Podcasts about pming

If you've listened to the podcast for a while, you might have heard our ElevenLabs-powered AI co-host Charlie a few times. Text-to-speech has made amazing progress in the last 18 months, with OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode (aka “Her”) as a sneak peek of the future of AI interactions (see our “Building AGI in Real Time” recap). Yet, we had yet to see a real killer app for AI voice (not counting music).Today's guests, Raiza Martin and Usama Bin Shafqat, are the lead PM and AI engineer behind the NotebookLM feature flag that gave us the first viral AI voice experience, the “Deep Dive” podcast:The idea behind the “Audio Overviews” feature is simple: take a bunch of documents, websites, YouTube videos, etc, and generate a podcast out of them. This was one of the first demos that people built with voice models + RAG + GPT models, but it was always a glorified speech-to-text. Raiza and Usama took a very different approach:* Make it conversational: when you listen to a NotebookLM audio there are a ton of micro-interjections (Steven Johnson calls them disfluencies) like “Oh really?” or “Totally”, as well as pauses and “uh…”, like you would expect in a real conversation. These are not generated by the LLM in the transcript, but they are built into the the audio model. See ~28:00 in the pod for more details. * Listeners love tension: if two people are always in agreement on everything, it's not super interesting. They tuned the model to generate flowing conversations that mirror the tone and rhythm of human speech. They did not confirm this, but many suspect the 2 year old SoundStorm paper is related to this model.* Generating new insights: because the hosts' goal is not to summarize, but to entertain, it comes up with funny metaphors and comparisons that actually help expand on the content rather than just paraphrasing like most models do. We have had listeners make podcasts out of our podcasts, like this one.This is different than your average SOTA-chasing, MMLU-driven model buildooor. Putting product and AI engineering in the same room, having them build evals together, and understanding what the goal is lets you get these unique results. The 5 rules for AI PMsWe always focus on AI Engineers, but this episode had a ton of AI PM nuggets as well, which we wanted to collect as NotebookLM is one of the most successful products in the AI space:1. Less is more: the first version of the product had 0 customization options. All you could do is give it source documents, and then press a button to generate. Most users don't know what “temperature” or “top-k” are, so you're often taking the magic away by adding more options in the UI. Since recording they added a few, like a system prompt, but those were features that users were “hacking in”, as Simon Willison highlighted in his blog post.2. Use Real-Time Feedback: they built a community of 65,000 users on Discord that is constantly reporting issues and giving feedback; sometimes they noticed server downtime even before the Google internal monitoring did. Getting real time pings > aggregating user data when doing initial iterations. 3. Embrace Non-Determinism: AI outputs variability is a feature, not a bug. Rather than limiting the outputs from the get-go, build toggles that you can turn on/off with feature flags as the feedback starts to roll in.4. Curate with Taste: if you try your product and it sucks, you don't need more data to confirm it. Just scrap that and iterate again. This is even easier for a product like this; if you start listening to one of the podcasts and turn it off after 10 seconds, it's never a good sign. 5. Stay Hands-On: It's hard to build taste if you don't experiment. Trying out all your competitors products as well as unrelated tools really helps you understand what users are seeing in market, and how to improve on it.Chapters00:00 Introductions01:39 From Project Tailwind to NotebookLM09:25 Learning from 65,000 Discord members12:15 How NotebookLM works18:00 Working with Steven Johnson23:00 How to prioritize features25:13 Structuring the data pipelines29:50 How to eval34:34 Steering the podcast outputs37:51 Defining speakers personalities39:04 How do you make audio engaging?45:47 Humor is AGI51:38 Designing for non-determinism53:35 API when?55:05 Multilingual support and dialect considerations57:50 Managing system prompts and feature requests01:00:58 Future of NotebookLM01:04:59 Podcasts for your codebase01:07:16 Plans for real-time chat01:08:27 Wrap upShow Notes* Notebook LM* AI Test Kitchen* Nicholas Carlini* Steven Johnson* Wealth of Nations* Histories of Mysteries by Andrej Karpathy* chicken.pdf Threads* Area 120* Raiza Martin* Usama Bin ShafqatTranscriptNotebookLM [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, we're here today as guests on Latent Space. It's great to be here, I'm a long time listener and fan, they've had some great guests on this show before. Yeah, what an honor to have us, the hosts of another podcast, join as guests. I mean a huge thank you to Swyx and Alessio for the invite, thanks for having us on the show. Yeah really, it seems like they brought us here to talk a little bit about our show, our podcast. Yeah, I mean we've had lots of listeners ourselves, listeners at Deep Dive. Oh yeah, we've made a ton of audio overviews since we launched and we're learning a lot. There's probably a lot we can share around what we're building next, huh? Yeah, we'll share a little bit at least. The short version is we'll keep learning and getting better for you. We're glad you're along for the ride. So yeah, keep listening. Keep listening and stay curious. We promise to keep diving deep and bringing you even better options in the future. Stay curious.Alessio [00:00:52]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Residence at Decibel Partners. And I'm joined by my co-host, Swyx, founder of Smol.ai.Swyx [00:01:01]: Hey, and today we're back in the studio with our special guest, Raiza Martin. And Raiza, I forgot to get your last name, Shafqat.Raiza [00:01:10]: Yes.Swyx [00:01:10]: Okay, welcome.Raiza [00:01:12]: Hello, thank you for having us.Swyx [00:01:14]: So AI podcasters meet human podcasters, always fun. Congrats on the success of Notebook LM. I mean, how does it feel?Raiza [00:01:22]: It's been a lot of fun. A lot of it, honestly, was unexpected. But my favorite part is really listening to the audio overviews that people have been making.Swyx [00:01:29]: Maybe we should do a little bit of intros and tell the story. You know, what is your path into the sort of Google AI org? Or maybe, actually, I don't even know what org you guys are in.Raiza [00:01:39]: I can start. My name is Raisa. I lead the Notebook LM team inside of Google Labs. So specifically, that's the org that we're in. It's called Google Labs. It's only about two years old. And our whole mandate is really to build AI products. That's it. We work super closely with DeepMind. Our entire thing is just, like, try a bunch of things and see what's landing with users. And the background that I have is, really, I worked in payments before this, and I worked in ads right before, and then startups. I tell people, like, at every time that I changed orgs, I actually almost quit Google. Like, specifically, like, in between ads and payments, I was like, all right, I can't do this. Like, this is, like, super hard. I was like, it's not for me. I'm, like, a very zero-to-one person. But then I was like, okay, I'll try. I'll interview with other teams. And when I interviewed in payments, I was like, oh, these people are really cool. I don't know if I'm, like, a super good fit with this space, but I'll try it because the people are cool. And then I really enjoyed that, and then I worked on, like, zero-to-one features inside of payments, and I had a lot of fun. But then the time came again where I was like, oh, I don't know. It's like, it's time to leave. It's time to start my own thing. But then I interviewed inside of Google Labs, and I was like, oh, darn. Like, there's definitely, like—Alessio [00:02:48]: They got you again.Raiza [00:02:49]: They got me again. And so now I've been here for two years, and I'm happy that I stayed because especially with, you know, the recent success of Notebook LM, I'm like, dang, we did it. I actually got to do it. So that was really cool.Usama [00:03:02]: Kind of similar, honestly. I was at a big team at Google. We do sort of the data center supply chain planning stuff. Google has, like, the largest sort of footprint. Obviously, there's a lot of management stuff to do there. But then there was this thing called Area 120 at Google, which does not exist anymore. But I sort of wanted to do, like, more zero-to-one building and landed a role there. We were trying to build, like, a creator commerce platform called Kaya. It launched briefly a couple years ago. But then Area 120 sort of transitioned and morphed into Labs. And, like, over the last few years, like, the focus just got a lot clearer. Like, we were trying to build new AI products and do it in the wild and sort of co-create and all of that. So, you know, we've just been trying a bunch of different things. And this one really landed, which has felt pretty phenomenal. Really, really landed.Swyx [00:03:53]: Let's talk about the brief history of Notebook LM. You had a tweet, which is very helpful for doing research. May 2023, during Google I.O., you announced Project Tailwind.Raiza [00:04:03]: Yeah.Swyx [00:04:03]: So today is October 2024. So you joined October 2022?Raiza [00:04:09]: Actually, I used to lead AI Test Kitchen. And this was actually, I think, not I.O. 2023. I.O. 2022 is when we launched AI Test Kitchen, or announced it. And I don't know if you remember it.Swyx [00:04:23]: That's how you, like, had the basic prototype for Gemini.Raiza [00:04:26]: Yes, yes, exactly. Lambda.Swyx [00:04:28]: Gave beta access to people.Raiza [00:04:29]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I remember, I was like, wow, this is crazy. We're going to launch an LLM into the wild. And that was the first project that I was working on at Google. But at the same time, my manager at the time, Josh, he was like, hey, I want you to really think about, like, what real products would we build that are not just demos of the technology? That was in October of 2022. I was sitting next to an engineer that was working on a project called Talk to Small Corpus. His name was Adam. And the idea of Talk to Small Corpus is basically using LLM to talk to your data. And at the time, I was like, wait, there's some, like, really practical things that you can build here. And just a little bit of background, like, I was an adult learner. Like, I went to college while I was working a full-time job. And the first thing I thought was, like, this would have really helped me with my studying, right? Like, if I could just, like, talk to a textbook, especially, like, when I was tired after work, that would have been huge. We took a lot of, like, the Talk to Small Corpus prototypes, and I showed it to a lot of, like, college students, particularly, like, adult learners. They were like, yes, like, I get it, right? Like, I didn't even have to explain it to them. And we just continued to iterate the prototype from there to the point where we actually got a slot as part of the I.O. demo in 23.Swyx [00:05:42]: And Corpus, was it a textbook? Oh, my gosh.Raiza [00:05:45]: Yeah. It's funny. Actually, when he explained the project to me, he was like, talk to Small Corpus. It was like, talk to a small corpse?Swyx [00:05:51]: Yeah, nobody says Corpus.Raiza [00:06:00]: It was like, a small corpse? This is not AI. Yeah, yeah. And it really was just, like, a way for us to describe the amount of data that we thought, like, it could be good for.Swyx [00:06:02]: Yeah, but even then, you're still, like, doing rag stuff. Because, you know, the context length back then was probably, like, 2K, 4K.Raiza [00:06:08]: Yeah, it was basically rag.Raiza [00:06:09]: That was essentially what it was.Raiza [00:06:10]: And I remember, I was like, we were building the prototypes. And at the same time, I think, like, the rest of the world was. Right? We were seeing all of these, like, chat with PDF stuff come up. And I was like, come on, we gotta go. Like, we have to, like, push this out into the world. I think if there was anything, I wish we would have launched sooner because I wanted to learn faster. But I think, like, we netted out pretty well.Alessio [00:06:30]: Was the initial product just text-to-speech? Or were you also doing kind of, like, synthesizing of the content, refining it? Or were you just helping people read through it?Raiza [00:06:40]: Before we did the I.O. announcement in 23, we'd already done a lot of studies. And one of the first things that I realized was the first thing anybody ever typed was, summarize the thing. Right?Raiza [00:06:53]: Summarize the document.Raiza [00:06:54]: And it was, like, half like a test and half just like, oh, I know the content. I want to see how well it does this. So it was part of the first thing that we launched. It was called Project Tailwind back then. It was just Q&A, so you could chat with the doc just through text, and it would automatically generate a summary as well. I'm not sure if we had it back then.Raiza [00:07:12]: I think we did.Raiza [00:07:12]: It would also generate the key topics in your document, and it could support up to, like, 10 documents. So it wasn't just, like, a single doc.Alessio [00:07:20]: And then the I.O. demo went well, I guess. And then what was the discussion from there to where we are today? Is there any, maybe, intermediate step of the product that people missed between this was launch or?Raiza [00:07:33]: It was interesting because every step of the way, I think we hit, like, some pretty critical milestones. So I think from the initial demo, I think there was so much excitement of, like, wow, what is this thing that Google is launching? And so we capitalized on that. We built the wait list. That's actually when we also launched the Discord server, which has been huge for us because for us in particular, one of the things that I really wanted to do was to be able to launch features and get feedback ASAP. Like, the moment somebody tries it, like, I want to hear what they think right now, and I want to ask follow-up questions. And the Discord has just been so great for that. But then we basically took the feedback from I.O., we continued to refine the product.Raiza [00:08:12]: So we added more features.Raiza [00:08:13]: We added sort of, like, the ability to save notes, write notes. We generate follow-up questions. So there's a bunch of stuff in the product that shows, like, a lot of that research. But it was really the rolling out of things. Like, we removed the wait list, so rolled out to all of the United States. We rolled out to over 200 countries and territories. We started supporting more languages, both in the UI and, like, the actual source stuff. We experienced, like, in terms of milestones, there was, like, an explosion of, like, users in Japan. This was super interesting in terms of just, like, unexpected. Like, people would write to us and they would be like, this is amazing. I have to read all of these rules in English, but I can chat in Japanese. It's like, oh, wow. That's true, right? Like, with LLMs, you kind of get this natural, it translates the content for you. And you can ask in your sort of preferred mode. And I think that's not just, like, a language thing, too. I think there's, like, I do this test with Wealth of Nations all the time because it's, like, a pretty complicated text to read. The Evan Smith classic.Swyx [00:09:11]: It's, like, 400 pages or something.Raiza [00:09:12]: Yeah. But I like this test because I'm, like, asking, like, Normie, you know, plain speak. And then it summarizes really well for me. It sort of adapts to my tone.Swyx [00:09:22]: Very capitalist.Raiza [00:09:25]: Very on brand.Swyx [00:09:25]: I just checked in on a Notebook LM Discord. 65,000 people. Yeah.Raiza [00:09:29]: Crazy.Swyx [00:09:29]: Just, like, for one project within Google. It's not, like, it's not labs. It's just Notebook LM.Raiza [00:09:35]: Just Notebook LM.Swyx [00:09:36]: What do you learn from the community?Raiza [00:09:39]: I think that the Discord is really great for hearing about a couple of things.Raiza [00:09:43]: One, when things are going wrong. I think, honestly, like, our fastest way that we've been able to find out if, like, the servers are down or there's just an influx of people being, like, it saysRaiza [00:09:53]: system unable to answer.Raiza [00:09:54]: Anybody else getting this?Raiza [00:09:56]: And I'm, like, all right, let's go.Raiza [00:09:58]: And it actually catches it a lot faster than, like, our own monitoring does.Raiza [00:10:01]: It's, like, that's been really cool. So, thank you.Swyx [00:10:03]: Canceled eat a dog.Raiza [00:10:05]: So, thank you to everybody. Please keep reporting it. I think the second thing is really the use cases.Raiza [00:10:10]: I think when we put it out there, I was, like, hey, I have a hunch of how people will use it, but, like, to actually hear about, you know, not just the context of, like, the use of Notebook LM, but, like, what is this person's life like? Why do they care about using this tool?Raiza [00:10:23]: Especially people who actually have trouble using it, but they keep pushing.Raiza [00:10:27]: Like, that's just so critical to understand what was so motivating, right?Raiza [00:10:31]: Like, what was your problem that was, like, so worth solving? So, that's, like, a second thing.Raiza [00:10:34]: The third thing is also just hearing sort of, like, when we have wins and when we don't have wins because there's actually a lot of functionality where I'm, like, hmm, IRaiza [00:10:42]: don't know if that landed super well or if that was actually super critical.Raiza [00:10:45]: As part of having this sort of small project, right, I want to be able to unlaunch things, too. So, it's not just about just, like, rolling things out and testing it and being, like, wow, now we have, like, 99 features. Like, hopefully we get to a place where it's, like, there's just a really strong core feature set and the things that aren't as great, we can just unlaunch.Swyx [00:11:02]: What have you unlaunched? I have to ask.Raiza [00:11:04]: I'm in the process of unlaunching some stuff, but, for example, we had this idea that you could highlight the text in your source passage and then you could transform it. And nobody was really using it and it was, like, a very complicated piece of our architecture and it's very hard to continue supporting it in the context of new features. So, we were, like, okay, let's do a 50-50 sunset of this thing and see if anybody complains.Raiza [00:11:28]: And so far, nobody has.Swyx [00:11:29]: Is there, like, a feature flagging paradigm inside of your architecture that lets you feature flag these things easily?Raiza [00:11:36]: Yes, and actually...Raiza [00:11:37]: What is it called?Swyx [00:11:38]: Like, I love feature flagging.Raiza [00:11:40]: You mean, like, in terms of just, like, being able to expose things to users?Swyx [00:11:42]: Yeah, as a PM. Like, this is your number one tool, right?Raiza [00:11:44]: Yeah, yeah.Swyx [00:11:45]: Let's try this out. All right, if it works, roll it out. If it doesn't, roll it back, you know?Raiza [00:11:49]: Yeah, I mean, we just run Mendel experiments for the most part. And, actually, I don't know if you saw it, but on Twitter, somebody was able to get around our flags and they enabled all the experiments.Raiza [00:11:58]: They were, like, check out what the Notebook LM team is cooking.Raiza [00:12:02]: I was, like, oh!Raiza [00:12:03]: And I was at lunch with the rest of the team and I was, like, I was eating. I was, like, guys, guys, Magic Draft League!Raiza [00:12:10]: They were, like, oh, no!Raiza [00:12:12]: I was, like, okay, just finish eating and then let's go figure out what to do.Raiza [00:12:15]: Yeah.Alessio [00:12:15]: I think a post-mortem would be fun, but I don't think we need to do it on the podcast now. Can we just talk about what's behind the magic? So, I think everybody has questions, hypotheses about what models power it. I know you might not be able to share everything, but can you just get people very basic? How do you take the data and put it in the model? What text model you use? What's the text-to-speech kind of, like, jump between the two? Sure.Raiza [00:12:42]: Yeah.Raiza [00:12:42]: I was going to say, SRaiza, he manually does all the podcasts.Raiza [00:12:46]: Oh, thank you.Usama [00:12:46]: Really fast. You're very fast, yeah.Raiza [00:12:48]: Both of the voices at once.Usama [00:12:51]: Voice actor.Raiza [00:12:52]: Good, good.Usama [00:12:52]: Yeah, so, for a bit of background, we were building this thing sort of outside Notebook LM to begin with. Like, just the idea is, like, content transformation, right? Like, we can do different modalities. Like, everyone knows that. Everyone's been poking at it. But, like, how do you make it really useful? And, like, one of the ways we thought was, like, okay, like, you maybe, like, you know, people learn better when they're hearing things. But TTS exists, and you can, like, narrate whatever's on screen. But you want to absorb it the same way. So, like, that's where we sort of started out into the realm of, like, maybe we try, like, you know, two people are having a conversation kind of format. We didn't actually start out thinking this would live in Notebook, right? Like, Notebook was sort of, we built this demo out independently, tried out, like, a few different