preps and not enough time? Let's make your planning period actually work for you.Planning for the next school year? If your day is organized by class period, your planning calendar should be too. Grab my Editable Class Period Calendar here: https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpodUnlock 20 time-saving strategies designed to keep your students engaged and your sanity intact with the free Simple Teaching Strategies Toolkit. Each strategy comes with detailed instructions, objectives, and a materials list, all editable in a convenient Google Doc. https://khristenmassic.com/toolboxGet the Planning Period Reset Toolkit—a free set of quick-start tools to help you protect your time, focus faster, and finally finish something… even during chaotic school days. https://khristenmassic.com/resetShop my Teachers Pay Teachers store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-Coach
This episode focuses on the newly updated second edition of the Research Like a Pro with AI genealogy workbook. Nicole and Diana discuss how the book shifts its attention from early 2025 models to the most powerful models available in mid-February 2026, specifically ChatGPT 5.2, Claude Opus 4.6, and Gemini 3. Diana highlights the most significant change, which is the introduction of "agentic" browsers, including Claude in Chrome, Perplexity Comet, and ChatGPT Atlas. These autonomous agents can now perform tasks like actively clicking through family tree lines to find research gaps, navigating library catalogs to compile relevant collections, and autonomously executing research plans directly from a Google Doc. Nicole details the expanded coverage of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), which now includes specialized tools such as Gemini in Google AI Studio, Leo for paleography, and Ancestry.com's Image Transcript beta tool. Diana covers the native AI features built into genealogy platforms like Ancestry's "Ideas" and FamilySearch's AI Research Assistant, as well as productivity tools like Goldie May and Airtable. Nicole notes that Airtable AI is now more accessible to free users and describes how its new Omni sidebar can synthesize evidence across multiple rows, such as pulling together scattered land and tax records to build a case for a parent-child relationship. Diana provides crucial privacy updates, alerting users that Claude now trains on user data by default, and she outlines the specific limits on "Deep Research" features. She also discusses NotebookLM's ability to process YouTube video transcripts and Gemini 3's "spatial grounding" capabilities for reading complex historical documents. Listeners learn that the 2026 Second Edition moves from manual AI prompting to autonomous, integrated research workflows, equipping genealogists with cutting-edge efficiency. This summary was generated by Google Gemini. Links Agentic Browsers and Native Integrations: Inside the New Edition of Research Like a Pro with AI - https://familylocket.com/agentic-browsers-and-native-integrations-inside-the-new-edition-of-research-like-a-pro-with-ai/ Research Like a Pro with AI Workbook – Second Edition (eBook) - https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-with-ai-workbook-second-edition-ebook/ Sponsor – Newspapers.com For listeners of this podcast, Newspapers.com is offering new subscribers 20% off a Publisher Extra subscription so you can start exploring today. Just use the code "FamilyLocket" at checkout. Research Like a Pro Resources Airtable Universe - Nicole's Airtable Templates - https://www.airtable.com/universe/creator/usrsBSDhwHyLNnP4O/nicole-dyer Airtable Research Logs Quick Reference - by Nicole Dyer - https://familylocket.com/product-tag/airtable/ Research Like a Pro: A Genealogist's Guide book by Diana Elder with Nicole Dyer on Amazon.com - https://amzn.to/2x0ku3d 14-Day Research Like a Pro Challenge Workbook - digital - https://familylocket.com/product/14-day-research-like-a-pro-challenge-workbook-digital-only/ and spiral bound - https://familylocket.com/product/14-day-research-like-a-pro-challenge-workbook-spiral-bound/ Research Like a Pro Webinar Series - monthly case study webinars including documentary evidence and many with DNA evidence - https://familylocket.com/product-category/webinars/ Research Like a Pro eCourse - independent study course - https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-e-course/ RLP Study Group - upcoming group and email notification list - https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-study-group/ Research Like a Pro Institute Courses - https://familylocket.com/product-category/institute-course/ Research Like a Pro with DNA Resources Research Like a Pro with DNA: A Genealogist's Guide to