sort of sources. The main idea was, like, go from some sort of sources and transform it into a listenable, engaging audio format. And then through that process, we, like, unlocked a bunch more sort of learnings. Like, for example, in a sense, like, you're not prompting the model as much because, like, the information density is getting unrolled by the model prompting itself, in a sense. Because there's two speakers, and they're both technically, like, AI personas, right? That have different angles of looking at things. And, like, they'll have a discussion about it. And that sort of, we realized that's kind of what was making it riveting, in a sense. Like, you care about what comes next, even if you've read the material already. Because, like, people say they get new insights on their own journals or books or whatever. Like, anything that they've written themselves. So, yeah, from a modeling perspective, like, it's, like Reiza said earlier, like, we work with the DeepMind audio folks pretty closely. So, they're always cooking up new techniques to, like, get better, more human-like audio. And then Gemini 1.5 is really, really good at absorbing long context. So, we sort of, like, generally put those things together in a way that we could reliably produce the audio.Raiza [00:14:52]: I would add, like, there's something really nuanced, I think, about sort of the evolution of, like, the utility of text-to-speech. Where, if it's just reading an actual text response, and I've done this several times. I do it all the time with, like, reading my text messages. Or, like, sometimes I'm trying to read, like, a really dense paper, but I'm trying to do actual work. I'll have it, like, read out the screen. There is something really robotic about it that is not engaging. And it's really hard to consume content in that way. And it's never been really effective. Like, particularly for me, where I'm, like, hey, it's actually just, like, it's fine for, like, short stuff. Like, texting, but even that, it's, like, not that great. So, I think the frontier of experimentation here was really thinking about there is a transform that needs to happen in between whatever.Raiza [00:15:38]: Here's, like, my resume, right?Raiza [00:15:39]: Or here's, like, a 100-page slide deck or something. There is a transform that needs to happen that is inherently editorial. And I think this is where, like, that two-person persona, right, dialogue model, they have takes on the material that you've presented. That's where it really sort of, like, brings the content to life in a way that's, like, not robotic. And I think that's, like, where the magic is, is, like, you don't actually know what's going to happen when you press generate.Raiza [00:16:08]: You know, for better or for worse.Raiza [00:16:09]: Like, to the extent that, like, people are, like, no, I actually want it to be more predictable now. Like, I want to be able to tell them. But I think that initial, like, wow was because you didn't know, right? When you upload your resume, what's it about to say about you? And I think I've seen enough of these where I'm, like, oh, it gave you good vibes, right? Like, you knew it was going to say, like, something really cool. As we start to shape this product, I think we want to try to preserve as much of that wow as much as we can. Because I do think, like, exposing, like, all the knobs and, like, the dials, like, we've been thinking about this a lot. It's like, hey, is that, like, the actual thing?Raiza [00:16:43]: Is that the thing that people really want?Alessio [00:16:45]: Have you found differences in having one model just generate the conversation and then using text-to-speech to kind of fake two people? Or, like, are you actually using two different kind of system prompts to, like, have a conversation step-by-step? I'm always curious, like, if persona system prompts make a big difference? Or, like, you just put in one prompt and then you just let it run?Usama [00:17:05]: I guess, like, generally we use a lot of inference, as you can tell with, like, the spinning thing takes a while. So, yeah, there's definitely, like, a bunch of different things happening under the hood. We've tried both approaches and they have their, sort of, drawbacks and benefits. I think that that idea of, like, questioning, like, the two different personas, like, persists throughout, like, whatever approach we try. It's like, there's a bit of, like, imperfection in there. Like, we had to really lean into the fact that, like, to build something that's engaging, like, it needs to be somewhat human and it needs to be just not a chatbot. Like, that was sort of, like, what we need to diverge from. It's like, you know, most chatbots will just narrate the same kind of answer, like, given the same sources, for the most part, which is ridiculous. So, yeah, there's, like, experimentation there under the hood, like, with the model to, like, make sure that it's spitting out, like, different takes and different personas and different, sort of, prompting each other is, like, a good analogy, I guess.Swyx [00:18:00]: Yeah, I think Steven Johnson, I think he's on your team. I don't know what his role is. He seems like chief dreamer, writer.Raiza [00:18:08]: Yeah, I mean, I can comment on Steven. So, Steven joined, actually, in the very early days, I think before it was even a fully funded project. And I remember when he joined, I was like, Steven Johnson's going to be on my team? You know, and for folks who don't know him, Steven is a New York Times bestselling author of, like, 14 books. He has a PBS show. He's, like, incredibly smart, just, like, a true, sort of, celebrity by himself. And then he joined Google, and he was like, I want to come here, and I want to build the thing that I've always dreamed of, which is a tool to help me think. I was like, a what? Like, a tool to help you think? I was like, what do you need help with? Like, you seem to be doing great on your own. And, you know, he would describe this to me, and I would watch his flow. And aside from, like, providing a lot of inspiration, to be honest, like, when I watched Steven work, I was like, oh, nobody works like this, right? Like, this is what makes him special. Like, he is such a dedicated, like, researcher and journalist, and he's so thorough, he's so smart. And then I had this realization of, like, maybe Steven is the product. Maybe the work is to take Steven's expertise and bring it to, like, everyday people that could really benefit from this. Like, just watching him work, I was like, oh, I could definitely use, like, a mini-Steven, like, doing work for me. Like, that would make me a better PM. And then I thought very quickly about, like, the adjacent roles that could use sort of this, like, research and analysis tool. And so, aside from being, you know, chief dreamer, Steven also represents, like, a super workflow that I think all of us, like, if we had access to a tool like it, would just inherently, like, make us better.Swyx [00:19:46]: Did you make him express his thoughts while he worked, or you just silently watched him, or how does this work?Raiza [00:19:52]: Oh, now you're making me admit it. But yes, I did just silently watch him.Swyx [00:19:57]: This is a part of the PM toolkit, right? They give user interviews and all that.Raiza [00:20:00]: Yeah, I mean, I did interview him, but I noticed, like, if I interviewed him, it was different than if I just watched him. And I did the same thing with students all the time. Like, I followed a lot of students around. I watched them study. I would ask them, like, oh, how do you feel now, right?Raiza [00:20:15]: Or why did you do that? Like, what made you do that, actually?Raiza [00:20:18]: Or why are you upset about, like, this particular thing? Why are you cranky about this particular topic? And it was very similar, I think, for Steven, especially because he was describing, he was in the middle of writing a book. And he would describe, like, oh, you know, here's how I research things, and here's how I keep my notes. Oh, and here's how I do it. And it was really, he was doing this sort of, like, self-questioning, right? Like, now we talk about, like, chain of, you know, reasoning or thought, reflection.Raiza [00:20:44]: And I was like, oh, he's the OG.Raiza [00:20:46]: Like, I watched him do it in real time. I was like, that's, like, L-O-M right there. And to be able to bring sort of that expertise in a way that was, like, you know, maybe, like, costly inference-wise, but really have, like, that ability inside of a tool that was, like, for starters, free inside of NotebookLM, it was good to learn whether or not people really did find use out of it.Swyx [00:21:05]: So did he just commit to using NotebookLM for everything, or did you just model his existing workflow?Raiza [00:21:12]: Both, right?Raiza [00:21:12]: Like, in the beginning, there was no product for him to use. And so he just kept describing the thing that he wanted. And then eventually, like, we started building the thing. And then I would start watching him use it. One of the things that I love about Steven is he uses the product in ways where it kind of does it, but doesn't quite. Like, he's always using it at, like, the absolute max limit of this thing. But the way that he describes it is so full of promise, where he's like, I can see it going here. And all I have to do is sort of, like, meet him there and sort of pressure test whether or not, you know, everyday people want it. And we just have to build it.Swyx [00:21:47]: I would say OpenAI has a pretty similar person, Andrew Mason, I think his name is. It's very similar, like, just from the writing world and using it as a tool for thought to shape Chachabitty. I don't think that people who use AI tools to their limit are common. I'm looking at my NotebookLM now. I've got two sources. You have a little, like, source limit thing. And my bar is over here, you know, and it stretches across the whole thing. I'm like, did he fill it up?Raiza [00:22:09]: Yes, and he has, like, a higher limit than others, I think. He fills it up.Raiza [00:22:14]: Oh, yeah.Raiza [00:22:14]: Like, I don't think Steven even has a limit, actually.Swyx [00:22:17]: And he has Notes, Google Drive stuff, PDFs, MP3, whatever.Raiza [00:22:22]: Yes, and one of my favorite demos, he just did this recently, is he has actually PDFs of, like, handwritten Marie Curie notes. I see.Swyx [00:22:29]: So you're doing image recognition as well. Yeah, it does support it today.Raiza [00:22:32]: So if you have a PDF that's purely images, it will recognize it.Raiza [00:22:36]: But his demo is just, like, super powerful.Raiza [00:22:37]: He's like, okay, here's Marie Curie's notes. And it's like, here's how I'm using it to analyze it. And I'm using it for, like, this thing that I'm writing.Raiza [00:22:44]: And that's really compelling.Raiza [00:22:45]: It's like the everyday person doesn't think of these applications. And I think even, like, when I listen to Steven's demo, I see the gap. I see how Steven got there, but I don't see how I could without him. And so there's a lot of work still for us to build of, like, hey, how do I bring that magic down to, like, zero work? Because I look at all the steps that he had to take in order to do it, and I'm like, okay, that's product work for us, right? Like, that's just onboarding.Alessio [00:23:09]: And so from an engineering perspective, people come to you and it's like, hey, I need to use this handwritten notes from Marie Curie from hundreds of years ago. How do you think about adding support for, like, data sources and then maybe any fun stories and, like, supporting more esoteric types of inputs?Raiza [00:23:25]: So I think about the product in three ways, right? So there's the sources, the source input. There's, like, the capabilities of, like, what you could do with those sources. And then there's the third space, which is how do you output it into the world? Like, how do you put it back out there? There's a lot of really basic sources that we don't support still, right? I think there's sort of, like, the handwritten notes stuff is one, but even basic things like DocX or, like, PowerPoint, right? Like, these are the things that people, everyday people are like, hey, my professor actually gave me everything in DocX. Can you support that? And then just, like, basic stuff, like images and PDFs combined with text. Like, there's just a really long roadmap for sources that I think we just have to work on.Raiza [00:24:04]: So that's, like, a big piece of it.Raiza [00:24:05]: On the output side, and I think this is, like, one of the most interesting things that we learned really early on, is, sure, there's, like, the Q&A analysis stuff, which is like, hey, when did this thing launch? Okay, you found it in the slide deck. Here's the answer. But most of the time, the reason why people ask those questions is because they're trying to make something new. And so when, actually, when some of those early features leaked, like, a lot of the features we're experimenting with are the output types. And so you can imagine that people care a lot about the resources that they're putting into NotebookLM because they're trying to create something new. So I think equally as important as, like, the source inputs are the outputs that we're helping people to create. And really, like, you know, shortly on the roadmap, we're thinking about how do we help people use NotebookLM to distribute knowledge? And that's, like, one of the most compelling use cases is, like, shared notebooks. It's, like, a way to share knowledge. How do we help people take sources and, like, one-click new documents out of it, right? And I think that's something that people think is, like, oh, yeah, of course, right? Like, one push a document. But what does it mean to do it right? Like, to do it in your style, in your brand, right?Raiza [00:25:08]: To follow your guidelines, stuff like that.Raiza [00:25:09]: So I think there's a lot of work, like, on both sides of that equation.Raiza [00:25:13]: Interesting.Swyx [00:25:13]: Any comments on the engineering side of things?Usama [00:25:16]: So, yeah, like I said, I was mostly working on building the text to audio, which kind of lives as a separate engineering pipeline, almost, that we then put into NotebookLM. But I think there's probably tons of NotebookLM engineering war stories on dealing with sources. And so I don't work too closely with engineers directly. But I think a lot of it does come down to, like, Gemini's native understanding of images really well with the latest generation.Raiza [00:25:39]: Yeah, I think on the engineering and modeling side, I think we are a really good example of a team that's put a product out there, and we're getting a lot of feedback from the users, and we return the data to the modeling team, right? To the extent that we say, hey, actually, you know what people are uploading, but we can't really support super well?Raiza [00:25:56]: Text plus image, right?Raiza [00:25:57]: Especially to the extent that, like, NotebookLM can handle up to 50 sources, 500,000 words each. Like, you're not going to be able to jam all of that into, like, the context window. So how do we do multimodal embeddings with that? There's really, like, a lot of things that we have to solve that are almost there, but not quite there yet.Alessio [00:26:16]: On then turning it into audio, I think one of the best things is it has so many of the human... Does that happen in the text generation that then becomes audio? Or is that a part of, like, the audio model that transforms the text?Usama [00:26:27]: It's a bit of both, I would say. The audio model is definitely trying to mimic, like, certain human intonations and, like, sort of natural, like, breathing and pauses and, like, laughter and things like that. But yeah, in generating, like, the text, we also have to sort of give signals on, like, where those things maybe would make sense.Alessio [00:26:45]: And on the input side, instead of having a transcript versus having the audio, like, can you take some of the emotions out of it, too? If I'm giving, like, for example, when we did the recaps of our podcast, we can either give audio of the pod or we can give a diarized transcription of it. But, like, the transcription doesn't have some of the, you know, voice kind of, like, things.Raiza [00:27:05]: Yeah, yeah.Alessio [00:27:05]: Do you reconstruct that when people upload audio or how does that work?Raiza [00:27:09]: So when you upload audio today, we just transcribe it. So it is quite lossy in the sense that, like, we don't transcribe, like, the emotion from that as a source. But when you do upload a text file and it has a lot of, like, that annotation, I think that there is some ability for it to be reused in, like, the audio output, right? But I think it will still contextualize it in the deep dive format. So I think that's something that's, like, particularly important is, like, hey, today we only have one format.Raiza [00:27:37]: It's deep dive.Raiza [00:27:38]: It's meant to be a pretty general overview and it is pretty peppy.Raiza [00:27:42]: It's just very upbeat.Raiza [00:27:43]: It's very enthusiastic, yeah.Raiza [00:27:45]: Yeah, yeah.Raiza [00:27:45]: Even if you had, like, a sad topic, I think they would find a way to be, like, silver lining, though.Raiza [00:27:50]: Really?Raiza [00:27:51]: Yeah.Raiza [00:27:51]: We're having a good chat.Raiza [00:27:54]: Yeah, that's awesome.Swyx [00:27:54]: One of the ways, many, many, many ways that deep dive went viral is people saying, like, if you want to feel good about yourself, just drop in your LinkedIn. Any other, like, favorite use cases that you saw from people discovering things in social media?Raiza [00:28:08]: I mean, there's so many funny ones and I love the funny ones.Raiza [00:28:11]: I think because I'm always relieved when I watch them. I'm like, haha, that was funny and not scary. It's great.Raiza [00:28:17]: There was another one that was interesting, which was a startup founder putting their landing page and being like, all right, let's test whether or not, like, the value prop is coming through. And I was like, wow, that's right.Raiza [00:28:26]: That's smart.Usama [00:28:27]: Yeah.Raiza [00:28:28]: And then I saw a couple of other people following up on that, too.Raiza [00:28:32]: Yeah.Swyx [00:28:32]: I put my about page in there and, like, yeah, if there are things that I'm not comfortable with, I should remove it. You know, so that it can pick it up. Right.Usama [00:28:39]: I think that the personal hype machine was, like, a pretty viral one. I think, like, people uploaded their dreams and, like, some people, like, keep sort of dream journals and it, like, would sort of comment on those and, like, it was therapeutic. I didn't see those.Raiza [00:28:54]: Those are good. I hear from Googlers all the time, especially because we launched it internally first. And I think we launched it during the, you know, the Q3 sort of, like, check-in cycle. So all Googlers have to write notes about, like, hey, you know, what'd you do in Q3? And what Googlers were doing is they would write, you know, whatever they accomplished in Q3 and then they would create an audio overview. And these people they didn't know would just ping me and be like, wow, I feel really good, like, going into a meeting with my manager.Raiza [00:29:25]: And I was like, good, good, good, good. You really did that, right?Usama [00:29:29]: I think another cool one is just, like, any Wikipedia article. Yeah. Like, you drop it in and it's just, like, suddenly, like, the best sort of summary overview.Raiza [00:29:38]: I think that's what Karpathy did, right? Like, he has now a Spotify channel called Histories of Mysteries, which is basically, like, he just took, like, interesting stuff from Wikipedia and made audio overviews out of it.Swyx [00:29:50]: Yeah, he became a podcaster overnight.Raiza [00:29:52]: Yeah.Raiza [00:29:53]: I'm here for it. I fully support him.Raiza [00:29:55]: I'm racking up the listens for him.Swyx [00:29:58]: Honestly, it's useful even without the audio. You know, I feel like the audio does add an element to it, but I always want, you know, paired audio and text. And it's just amazing to see what people are organically discovering. I feel like it's because you laid the groundwork with NotebookLM and then you came in and added the sort of TTS portion and made it so good, so human, which is weird. Like, it's this engineering process of humans. Oh, one thing I wanted to ask. Do you have evals?Raiza [00:30:23]: Yeah.Swyx [00:30:23]: Yes.Raiza [00:30:24]: What? Potatoes for chefs.Swyx [00:30:27]: What is that? What do you mean, potatoes?Raiza [00:30:29]: Oh, sorry.Raiza [00:30:29]: Sorry. We were joking with this, like, a couple of weeks ago. We were doing, like, side-by-sides. But, like, Raiza sent me the file and it was literally called Potatoes for Chefs. And I was like, you know, my job is really serious, but you have to laugh a little bit. Like, the title of the file is, like, Potatoes for Chefs.Swyx [00:30:47]: Is it like a training document for chefs?Usama [00:30:50]: It's just a side-by-side for, like, two different kind of audio transcripts.Swyx [00:30:54]: The question is really, like, as you iterate, the typical engineering advice is you establish some kind of test or benchmark. You're at, like, 30 percent. You want to get it up to 90, right?Raiza [00:31:05]: Yeah.Swyx [00:31:05]: What does that look like for making something sound human and interesting and voice?Usama [00:31:11]: We have the sort of formal eval process as well. But I think, like, for this particular project, we maybe took a slightly