Finding and Confirming Ancestors with DNA Evidence book by Diana Elder, Nicole Dyer, and Robin Wirthlin - https://amzn.to/3gn0hKx Research Like a Pro with DNA eCourse - independent study course - https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-ecourse/ RLP with DNA Study Group - upcoming group and email notification list - https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-study-group/ Thank you Thanks for listening! We hope that you will share your thoughts about our podcast and help us out by doing the following: Write a review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. If you leave a review, we will read it on the podcast and answer any questions that you bring up in your review. Thank you! Leave a comment in the comment or question in the comment section below. Share the episode on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. Subscribe on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. Sign up for our newsletter to receive notifications of new episodes - https://familylocket.com/sign-up/ Check out this list of genealogy podcasts from Feedspot: Best Genealogy Podcasts - https://blog.feedspot.com/genealogy_podcasts/
In this episode, Danielle explores the tension between intuition and practicality, and why what you've been taught is “practical” may actually be the very thing holding you back. She shares her personal journey of walking away from a 24-year nursing career, choosing intuition over logic, and building a million-dollar business starting with nothing but a Google Doc and her Wealth Codes. This is a conversation about redefining what practicality really means, and how following your intuition (even when it makes no sense) is often the most aligned and lucrative path available to you. Danielle breaks down how conditioning keeps you playing small, why intuition can feel destabilizing at higher levels, and how true freedom requires you to release the need for things to make logical sense. If you've been feeling the pull to do something that doesn't “add up” on paper… this episode will challenge you to trust it, and follow it anyway. In this episode, you'll learn: Why intuition often feels impractical, and why that's exactly the point How your current definition of practicality has created your current life and results Why following your intuition may require decisions that go against logic, timing, and external expectations How Danielle built a six-figure business (and beyond) starting with a simple Google Doc Why intuition becomes more destabilizing as you step into bigger visibility and authority The connection between intuition, self-trust, and your ability to create income and freedom Why “lucrative” isn't just about money - it's about energy, alignment, and expansion How conditioning keeps you choosing safety over your soul's calling What it actually means to make the “impractical” your new standard for success How to start redefining practicality in a way that supports your freedom and purpose ______________________________________________ Links & Resources Join the waitlist for the next FREE Live Training Download your Wealth Codes Chart Get the Email Series That Pays
Perry Rosenbloom, founder of LaunchBay, previously built and sold Brighter Vision before starting his second SaaS company focused on onboarding. After running hundreds of onboarding processes per month, he saw a consistent problem: what happens after the sale is messy, manual, and often ignored. LaunchBay helps SaaS and professional services teams manage customer onboarding with structured workflows, shared client portals, and automation. The company has grown past $1M in ARR, doubling in 2025, with a focused approach on helping teams reduce onboarding time from 60–90 days to significantly faster activation. Perry shares practical lessons on onboarding as a core growth lever—not just an operational task. He explains why onboarding debt compounds, why charging for implementation improves outcomes, and how better onboarding drives retention, expansion, and long-term revenue quality. Key Takeaways Onboarding Debt Compounds - Most SaaS companies duct-tape onboarding early, but delays, inefficiencies, and churn risks compound quickly as sales scale. Activation Matters More - The real bottom of funnel isn't closed-won deals—it's when customers actually reach value and start using the product. Stop The Chase - Much of onboarding is manual follow-ups and coordination; removing this admin work unlocks higher-leverage customer success teams. Charge For Setup - Charging for onboarding improves completion rates, sets expectations, and ensures customers have real skin in the game. Segment The Process - Treating all customers the same breaks onboarding—different