different route to begin with. Like, there was a lot of just within the team listening sessions. A lot of, like, sort of, like... Dogfooding.Raiza [00:31:23]: Yeah.Usama [00:31:23]: Like, I think the bar that we tried to get to before even starting formal evals with raters and everything was much higher than I think other projects would. Like, because that's, as you said, like, the traditional advice, right? Like, get that ASAP. Like, what are you looking to improve on? Whatever benchmark it is. So there was a lot of just, like, critical listening. And I think a lot of making sure that those improvements actually could go into the model. And, like, we're happy with that human element of it. And then eventually we had to obviously distill those down into an eval set. But, like, still there's, like, the team is just, like, a very, very, like, avid user of the product at all stages.Raiza [00:32:02]: I think you just have to be really opinionated.Raiza [00:32:05]: I think that sometimes, if you are, your intuition is just sharper and you can move a lot faster on the product.Raiza [00:32:12]: Because it's like, if you hold that bar high, right?Raiza [00:32:15]: Like, if you think about, like, the iterative cycle, it's like, hey, we could take, like, six months to ship this thing. To get it to, like, mid where we were. Or we could just, like, listen to this and be like, yeah, that's not it, right? And I don't need a rater to tell me that. That's my preference, right? And collectively, like, if I have two other people listen to it, they'll probably agree. And it's just kind of this step of, like, just keep improving it to the point where you're like, okay, now I think this is really impressive. And then, like, do evals, right? And then validate that.Swyx [00:32:43]: Was the sound model done and frozen before you started doing all this? Or are you also saying, hey, we need to improve the sound model as well? Both.Usama [00:32:51]: Yeah, we were making improvements on the audio and just, like, generating the transcript as well. I think another weird thing here was, like, we needed to be entertaining. And that's much harder to quantify than some of the other benchmarks that you can make for, like, you know, Sweebench or get better at this math.Swyx [00:33:10]: Do you just have people rate one to five or, you know, or just thumbs up and down?Usama [00:33:14]: For the formal rater evals, we have sort of like a Likert scale and, like, a bunch of different dimensions there. But we had to sort of break down what makes it entertaining into, like, a bunch of different factors. But I think the team stage of that was more critical. It was like, we need to make sure that, like, what is making it fun and engaging? Like, we dialed that as far as it goes. And while we're making other changes that are necessary, like, obviously, they shouldn't make stuff up or, you know, be insensitive.Raiza [00:33:41]: Hallucinations. Safety.Swyx [00:33:42]: Other safety things.Raiza [00:33:43]: Right.Swyx [00:33:43]: Like a bunch of safety stuff.Raiza [00:33:45]: Yeah, exactly.Usama [00:33:45]: So, like, with all of that and, like, also just, you know, following sort of a coherent narrative and structure is really important. But, like, with all of this, we really had to make sure that that central tenet of being entertaining and engaging and something you actually want to listen to. It just doesn't go away, which takes, like, a lot of just active listening time because you're closest to the prompts, the model and everything.Swyx [00:34:07]: I think sometimes the difficulty is because we're dealing with non-deterministic models, sometimes you just got a bad roll of the dice and it's always on the distribution that you could get something bad. Basically, how many do you, like, do ten runs at a time? And then how do you get rid of the non-determinism?Raiza [00:34:23]: Right.Usama [00:34:23]: Yeah, that's bad luck.Raiza [00:34:25]: Yeah.Swyx [00:34:25]: Yeah.Usama [00:34:26]: I mean, there still will be, like, bad audio overviews. There's, like, a bunch of them that happens. Do you mean for, like, the raider? For raiders, right?Swyx [00:34:34]: Like, what if that one person just got, like, a really bad rating? You actually had a great prompt, you actually had a great model, great weights, whatever. And you just, you had a bad output.Usama [00:34:42]: Like, and that's okay, right?Raiza [00:34:44]: I actually think, like, the way that these are constructed, if you think about, like, the different types of controls that the user has, right? Like, what can the user do today to affect it?Usama [00:34:54]: We push a button.Raiza [00:34:55]: You just push a button.Swyx [00:34:56]: I have tried to prompt engineer by changing the title. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Raiza [00:34:59]: Changing the title, people have found out.Raiza [00:35:02]: Yeah.Raiza [00:35:02]: The title of the notebook, people have found out. You can add show notes, right? You can get them to think, like, the show has changed. Someone changed the language of the output. Changing the language of the output. Like, those are less well-tested because we focused on, like, this one aspect. So it did change the way that we sort of think about quality as well, right? So it's like, quality is on the dimensions of entertainment, of course, like, consistency, groundedness. But in general, does it follow the structure of the deep dive? And I think when we talk about, like, non-determinism, it's like, well, as long as it follows, like, the structure of the deep dive, right? It sort of inherently meets all those other qualities. And so it makes it a little bit easier for us to ship something with confidence to the extent that it's like, I know it's going to make a deep dive. It's going to make a good deep dive. Whether or not the person likes it, I don't know. But as we expand to new formats, as we open up controls, I think that's where it gets really much harder. Even with the show notes, right? Like, people don't know what they're going to get when they do that. And we see that already where it's like, this is going to be a lot harder to validate in terms of quality, where now we'll get a greater distribution. Whereas I don't think we really got, like, varied distribution because of, like, that pre-process that Raiza was talking about. And also because of the way that we'd constrain, like, what were we measuring for? Literally, just like, is it a deep dive?Swyx [00:36:18]: And you determine what a deep dive is. Yeah. Everything needs a PM. Yeah, I have, this is very similar to something I've been thinking about for AI products in general. There's always like a chief tastemaker. And for Notebook LM, it seems like it's a combination of you and Steven.Raiza [00:36:31]: Well, okay.Raiza [00:36:32]: I want to take a step back.Swyx [00:36:33]: And Raiza, I mean, presumably for the voice stuff.Raiza [00:36:35]: Raiza's like the head chef, right? Of, like, deep dive, I think. Potatoes.Raiza [00:36:40]: Of potatoes.Raiza [00:36:41]: And I say this because I think even though we are already a very opinionated team, and Steven, for sure, very opinionated, I think of the audio generations, like, Raiza was the most opinionated, right? And we all, like, would say, like, hey, I remember, like, one of the first ones he sent me.Raiza [00:36:57]: I was like, oh, I feel like they should introduce themselves. I feel like they should say a title. But then, like, we would catch things, like, maybe they shouldn't say their names.Raiza [00:37:04]: Yeah, they don't say their names.Usama [00:37:05]: That was a Steven catch, like, not give them names.Raiza [00:37:08]: So stuff like that is, like, we all injected, like, a little bit of just, like, hey, here's, like, my take on, like, how a podcast should be, right? And I think, like, if you're a person who, like, regularly listens to podcasts, there's probably some collective preference there that's generic enough that you can standardize into, like, the deep dive format. But, yeah, it's the new formats where I think, like, oh, that's the next test. Yeah.Swyx [00:37:30]: I've tried to make a clone, by the way. Of course, everyone did. Yeah. Everyone in AI was like, oh, no, this is so easy. I'll just take a TTS model. Obviously, our models are not as good as yours, but I tried to inject a consistent character backstory, like, age, identity, where they work, where they went to school, what their hobbies are. Then it just, the models try to bring it in too much.Raiza [00:37:49]: Yeah.Swyx [00:37:49]: I don't know if you tried this.Raiza [00:37:51]: Yeah.Swyx [00:37:51]: So then I'm like, okay, like, how do I define a personality? But it doesn't keep coming up every single time. Yeah.Raiza [00:37:58]: I mean, we have, like, a really, really good, like, character designer on our team.Raiza [00:38:02]: What?Swyx [00:38:03]: Like a D&D person?Raiza [00:38:05]: Just to say, like, we, just like we had to be opinionated about the format, we had to be opinionated about who are those two people talking.Raiza [00:38:11]: Okay.Raiza [00:38:12]: Right.Raiza [00:38:12]: And then to the extent that, like, you can design the format, you should be able to design the people as well.Raiza [00:38:18]: Yeah.Swyx [00:38:18]: I would love, like, a, you know, like when you play Baldur's Gate, like, you roll, you roll like 17 on Charisma and like, it's like what race they are. I don't know.Raiza [00:38:27]: I recently, actually, I was just talking about character select screens.Raiza [00:38:30]: Yeah. I was like, I love that, right.Raiza [00:38:32]: And I was like, maybe there's something to be learned there because, like, people have fallen in love with the deep dive as a, as a format, as a technology, but also as just like those two personas.Raiza [00:38:44]: Now, when you hear a deep dive and you've heard them, you're like, I know those two.Raiza [00:38:48]: Right.Raiza [00:38:48]: And people, it's so funny when I, when people are trying to find out their names, like, it's a, it's a worthy task.Raiza [00:38:54]: It's a worthy goal.Raiza [00:38:55]: I know what you're doing. But the next step here is to sort of introduce, like, is this like what people want?Raiza [00:39:00]: People want to sort of edit the personas or do they just want more of them?Swyx [00:39:04]: I'm sure you're getting a lot of opinions and they all, they all conflict with each other. Before we move on, I have to ask, because we're kind of on this topic. How do you make audio engaging? Because it's useful, not just for deep dive, but also for us as podcasters. What is, what does engaging mean? If you could break it down for us, that'd be great.Usama [00:39:22]: I mean, I can try. Like, don't, don't claim to be an expert at all.Swyx [00:39:26]: So I'll give you some, like variation in tone and speed. You know, there's this sort of writing advice where, you know, this sentence is five words. This sentence is three, that kind of advice where you, where you vary things, you have excitement, you have laughter, all that stuff. But I'd be curious how else you break down.Usama [00:39:42]: So there's the basics, like obviously structure that can't be meandering, right? Like there needs to be sort of a, an ultimate goal that the voices are trying to get to, human or artificial. I think one thing we find often is if there's just too much agreement between people, like that's not fun to listen to. So there needs to be some sort of tension and build up, you know, withholding information. For example, like as you listen to a story unfold, like you're going to learn more and more about it. And audio that maybe becomes even more important because like you actually don't have the ability to just like skim to the end of something. You're driving or something like you're going to be hooked because like there's, and that's how like, that's how a lot of podcasts work. Like maybe not interviews necessarily, but a lot of true crime, a lot of entertainment in general. There's just like a gradual unrolling of information. And that also like sort of goes back to the content transformation aspect of it. Like maybe you are going from, let's say the Wikipedia article of like one of the History of Mysteries, maybe episodes. Like the Wikipedia article is going to state out the information very differently. It's like, here's what happened would probably be in the very first paragraph. And one approach we could have done is like maybe a person's just narrating that thing. And maybe that would work for like a certain audience. Or I guess that's how I would picture like a standard history lesson to unfold. But like, because we're trying to put it in this two-person dialogue format, like there, we inject like the fact that, you know, there's, you don't give everything at first. And then you set up like differing opinions of the same topic or the same, like maybe you seize on a topic and go deeper into it and then try to bring yourself back out of it and go back to the main narrative. So that's, that's mostly from like the setting up the script perspective. And then the audio, I was saying earlier, it's trying to be as close to just human speech as possible. I think was the, what we found success with so far.Raiza [00:41:40]: Yeah. Like with interjections, right?Raiza [00:41:41]: Like I think like when you listen to two people talk, there's a lot of like, yeah, yeah, right. And then there's like a lot of like that questioning, like, oh yeah, really?Raiza [00:41:49]: What did you think?Swyx [00:41:50]: I noticed that. That's great.Raiza [00:41:52]: Totally.Usama [00:41:54]: Exactly.Swyx [00:41:55]: My question is, do you pull in speech experts to do this? Or did you just come up with it yourselves? You can be like, okay, talk to a whole bunch of fiction writers to, to make things engaging or comedy writers or whatever, stand up comedy, right? They have to make audio engaging, but audio as well. Like there's professional fields of studying where people do this for a living, but us as AI engineers are just making this up as we go.Raiza [00:42:19]: I mean, it's a great idea, but you definitely didn't.Raiza [00:42:22]: Yeah.Swyx [00:42:24]: My guess is you didn't.Raiza [00:42:25]: Yeah.Swyx [00:42:26]: There's a, there's a certain field of authority that people have. They're like, oh, like you can't do this because you don't have any experience like making engaging audio. But that's what you literally did.Raiza [00:42:35]: Right.Usama [00:42:35]: I mean, I was literally chatting with someone at Google earlier today about how some people think that like you need a linguistics person in the room for like making a good chatbot. But that's not actually true because like this person went to school for linguistics. And according to him, he's an engineer now. According to him, like most of his classmates were not actually good at language. Like they knew how to analyze language and like sort of the mathematical patterns and rhythms and language. But that doesn't necessarily mean they were going to be eloquent at like while speaking or writing. So I think, yeah, a lot of we haven't invested in specialists in audio format yet, but maybe that would.Raiza [00:43:13]: I think it's like super interesting because I think there is like a very human question of like what makes something interesting. And there's like a very deep question of like what is it, right? Like what is the quality that we are all looking for? Is it does somebody have to be funny? Does something have to be entertaining? Does something have to be straight to the point? And I think when you try to distill that, this is the interesting thing I think about our experiment, about this particular launch is first, we only launched one format. And so we sort of had to squeeze everything we believed about what an interesting thing is into one package. And as a result of it, I think we learned it's like, hey, interacting with a chatbot is sort of novel at first, but it's not interesting, right? It's like humans are what makes interacting with chatbots interesting.Raiza [00:43:59]: It's like, ha ha ha, I'm going to try to trick it. It's like, that's interesting.Raiza [00:44:02]: Spell strawberry, right?Raiza [00:44:04]: This is like the fun that like people have with it. But like that's not the LLM being interesting.Raiza [00:44:08]: That's you just like kind of giving it your own flavor. But it's like, what does it mean to sort of flip it on its head and say, no, you be interesting now, right? Like you give the chatbot the opportunity to do it. And this is not a chatbot per se. It is like just the audio. And it's like the texture, I think, that really brings it to life. And it's like the things that we've described here, which is like, okay, now I have to like lead you down a path of information about like this commercialization deck.Raiza [00:44:36]: It's like, how do you do that?Raiza [00:44:38]: To be able to successfully do it, I do think that you need experts. I think we'll engage with experts like down the road, but I think it will have to be in the context of, well, what's the next thing we're building, right? It's like, what am I trying to change here? What do I fundamentally believe needs to be improved? And I think there's still like a lot more studying that we have to do in terms of like, well, what are people actually using this for? And we're just in such early days. Like it hasn't even been a month. Two, three weeks.Usama [00:45:05]: Three weeks.Raiza [00:45:06]: Yeah, yeah.Usama [00:45:07]: I think one other element to that is the fact that you're bringing your own sources to it. Like it's your stuff. Like, you know this somewhat well, or you care to know about this. So like that, I think, changed the equation on its head as well. It's like your sources and someone's telling you about it. So like you care about how that dynamic is, but you just care for it to be good enough to be entertaining. Because ultimately they're talking about your mortgage deed or whatever.Swyx [00:45:33]: So it's interesting just from the topic itself. Even taking out all the agreements and the hiding of the slow reveal. I mean, there's a baseline, maybe.Usama [00:45:42]: Like if it was like too drab. Like if someone was reading it off, like, you know, that's like the absolute worst.Raiza [00:45:46]: But like...Swyx [00:45:47]: Do you prompt for humor? That's a tough one, right?Raiza [00:45:51]: I think it's more of a generic way to bring humor out if possible. I think humor is actually one of the hardest things. Yeah.Raiza [00:46:00]: But I don't know if you saw...Raiza [00:46:00]: That is AGI.Swyx [00:46:01]: Humor is AGI.Raiza [00:46:02]: Yeah, but did you see the chicken one?Raiza [00:46:03]: No.Raiza [00:46:04]: Okay. If you haven't heard it... We'll splice it in here.Swyx [00:46:06]: Okay.Raiza [00:46:07]: Yeah.Raiza [00:46:07]: There is a video on Threads. I think it was by Martino Wong. And it's a PDF.Raiza [00:46:16]: Welcome to your deep dive for today. Oh, yeah. Get ready for a fun one. Buckle up. Because we are diving into... Chicken, chicken, chicken. Chicken, chicken. You got that right. By Doug Zonker. Now. And yes, you heard that title correctly. Titles. Our listener today submitted this paper. Yeah, they're going to need our help. And I can totally see why. Absolutely. It's dense. It's baffling. It's a lot. And it's packed with more chicken than a KFC buffet. What? That's hilarious.Raiza [00:46:48]: That's so funny. So it's like stuff like that, that's like truly delightful, truly surprising.Raiza [00:46:53]: But it's like we didn't tell it to be funny.Usama [00:46:55]: Humor is contextual also. Like super contextual is what we're realizing. So we're not prompting for humor, but we're prompting for maybe a lot of other things that are bringing out that humor.Alessio [00:47:04]: I think the thing about ad-generated content, if we look at YouTube, like we do videos on YouTube and it's like, you know, a lot of people like screaming in the thumbnails to get clicks. There's like everybody, there's kind of like a meta of like what you need to do to get clicks. But I think in your product, there's no actual creator on the other side investing the time. So you can actually generate a type of content that is maybe not universally appealing, you know, at a much, yeah, exactly. I think that's the most interesting thing. It's like, well, is there a way for like, take Mr.Raiza [00:47:36]: Beast, right?Alessio [00:47:36]: It's like Mr. Beast optimizes videos to reach the biggest audience and like the most clicks. But what if every video could be kind of like regenerated to be closer to your taste, you know, when you watch it?Raiza [00:47:48]: I think that's kind of the promise of AI that I think we are just like touching on, which is, I think every time I've gotten information from somebody, they have delivered it to me in their preferred method, right?Raiza [00:47:59]: Like if somebody gives me a PDF, it's a PDF.Raiza [00:48:01]: Somebody gives me a hundred slide deck, that is the format in which I'm going to read it. But I think we are now living in the era where transformations are really possible, which is, look, like I don't want to read your hundred slide deck, but I'll listen to a 16 minute audio overview on the drive home. And that, that I think is, is really novel. And that is, is paving the way in a way that like maybe we wanted, but didn'tRaiza [00:48:24]: expect.Raiza [00:48:25]: Where I also think you're listening to a lot of content that normally wouldn't have had content made about it. Like I watched this TikTok where this woman uploaded her diary from 2004.Raiza [00:48:36]: For sure, right?Raiza [00:48:36]: Like nobody was goin