tiers and workflows are required for different customer types. Visibility Is Critical - Without clear visibility into onboarding progress and bottlenecks, problems are only discovered after deals are already at risk. Quote from Perry Rosenbloom, Founder of LaunchBay "There's only so long that you can duct tape a process like onboarding new customers, with just hustle to make it work. A lot of companies are using Google Docs, shared Slack spaces, shared spreadsheets, and it almost works, until it doesn't. And the biggest mistake is continuing to let it not work. "When you're founder-led and you are doing one to three implementations a month, you can get by without a dedicated tool for that. It's not going to be the best customer experience, but you can get by without a tool for that. "But when you want to start scaling, you need to build out repeatable processes that can enable every single customer to have a phenomenal experience that is consistent, that is unified and that delivers value. "That's when you start looking for a specialized solution to solve those problems and don't build up more onboarding debt. Onboarding debt is real and early-stage SaaS companies in their processes and customer experiences." Links Perry Rosenbloom on LinkedIn LaunchBay on LinkedIn LaunchBay website Free ebook: The Paid Implementation PlaybookROI calculator: Implementation margins Podcast Sponsor – LaunchBay LaunchBay helps B2B software companies automate client onboarding and implementation so customers activate faster and everyone stays aligned. If your onboarding includes data collection, setup steps, approvals, training, or any level of customization, LaunchBay replaces the messy mix of emails, spreadsheets, and meetings with a clear, all-in-one onboarding system. Teams use LaunchBay to onboard clients faster, stay on top of follow-ups automatically, and deliver a smoother experience, without hiring more people or adding more tools. Visit launchbay.com/practical and get 25% off your first 3 months on any LaunchBay plan. The Practical Founders Podcast Tune into the Practical Founders Podcast for weekly in-depth interviews with founders who have built valuable software companies without big funding. Subscribe to the Practical Founders Podcast using your favorite podcast app or view on our YouTube channel. Get the weekly Practical Founders newsletter and podcast updates at practicalfounders.com. Practical Founders CEO Peer Groups Be part of a committed and confidential group of practical founders creating valuable software companies without big VC funding. A Practical Founders Peer Group is a committed and confidential group of founders/CEOs who want to help you succeed on your terms. Each Practical Founders Peer Group is personally curated and moderated by Greg Head.
In this episode, Chris sits down with Matthew Ogle, Co-founder & CEO of Legacy Knight, a $2.8B multi-family office in Dallas, TX that he co-founded in 2019. We dig into how you build a world-class multi-family office from scratch - and why so many wealthy families out there don't actually have one yet. Matthew's path into wealth management didn't start in a boardroom - it started on a tennis court. A summer teaching tennis to a CIO's family at Cape Cod opened the first door, which led him to Credit Suisse's private bank through the GFC and then five years at the Crow family office, helping transform it into one of the first true multi-family offices in Dallas. He opened Legacy Knight's doors in October 2019 with $2.5M of operating capital, 14 seed families, and a contrarian bet - that the new generation of sub-50-year-old entrepreneurs hitting their first liquidity event needed something the bulge brackets couldn't offer. Six years later, Legacy Knight manages over $3B and was named the fastest-growing RIA in Texas. Chris and Matthew go deep on what it actually takes to build a multi-family office the right way - the technology, the hiring, the legacy conversations with families, and why Matthew refuses to grow by acquiring other books of business. They discuss: Why every hire at Legacy Knight comes out of the family office world, not from the bulge brackets How most $100M+ families are still running their wealth on a Google Doc and a handshake with their accountant Why "do nothing in the year after a liquidity event" is half good advice and half terrible advice The most creative things Matthew has seen ultra-wealthy families do with their capital How Matthew thinks about his own kids, legacy, and when to start the wealth conversation Links: Legacy Knight - https://legacyknight.com/ Matthew on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-ogle-ab11873/ Topics: (02:01) Matthew's First Exposure to Wealth Management (07:58) Joining Credit Suisse (Pre-GFC): Why the "Bulge Bracket" Mattered, How the Private Banking Associate Model Works (13:08) Why Credit Suisse Failed to Serve Ultra-High-Net-Worth Families (20:07) The First Client Meeting: Soft-Tissue Questions (28:57) Tax Timing and Mitigation Strategies (37:57) The Founding Thesis: People and Platform (Building Legacy Knight) (44:46) The Decision to Launch Legacy Knight Independently (54:43) Fundraising Lessons: Managing Expectations and The Importance of Pitch Order (01:01:18) The Full-Service Family Office Model (01:06:24) What a Vertically Integrated Family Office Actually Includes (01:09:07) Proactive Investment Sourcing (01:13:02) Next-Gen Engagement and Family Legacy Planning: How to Involve Children Appropriately (01:21:46) Matthew's Hiring Philosophy (01:30:05) Time as the Hidden Cost of Unstructured Wealth Support our Sponsors: Collateral Partners: https://collateral.com/fort Chris on Social Media: X: https://x.com/fortworthchris Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thepowerspodcast LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrispowersjr/ Visit our website: https://www.powerspod.com/ Leave a review on Apple: https://bit.ly/45crFD0 Leave a review on Spotify: https://bit.ly/3Krl9jO
Middle and high school teachers juggling multiple preps, let's get real about “differentiated instruction for multiple prep teachers.” Somewhere along the way, most of us were told to plan for the average student—then tack on extensions for high achievers and interventions for strugglers. It sounds smart until you try living it with a full schedule and three, four, or five different classes to prep each day. You're burned out and barely holding it together, all because you're basically writing three versions of every lesson. Host Khristen Massic calls out this outdated advice, and she's got a better way.If you're stuck in the plan-for-the-middle rut, you know what happens: your top students breeze through the work and get bored, the strugglers get lost, and somehow “average” becomes a code word for “meh.” You scramble to come up with side quests for the kids who finish early, and you tape together interventions for those who can't get started at all. That's not differentiated instruction—it's full-blown teacher burnout.Let's flip that script. Host Khristen Massic learned a game-changer after supporting gifted and talented students: if you plan for your top students and then scaffold down, you create one challenge-rich lesson for everyone instead of splitting yourself into three teachers. The magic? Scaffolds turn one complex task into a flexible, differentiated experience—kids who need help use the supports, and kids ready for more ignore them. No more separate packets, no more watered-down busywork, no more grading nightmares across “levels.”Here's a practical glimpse inside Khristen's classroom: when teaching drafting, she used to dole out simplified drawings and cobble together random extra-credit options for fast finishers. But those extensions didn't always connect to the core lesson, and the struggling students ended up with a pile of work that missed the actual learning target. The new way? Everybody gets the complex 3D drawing problem. Students who need support get access to 3D-printed models, enlarged exemplar posters, or step-by-step checklists—any of which they can grab when and if they need them.Scaffolds aren't more work on your part. A checklist or exemplar might take you five minutes to make, rather than hours crafting a whole “extension activity.” Sentence stems, graphic organizers, vocabulary banks, or formula sheets—all optional, all ready when kids reach for them. It's not about lowering the bar; it's about keeping expectations high while honoring where each student is starting.This approach isn't just theory—it's a life raft for multi-prep teachers. You're not lazy for wanting to plan one strong lesson that works for every kid. You're strategic, and you're finally giving yourself the work-life balance you desperately need in the secondary classroom. Instead of grading three assignments on the same concept, you look at the end product and know each student had the chance to show real understanding—with or without the scaffolds, depending on what they needed.Khristen reminds us that when we make the scaffolds optional, we hand responsibility to the students. They get to decide what supports to lean on. You're not stuck labeling or sorting kids in front of the class, and you're not caught in a grading labyrinth. You set the bar high and believe that all kids can meet it when the right steps are in place.Multi-prep teachers: imagine shaving hours off your planning, freeing up your brain