On today's episode, I got to speak with Stephanie Jerome, Product Manager at Akoya. Stephanie has a ton of experience managing internal products, and that was the focus of our conversation today. Stephanie also shared how she got her start in product management and lessons she's learned along the way.  If you're managing or considering managing internal products or looking to get your first shot at a PM job, this is a great episode to check out!  If you're looking to get into product management, you can get credible PM experience today at Path2Product If you need a free and powerful tool to organize and manage your research and insights, try out ResearchRepo for free today Outline: 0:00-0:35 - Episode Intro 0:35-6:50 - Stephanie's Path to product management 6:50-8:10 - Stephanie's experience with internal product management 8:10-10:55 - Key differences PMing internal products vs customer-facing products 10:55-15:10 - Biases and assumptions in internal research 15:10-18:30 - Using internal tools for internal tools (meta, I know) 18:30-21:50 - GTM and Customer Success for internal products 21:50-23:16 - Stephanie's final thoughts on research for internal products 23:16-24:16 - Outro

Today I am going to talk about why VAs don't work for free. This episode is for VAs and business owners alike - and it's just the simplest concept ever. When someone does work, they should get paid for it. Quote: I don't just sing for free. It's my work. You're paid for what you do. And I work hard. - Celine Dion Yeah Celine! There's a fire in my belly over this one, folks. Let's go. This week I saw a post in a VA group asking the group members if they were interested in a 3 month unpaid internship. You would work 15 hours a week for 3 months (!) to ‘learn the ropes' of a variety of marketing tasks for a private company. The OP called it great experience, something to add to your resume, with a potential for some paid time 3 months from now. And it would be great experience. But it's pretty much illegal. What?? Yep. In Canada you can't be an unpaid intern unless the internship is tied to an educational institution. I'll get into the specifics of that in a bit, but here's the thing … Someone is posting what appears to be an opportunity. So many VAs get excited because they can LEARN! And so come the replies... I'm interested, PMing you now, this is my jam, I would love to learn from you, and so on. And the VAs have NO idea that it's against the law. Not even the OP knows that it's not allowed, clearly (if they do it's even worse, butI'm pretty sure this one honestly didn't know!) Now I'm not trying to call out this person who posted this in that particular group. I want to use it simply as an example I gave her the info that she clearly didn't have, and she removed the post, but the problem is that this kind of damage is done DAILY to our industry, because we just don't know any better. And that's what gets me riled up. You must know! You need to learn what's right. It is your obligation as a small business owner. I actually bumped my regularly scheduled podcast episode to create this one for this week because I really want to know that you have the right information - at least where to get it - before you make these kinds of decisions in your VA business. You have to know what the legalities are of what you are doing in your business. It's 100% your responsibility to learn what you don't know, and to do things the right way. I'm not a lawyer, I don't play one on TV, and I bow the experts .. .every single time. But I'll tell you, one quick Google search will show you that you can not have someone do work for you and not pay them, claiming that they are getting an advantage or that it's good experience for them. Just because you both agree to something doesn't make it legal. write that down! Now, have I ever bartered work? Of course I have! Have I ever hired interns? Yes I have! Have I ever done free work for someone? You bet I have! But NOT for 3 months at 15 hours per week. And NOT for nothing else in return except the actual work you ‘get' to do. Come on. Let's break down the math on this … If you work 15 hours per week for 12 weeks, that is 180 hours of free work you are giving someone. Presumably, they are getting paid by their clients for that work, so they are earning money for the work getting.done. And yet you are not. They are getting free labour. It is as simple as that. If you charged the bare minimum VA rate, $25 per hour, that is the equivalent of $4500 worth of work for no pay. Most VAs bill $30, so that's already over $5K. Five thousand dollars you are giving someone! If they paid you minimum wage in Ontario, which is currently around $16 per hour, it's $2880. Almost $3000. interns are legally required to be paid minimum wage. Why would you agree to this? Because you are learning something? Because you are getting experience? Let me ask you this. If I offered you a marketing course that taught you how to do a few marketing tasks, would you pay me between $3 and $5K to take it? Of course you wouldn't. That is exorbitant. That's red flag number 1 - never mind the legalities! What is the tradeoff for you? I'll tell you one thing, it is absolutely not as much as the person providing the ‘opportunity' is getting. If you decide that you want to trade services with someone (ie barter) or if you want to do work with people for no money (volunteer), then here is what you should be doing instead. Bartering If you plan to exchange services with someone, do it properly. Decide what you will each do that is equal in value. For me, I bartered with my first business coach. $750 worth of my VA work for $750 worth of their coaching services. We BOTH got equal value, and we helped each other. Bartering is a good way to get experience, but you aren't just ‘getting' the experience. You are trading something else that is of the same value. I was a part of their mastermind group, I got training and coaching and it made me a better business person. They got client care and marketing support for their business, we built procedures, and we even expanded their team when things got going. The key with bartering is to have a contract in place - and a short time frame. As soon as possible, you want to start paying each other, don't let it go long term. You can trade VA services for learning ... just make sure they ARE of equal value. Free Work Volunteering is one way to get experience that isn't against any laws. But it's not usually something that you do for 60 hours a month. And it's definitely not called an internship. Volunteering is something you do for a non profit organization, charity or public service if you want to, and not because you are getting them to teach you something. You work in your expertise and you provide a service, like maybe bookkeeping or marketing and you do it in kind for them - like your church or a business association or group. You are helping them because you want to and because you can. So volunteering is not usually to get experience but it could benefit you by expanding your community of people who recognize your value. Internship An internship is a legal relationship or position that has rules attached to it. In terms of unpaid internships, they are simply not legal. An intern has to get paid at least minimum wage (in the example I gave you that would be almost $3K for the work requested). Unpaid interns are only allowed as part of an education institutional program (college or university etc), or through the co op programs. What does that mean? If your business isn't a college or university, no free interns! I'm not an expert guys. This information is readily available on the Canada.ca website. I Googled it, and you can too. As I said, I'm not a lawyer or a tax specialist, and I never give legal or tax advice, but I do tell you where to go to find it. It's soooo simple folks. Go to your Government website pages. They have all of the information you need to do things the right way. They tell you the rules, they tell you what the consequences are, and they can be severe. It is not good enough to say ‘I didn't know'. It's your responsibility as a business owner to learn what you need to learn to run your business where you live. On the intern info page you will also learn about misclassifying employees as independent contractors, which is another BIG issue in the VA industry, but not one that I'm going to cover in this episode (essentially if you are working with just one client, you are their employee … you can't be called a contractor if you don't have multiple clients … and both of you can get caught! Bet you didn't know that either... but now you do!) Protect yourself when you are getting started, or when you see what appears to be a great opportunity - investigate it. Don't assume that the other person knows what they are talking about. Here's what to do instead: Learn for free, don't work for free. There are umpteen thousands of free places to learn what you want to know online. Don't do free work for someone else to learn - especially if they are being compensated. You need to get paid at least minimum wage as an employee, or your minimum rate as a VA. Subbing for other VAs is a great way to learn on the job. They get to do all the marketing and business running, and you just need to help them with the work. I subbed for a great VA for 4 years because I just kept on learning more stuff from her (that is a great perk for a lot of VAs who run teams), but I got paid for every single hour I worked. And quite frankly, trust yourself. Offer services that you know how to do NOW - if I wanted to hire you today, what could you do for me? Those are the services that you need to be out there getting clients for. Don't try to get clients doing something you've never done - it's much too hard. Once you have revenue coming in, then you can take some training and change your service offerings. I started with some bookkeeping and finance type of work because I could do it (but I didn't like it) and as soon as I got a few months of revenue in, I joined Freelance University and learned how to do digital marketing. I found my target clients and started marketing my new services to them (I wasn't a new VA anymore, I just had new services). My business exploded because I did what I knew. I didn't need to intern with anyone and I certainly never worked for free - never mind knowing whether it was against any laws or not, I just knew that I was getting paid to do THIS at a job, and therefore I was getting paid when I did it for anyone as my client. So there ya go. That's my rant. I had to do it.Now back to your regular schedule program! ;) PLEASE learn what you need to know - don't sell yourself short, and do NOT work for free. Just ever. And to those business owners who think they can get VAs to do free work, just do better. Pay someone to help you. If you don't have a large budget, work within it. Value your VAs. They are soooo valuable to your business. Now in the interest of transparency, you heard me say earlier that I did hire interns - so I want to be clear on that. I did not pay my interns at the time. (gasp!). I bartered with my interns. They got trainings in return for the work they did for me - and they did 3 months of work for me during their internship. But it was for up to 10 hours per month (or 2 hours per week) - up to a total of 30 hours. Which amounted to about $600 of work I got, to their $600 of VA training. One of the things I bartered was my Getting Started as a VA training self study program - which is 10 hours of training and resources to help you start your VA business. They got immediate access to that and could easily get their business plan and business started within a few days if they went through the program and did all the homework. During their internship, they also got access to me as a coach and could ask questions, talk to me about setting up their business, which I only offer as private coaching services. It's valuable. So I know I did right by the few women that I hired as interns. It was a barter. And like I said bartering can be very valuable to both sides. The key is to offer very clear terms, a contract, and a stop date. And be reasonable with what you are trading - if someone needs 15 hours per week of support, they have to have revenue to support that. All right I'm jumping off my soap box now. The bottom line is there are right ways to work with people and there are wrong ways. If you find yourself in a wrong way, fix it. Value the people that you work with and who do work for you. If you have any admin experience whatsoever, you do not need to work for free. If you need to learn to set up your business or run it, then learn that. If you need to learn how to get clients, then learn that. If you need to learn to upgrade your existing skills, then learn that. And then when you have revenue coming in, learn something new and you can change the course of your business. Value yourself above all. I do! I am your advocate, and I need you to know that! Be Celine! You work hard, just like she does. Just like I do. Just like your clients do. They get paid for what they do. You need to get paid for what you do too. Celine gets paid! This is exactly what I help VAs do. As a VA coach and trainer, I help you set yourself up for success, helping you fix the specific things that are going wrong in your business. When we work together either privately or in a group we talk specifically about your business and you - there is no one stop solution for everyone when it comes to service businesses like VA businesses. I'll help you get clarity around your issues, and cheer you on as you walk through the steps to fix them. I've helped hundreds of VAs through their challenges and got them on their way to growing their business and the lifestyle that they dream of. I'd love to do the same for you. You can work with me privately, or you can join The Virtual Circle, my mastermind group for Virtual Assistants. Check it out at www.YourVAMentor.com/TVC (the virtual circle) - I bet it's exactly what you need to start running the VA business you dreamed of. Reach out to me if you are interested. That's all I've got for you this week, see you next time!

Galen Low is joined by Brett Harned, Digital PM Consultant and Founder of The Digital PM Summit, to dive into two questions we get all the time: what is digital project management, and how is it different from other types of project management?

We hope you enjoyed last week's episode about PMing—and this week we are back with another PM, a Project Manager. Project Managers are responsible for executing "projects" on behalf of a company or organization, and the projects can vary in size, scope, length of time, and type. Organizations can define "projects" in many ways, and success looks different among companies and across industries. We've invited Brad Parker to discuss what it means to project manage in the context of the live music industry. MUSIC'S BACK BABY and so are festivals! Brad gives us a view into what it means to be a project manager putting on major music festivals like Bonnaroo, Austin City Limits, and Lollapalooza. Brad's front row, literally, to how these shows come together and what it takes to leave festival-goers happy, safe, and thoroughly entertained.

In 1999, Val Zlatev stumbled across a group of traders while attending a physics conference in Chicago. Enamored by the energy in the room, Val decided to abandon his boredom in physics and enter the exciting world of finance. This career pivot provided Val with exposure to valuable mentors and experiences, enabling him to further refine his philosophies for both investing and life. Among his favorite insights, is an early mentor's advice, “Simplicity always trumps complexity.” This wisdom continues to impact Val's investment decisions today. As Senior Founding Partner and CIO at Analog Century, Val focuses on playing to his strengths, acknowledging the certainty of uncertainty, and cultivating the best possible performance from his team. No matter the outcome, Val chooses to focus on lessons learned. Speaking of a fund that closed, Val shares, “First and foremost, the learning was find a way to unwind. Don't allow stress of the job to burn you out. PMing is not a sprint. It's a marathon. And burning out doesn't help anybody.” Val Zlatev holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania; his thesis focused on the early moments following the Big Bang. Val's professional experience includes McKinsey & Company, MSD Capital, and Kingdon Capital. Prior to Analog Century, Val served as Partner at Quentec Asset Management.

Are you great with details? Do you like juggling multiple projects at once? Is your organization system the topic of awed discussion between your co-workers? Or are you just interested in getting into cybersecurity from a different angle? If so, you might already be a top-notch project manager and not even know it!Join a panel of past Cyber Work Podcast guests as they discuss their tips to become a project management all-star:– Jackie Olshack, Senior Program Manager, Dell Technologies– Ginny Morton, Advisory Manager, Identity Access Management, Deloitte Risk & Financial AdvisoryIf you're interested in project management as a long-term career, Jackie and Ginny will discuss their career histories and tips for breaking into the field. If you plan to use project management as a way to learn more about other cybersecurity career paths, we'll also cover how to leverage those skills to transition into roles.This episode was recorded live on December 15, 2021. Want to join the next Cyber Work Live and get your career questions answered? See upcoming events here: https://www.infosecinstitute.com/events/Want to earn your PMP certification? Learn more here: https://www.infosecinstitute.com/courses/pmp-boot-camp-training/The topics covered include:0:00 - Intro0:51 - Meet the panel3:12 - Why we're talking project management6:27 - Agenda for this discussion6:55 - Part 1: Break into cybersecurity project management7:45 - Resume recommendations for project managers12:35 - Interview mistakes for project managers19:22 - Creating your elevator pitch23:10 - Importance of your LinkedIn page25:05 - What certifications should I get?30:38 - Do I need to be technical to be successful?34:20 - How to build cybersecurity project management skills38:28 - Part 2: Doing the work of project management40:47 - Getting team members to lead themselves44:50 - Dealing with customer ambiguity47:30 - Part 3: Pivoting out of project management47:48 - How do I change roles in an organization51:50 - What's the next step after cybersecurity project manager?53:43 - How to move from PMing security teams into leading them?59:05 - OutroAbout InfosecInfosec believes knowledge is power when fighting cybercrime. We help IT and security professionals advance their careers with skills development and certifications while empowering all employees with security awareness and privacy training to stay cyber-safe at work and home. It's our mission to equip all organizations and individuals with the know-how and confidence to outsmart cybercrime. Learn more at infosecinstitute.com.

Hey FolksIn this week's podcast, we catch up with Maneesh Dhabria, a Civil Engineer from IIT B who started doing Construction Project Management at ITC and is now a senior product professional at Vedantu.P.S: Vedantu is Hiring. You will not find a better time to be part of EdTech so better hurry and check out their LinkedIn page or reach out to Maneesh directly. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/maneeshdhabria/)If you want us to review your analysis, then do shoot a mail/tweet us!For any feedback or requests, reach us onTwitter: @pm_journeyemail: productmanagement0100@gmail.comwebsite: https://unthinking.org/podcasts/product-management/

Industry 4.0 is a name given to the current trend of automation and data exchange in industrial technologies. It includes the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensors, cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Today on the podcast we discuss Maintenance 4.0 and how it is being implemented and can be implemented across the Pharmaceutical Industry. Our guest today is Tobias Kuners of Koenders (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobiaskunersofkoenders/). Tobias has more than 30 years of experience across multiple facets of operations including Project Management, Facilities Services, Maintenance, Engineering, Validation, Packaging and Supply Chain within highly regulated industries. He is the managing consultant at Tob Management, a Netherlands-based consulting firm providing business and technical expertise to the pharmaceutical, biotech, medical device, and FSMP (food for special medical purpose) industries. Here's what we discuss on this episode: First off, before we get started, just to get to know you a little better...what is the last book you read? Dutch Light: Christiaan Huygens and the Making of Science in Europe https://www.amazon.com/Dutch-Light-Christiaan-Huygens-Science-ebook/dp/B085NWR3QL/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=dutch+light&qid=1621872488&sr=8-1 What is Pharma 4.0 as defined by the ISPE SIG? What is “Maintenance 4.0” and how does it fit into the Pharma 4.0 framework? (Here is one of Tobias' articles: https://www.biosimilardevelopment.com/author/tobias-kuners-of-koenders) We had some lag on this interview so you may notice some "cuts" as I tried to take out as much of the awkward as possible :). The 5 Core Aspects of Maintenance 4.0...Periodic Inspection, Prescriptive Maintenance, Preventative (Routine) Maintenance, Predictive (Reliability) Maintenance, and Corrective/Reactive Maintenance. Where do you see the largest upside from where we are at today to in the future in these 5 core aspects? As the data set available to us continues to grow, it seems overwhelming. How do companies prioritize data for good use rather than get buried by it and resort to either “over PMing” everything or corrective/reactive maintenance? How have you seen this done with one of your clients? Let's talk about existing facilities vs new facilities. It would seem an existing facility transition to Maintenance 4.0 could be very difficult from a “culture” perspective while at a new facility, there is a lack of history to work from developing KPIs and benchmarking. Can you talk to some of the issues an older facility vs a new facility might run into? If you were to speak with a new client, what would be the first thing you would tell them to begin to look at to start the transition towards Maintenance 4.0?

* (0:29) Lura struggles with her own name, but we’re there to help! * (3:39) The flash fiction anthology, Worth 1,000 Words, is still available for purchase. * (7:43) Laura is starting a game for minority and marginalized people. You can contact her to learn more on her TikTok account, email (Laura@FearTheBoot.com), or by PMing her […]

Giff is an Entrepreneur and Product Leader who has sold three companies and helped build many others. In 2014, he published the book Talking to Humans as a practical guide to customer discovery for aspiring entrepreneurs.Get the FREE Product Book here

Product Management professionals seldom set out on that career path, but most fall for the role very quickly. However, there’s really no one set list of responsibilities for the position. What’s the draw? This episode serves as a love letter to product and PMing. As part of our One is the Loneliest Number series, Product Talk host and product exec, Christina Lucey, interviews BetterUp Product Lead, Nick Fassler, on product culture.

Join our growing entrepreneur community on Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/139597470073188/ Got any questions? Ask me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/AleksanderVitkinPage/ Check out my free business training: www.businessmentor.com Do web developers need a degree to get those sweet freelance web development projects? The answer is obvious (explained in the first 30 seconds of the video), but what to do about it to get the results you want as a developer? Check out the podcast and let me know your thoughts by commenting or PMing me.

Ido chats with Ofer Baharav and Oz Wasserman about his upbringing in the north of Israel, PMing in the military, Technion, McKinsey, startup, Facebook and Intuit. He lays out what he loves most about PM'ing, how he works cross functionally especially bringing the voice of the customer back to engineering and design, the importance of culture fit, and what makes him pumped about product management. In the end he gives a taste for a much needed product improvement he has in mind, and ways to get in touch.

Lin is the best selling author of Decode and Conquer, one of the best books to prepare for product management interviews. He has years of experience leading teams at Google and Microsoft, and is currently the CEO of two companies, Impact Interview and People Maven.We hear a lot about how to survive and thrive as a product manager in big companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook etc. However, we know that there are great product managers out there in the consulting and agency world. So, we want to uncover the frameworks, tactics, and traits for product managers to succeed in the consulting and agency setting. In order to do so, we hosted Lewis C. Lin for a conversation on product management based on his most recent book, Be the Greatest Product Manager Ever. We tackled questions like, How does PMing shift in the consulting space? What does success look like for PMs when they have to worry about the needs of not only their team but also a client? Lin helps us to understand the differences by discussing each section of his ESTEEM framework from the lens of a software development consulting firm. To learn more about our process and what we do, check out www.lftechnology.com.

This week, I talk to Rich Mironov, the CEO of Mironov Consulting, and an all-around product guru. Rich has been practicing product management since the 80's. We discussed why a grasp of human psychology is crucial for PMing, and why it's important to understand the difference between features that are for show and those that are actually used.

Because product management is so broad, we typically do episodes about a specific, narrow skill within the role—that allows us to go deep into what we think matters there. But we always knew we wanted to do one generalist book about PMing.Many years ago I (Anna Marie) read the first version of Marty Cagen's book Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love, published in 2008. I learned so much from that book! It shaped how I thought about developing product and the core role of product management.Back when we started the podcast (close to 3 years ago

Chiara is a Product Manager who supports the Workplace team. She joins Pascal and Mihaela on episode 12 to give some clarity on the role of a Product Manager. With a background in graphic design, she tells us about her journey to becoming a Product Manager and the skills and mindset she practices in this role. If you enjoy the business aspect of a project and you're someone who can coordinate understanding a problem and identifying a path to the solution, being a Product Manager will fit you like a glove. Tune in to hear from Chiara herself! Projects discussed Fresco: https://frescolib.org/ Flipper: https://fbflipper.com/ Aroma: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/aroma-ml-for-code-recommendation/ Workplace: https://workplace.com/ Timestamps Intro 00:00 News: Fresco Anniversary 01:13 News: Litho Sections in Flipper 01:57 News: Aroma 02:25 Guest intro 03:28 Chiara 04:29 What does a PM do? 05:06 Becoming a PM 06:02 How is PMing at FB different? 07:16 PM framework 08:19 When does having a PM make sense? 12:06 Resolving conflicts 13:39 Where do ideas come from? 15:17 Working with/on mobile 16:11 Workplace 18:33 Who uses Workplace? 20:59 Ad: The Diff 23:36 Teams within Workplace 24:06 PM at Workplace vs Facebook 26:07 Favourite features 27:14 Bants 29:20 Outro 30:13 Bloopers 33:14  

Kaner & Amby start settling back into the online scene but have started applying their face-to-face Dip ninja skills to online gameplay. Plus their current games and new variants.  Intro The guys introduce the show and reflect the site and podcast album art probably needs to reflect Diplomacy as a whole - online and face to face (0 mins 5 secs) They’re drinking at Finney Isles in Fortitude Valley. They talk about their drinks and settling back in. (1 min) Amby says that family commitments in reflection will prevent him from going to the 2020 WDC in Vermont. Kaner still may go. But neither of the guys can swing Marseilles 2019 (5 mins) Amby brings up his (failed) Montana theory about Kaner’s online handle of kaner406 and talk a little about America (6 mins) Kaner talks about his thoughts on connecting in with local gaming groups and introducing Diplomacy. (10 mins) Amby discusses a little keyword research he’s done about potentially targeting people interested in the game to come along to a social face-to-face game in Brisbane (11 mins 15 secs) Around the grounds Kaner brings up a now completed anonymous game, "Big Guns" that has just wrapped up where he stabbed Amby. The game ended in a draw with both of the guys surprised the draw passed (13 mins 15 secs) They talk about the decision to stab (15 mins 30 secs) Kaner asks Amby about his PlayDip games - they talk about the now completed Versailles game (with fog of war) called “We have a Hulk” where Amby survived to the end which was drawn with Sweden, Poland, France, Czechoslovakia and Egypt (which Amby was playing as) (20 mins 20 secs) Amby’s also in a 1900 game which is potentially heading towards the end game. Its public press only where Amby discusses the importance of learning from face-to-face about the importance of communication. But its not working out as a public press game as half of the players aren’t communicating (24 mins 20 secs) Kaner discusses starting a game with grey press, global posting only, fog of war, written in a Newspaper style and then dropped through multiple translations (27 mins) Amby reminds new listeners that the way a Translation game works is covered in episode 4 of the podcast (29 mins)  Kaner asks about Amby’s anonymous Divided States game and how that’s going (30 mins 40 secs) They talk about a new World War IV Sealanes game that has started and why Amby didn’t join (32 mins 20 secs) After fresh drinks the guys talk hops and possums (37 mins 50 secs) They return to the WWIV game and discuss Kaner’s plan. Amby poses two questions to Kaner around this (42 mins 30 secs) New variants Kaner introduces two new variants to the vDip website, starting with Caucasia... which both he and Amby mistake the name of the variant and get into the usual argy bargy on. Then Professor Kaner gives a Geography lesson (46 mins) Then it’s onto Edwardian (3rd edition.) Kaner bitches about Christmas colors and why can’t Diplomacy maps be like Reader’s Digest maps (50 mins 45 secs) Kaner asks what the difference is in this variant to its earlier iteration. Amby discusses creating a big hitters game for Edwardian III and someone PMing about wanting to join. Kaner explains how moderators can force add people to games (54 mins) Changes at vDip Large amounts of webDip’s code has moved across to vDip. The guys discuss what they like and dislike (58 mins) After discussing some of the changes in ratings breakdown for game types, they talk how Kaner has played more games than Amby and question the math behind total game stats and variant stats  (1 hr 1 mins) Amby discusses how with the changes his ranking seems to have got a bit of a boost. They also talk about removing non-active players from the rankings and Kaner’s chats to Oli about this. They discuss there being zero downside to this change (1 hr 3 mins 40 secs) Amby suggests how can Oli (or other Dip site admins) can reach out by email to non-active players about recent improvements and coming back to the site to play games again (1 hr 8 mins) The guys tease the audience about some prospective interview guests planned for the show (1 hr 11 mins) Amby recalls the Flight of the Conchords episode with their French language song… a MUST LISTEN for anyone going to WDC in Marseilles this year (1 hr 12 mins) The guys wrap up (1 hr 13 mins) Venue: Finney Isles, Brisbane Drinks of choice: Kaner - Windblower IPA Amby - Ochota Barrels Syrah (Shiraz) from the Basket Ranges in South Australia Just a reminder you can support the show by giving it 5 stars on iTunes or Stitcher. And don't forget if you want to help improve the audio equipment... or get the guys more drunk,  you can also donate at Patreon. Lastly, don't forget to subscribe so you get the latest Diplomacy Games episodes straight to your phone! Thanks as always to Dr Dan for his rockin' intro tune. Used it as a segment segue this time around for something different.

EP 50!? My Parents & I Did DNA Heritage Tests - "23 & Me" (Our Results Are Shocking & Spoiler Alert: 1 of us has an Asian Background!*) First off, I can't BELEIVE I have completed 50 EPISODES of the SDL podcast that included 33 diverse / incredible guests ranging from political candidates, movie directors, national geographic photographers, best selling authors, TedX speakers, world travelers, health experts & successful entrepreneurs....and we are JUST getting started! I have 30 episodes already pre-recorded, yet to release with even more incredible guests. Thought it would be awesome to feature this special 50th episode with my most special guest, my incredible parents Was so fun to document this experience to discover each of our DNA and cultural heritage that will be a nice record of our family history. (wait until you see our reactions) Truly wanna thank everyone who has supported this new venture by subscribing, sharing, PMing me about guests to recommend or simply commenting on the posts, it REALLY means a lot and this has been by far the most inspiring and rewarding project I have ever worked on. What would really mean a ton is if you have an iphone please head over to itunes to leave a 5* rating & a short review, if you don't have an iphone can subscribe on spotify and youtube for notifications of new episodes coming soon. Links are at www.selfdevelopedlife.com :) --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/self-developed-life/message

Panel: Charles Max Wood Special Guest: Brady Gaster In this episode, Chuck talks with Brady Gaster about SignalR that is offered through Microsoft. Brady Gaster is a computer software engineer at Microsoft and past employers include Logical Advantage, and Market America, Inc. Check out today’s episode where the two dive deep into SignalR topics. Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:56 – Chuck: Hello! We are going to talk about SignalR, which is an offering through Microsoft. 1:09 – Guest: It started in 2011 that’s when I got involved, but I wasn’t with Microsoft, yet, at that point. I was working on the technology, though. Effectively you can do real time HTMP but what they did (Damon and David) let’s create a series of abstractions but not we have for Java. They basically cam up this idea let’s do web sockets and then go back to pole / pole / pole. It’s to see what the server and the client can support. Guest talks about Socket.io, too. 6:45 – Chuck: What we are talking about real time coordination between apps. 6:56 – Guest: Web sockets, 1 million...and 2.6 million messages a second! 7:05 – Chuck: I can set that up like I usually set up web sockets? 7:17 – Guest: There is a client library for each. Effectively you have a concept called a connection. 9:48 – Chuck: How do you handle authentication on the frontend? 9:56 – Guest: We have server side things that we can attribute things. 10:09 – Chuck. 10:12 – Guest: If you authenticate to the site then the site passes the token and it basically sits on top of the same plumbing. 10:38 – Chuck. 10:42 – Guest. 10:54 – Chuck. 10:58 – Guest: We recently just had the DOT NET CONF. We had an all night, 24-hour thing. 11:48 – Chuck: Here you are, here you go. You hook it all up, JavaScript into your bundle. 12:05 – (The guest talks about how to install.) 13:12 – Chuck: I could come up with my own scheme. 13:25 – Guest: The traditional example is SEND A MESSAGE and then pass you string. Well tomorrow I do that and I just change the code – it’s great b/c I send up a ping and everybody knows what to do what that ping. It’s just a proxy. 14:17 – Chuck: I am trying to envision what you would use this for? If you are worried about it being stale then you refresh. But if you want the collaborative stuff at what point do you ask: Do I need SignalR? 15:00 – Guest: When I do my presentations on SignalR and being transparent I want to send you 1,000 messages but 1 or 2 messages will be dropped. You don’t want to transmit your order data or credit card information. Do you have a hammer and you need a screw?  If you need stock tickers and other applications SignalR would work. Keeping your UI fresh it is a great thing. 19:02 – Chuck: You do that at the Hub? You set up the Hub and it passes everything back and forth. What can you do at the Hub for filtering and/or certain types of events? 19:26 – Guest: I am looking at a slide. What’s the cool thing about SignalR and the API is it’s deceptively simple on purpose. If you want to call out to clients, you can get a message to all of your clients if you select that/those feature(s).  Some other features you have are OTHERS, and Clients.Group. 20:57 – Chuck: Can you set up your own? 20:58 – Guest: I don’t know. 21:12 – Chuck: Clients who belong to more than one group. 21:23 – Guest: Dynamics still give some people heartburn. (The guest talks about C#, Dev, Hub, and more!) 23:46 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 24:23 – Chuck: How do people get started with this? Do they need Azure? 24:30 – Guest: You don’t need Azure you can go to Microsoft and it’s apart of the .NET team, too. 26:39 – Guest talks about how to install SignalR – see links below! 27:03 – Chuck: You don’t have to KNOW .NET. 27:11 – Guest: It was created by that team (*fair enough*) but you don’t have to know .NET. 27:57 – Guest: You can I could do JavaScript all the way. 29:04 – Chuck: Yes, we keep moving forward. It will look different what people are using. 29:21 – Guest: That was an early thing and I was reading through the old bugs from 2011/2012 and that’s one thing that kept coming up. I didn’t want to use jQuery to use SignalR – now you don’t. It’s a happy thing. 30:45 – Guest: Someone suggested using PARCEL. I have a question do you have any recommendations to have NODE-SASS workflow to have it less stressful?  31:30 – Chuck: It’s out of Ruby that’s my experience with Node-Sass. 31:40 – Guest: I haven’t used Ruby, yet. 31:46 – Guest: I haven’t heard of Phoenix what is that? 31:50 – Chuck answers. Chuck: It’s functional and very fast. Once you’ve figured out those features they almost become power features for you. Elixir has a lot of great things going for it. 32:50 – Guest: I tried picking up GO recently. 33:08 – Chuck: Lots of things going on in the programming world. 33:18 – Guest: I have always had a mental block around Java. I was PMing the Java guys and I asked: will this stuff work on... Once I got it then I thought that I needed to explore this stuff more! I want to learn Ruby, though. 34:16 – Chuck: Anything else in respect to SignalR? 34:15 – Guest: I really think I have dumped everything I know about Signal R just now. I would draw people to the DOCS pages. A guide for anything that could happen on the JavaScript side – check them out! We have tons of new ideas, too! 37:33 – Picks! 37:42 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 47:54 – Advertisement – Cache Fly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular C# Chuck’s Twitter SignalR SignalR’s Twitter GitHub SignalR Socket.io Node-SASS ASP.NET SignalR Hubs API Guide – JavaScript Client SignalR.net Real Talk JavaScript Parcel Brady Gaster’s Twitter Brady Gaster’s GitHub Brady Gaster’s LinkedIn Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Cache Fly Picks: Brady Team on General Session Korg SeaHawks Brady’s kids Logictech spot light AirPods Charles Express VPN Hyper Drive J5 ports and SD card readers Podwrench

Panel: Charles Max Wood Special Guest: Brady Gaster In this episode, Chuck talks with Brady Gaster about SignalR that is offered through Microsoft. Brady Gaster is a computer software engineer at Microsoft and past employers include Logical Advantage, and Market America, Inc. Check out today’s episode where the two dive deep into SignalR topics. Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:56 – Chuck: Hello! We are going to talk about SignalR, which is an offering through Microsoft. 1:09 – Guest: It started in 2011 that’s when I got involved, but I wasn’t with Microsoft, yet, at that point. I was working on the technology, though. Effectively you can do real time HTMP but what they did (Damon and David) let’s create a series of abstractions but not we have for Java. They basically cam up this idea let’s do web sockets and then go back to pole / pole / pole. It’s to see what the server and the client can support. Guest talks about Socket.io, too. 6:45 – Chuck: What we are talking about real time coordination between apps. 6:56 – Guest: Web sockets, 1 million...and 2.6 million messages a second! 7:05 – Chuck: I can set that up like I usually set up web sockets? 7:17 – Guest: There is a client library for each. Effectively you have a concept called a connection. 9:48 – Chuck: How do you handle authentication on the frontend? 9:56 – Guest: We have server side things that we can attribute things. 10:09 – Chuck. 10:12 – Guest: If you authenticate to the site then the site passes the token and it basically sits on top of the same plumbing. 10:38 – Chuck. 10:42 – Guest. 10:54 – Chuck. 10:58 – Guest: We recently just had the DOT NET CONF. We had an all night, 24-hour thing. 11:48 – Chuck: Here you are, here you go. You hook it all up, JavaScript into your bundle. 12:05 – (The guest talks about how to install.) 13:12 – Chuck: I could come up with my own scheme. 13:25 – Guest: The traditional example is SEND A MESSAGE and then pass you string. Well tomorrow I do that and I just change the code – it’s great b/c I send up a ping and everybody knows what to do what that ping. It’s just a proxy. 14:17 – Chuck: I am trying to envision what you would use this for? If you are worried about it being stale then you refresh. But if you want the collaborative stuff at what point do you ask: Do I need SignalR? 15:00 – Guest: When I do my presentations on SignalR and being transparent I want to send you 1,000 messages but 1 or 2 messages will be dropped. You don’t want to transmit your order data or credit card information. Do you have a hammer and you need a screw?  If you need stock tickers and other applications SignalR would work. Keeping your UI fresh it is a great thing. 19:02 – Chuck: You do that at the Hub? You set up the Hub and it passes everything back and forth. What can you do at the Hub for filtering and/or certain types of events? 19:26 – Guest: I am looking at a slide. What’s the cool thing about SignalR and the API is it’s deceptively simple on purpose. If you want to call out to clients, you can get a message to all of your clients if you select that/those feature(s).  Some other features you have are OTHERS, and Clients.Group. 20:57 – Chuck: Can you set up your own? 20:58 – Guest: I don’t know. 21:12 – Chuck: Clients who belong to more than one group. 21:23 – Guest: Dynamics still give some people heartburn. (The guest talks about C#, Dev, Hub, and more!) 23:46 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 24:23 – Chuck: How do people get started with this? Do they need Azure? 24:30 – Guest: You don’t need Azure you can go to Microsoft and it’s apart of the .NET team, too. 26:39 – Guest talks about how to install SignalR – see links below! 27:03 – Chuck: You don’t have to KNOW .NET. 27:11 – Guest: It was created by that team (*fair enough*) but you don’t have to know .NET. 27:57 – Guest: You can I could do JavaScript all the way. 29:04 – Chuck: Yes, we keep moving forward. It will look different what people are using. 29:21 – Guest: That was an early thing and I was reading through the old bugs from 2011/2012 and that’s one thing that kept coming up. I didn’t want to use jQuery to use SignalR – now you don’t. It’s a happy thing. 30:45 – Guest: Someone suggested using PARCEL. I have a question do you have any recommendations to have NODE-SASS workflow to have it less stressful?  31:30 – Chuck: It’s out of Ruby that’s my experience with Node-Sass. 31:40 – Guest: I haven’t used Ruby, yet. 31:46 – Guest: I haven’t heard of Phoenix what is that? 31:50 – Chuck answers. Chuck: It’s functional and very fast. Once you’ve figured out those features they almost become power features for you. Elixir has a lot of great things going for it. 32:50 – Guest: I tried picking up GO recently. 33:08 – Chuck: Lots of things going on in the programming world. 33:18 – Guest: I have always had a mental block around Java. I was PMing the Java guys and I asked: will this stuff work on... Once I got it then I thought that I needed to explore this stuff more! I want to learn Ruby, though. 34:16 – Chuck: Anything else in respect to SignalR? 34:15 – Guest: I really think I have dumped everything I know about Signal R just now. I would draw people to the DOCS pages. A guide for anything that could happen on the JavaScript side – check them out! We have tons of new ideas, too! 37:33 – Picks! 37:42 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 47:54 – Advertisement – Cache Fly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular C# Chuck’s Twitter SignalR SignalR’s Twitter GitHub SignalR Socket.io Node-SASS ASP.NET SignalR Hubs API Guide – JavaScript Client SignalR.net Real Talk JavaScript Parcel Brady Gaster’s Twitter Brady Gaster’s GitHub Brady Gaster’s LinkedIn Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Cache Fly Picks: Brady Team on General Session Korg SeaHawks Brady’s kids Logictech spot light AirPods Charles Express VPN Hyper Drive J5 ports and SD card readers Podwrench

Boom, what's going on everyone? It's Steve Larsen, this is Sales Funnel Radio, and today I'm gonna teach you guys how to use the sales letters to go find good interns. I've spent the last four years learning from the most brilliant marketers today, and now I've left my nine to five to take the plunge and build my million dollar business. The real question is, how will I do it without VC funding or debt, completely from scratch? This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me and follow along as I learn, apply, and share marketing strategies to grow my online business using only today's best internet sales funnels.My name is Steve Larsen and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio. What's up, guys? I'm excited for this! Okay, so it's about a week, I don't know, a week and or two ago, we were looking at all the leads coming into our funnel. Right now I've got anywhere from 500 to 1,500 opt-ins every week to see my webinar - that's where we are right now, that's where the numbers are shaking out.What's interesting is the automation of the funnel itself is selling a percentage of those people, but there's a huge percentage of people who don't actually go buy because they have one last question. They need to talk to somebody. And literally, the volume is just something I can't handle. What was interesting is, we found out, we were looking at... I went to BYU Idaho... They're not far away from here, they're like five and a half hours away from here...We just found out that they added a sales program to their majors, right. You can actually go and get an emphasis in sales now, which is awesome, super cool - first undergrad I've ever heard to go do that. So, turns out, they're having their career fair super fast, so we went to work. I opened up FunnelScripts, and I was like okay, a sale is a sale regardless if there's money involved, right? I sell somebody on a movie I wanna to go see. I sell somebody on this is where I wanna go eat. I sell somebody, right? Sales is everywhere. And honestly, if you're not getting what you want in life, it's because you're not a good salesman. It's true! I'm not talking about just for money. I'm talking about anything. It's kind of funny, I went into FunnelScripts and I opened up the short sales letter script and I started filling it out all of the little pieces to sell a student to taking an internship with me. I was like, “Hey, if we're getting 1,500 leads every single week, what can we do to get these people, if they just have one question left, how can we get them to come the rest of the way and actually purchase?" So, what we did was, we went back to college. And we went to this career fair, and I decided, how cool would it be to use some direct response. You know, like the old school direct mail kind of principles, right? I went through and I wrote a sales letter on yellow paper, right? And anyway, this is it. So, I just wanna go through and I'm just gonna read this thing to you guys so you can see how persuasive this was - because the result was amazing. The result was incredible. It was kinda funny at first to stand there. We actually brought this exact same set up that you see here if you guys are on YouTube:We got the big Sales Funnel Radio paparazzi wall and that's what we put up. We got this big banner made.We made these Capitalist Pig T-shirts - that are going to be made available to anybody soon. I'm super excited about it. People are PMing me like crazy. They say 'Capitalist Pig' on the front and its like a piggy bank and there's a dollar sign for the eyes. It says 'Capitalist Pig' and then on the back it says 'Sales Funnel Radio'. It's super cool! Anyway, a lot of people were asking for 'em. So, we figured we might as well make 'em publicly available to all of you soon. It's not gonna be like a thing we have open forever, just gonna open and close kinda stuff just 'cause I'm not really in the T-shirt biz so, kinda when time permits, I'll sell that shirt and then not. Anyway, I'm excited though. And we have an 'It's Monday Baby' shirt coming out soon. Anyway, so we were wearing the Capitalist Pig shirts I should be wearing it now, that'd be kinda cool. We had this setup, we had the high ticket sales banner here the Sales Funnel Radio thing, and the crown jewel of it all, in my opinion, was this script. And what was cool about it is like this thing, I'm selling them to take an interview. I'm selling them to not just do the internship, but I just want them to go take the interview. I'm selling the next step in the process. Get on an interview. So this is what I did... I went into FunnelScripts and literally an hour before it started, I was doing the One Funnel Away challenge stuff which, I know a lotta you guys are in... Anyway, that's over now. That first month, that's over now. I thank you guys so much for being a part of it, really appreciate it. But I was doing that...And about thirty minutes prior to this career fair starting, I opened up Funnel Scripts and I was like, "Hey I'm gonna go and I'm gonna write a sales letter to get somebody to come fill these closer positions." There's a lot of people out there that are already experts at it, but I thought it'd be kinda neat to go take some college students and do that. Which is super cool. Anyway, this is it:"Attention graduating or interning BYUI students, get a paid internship, with on-the-go training which you'll actually use after you graduate." 'Cause like the headline right there, that's it right there. Just like I would in a webinar, right? "Attention audience, attention audience," and then a headline, "Get a paid internship with on-the-job training which you'll actually use after you graduate." Holy smokes, right? What do they want? That's a promise of a paid internship with on-the-job training. And then what's the fear here? "Oh man, I'm not gonna actually use that when I graduate." No, you actually will use this if you graduate. If you know how to sell, you're gonna use that everywhere in your life, the rest of life. And then I wrote it as if it was first person button lingo. For buttons lotta times we'll use first person language. "Yes, give me Secret MLM Hacks. Yes, give me "insert product", whatever." So, I wrote it in that manner. "Yes," in quote marks: "Yes, I'm ready to learn the one skill that makes me more valuable to the marketplace. A real skill that is transferable to any profession I end up in and keep control of my income." What? Thank you, FunnelScripts! "I understand that when I act now I'll become a high-paid sales closer of the Sales Funnel Radio high-ticket closing position and get....," and here's my offer...I wrote an offer for the interns, it's an intern offer:Number one: salary plus commission - We're paying 'em like eight bucks an hour just to keep them moving, right? And then we pay commission. We're the one paying for all the leads... I'm the one serving up all the leads to 'em, so, anyway we give them 10% of whatever they close, at any price point. Right now at the recording of this, I have products anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000, and then $30,000 to $150,000 products. I'll give them 10% of whatever they close, I don't care. So, "salary plus commission." Number two: A choice of part or full time. A choice of your own hours. A chance for full-time hire. A chance to learn on the job. An amazing reward program which we have - which is really cool. "I also understand that when I act now I also get the top converting sales scripts in today's market."  - I'm just gonna write a sales script. I'm gonna use the four question close from Expert Secrets. That's what I'm gonna teach 'em on.   “Pre-qualified leads to set up for you.”"Remote work available" - I'm trying to think if I was a student again, what was super frustrating to me? Working with hours... They're my target market, right? I'm just laughing at this, and the whole reason for this entire episode is because I want you to understand it doesn't matter who you're selling or what you're selling or who you're trying to convince, sales are involved.The concept of offer creation the concept of sales letter writing is something that pays you wherever you go. I don't care what you're selling, or if there's even money involved with it. It will "pay you" whatever you want. Basically, I said they get everything for free instead of the public price of $15,000, which is what it normally would be to the public at like a two or three-day event. I'm gonna teach them one-on-one with a lot of this stuff to make sure that they're awesome closers, right? "To your professional success Stephen Larson - interview for one of the three positions now." Wait, there are three positions? Wait, there's scarcity and urgency... Right, it's the same principles throughout. Anyway, there are a few other things inside here which are pretty awesome. But it's the same principles as you would any kinda sales letter. What I did is I went through and I starting thinking through how I would, so I designed this banner the day before, and funny enough we were able to get it actually printed, which is awesome. But I just want to walk through the banner really quick here. Check this out, so I'm actually gonna unhook the camera. First time in Sales Funnel Radio history! Check this out, so it says:"Sales Funnel Radio. 200K+ downloads." - By the way, that's cool. That just happened. 200,000 downloads of Sales Funnel Radio. Thank you very much by the way. Big ol' picture, why? 'Cause I'm trying to add a little bit of authority in it and most people, they looked at the banner, they looked back at me, look at the banner, look back at me. Like, "That's you!" Like, "Yeah!" I specifically created the marketing to get an intern so that it would offend the right people and attract the right people. It's very key, so many people are apologetic in their marketing. Saying, "High-Ticket Sales" right there, big across the front, "High-Ticket Sales", right there. Guys, it's fascinating how many people that repelled. Good! Good! This thing did most of the work for us. And then I went through and I started lacing out all of the benefits: rOh, "Salary + commission", "part or full-time," "remote work," "reward program," "choose your own hours," "chance of full-time hire", "on the job training," "pre-qualified leads," right? "We just need more closers," right? That's what I say at the bottom there. I said, "Apply here. There are only four positions available." I think on the sales letter it said three, but anyway, I don't really care. I just need scarcity and urgency and need 'em to be hungry. Hunger is the thing I can never teach anybody. So I'm trying to farm out those who are hungry. Then, just like we would with a progress bar on a landing page or an application, I needed to do some kind of a progress bar. So check this out, there's already a sense of fulfillment. I'm trying to give them a dopamine hit because they've already completed step one. Right here, check this out: Step number one, go apply. Step number two, get the script, which I'm going to teach them, it's really simple. Step number three, close the lead. That's it, that's all they gotta do. At the very bottom, I added testimonials to people I've trained in the past. Super cool! "Orlando. What's up, dude? Shout out to you." He said, "My highest gratitude to Steve when I started two weeks ago, I did $30,000 at my first presentation yesterday." It's a true story, super epic. Another one from Angela Florence! "What's up? Shout out to you." Said, "I'm a quiet person, but when I went to Stephen's training I closed over 50% of my leads the first time ever trying." So I went through and I just wanted people to understand this is a real thing. So let me just secure the camera again here. Bam! There we go. What I want people to understand is if you want to do this, it's a script I'm gonna teach you. They're not cold leads, they're coming in and... Anyway, so I'm excited about this and it's been really cool. And as a result in just a few hour period that we were there, we ended up getting, I think, 24 people asking. Two of them were an obvious "Absolutely Not," so we went down to 22. And then we've been following up and closing back and I think we're gonna grab six or seven of them, which is awesome. So what we've been doing to the business now, and this is why this is making Sales Funnel Radio... If I'm looking at the funnel, and I got more leads coming in then I can handle, this is an obvious, easy position to add in the back, people just closing other people, just pulling them on in: "Hey, what's up? Hey, how's it going? Hey, hey, hey, hey." It's an obvious, very, very easy position to go fill. It's commission, and even then, eight bucks an hour. If my course is a $1,000 or $1,500 you only gotta sell one, like, a month to pay for themselves. If they can't sell one a month, I guarantee ya, I'm not keeping them. It's just how it works if they're that bad. It's not like they're cold leads. They're just following up with people who have already opted-in to get the info, right? They're literally answering the last final questions before someone buys. Anyway, so it's very hard for me to not justify doing this. So what we've been doing is we've been going in and setting up the back-end systems. So when somebody comes in and they buy, or when somebody comes in and they're like, "Yeah, I need one or few more, one or two last questions set up before I go buy." We got these back-end systems that are being set up there: We got a phone system, which is awesome. It's tracking all the stuff. We use Zoho, Zoho is the CRM that I like to use, and it's simple, it's awesome, it's powerful. That phone system updates Zoho, the contact in there, with any updates.On the  ClickFunnel side, we have an internal form for the sales agent to fill out when they're on the phone with the person, which gives the sales agent credit and then takes the sale and opens up all the marketing automation for anybody as if they bought straight off of the webinar. So super cool, with very few adjustments. I truly think this is going to double the revenue because we're gonna have people who are actually getting their questions answered. Now the one thing that I know that will kill the sale is if I educate the salesmen too much. They'll start talking their way out of the sale. Literally, talk their way out of the purchase. And so I'm being careful to just teach a script, not the product. The point for any backend sales closer is not to teach the product, it's to get the sale. It's super fun, guys, I'm literally going in and I'm using the four question close. That's right from Expert Secrets, and I will tell you firsthand that's the script that ClickFunnels uses. That's exactly what Russell's high-ticket salesmen use as well. So if you want to see what that is, by the way, you can: Number one, go look at it inside of Expert Secrets, it's toward the back. Number two, go to Affiliate Outrage, and Derek Wilson, the high-ticket closer at ClickFunnels right now - he's the man. He's using that script and if you go to Affiliate Outrage, he did a whole little mini-course for Affiliate Outrage for the community for free, just to show people a little bit more of what he does, and he walks through the script. So that's what we're doing. That's exactly what I've been plugging in and it's been a whole bunch of fun. It's interesting what's happening to the business because of the possible new revenue. So we've been going in and we're creating these new things in the back and in the front to capture more leads, capture more phone numbers, make it so all the systems are talking to each other and it's just full automation and super seamless. It's exciting. It's really fun. So I thought it'd be kinda cool just to share with you what happened and it was honestly on a whim. I went and I slept on a kitchen floor of my brother. He lives over there on campus. Colton went and found an old relation over there as well. Right, an old friend and it was super haphazard. We just showed up and we just did it and it was super fun. And we got a bunch of people asking.I was shocked at the level of talent. Man, when I was in college, not long ago, there were not many people trying to do sales, and it was interesting to see how many people had already, not just wanted it, but there were a few students who knew they wanted it so bad they dropped all their classes and they were just they were just trying to find someone's product to sell. I was like, what the heck. And there's a lot of them. I thought we'd get like two or three rock stars. It was actually the opposite. There was two or three that weren't rock stars and I was shocked about that.So don't be afraid to grab some interns. Don't be afraid to add in a closer system, phone system at the end of your funnels. A lot of times, all you gotta do is change the selling environment, meaning take them off the Internet, close them right there and then.onestly, a lot of times I've seen people do that, they'll double their company. I've seen a lot of inner-circle members do that. Adding in a high-ticket thing or adding in a phone person to close leads. Does that make sense? So anyway, that's all I'm trying to help you guys understand.As far as Sales Funnels go, that's the next place that my funnel is reaching out. The funnel, we're extending it to a phone closer scenario. That's how we found the closers. Those are the script we're using. Those are the systems we're using to plug in back and forth. It's been really epic and super excited about it. So I will keep you updated on how it's going, but we've got to college interns now. How freaking cool is this? So with the content team, with the rest of us all in there, it has the potential to be like 15 people working on this thing now, it's like freaking awesome. Like legit, I should probably wear shoes sometimes.Alright, thanks so much, if you enjoyed this episode, please go share it, please like it, please subscribe if you haven't. It really means a lot to me and it means a lot to the community. Thank you so much again for over 200,000 downloads by the way. I almost get as many downloads a day as I did my very first month of the show. It's humbling for me to see that. It's humbling for me to see how far this has all come. Anyway, the value that it's been able to be to everybody and myself as well and really mean it and very much just want to thank everybody. Thanks so much for all you guys who came to OfferMind as well, that is definitely something I'll do again in the future, so you guys can figure out exactly the sales message and offer that the market is asking you to sell them. That's very key, and I know that will pop out another time. Just make sure you stay tuned and guys.Thanks so much. I'll see ya. Bye. Whoo! Hey, there's more marketing resources than there is sand in the sea, am I right? Okay, maybe not, but there's a lot. How do you know if you're paying for good ones? Recently I went to my business bank statement, and I counted 51 Internet tools and resources that I use to run my business every day and actually keep my team size small. If you want to see the list, I actually filmed an individual video teaching you why I use each tool and the strategy behind it, and then I dropped the link straight to the source right below it. If you want to see the list and see what you can use yourself, go to bestmarketingresources.com. That's bestmarketingresources.com.