space, and finally having the energy to connect with your students, not just shuffle papers for them. Whether you're teaching science, ELA, math, or career/tech, this structure has your back. Pick the real challenge, build in flexible scaffolds, and watch your classroom routines—and your energy—transform for the better.If you've been told that differentiated instruction means reinventing every lesson three times, it's time to toss that myth out for good. One strong, scaffolded lesson gives you your life back and helps every student rise to the challenge.Cut your workload, not your standards. You don't have to choose between being effective and having a life. Plan for the top, scaffold down, and let students show you just how much they can do.Kick the “plan for the middle” advice to the curb—your classroom (and your sanity) deserve better.Too many preps and not enough time? Let's make your planning period actually work for you.Planning for the next school year? If your day is organized by class period, your planning calendar should be too. Grab my Editable Class Period Calendar here: https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpodUnlock 20 time-saving strategies designed to keep your students engaged and your sanity intact with the free Simple Teaching Strategies Toolkit. Each strategy comes with detailed instructions, objectives, and a materials list, all editable in a convenient Google Doc. https://khristenmassic.com/toolboxGet the Planning Period Reset Toolkit—a free set of quick-start tools to help you protect your time, focus faster, and finally finish something… even during chaotic school days. https://khristenmassic.com/resetShop my Teachers Pay Teachers store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-Coach
You probably noticed something quite different for today's conversation. Alexis Drye is joined by Pastor Jonathan Emery White, who serves children and families at Mecklenburg Community Church. Along with his pastoral role at Meck, he also teaches classes through the Meck Institute, instructing parents about the realities of the new digital world when it comes to their children. It's this background that he brings to today's episode about some recent interesting studies and trends related to teenage sexuality. Episode Links There's an on-demand class at Mecklenburg Community Church that was taught by Jonathan called “FaceTime: What Parents Need to Know About Technology, Social Media, Video Games and More.” You can find that on the Meck website HERE. Dr. White also did a series at Meck called “Streaming Now,” which featured background on four of the most popular streaming series at the time and the lessons that can be applied to the Christian life through them. One of the installments was on the show Adolescence - you can find that series HERE. Jonathan mentioned the software that he recommends to protect parents and their children from the dangers of pornography and the online world. It's called Covenant Eyes, and you can find that HERE. There are also a number of articles relevant to our conversation today if you'd like to take a deeper dive on this topic. We'd encourage you to check out: Selena Simmons-Duffin, “Teen birth rates hit another historical low in 2025, CDC says,” NPR. Lyman Stone, “Sexless America: Young Adults Are Having Less Sex,” Institute for Family Studies. “The Impact of Pornography on Children,” American College of Pediatricians. Mar Alvarez-Segur et al., “Impact of pornography consumption on children and adolescents: a trauma-informed approach,” National Library of Medicine. Carmen M. Leon et al., “From Pornography Consumption to Sexually Violent Practices: Uncovering the Hidden Influence of Sexual Norms,” National Library of Medicine. Taylor Lorenz, “The Hottest Chat App for Teens Is … Google Docs,” The Atlantic. “Injections, Bone Hammering and the Pursuit of Peak Male Beauty: Inside the image-obsessed subculture that is ‘looksmaxxing,'” The New York Times. John Koetsier, “80% Of Gen Zers Would Marry An AI: Study,” Forbes. Finally, there are two past podcast episodes that we'd encourage you to go back and listen to when you have the time. They are: CCP152: On Women's Porn, CCP72: On Toxic Masculinity and CCP146: On Hooters and OnlyFans. For those of you who are new to Church & Culture, we'd love to invite you to subscribe (for free of course) to the twice-weekly Church & Culture blog and check out the Daily Headline News - a collection of headlines from around the globe each weekday. We'd also love to hear from you if there is a topic that you'd like to see discussed on the Church & Culture Podcast in an upcoming episode. You can find the form to submit your questions at the bottom of the podcast page HERE.