Panel: Charles Max Wood Special Guest: Brady Gaster In this episode, Chuck talks with Brady Gaster about SignalR that is offered through Microsoft. Brady Gaster is a computer software engineer at Microsoft and past employers include Logical Advantage, and Market America, Inc. Check out today’s episode where the two dive deep into SignalR topics. Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:56 – Chuck: Hello! We are going to talk about SignalR, which is an offering through Microsoft. 1:09 – Guest: It started in 2011 that’s when I got involved, but I wasn’t with Microsoft, yet, at that point. I was working on the technology, though. Effectively you can do real time HTMP but what they did (Damon and David) let’s create a series of abstractions but not we have for Java. They basically cam up this idea let’s do web sockets and then go back to pole / pole / pole. It’s to see what the server and the client can support. Guest talks about Socket.io, too. 6:45 – Chuck: What we are talking about real time coordination between apps. 6:56 – Guest: Web sockets, 1 million...and 2.6 million messages a second! 7:05 – Chuck: I can set that up like I usually set up web sockets? 7:17 – Guest: There is a client library for each. Effectively you have a concept called a connection. 9:48 – Chuck: How do you handle authentication on the frontend? 9:56 – Guest: We have server side things that we can attribute things. 10:09 – Chuck. 10:12 – Guest: If you authenticate to the site then the site passes the token and it basically sits on top of the same plumbing. 10:38 – Chuck. 10:42 – Guest. 10:54 – Chuck. 10:58 – Guest: We recently just had the DOT NET CONF. We had an all night, 24-hour thing. 11:48 – Chuck: Here you are, here you go. You hook it all up, JavaScript into your bundle. 12:05 – (The guest talks about how to install.) 13:12 – Chuck: I could come up with my own scheme. 13:25 – Guest: The traditional example is SEND A MESSAGE and then pass you string. Well tomorrow I do that and I just change the code – it’s great b/c I send up a ping and everybody knows what to do what that ping. It’s just a proxy. 14:17 – Chuck: I am trying to envision what you would use this for? If you are worried about it being stale then you refresh. But if you want the collaborative stuff at what point do you ask: Do I need SignalR? 15:00 – Guest: When I do my presentations on SignalR and being transparent I want to send you 1,000 messages but 1 or 2 messages will be dropped. You don’t want to transmit your order data or credit card information. Do you have a hammer and you need a screw?  If you need stock tickers and other applications SignalR would work. Keeping your UI fresh it is a great thing. 19:02 – Chuck: You do that at the Hub? You set up the Hub and it passes everything back and forth. What can you do at the Hub for filtering and/or certain types of events? 19:26 – Guest: I am looking at a slide. What’s the cool thing about SignalR and the API is it’s deceptively simple on purpose. If you want to call out to clients, you can get a message to all of your clients if you select that/those feature(s).  Some other features you have are OTHERS, and Clients.Group. 20:57 – Chuck: Can you set up your own? 20:58 – Guest: I don’t know. 21:12 – Chuck: Clients who belong to more than one group. 21:23 – Guest: Dynamics still give some people heartburn. (The guest talks about C#, Dev, Hub, and more!) 23:46 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 24:23 – Chuck: How do people get started with this? Do they need Azure? 24:30 – Guest: You don’t need Azure you can go to Microsoft and it’s apart of the .NET team, too. 26:39 – Guest talks about how to install SignalR – see links below! 27:03 – Chuck: You don’t have to KNOW .NET. 27:11 – Guest: It was created by that team (*fair enough*) but you don’t have to know .NET. 27:57 – Guest: You can I could do JavaScript all the way. 29:04 – Chuck: Yes, we keep moving forward. It will look different what people are using. 29:21 – Guest: That was an early thing and I was reading through the old bugs from 2011/2012 and that’s one thing that kept coming up. I didn’t want to use jQuery to use SignalR – now you don’t. It’s a happy thing. 30:45 – Guest: Someone suggested using PARCEL. I have a question do you have any recommendations to have NODE-SASS workflow to have it less stressful?  31:30 – Chuck: It’s out of Ruby that’s my experience with Node-Sass. 31:40 – Guest: I haven’t used Ruby, yet. 31:46 – Guest: I haven’t heard of Phoenix what is that? 31:50 – Chuck answers. Chuck: It’s functional and very fast. Once you’ve figured out those features they almost become power features for you. Elixir has a lot of great things going for it. 32:50 – Guest: I tried picking up GO recently. 33:08 – Chuck: Lots of things going on in the programming world. 33:18 – Guest: I have always had a mental block around Java. I was PMing the Java guys and I asked: will this stuff work on... Once I got it then I thought that I needed to explore this stuff more! I want to learn Ruby, though. 34:16 – Chuck: Anything else in respect to SignalR? 34:15 – Guest: I really think I have dumped everything I know about Signal R just now. I would draw people to the DOCS pages. A guide for anything that could happen on the JavaScript side – check them out! We have tons of new ideas, too! 37:33 – Picks! 37:42 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 47:54 – Advertisement – Cache Fly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular C# Chuck’s Twitter SignalR SignalR’s Twitter GitHub SignalR Socket.io Node-SASS ASP.NET SignalR Hubs API Guide – JavaScript Client SignalR.net Real Talk JavaScript Parcel Brady Gaster’s Twitter Brady Gaster’s GitHub Brady Gaster’s LinkedIn Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Cache Fly Picks: Brady Team on General Session Korg SeaHawks Brady’s kids Logictech spot light AirPods Charles Express VPN Hyper Drive J5 ports and SD card readers Podwrench

Panel: Charles Max Wood Special Guest: Brady Gaster In this episode, Chuck talks with Brady Gaster about SignalR that is offered through Microsoft. Brady Gaster is a computer software engineer at Microsoft and past employers include Logical Advantage, and Market America, Inc. Check out today’s episode where the two dive deep into SignalR topics. Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:56 – Chuck: Hello! We are going to talk about SignalR, which is an offering through Microsoft. 1:09 – Guest: It started in 2011 that’s when I got involved, but I wasn’t with Microsoft, yet, at that point. I was working on the technology, though. Effectively you can do real time HTMP but what they did (Damon and David) let’s create a series of abstractions but not we have for Java. They basically cam up this idea let’s do web sockets and then go back to pole / pole / pole. It’s to see what the server and the client can support. Guest talks about Socket.io, too. 6:45 – Chuck: What we are talking about real time coordination between apps. 6:56 – Guest: Web sockets, 1 million...and 2.6 million messages a second! 7:05 – Chuck: I can set that up like I usually set up web sockets? 7:17 – Guest: There is a client library for each. Effectively you have a concept called a connection. 9:48 – Chuck: How do you handle authentication on the frontend? 9:56 – Guest: We have server side things that we can attribute things. 10:09 – Chuck. 10:12 – Guest: If you authenticate to the site then the site passes the token and it basically sits on top of the same plumbing. 10:38 – Chuck. 10:42 – Guest. 10:54 – Chuck. 10:58 – Guest: We recently just had the DOT NET CONF. We had an all night, 24-hour thing. 11:48 – Chuck: Here you are, here you go. You hook it all up, JavaScript into your bundle. 12:05 – (The guest talks about how to install.) 13:12 – Chuck: I could come up with my own scheme. 13:25 – Guest: The traditional example is SEND A MESSAGE and then pass you string. Well tomorrow I do that and I just change the code – it’s great b/c I send up a ping and everybody knows what to do what that ping. It’s just a proxy. 14:17 – Chuck: I am trying to envision what you would use this for? If you are worried about it being stale then you refresh. But if you want the collaborative stuff at what point do you ask: Do I need SignalR? 15:00 – Guest: When I do my presentations on SignalR and being transparent I want to send you 1,000 messages but 1 or 2 messages will be dropped. You don’t want to transmit your order data or credit card information. Do you have a hammer and you need a screw?  If you need stock tickers and other applications SignalR would work. Keeping your UI fresh it is a great thing. 19:02 – Chuck: You do that at the Hub? You set up the Hub and it passes everything back and forth. What can you do at the Hub for filtering and/or certain types of events? 19:26 – Guest: I am looking at a slide. What’s the cool thing about SignalR and the API is it’s deceptively simple on purpose. If you want to call out to clients, you can get a message to all of your clients if you select that/those feature(s).  Some other features you have are OTHERS, and Clients.Group. 20:57 – Chuck: Can you set up your own? 20:58 – Guest: I don’t know. 21:12 – Chuck: Clients who belong to more than one group. 21:23 – Guest: Dynamics still give some people heartburn. (The guest talks about C#, Dev, Hub, and more!) 23:46 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 24:23 – Chuck: How do people get started with this? Do they need Azure? 24:30 – Guest: You don’t need Azure you can go to Microsoft and it’s apart of the .NET team, too. 26:39 – Guest talks about how to install SignalR – see links below! 27:03 – Chuck: You don’t have to KNOW .NET. 27:11 – Guest: It was created by that team (*fair enough*) but you don’t have to know .NET. 27:57 – Guest: You can I could do JavaScript all the way. 29:04 – Chuck: Yes, we keep moving forward. It will look different what people are using. 29:21 – Guest: That was an early thing and I was reading through the old bugs from 2011/2012 and that’s one thing that kept coming up. I didn’t want to use jQuery to use SignalR – now you don’t. It’s a happy thing. 30:45 – Guest: Someone suggested using PARCEL. I have a question do you have any recommendations to have NODE-SASS workflow to have it less stressful?  31:30 – Chuck: It’s out of Ruby that’s my experience with Node-Sass. 31:40 – Guest: I haven’t used Ruby, yet. 31:46 – Guest: I haven’t heard of Phoenix what is that? 31:50 – Chuck answers. Chuck: It’s functional and very fast. Once you’ve figured out those features they almost become power features for you. Elixir has a lot of great things going for it. 32:50 – Guest: I tried picking up GO recently. 33:08 – Chuck: Lots of things going on in the programming world. 33:18 – Guest: I have always had a mental block around Java. I was PMing the Java guys and I asked: will this stuff work on... Once I got it then I thought that I needed to explore this stuff more! I want to learn Ruby, though. 34:16 – Chuck: Anything else in respect to SignalR? 34:15 – Guest: I really think I have dumped everything I know about Signal R just now. I would draw people to the DOCS pages. A guide for anything that could happen on the JavaScript side – check them out! We have tons of new ideas, too! 37:33 – Picks! 37:42 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 47:54 – Advertisement – Cache Fly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular C# Chuck’s Twitter SignalR SignalR’s Twitter GitHub SignalR Socket.io Node-SASS ASP.NET SignalR Hubs API Guide – JavaScript Client SignalR.net Real Talk JavaScript Parcel Brady Gaster’s Twitter Brady Gaster’s GitHub Brady Gaster’s LinkedIn Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Cache Fly Picks: Brady Team on General Session Korg SeaHawks Brady’s kids Logictech spot light AirPods Charles Express VPN Hyper Drive J5 ports and SD card readers Podwrench