This episode is brought to you by Hyperbolic and the MLflow team. Check out more information at hyperbolic.ai and MLflow.org.Why AI Coding Agents Are Moving to the Cloud — With Zach Lloyd, CEO of WarpZach Lloyd is the founder and CEO of Warp, the AI-native terminal and agentic development platform trusted by over a million developers. Before Warp, Zach was a product lead at Google on Google Docs — giving him a uniquely deep intuition for what it means to build truly collaborative developer tools at scale.Why Agents are Driving Software Development to the Cloud // MLOps Podcast #371 with Zach Lloyd, CEO of WarpWhat we cover:
Send me a message Everyone knows AI is writing your content. Why? Because your AI-generated content sounds like everyone else's. Your audience knows you're just copy/pasting what ChatGPT spits out.Most agents post generic, robotic captions and video scripts that sound exactly like corporate newsletters. (Who the hell says "delve" anyways? LOL) If your content sounds like every other agent using the same ChatGPT prompts, you have a problem. But a fixable one.The fix isn't to stop using AI. But you need to stop being lazy.In this episode of the Massive Agent Podcast, I break down my exact 6-step process to train your AI (specifically Claude) to write and speak in your actual voice. This episode will move you from "Robotic Agent" to "AI Powered Bad Ass Agent" by showing you the feedback hacks that turns bot-written drafts into high-converting content.Inside this episode:The Voice Manual: How to use your podcast, social media scripts and video transcripts to train your AIThe AI Tell Audit: Why you must delete words like "Furthermore" and "Moreover" immediatelyThe Frankenstein Method: My strategy for stealing the best parts of 3-5 different AI drafts to create one perfect post.The Refinement Loop: How to grade, and ultimately teach, your AI so it gets smarter every time you use itAI can get you 85% of the way there. But if you skip that last 15%, you're just another agent blending into the noise.*Want the Google Doc with the whole 6 step process and prompts? Comment the word HUMAN on any of my Instagram posts, and my automation will send it to you immediately. ***********************RESOURCES :Free "Clients From Social" Masterclass - Learn the new formula top agents are using on social media to attract 5+ new closings, month after month. REGISTER HERE: https://members.massiveagentsociety.com/free-masterclass-registration?utm_source=podcast_notesMassive Agent Society on Skool - My coaching community giving Realtors the exact blueprint (and handholding) to attract 5+ new clients, every single month. CLICK HERE: https://www.skool.com/massiveagentsocietyManychat PRO - Automate your Instagram DM's and Get 30 days of Manychat Pro for FREE - CLICK HERE REAL Broker - Learn how we can be business partners and build a business together @ ΓEA⅃ Broker- CLICK HEREPLEASE LEAVE A REVIEW on APPLE PODCASTS or SPOTIFY
Send us Fan MailThanks to B.R Goodwin for chatting with me about the newest release in her closed door romance series, Head Over Wheels. Support B.R.:Read Head Over WheelsRead Forget Me KnotRead Grits and GlamourFollow her on InstagramFor links to the books discussed in this episode, click the link here to take you to the Google Doc to view the list. For episode feedback, future reading and author recommendations, you can text the podcast by clicking the "Send us a message button" above. For more, follow along on Instagram @whereileftoffpod.
Grab the free Google Doc to build and deploy your first Claude Managed Agent in 60 seconds: https://return-my-time.kit.com/2872b904f5I sit down with Nick Spisak, an AI agent builder who deployed his first Claude Managed Agent the same week Anthropic released the capability, to break down exactly what this platform is, who it's for, and when it makes financial sense to use it. We walk through the four user personas Claude Managed Agents is built for.Links Mentioned:Corey's X article: https://x.com/coreyganim/status/2042286607449874527Nick's X article: https://x.com/NickSpisak_/status/2041949191887262164Timestamps00:00 – Intro00:05 – What is Claude Managed Agents?00:29 – Architecture: decoupling tools, sessions, and orchestration01:15 – Who managed agents is and isn't for01:33 – The four user personas breakdown03:58 – Why AI Tinkerers should stick with Claude Code subscription04:21 – Free Google Doc: build your first agent in 60 seconds05:28 – Platform-as-a-service model explained05:43 – Cost comparison: Managed Agents vs Agent SDK06:09 – Live look inside platform.claude.com06:23 – Workbench, sessions, and output walkthrough08:16 – Sessions: tool calls vs. finished output explained08:31 – Analytics dashboard and real cost breakdown09:36 – When the ROI math works (and when it doesn't)11:18 – Next steps: articles on X, how to get started12:04 – OutroJoin the Build With AI community - weekly AI implementations, live coaching, and templates built for non-technical entrepreneurs: https://www.skool.com/buildwithai/aboutFIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/coreyganimInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/coreyganim/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyganim/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@coreyganimFIND NICK ON SOCIALX: https://x.com/NickSpisak_LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasspisak/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nickspisak_
BOSSes, it is the month of taxes, and while most people's eyes glaze over at the mention of the IRS, Tom Dheere (The VO Strategist) and Anne Ganguzza are here to make it manageable. This year is particularly significant due to major shifts in federal reporting thresholds. This episode provides actionable voiceover tax tips to help you move from a "hobbyist" mindset to a professional business owner, highlighting the importance of clear audit trails and strategic expense tracking. Chapter Summaries: The Multifunctional Cash Flow Spreadsheet (01:34) Tom introduces his cornerstone tool: the Cash Flow Spreadsheet. Used for over 20 years, this template tracks every penny in and out. Beyond taxes, it serves as a marketing diagnostic by logging genres, booking sources (agent vs. direct), and payment portals. Anne notes that tracking the source of income is vital for analyzing which training and marketing efforts are actually paying off. Threshold Shock: The 2026 1099 Changes (19:28) Tom reveals the most critical update for 2026: The 1099 reporting threshold has jumped from $600 to $2,000. This applies to both the 1099-NEC (Non-Employee Compensation) and 1099-MISC. Many talent will receive fewer forms this year, but Tom and Anne stress that this is not free money—you are still legally required to declare every cent of income, even if no form is issued. The 1099-K and Third-Party Payments (20:53) For those paid via PayPal, Venmo, or credit cards, the 1099-K threshold now stands at $20,000 and 200 transactions. Unless you hit both metrics, these platforms won't send you a form. This makes meticulous personal record-keeping through spreadsheets or accounting software like Wave or QuickBooks essential for an accurate filing. Hobby vs. Business: The IRS Standard (10:40) Even if you haven't made a profit yet, Anne and Tom encourage filing to claim deductions for training, gear, and marketing. However, they caution that the IRS may classify your career as a "hobby" if you don't show a profit within a few years. Having a professional CPA who understands self-employment is a deductible business expense that provides protection during potential audits. Creating an Audit Trail (13:55) A "Real Boss" keeps personal and professional finances separate. Tom recommends opening a dedicated "Voiceover" checking account. By running all business transactions through one account, you create a clean audit trail that simplifies tax prep and provides concrete evidence of business activity if the IRS comes knocking. AI for Financial Analysis (05:27) Tom discusses moving his data to Google Docs to leverage AI (Google Gemini). By using AI to analyze his spreadsheet, he can quickly identify which genres are growing or shrinking and compare year-over-year performance, turning "tax prep" into a powerful business strategy session. Top 10 Takeaways for Voice Actors: Declare Everything: Regardless of the new $2,000 threshold, you must report 100% of your income to the IRS. Separate Your Accounts: Use a dedicated checking account for all VO-related income and expenses to create an easy audit trail. File Even When Starting: You can deduct coaching and equipment costs in your first year, even if you haven't booked a job yet. Know the NEC vs. MISC: Understand the difference between non-employee compensation (NEC) and royalties (MISC), as the latter still has a $10 reporting threshold. Hire a Specialized CPA: Don't rely on generic software if your taxes involve 1099s; find a professional who understands the unique needs of freelancers. Track Genres for ROI: Use your financial records to see if your training in specific genres (like medical or e-learning) is resulting in paid work. Watch for Digital 1099s: Check your email and portal dashboards (like Voices or Voice123) for downloadable tax forms; many companies no longer send snail mail. Automate with Informed Delivery: Use the USPS Informed Delivery service to see scans of your incoming physical tax documents. Quarterly Estimates: Avoid a massive year-end bill by paying estimated quarterly taxes throughout the year. Taxes Tell Your Story: View tax season as a "Year in Review" to see the growth and health of your voiceover business.
In this episode of The Dept. Omar breaks down the missing link to your business. Leveraging content to lead to more conversations is how you will make more money online! Creating and giving lead magnets to your viewers can build trust at a deeper level with your future clients! Make it easy for people to say yes to you.
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