Panel: Charles Max Wood Special Guest: Brady Gaster In this episode, Chuck talks with Brady Gaster about SignalR that is offered through Microsoft. Brady Gaster is a computer software engineer at Microsoft and past employers include Logical Advantage, and Market America, Inc. Check out today’s episode where the two dive deep into SignalR topics. Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:56 – Chuck: Hello! We are going to talk about SignalR, which is an offering through Microsoft. 1:09 – Guest: It started in 2011 that’s when I got involved, but I wasn’t with Microsoft, yet, at that point. I was working on the technology, though. Effectively you can do real time HTMP but what they did (Damon and David) let’s create a series of abstractions but not we have for Java. They basically cam up this idea let’s do web sockets and then go back to pole / pole / pole. It’s to see what the server and the client can support. Guest talks about Socket.io, too. 6:45 – Chuck: What we are talking about real time coordination between apps. 6:56 – Guest: Web sockets, 1 million...and 2.6 million messages a second! 7:05 – Chuck: I can set that up like I usually set up web sockets? 7:17 – Guest: There is a client library for each. Effectively you have a concept called a connection. 9:48 – Chuck: How do you handle authentication on the frontend? 9:56 – Guest: We have server side things that we can attribute things. 10:09 – Chuck. 10:12 – Guest: If you authenticate to the site then the site passes the token and it basically sits on top of the same plumbing. 10:38 – Chuck. 10:42 – Guest. 10:54 – Chuck. 10:58 – Guest: We recently just had the DOT NET CONF. We had an all night, 24-hour thing. 11:48 – Chuck: Here you are, here you go. You hook it all up, JavaScript into your bundle. 12:05 – (The guest talks about how to install.) 13:12 – Chuck: I could come up with my own scheme. 13:25 – Guest: The traditional example is SEND A MESSAGE and then pass you string. Well tomorrow I do that and I just change the code – it’s great b/c I send up a ping and everybody knows what to do what that ping. It’s just a proxy. 14:17 – Chuck: I am trying to envision what you would use this for? If you are worried about it being stale then you refresh. But if you want the collaborative stuff at what point do you ask: Do I need SignalR? 15:00 – Guest: When I do my presentations on SignalR and being transparent I want to send you 1,000 messages but 1 or 2 messages will be dropped. You don’t want to transmit your order data or credit card information. Do you have a hammer and you need a screw?  If you need stock tickers and other applications SignalR would work. Keeping your UI fresh it is a great thing. 19:02 – Chuck: You do that at the Hub? You set up the Hub and it passes everything back and forth. What can you do at the Hub for filtering and/or certain types of events? 19:26 – Guest: I am looking at a slide. What’s the cool thing about SignalR and the API is it’s deceptively simple on purpose. If you want to call out to clients, you can get a message to all of your clients if you select that/those feature(s).  Some other features you have are OTHERS, and Clients.Group. 20:57 – Chuck: Can you set up your own? 20:58 – Guest: I don’t know. 21:12 – Chuck: Clients who belong to more than one group. 21:23 – Guest: Dynamics still give some people heartburn. (The guest talks about C#, Dev, Hub, and more!) 23:46 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 24:23 – Chuck: How do people get started with this? Do they need Azure? 24:30 – Guest: You don’t need Azure you can go to Microsoft and it’s apart of the .NET team, too. 26:39 – Guest talks about how to install SignalR – see links below! 27:03 – Chuck: You don’t have to KNOW .NET. 27:11 – Guest: It was created by that team (*fair enough*) but you don’t have to know .NET. 27:57 – Guest: You can I could do JavaScript all the way. 29:04 – Chuck: Yes, we keep moving forward. It will look different what people are using. 29:21 – Guest: That was an early thing and I was reading through the old bugs from 2011/2012 and that’s one thing that kept coming up. I didn’t want to use jQuery to use SignalR – now you don’t. It’s a happy thing. 30:45 – Guest: Someone suggested using PARCEL. I have a question do you have any recommendations to have NODE-SASS workflow to have it less stressful?  31:30 – Chuck: It’s out of Ruby that’s my experience with Node-Sass. 31:40 – Guest: I haven’t used Ruby, yet. 31:46 – Guest: I haven’t heard of Phoenix what is that? 31:50 – Chuck answers. Chuck: It’s functional and very fast. Once you’ve figured out those features they almost become power features for you. Elixir has a lot of great things going for it. 32:50 – Guest: I tried picking up GO recently. 33:08 – Chuck: Lots of things going on in the programming world. 33:18 – Guest: I have always had a mental block around Java. I was PMing the Java guys and I asked: will this stuff work on... Once I got it then I thought that I needed to explore this stuff more! I want to learn Ruby, though. 34:16 – Chuck: Anything else in respect to SignalR? 34:15 – Guest: I really think I have dumped everything I know about Signal R just now. I would draw people to the DOCS pages. A guide for anything that could happen on the JavaScript side – check them out! We have tons of new ideas, too! 37:33 – Picks! 37:42 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 47:54 – Advertisement – Cache Fly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular C# Chuck’s Twitter SignalR SignalR’s Twitter GitHub SignalR Socket.io Node-SASS ASP.NET SignalR Hubs API Guide – JavaScript Client SignalR.net Real Talk JavaScript Parcel Brady Gaster’s Twitter Brady Gaster’s GitHub Brady Gaster’s LinkedIn Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Cache Fly Picks: Brady Team on General Session Korg SeaHawks Brady’s kids Logictech spot light AirPods Charles Express VPN J5 ports and SD card readers Podwrench

Panel: Charles Max Wood Special Guest: Brady Gaster In this episode, Chuck talks with Brady Gaster about SignalR that is offered through Microsoft. Brady Gaster is a computer software engineer at Microsoft and past employers include Logical Advantage, and Market America, Inc. Check out today’s episode where the two dive deep into SignalR topics. Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:56 – Chuck: Hello! We are going to talk about SignalR, which is an offering through Microsoft. 1:09 – Guest: It started in 2011 that’s when I got involved, but I wasn’t with Microsoft, yet, at that point. I was working on the technology, though. Effectively you can do real time HTMP but what they did (Damon and David) let’s create a series of abstractions but not we have for Java. They basically cam up this idea let’s do web sockets and then go back to pole / pole / pole. It’s to see what the server and the client can support. Guest talks about Socket.io, too. 6:45 – Chuck: What we are talking about real time coordination between apps. 6:56 – Guest: Web sockets, 1 million...and 2.6 million messages a second! 7:05 – Chuck: I can set that up like I usually set up web sockets? 7:17 – Guest: There is a client library for each. Effectively you have a concept called a connection. 9:48 – Chuck: How do you handle authentication on the frontend? 9:56 – Guest: We have server side things that we can attribute things. 10:09 – Chuck. 10:12 – Guest: If you authenticate to the site then the site passes the token and it basically sits on top of the same plumbing. 10:38 – Chuck. 10:42 – Guest. 10:54 – Chuck. 10:58 – Guest: We recently just had the DOT NET CONF. We had an all night, 24-hour thing. 11:48 – Chuck: Here you are, here you go. You hook it all up, JavaScript into your bundle. 12:05 – (The guest talks about how to install.) 13:12 – Chuck: I could come up with my own scheme. 13:25 – Guest: The traditional example is SEND A MESSAGE and then pass you string. Well tomorrow I do that and I just change the code – it’s great b/c I send up a ping and everybody knows what to do what that ping. It’s just a proxy. 14:17 – Chuck: I am trying to envision what you would use this for? If you are worried about it being stale then you refresh. But if you want the collaborative stuff at what point do you ask: Do I need SignalR? 15:00 – Guest: When I do my presentations on SignalR and being transparent I want to send you 1,000 messages but 1 or 2 messages will be dropped. You don’t want to transmit your order data or credit card information. Do you have a hammer and you need a screw?  If you need stock tickers and other applications SignalR would work. Keeping your UI fresh it is a great thing. 19:02 – Chuck: You do that at the Hub? You set up the Hub and it passes everything back and forth. What can you do at the Hub for filtering and/or certain types of events? 19:26 – Guest: I am looking at a slide. What’s the cool thing about SignalR and the API is it’s deceptively simple on purpose. If you want to call out to clients, you can get a message to all of your clients if you select that/those feature(s).  Some other features you have are OTHERS, and Clients.Group. 20:57 – Chuck: Can you set up your own? 20:58 – Guest: I don’t know. 21:12 – Chuck: Clients who belong to more than one group. 21:23 – Guest: Dynamics still give some people heartburn. (The guest talks about C#, Dev, Hub, and more!) 23:46 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 24:23 – Chuck: How do people get started with this? Do they need Azure? 24:30 – Guest: You don’t need Azure you can go to Microsoft and it’s apart of the .NET team, too. 26:39 – Guest talks about how to install SignalR – see links below! 27:03 – Chuck: You don’t have to KNOW .NET. 27:11 – Guest: It was created by that team (*fair enough*) but you don’t have to know .NET. 27:57 – Guest: You can I could do JavaScript all the way. 29:04 – Chuck: Yes, we keep moving forward. It will look different what people are using. 29:21 – Guest: That was an early thing and I was reading through the old bugs from 2011/2012 and that’s one thing that kept coming up. I didn’t want to use jQuery to use SignalR – now you don’t. It’s a happy thing. 30:45 – Guest: Someone suggested using PARCEL. I have a question do you have any recommendations to have NODE-SASS workflow to have it less stressful?  31:30 – Chuck: It’s out of Ruby that’s my experience with Node-Sass. 31:40 – Guest: I haven’t used Ruby, yet. 31:46 – Guest: I haven’t heard of Phoenix what is that? 31:50 – Chuck answers. Chuck: It’s functional and very fast. Once you’ve figured out those features they almost become power features for you. Elixir has a lot of great things going for it. 32:50 – Guest: I tried picking up GO recently. 33:08 – Chuck: Lots of things going on in the programming world. 33:18 – Guest: I have always had a mental block around Java. I was PMing the Java guys and I asked: will this stuff work on... Once I got it then I thought that I needed to explore this stuff more! I want to learn Ruby, though. 34:16 – Chuck: Anything else in respect to SignalR? 34:15 – Guest: I really think I have dumped everything I know about Signal R just now. I would draw people to the DOCS pages. A guide for anything that could happen on the JavaScript side – check them out! We have tons of new ideas, too! 37:33 – Picks! 37:42 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 47:54 – Advertisement – Cache Fly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular C# Chuck’s Twitter SignalR SignalR’s Twitter GitHub SignalR Socket.io Node-SASS ASP.NET SignalR Hubs API Guide – JavaScript Client SignalR.net Real Talk JavaScript Parcel Brady Gaster’s Twitter Brady Gaster’s GitHub Brady Gaster’s LinkedIn Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Cache Fly Picks: Brady Team on General Session Korg SeaHawks Brady’s kids Logictech spot light AirPods Charles Express VPN J5 ports and SD card readers Podwrench

Panel: Charles Max Wood Special Guest: Brady Gaster In this episode, Chuck talks with Brady Gaster about SignalR that is offered through Microsoft. Brady Gaster is a computer software engineer at Microsoft and past employers include Logical Advantage, and Market America, Inc. Check out today’s episode where the two dive deep into SignalR topics. Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:56 – Chuck: Hello! We are going to talk about SignalR, which is an offering through Microsoft. 1:09 – Guest: It started in 2011 that’s when I got involved, but I wasn’t with Microsoft, yet, at that point. I was working on the technology, though. Effectively you can do real time HTMP but what they did (Damon and David) let’s create a series of abstractions but not we have for Java. They basically cam up this idea let’s do web sockets and then go back to pole / pole / pole. It’s to see what the server and the client can support. Guest talks about Socket.io, too. 6:45 – Chuck: What we are talking about real time coordination between apps. 6:56 – Guest: Web sockets, 1 million...and 2.6 million messages a second! 7:05 – Chuck: I can set that up like I usually set up web sockets? 7:17 – Guest: There is a client library for each. Effectively you have a concept called a connection. 9:48 – Chuck: How do you handle authentication on the frontend? 9:56 – Guest: We have server side things that we can attribute things. 10:09 – Chuck. 10:12 – Guest: If you authenticate to the site then the site passes the token and it basically sits on top of the same plumbing. 10:38 – Chuck. 10:42 – Guest. 10:54 – Chuck. 10:58 – Guest: We recently just had the DOT NET CONF. We had an all night, 24-hour thing. 11:48 – Chuck: Here you are, here you go. You hook it all up, JavaScript into your bundle. 12:05 – (The guest talks about how to install.) 13:12 – Chuck: I could come up with my own scheme. 13:25 – Guest: The traditional example is SEND A MESSAGE and then pass you string. Well tomorrow I do that and I just change the code – it’s great b/c I send up a ping and everybody knows what to do what that ping. It’s just a proxy. 14:17 – Chuck: I am trying to envision what you would use this for? If you are worried about it being stale then you refresh. But if you want the collaborative stuff at what point do you ask: Do I need SignalR? 15:00 – Guest: When I do my presentations on SignalR and being transparent I want to send you 1,000 messages but 1 or 2 messages will be dropped. You don’t want to transmit your order data or credit card information. Do you have a hammer and you need a screw?  If you need stock tickers and other applications SignalR would work. Keeping your UI fresh it is a great thing. 19:02 – Chuck: You do that at the Hub? You set up the Hub and it passes everything back and forth. What can you do at the Hub for filtering and/or certain types of events? 19:26 – Guest: I am looking at a slide. What’s the cool thing about SignalR and the API is it’s deceptively simple on purpose. If you want to call out to clients, you can get a message to all of your clients if you select that/those feature(s).  Some other features you have are OTHERS, and Clients.Group. 20:57 – Chuck: Can you set up your own? 20:58 – Guest: I don’t know. 21:12 – Chuck: Clients who belong to more than one group. 21:23 – Guest: Dynamics still give some people heartburn. (The guest talks about C#, Dev, Hub, and more!) 23:46 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 24:23 – Chuck: How do people get started with this? Do they need Azure? 24:30 – Guest: You don’t need Azure you can go to Microsoft and it’s apart of the .NET team, too. 26:39 – Guest talks about how to install SignalR – see links below! 27:03 – Chuck: You don’t have to KNOW .NET. 27:11 – Guest: It was created by that team (*fair enough*) but you don’t have to know .NET. 27:57 – Guest: You can I could do JavaScript all the way. 29:04 – Chuck: Yes, we keep moving forward. It will look different what people are using. 29:21 – Guest: That was an early thing and I was reading through the old bugs from 2011/2012 and that’s one thing that kept coming up. I didn’t want to use jQuery to use SignalR – now you don’t. It’s a happy thing. 30:45 – Guest: Someone suggested using PARCEL. I have a question do you have any recommendations to have NODE-SASS workflow to have it less stressful?  31:30 – Chuck: It’s out of Ruby that’s my experience with Node-Sass. 31:40 – Guest: I haven’t used Ruby, yet. 31:46 – Guest: I haven’t heard of Phoenix what is that? 31:50 – Chuck answers. Chuck: It’s functional and very fast. Once you’ve figured out those features they almost become power features for you. Elixir has a lot of great things going for it. 32:50 – Guest: I tried picking up GO recently. 33:08 – Chuck: Lots of things going on in the programming world. 33:18 – Guest: I have always had a mental block around Java. I was PMing the Java guys and I asked: will this stuff work on... Once I got it then I thought that I needed to explore this stuff more! I want to learn Ruby, though. 34:16 – Chuck: Anything else in respect to SignalR? 34:15 – Guest: I really think I have dumped everything I know about Signal R just now. I would draw people to the DOCS pages. A guide for anything that could happen on the JavaScript side – check them out! We have tons of new ideas, too! 37:33 – Picks! 37:42 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 47:54 – Advertisement – Cache Fly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular C# Chuck’s Twitter SignalR SignalR’s Twitter GitHub SignalR Socket.io Node-SASS ASP.NET SignalR Hubs API Guide – JavaScript Client SignalR.net Real Talk JavaScript Parcel Brady Gaster’s Twitter Brady Gaster’s GitHub Brady Gaster’s LinkedIn Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Cache Fly Picks: Brady Team on General Session Korg SeaHawks Brady’s kids Logictech spot light AirPods Charles Express VPN J5 ports and SD card readers Podwrench

This week, I talk to Rich Mironov, the CEO of Mironov Consulting, and an all-around product guru. Rich has been practicing product management since the 80’s. We discussed why a grasp of human psychology is crucial for PMing, and why it’s important to understand the difference between features that are for show and those that are actually used.

Savings, budgets, retirement. Oh my. No matter how on top of our lives we feel, talking about money still makes us squirm. And…well, we’re tired of it. Today on NYG, we talk about where those financial fears come from—and what we’re doing to get over them. To help us out, we chat with Shannah Compton Game, a Certified Financial Planner and the host of the Millennial Money podcast. Shannah’s all about helping people like us get more comfortable thinking and talking about money, and she’s quickly become one of our fave resources for financial info. > When you don’t talk about something, you feel really isolated, and you feel like you are alone. Like nobody could possibly have the same money issues you have. But the reality that I try to tell everybody is: you’re so wrong! We are all so much alike when it comes to money, especially the things that we’ve not done so well. > —Shannah Compton Game, host, Millennial Money Shannah tells us all about: Why money is such a taboo topic (but shouldn’t be) Which financial advice to take, and which to ignore Why we all hate the B word (budget, ugh) Why it’s totally not too late to get your finances in better shape Also in this episode: Sara celebrates her presidential birthday Katel survives on pizza by the slice Jenn gets deep into the meal prep lifestyle Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you.   Harvest, makers of awesome software to help you track your time, manage your projects, and get paid. Try it free, then use code NOYOUGO to get 50% off your first paid month. Transcript Jenn Lukas [Ad spot] This episode of No, You Go is made possible with help from our friends at Shopify. Their mission is to make commerce better for everyone—and they’re growing their world class team to make that happen. And you know what? They’ve read plenty of cover letters over the years. So this time they want you to read theirs. Because they don’t just want you to apply to them, they want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re all about [music fades in, plays alone for 12 seconds, fades out]. Welcome to No, You Go, the show about ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû. Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and this episode is going to come out the day after my birthday [someone says, “woo hoo!]”. Mm hmm. And it’s a very special birthday. I will be turning [clears throat] 35. KL Woo! SWB Which means I could be president. KL Yes! JL Nice! SWB Definitely can’t be president. KL No, you definitely should be [chuckles]. SWB Oof. I don’t know. Looks like a terrible job [laughter]. I’m not real pleased about how it’s going right now, and probably I’ve got too many skeletons in the closet [laughter]. However, the other thing they always say when you turn 35 is that, according to the financial quote/unquote “rules,” I am supposed to have two times my annual salary saved right now… Two times! My annual salary. Yeah. So I—I don’t have that. And I will say, like, I’m—I’m pretty organized. I’ve saved a lot for retirement, particularly starting when I was about 29, but I haven’t caught up to that mark yet, and I get a little stressed out whenever I think about it. So to help us with some of that stress, we are talking today with somebody who knows a lot about money: how to save it, how to budget, and how to even think about maybe retiring someday. That would be Shannah Compton Game. She is a Certified Financial Planner and the host of the Millennial Money podcast. Don’t worry, it’s not just for millennials. JL I’ve been listening to her podcast over the last few weeks and it’s been really awesome because actually about over the last month, month and a half, I gotta tell you: I’ve been taking a—a journey into money. SWB Uhhhh what kinda journey? [2:24] JL Well, every year around tax time, I get really anxious and I start going, “Hmm. Oh no I should’ve sent all this to my CPA awhile ago,” and then I look at the list of things I have and I go, “I was supposed to do this thing last year. Oh! I was supposed to do this thing the year before.” And I have this really organized list in Wunderlist about all the uh—it’s called my Adult List and [chuckles] it’s got all the things I’m supposed to do like [inhales deeply] allocating and diversifying my assets, giving things to Cooper’s future college fund, I’ve got this whole list of things I’m supposed to do and have I done them?… [Sucks teeth] No. Do I look at that list?… No [laughs]. KL And then you realize a year has passed. JL Yes! SWB And then like three years has passed. KL Yeah. JL Mm hmm! Where does that go? And then, you know, like other people, I start to think about it and again the anxiety starts to build up and I’m like, “No, thanks.” But then I started thinking like, “Ugh! I really—I just like really—I have to start learning about money.” Like, I have to. I can’t keep pushing this off. And, you know, it’s a mix of like looking at the taxes, thinking about my son, and just being like, “What am I doing?” And so my CPA had recommended the book Get a Financial Life and I found it on Audible [chuckles] because that’s my jam now. And I was like, “You know what? Maybe I’ll try giving this a shot because I can’t—” I’ve tried reading through other money—finance books before and though I can like really get down with like other books, the finance books just like I start glossing over, and I was like, “But maybe if I listen on Audible, I’ll like get into it.” So I did! And it’s abridged so it was only like two hours, which again was perfect because it was so short and listening to it at like 2X speed means it’s like over in an hour [laughter] and it’s like really basic but like just gave a lot of good overviews, and then I was like, “What other Audible books are out there?” And then I started getting a little wild. So I’ve been like reading slash listening to all these books, and reading these magazines, reading these blogs, listening to these podcasts, and I know so much more than I knew six weeks ago. SWB Do you feel more confident with what you should be doing now? JL I do! It’s awesome. So I’m now actually in the search for a financial planner. And that’s the other thing like I—I wanted to get some time with a financial planner but I didn’t wanna use my time at someone’s hourly rate to be explaining to me like what the difference between stocks and bonds are. You know like because that felt like a waste of money of something I could learn myself. So I felt like I should take some time, learn about real basic stuff, and then pay a professional to help me with like the real specifics to me, and not just like, “Here’s things about money.” [4:56] KL Yeah I like that and that sounds so… practical. And I think like something that we all really liked hearing from Shannah is that you kind of don’t [sighs] sometimes the first thing you think about isn’t the fact that you have to take into account your own personal goals and sort of like how your life is shaking out, and like whether you’re having kids or not, or like if you have a partner, or your business, or like all these variables that are… like you’re not like every other textbook case of, you know, what you should do with your money. So, I don’t know, it’s just I—I think that was like so important for—for me to hear, especially, just cuz it’s like you don’t know. If I wanna retire when I’m 60, that’s totally different than if you’re like, “Ok, I actually might work a lot longer than that.” And we’re all living a lot longer. So I think, I don’t know, just like taking into account all those things and realizing that there is a lot of research you can do on your own before you start talking to a professional. JL Right. Yeah and there’s so many—I mean that’s the thing like it—you can gather all these opinions and then you just have to factor them for you and what you wanna do. I mean there’s people now that are trying to retire at 25, and then there’s people that wanna work, you know, until the day they die. And I—or and obviously everything in between. So, I think it’s so important to like really think about what you wanna do and then start setting those goals for you. And there’s so many resources out there now. That’s the thing and it’s really intimidating to get started but I think like you just have to do it, and we’ve heard this before, right? Just like with starting businesses and starting projects, it’s one step at a time. You know? So if it’s even just like, “I’m gonna look up one term today.” Or, you know, “I’m gonna read one article or listen to one podcast.” Then like you’ve done more and learned more than you knew yesterday. SWB And for me it’s also been like I mean I need to do some things, right? So… it’s like ok I need to check some stuff off the list. So actually I go to the same accountant as Jenn and… he has also given me certain recommendations, right? So thinks like, “You and your husband should have wills at some point.” And things like that. And we’ve done some of them and some of them I haven’t gotten around to yet. But on my list for this year—and this is like the kind of thing that goes on like a year to-do list, because it’s such a pain in the ass—is like, I need to move some accounts to consolidate at a financial institution where I can manage them more effectively, and deal with some of my long-term like retirement planning. And just I know that the process of moving those accounts is going to be a bit painful and so I’m kind of setting myself, I’m saying like, that is a task I need to set aside some time for. You know there will be like paper forms, somebody might make me fax something. God knows that’s gonna take me a week [Katel laughs]. I know you can fax online. It will still take me a week. But, you know, this is achievable, but it doesn’t feel achievable sometimes in the moment, and I try to remind myself that like, look, it is very normal to feel this way. I happen to be in a lucky position where I like—I have money I can theoretically be saving. I know that not everybody does. Like, I’m doing fine. Give myself some, you know, break the tasks down. Just like anything that’s big. Break it down a little bit. And set some time frames that are realistic and allow myself to feel good about getting some of the things done and not so upset about the things I didn’t get to. [8:18] JL Yeah. I mean you know when you get that like new IKEA cabinet and it comes with like 20,000 pieces and you just look at it and you’re like, “Fuck my life.” [Katel laughs and says, “Yeah”] That’s like sort of looking at like your money to-do list and you’re like, “Oh my god I have to roll over a 401K. Ughhhhhh!” I mean how many of us have 401Ks that are like sitting somewhere and you’re like, “I don’t know what it’s doing?” From like a previous job. KL Yeah. You’re like, “It’s there. I think.” SWB I told you I started saving for retirement when I was 29. Do you know what I did when I was 29? That’s when I started working for myself. I literally never took advantage of an employer 401K while I had a traditional job. KL Yeah! SWB Whoops! KL But it’s more complicated than just being like, “Oh. This thing is available.” SWB I know. And I also really felt like I needed that money at that point in my life. KL Absolutely. JL Totally. And I mean that’s the like—the other thing that’s really like important and—and we’ll talk about this a little later on is that like, it’s ok. You can start saving now. And for me that was like so important because like the anxiety of like, “Ok well, you know what? I didn’t start investing when I was 18. So, you know, what now?” And the thing is but I’m doing it now. And that’s the other thing that I feel like stopped me from learning more. It’s like then I just start feeling bad. I’m like, “Oh I’ve got this like sitting in a money market account and it’s not like diversified enough. Like inflation is basically eating away my savings.” And now I’m like, “You know what? I can start now.” And—and that’s the thing it’s always like, you just need to start when you’re gonna start. And if it’s not tomorrow that’s ok too. If it’s next month, that’s ok. But like giving yourself that slack and being like, “I’m gonna do it.” So like I’m now moving all—like—like I have like two 401Ks that I need to move over from previous jobs and I’m like finally getting it done. And it’s a pain in the ass, I’m not gonna lie. But it’s also not as hard as I thought it was gonna be. So it’s like a combo. [10:01] SWB Some of this stuff I feel like the hardest part is that like mental blocker about it because it’s about something that makes you feel a little anxious. I mean I have, you know, like I know that in my family… my mom really started getting her retirement stuff together in her forties because she didn’t really make much money till then, till she became a professor, and before that, you know, we were pretty poor. She was extremely frugal, but there’s just not that much money, so there’s not that much money. And so I look at that stuff and it makes me stressed, and then it makes me both like wanna put a lot of money away but also like… not wanna deal with it. Like deal with it sort of like emotionally and—and I feel like I’ve gotten over a ton of that and I feel like getting over that has been super helpful for me to make some better plans around retirement and around—around just sort of like having my financial shit together in general, to the point where, look: I may be turning 35 and not exactly have two times my salary set aside, but I actually feel really fucking good about where I am financially right now as well as like kind of that I—I do have my shit together. Not everything but like no, I’ve made a lot of steps, and they’re good steps, and they were like tough to get to and now I fucking did it, and I can do future stuff. KL Yeah. I think that’s the thing like… that is a universal thing. It’s complicated. It can feel really raw and emotional which I think maybe sometimes I—I know a lot of the times I’m not expecting and I think to just like realize that and know that there are ways to get through it is super helpful. And I really loved hearing from Shannah because it made me feel like where I am is right for where I’m supposed to be right now, and that’s ok, and there are a lot of different things I can do to move forward. So, I don’t know, it was really good to hear from her [music fades in]. Sponsors SWB [Ad spot] Hey, everyone! Sara here to tell you a little bit about the people who are making No, You Go possible this week [music fades out]. First up is Harvest. Harvest makes awesome, easy to use software to help you track your time, manage your projects, and get paid. Seriously, I have actually been a Harvest customer since my very first day as a consultant back in 2011. I love how easy it is to create invoices, add expenses, and tie them back to my projects. Whether you’re a freelancer who just needs to get paid or an agency with complex workflows and lots of people, Harvest has you covered. Try it free for 30 days at getharvest.com and when you sign up with code No, You Go, you’ll also get 50% off your first paid month. That’s getharvest.com, offer code No, You Go. And we’re also proud to be supported by WordPress. Do you need to make a website to post your Riverdale fanfiction? Or promote your awesome new wine bar? Or, well, do basically anything else? Then you need WordPress. We trust WordPress to keep our site running smoothly, and to make it easy to customize, update, and share with the world. And we’re not alone. Nearly 30% of all websites run on WordPress. Maybe yours should too! Plans start at just four dollars a month. So start building your website today. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo for 15% off any new plan purchase. That’s 15% your brand-new website at wordpress.com/noyougo [music fades in, plays alone for six seconds, fades out]. [13:21] Interview: Shannah Compton Game SWB Shannah Compton Game is a Certified Financial Planner, and she’s the host of the Millennial Money podcast, where she dishes “life-changing money and lifestyle tips to jumpstart your finances, ignite your savings, and empower you to reach all your awesome goals,” which sounds pretty good to us. We are super excited to have Shannah on the show today because we know we have money questions, and we are dead certain that some of you have money questions, too. So why don’t we get into it? Welcome to No, You Go, Shannah. Shannah Compton Game Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited. I—I love talking about money, obviously [laughs]. SWB Yeah so speaking of that, ok you run a podcast about money, you’re a Certified Financial Planner, what does your day to day look like? Like obviously you talk about money all day. How does that break down? What’s the mix of things that you typically do? SCG Yeah, you know, I have a really interesting background, kind of a mix of both creative skills with sort of, you know, these money and business expertise skills and so a couple of years ago when I started my podcast I just thought, “You know I want to create a company and a brand that creates products that really help, you know, everyday people understand how to not only grow their money but—but how to deal with this money stuff in like a really relatable and dare I say, interesting and fun way.” So that was sort of the reason that I started the podcast. So every day for me looks completely different. Some days I’m writing a bunch of articles or I’m working on my first book right now. So there’s a lot of writing there. Other days are podcasting, other days are interviews. I also do a lot of teaching and I have—I host a lot of kind of like interesting dinner parties where we talk about money. So really every day I wake up it’s so completely different [laughs]. JL Oh! What are those dinner parties?!? SCG Yeah so it’s my version of talking about money. I’m sort of the anti, like, conference room person. So I get a bunch of people together, people who don’t know each other, and we have a chef come cook us an amazing meal, and we sit around and we talk about money, and we talk about life, and we talk about business, and all sorts of things, and so, you know, you walk outta there with like 20 new friends, and hopefully that you’ve been inspired to, you know, go do things a little bit differently. SWB So, that sounds really cool and this also sounds like a really interesting mix of things. Was there a moment when you realized like—I assume, you know, you were working with clients doing typical financial planner stuff when you realized that there was something else that you wanted to do. Like how did that happen? [16:00] SCG My dad had been in the financial industry for about 40 years and I started working with him and we worked with really high-net-worth clients, people who had a lot of cash, and it was great because it was really like a crash course to learning all of these things about money and then I got my—my Certified Financial Planner designation, and I thought, “Ok I’m gonna have, you know, my own planning practice.” Which I did for—for quite a few years. And then I just decided, you know what? I really like the creative side of money and I feel like we don’t have a lot of modern-day people talking to us about money. You know, there’s Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey—those are kind of the most popular names. But they’re a little old school I think in their thinking, and so I would just kind of tap into that like crazy entrepreneurial spirit and I’m like, “Ok well why not try to create something different? And something new and fresh?” But it hasn’t—it certainly hasn’t been easy but working with the clients for about 12 years really gave me an understanding of a lot of the similarities between people and then, you know, learning some of those like really tricky techniques as well. SWB Yeah, so, you mentioned a little bit that you felt like there were a lot of people who were kind of old-school doing financial planner work, or sort of being financial planning, I don’t know, “personalities” out there. What do you think is sort of the difference between what you would describe as sort of this old-fashioned take and the way that you approach it? SCG Look: I think we’re just in a really different climate. I mean there a lot of people, especially a lot of younger people, that are becoming entrepreneurs because they kind of have to, you know? The job market just isn’t what it used to be and people wanna create something. And there’s also a lot of debt, a lot of people still have student loan debt, a lot of people, you know, are having to plunk down a lot of money to buy a house. So I think there’s just a lot of really unique dynamics happening that just call for kind of a different approach. And I honestly feel with—I don’t know how you feel, but—with social media and, you know, Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and we’re always in other people’s lives… like the kind of pressure right now to compete with people financially even when you don’t have that money. I feel like there’s never been a time like now. SWB That’s really interesting that you mention that sort of sense of like it being—it seeming at least like all these people have all these fabulous things and are doing all of this amazing stuff in their life, and it does—it does create that sense of, like, you see people’s highlight reel on Instagram and you think that that’s how they’re living day to day, and like what you’re not seeing is, you know, the like sad peanut butter sandwich they’re having [chuckling] because there’s nothing else in their fridge right now, you know? SCG Yeah, it’s so true! I mean I even struggle with it myself where I’ll—I’ll get in this mode where I’m like, ok. This is like really silly. You have your own talents, your own skills. Like you don’t need to be, you know, comparing yourself. But it’s just—it’s so easy to do, you know? And like you said like we’re showcasing obviously usually like the flashy version of what we’re doing in life and not the realities which are, you know, tough. [18:59] SWB Yeah, so, it seems a little bit like the—the brand that you have, the podcast that you have, like the way that you talk about money, and sort of just the way you sort of position yourself feels… maybe a little bit more targeted to women, and I’m curious if that was something that you were doing intentionally or if that’s just sort of like my interpretation! SCG It wasn’t certainly intentional but I do feel, you know, that women—look: we are in a tough spot financially whether you know it or not. You know, women live longer than men. We start and stop our career. We just have a lot of issues that require us I think to think differently about money and then, you know, I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole entire career, so that’s really where a lot of my heart is in helping women—not only inspire them but also help them, you know, in the practical side of money because we just don’t learn this stuff anywhere. SWB Yeah, you know I was I thinking a little bit before this interview about the way that financial services I think have historically been pretty targeted at men and sort of advertised in a way that was targeted towards men and yet, you know, we’ve seen society really change around like a lot of women are breadwinners in their families and, you know, more likely to graduate from college. Like there’s a whole lot of—of shift happening in the role of women in the world and it’s like, you know, looking at the financial industry as sort of needing to catch up to that. So it’s cool to see people kind of like taking that seriously and looking at those issues more often facing women, you know, directly. SCG Yeah, absolutely, and I think particularly in the professional financial industry of—there are only about 70 some odd thousand Certified Financial Planners, which is kind of the highest echelon of—of financial planning designation you can get here in the US, and of that 70,000, only about 22% are women and it—that number is not increasing at all. Like it’s been stagnant at that number, and what I find working with a lot of of women, and particularly women entrepreneurs, is they don’t necessarily wanna like have a, you know, 60-year-old dude sitting across from them, lecturing them about their money, or taking time off to care for their newborn, or whatever it may be. You know, they want somebody that they feel they can relate to. And so it’s been a real interesting sort of sweet spot as well, you know, being a woman and—and having that expertise. SWB Oh my god, totally. As an entrepreneurial woman I can definitely say that I do not look forward to situations where I have to sit across a desk from a 60-year-old man who’s gonna tell me what to do with my life. Um [laughs]. SCG You and me both! SWB [Laughs] Ok so… thinking just a little bit more about your podcast and the writing that you do and this book that you’re working on, which I’m super excited to hear more about, does that all still feed back into doing financial planning for clients? Or is your career sort of like moved more into that… lots and lots of education and hosting dinner parties space, and you’re not doing as much of the like—of the one-on-one anymore? [22:00] SCG Yeah, exactly. The one-on-one is fantastic, I just have always felt pulled in this direction and, you know, it took me a few years of fighting against that pull to go, “Ok, ok. I [laughs] I give in,” you know? And so this is really where I feel my expertise lies. You know, I have an ability to connect with people I think and, you know, it works really well in this space, and, you know, I have sort of a separate brand where I work with female entrepreneurs, but kind of in a more business, money-centric approach, which is what I love. So, yeah, I mean for me, you know, I—I thought that if I was gonna be a CFP, I had to have a planning career and that was just the end of it. And it just felt, honestly, a little bit too boring for me. JL I mean it’s interesting you have this whole podcast about the subject of money, but a lot of people avoid talking about money. So what allowed you to overcome that stigma? SCG Honestly when I launched the podcast I thought, “Who in the world is gonna listen to a podcast of me just kind of like babbling on about money?” [Laughter] But what I have found is that, you know, like money revolves around every aspect of our lives: our relationships, our careers, our vacations, you know, everything that we do. And I—I think that, you know, for most people there’s a lot of like stress and fear around money and so I just approach it and the way I sort of approach everything is, you know, if we can sort of break you free from some of those stressors around money and like get you in a position where you can think about it differently and you can really understand that you can create the lifestyle that you wanna live. Like you have the tools right now in your bank account to do that, whether you know it or not, that, you know, that felt like a spot that was really comfortable for me because I’ve had my own kind of crazy money journey myself, and so, you know, I just wanted to be honest on the podcast. I wanted to share my own struggles, I wanted to share struggles that, you know, I’ve seen other people go through and how they’ve overcome those. And, you know, we just little by little, like sort of a grassroots movement, the podcast just has grown and grown and grown. JL Was it easy for you to start talking about it right away? Were you just like, you know what? I’m gonna be open and honest about this. SCG Not at all! It’s hard when you’re supposed to be the quote/unquote “expert”. You know? To admit like, “Oh, hey, when I came out of college, I had credit card debt,” and, you know, I’m very honest on my podcast. I went through a divorce in my really early thirties that was financially devastating for me, and I basically had to give up every asset that I owned in order to not have to pay my—my ex-spouse for 10-plus years. And take on debt. And that was a really hard position to be in, because I felt completely demoralized like, “Who am I to give advice to someone?” But I think I’m—I’m grateful for that because what I learned was I had these tools and these skills and I had the know how to pick myself back up and if I could instill those into other people, especially other women, to help them know that no matter what they go through in life, you know, they can get up, dust themselves off, and restart again, then maybe that was kind of the best thing that ever happened to me. [25:16] JL I think we try so hard to—to be perfect all the time. SCG Yes. JL And we try to like—and if we’re not, to definitely hide that. So I, like, I’m trying to think about the leap from like, “Ok. I’m gonna do it. I’m now gonna like admit to everyone that I’m not perfect.” SCG That’s a really tough space and I think honestly like you have to get there. First. You know like that to me is the starting point for change in anything that you—that you wanna, you know, achieve in life. And for me that was just the spot of—of being able to say to other people like, “Ok, I’m human. You know I’ve had stuff happen to me, and I’ve made mistakes, and I still sometimes spend too much on vacations, and, you know, all—all those sorts of things,” and I think for me it was, you know, speaking the reality of life and that’s what I try to get every guest on the podcast to do too that… through doing that people would figure that they’re—we’re all more alike than we’re different, particularly when it comes to our money. And that you just—perfect is totally unattainable when you’re thinking about your finances. So don’t even try to put yourself there. SWB I really love this and I’m so thankful to hear you kind of talk about about your own story and sort of saying like, “Look: I’ve been there. I’ve screwed it up. I’ve been in a bad place, and I worked myself out of it, and, you know, and other people can too.” I’m curious like… how did you work your way out of it? Like how did you go from that place of sort of having to kind of start over financially to feeling like you had it more together again? SCG The best advice I could give is just, I took it step by step by step. So if I looked at the entirety of the situation—like how much I was in debt, and how much I had to pay my ex-spouse, you know, all of the things that I had given up—like if I looked at in the entirety, I had, you know, those like panic, freak-out modes. And so I had to just break things down by little pieces. Like, “Ok. I’ve got this debt. Ok. I know how to attack debt, right? There’s two ways to attack debt, I’m gonna pick one of them and I’m gonna for it,” you know? So I started moving in that direction. And then I also know like, “Ok. I have all these skills, I have these talents. None of that was taken away from me. How do I turn that now and start having that be more revenue-producing for me than it was before?” So for me it was just literally about writing out goals, staying really focused, and, you know, trying to put these little steps together to get yourself to a place where you feel like, “Ok. I’m actually achieving things and it’s going in the right direction.” But it’s tough. It’s hard, especially when you’re in a tough emotional situation like that. But I think really being focused, and really seeing it like, “Ok, it might not be good financially but it is a clean slate to work from, so lemme just figure out how to, you know, start attacking some of this.” [28:07] SWB I love this idea that like you might feel like everything’s been taken away from you because you—you lost, you know, a lot of things financially, or people can feel like that if they lose a job, but like, nobody took away your talents. And like it’s a really good reminder that you’re still you, and you still have all of that. SCG Yeah! It’s really easy to feel down, to feel depressed, to have that anxiety, and I—I’ve certainly been there but, you know, yeah I mean that really for me was like the biggest realization. Like, “Ok. I had to give up all this stuff but I—yeah, I’m still me. I still have all of these talents and I can make these talents better and that’s something nobody can take away from me.” JL There’s so many topics in here that I think so many people would be afraid to talk about. And, I wanna ask you, Shannah, why do you think people are so afraid to talk about money? SCG I think it’s just this taboo topic and so because of that people just don’t talk about it. So when you don’t talk about something, you feel really isolated, and you feel like you are alone. Like nobody could possibly have the same money issues you have. But the reality that I try to tell everybody is: you’re so wrong! Like we—we are all so much alike when it comes to money, especially the things that we’ve not done so well. JL Right. How do you suggest people like start opening up about this to—to their friends or, you know, to others? Like when—when is the appropriate time to start talking about money? SCG Well, I think, you know, with friends you have to make sure you’re in good company. It’s really easy, I think, for other people to judge you, especially if you’ve never broached this topic. But I’m just a big believer, especially if it’s something where you feel really pent up about, like start talking to people in just a casual way. I mean you don’t to share everything, you know, that you feel like maybe has been a money mishap in your life, but start maybe having some conversations and see if that releases some of that pressure. JL You know how appropriate is it to talk about money with your coworkers? SCG You know that’s so interesting like the statistics are showing that people, especially people in their like twenties, are really, really open to talking about money at work with coworkers. It’s not a subject that I would probably talk about, you know, if I had coworkers. But, you know, I think again you just have to feel it out. You have to feel out like your comfort level and then you have to feel out, you know, the person that you’re talking to. Like is this person gonna be open or receptive to whatever I’m saying or any advice that, you know, I’m asking for? So it’s kind of like knowing your audience first is—is pretty key in that—that situation but the workplace is a little tricky, I think. [30:40] SWB I think that that’s one of those issues that’s coming up over and over recently because of so many conversations about like pay equity where, you know, particularly women and I’ve heard this from people of color and the you know like probably most of all I’ve heard this from women of color saying like, “You know we know we’re not achieving pay equity and if we don’t talk about what other people are making, then we don’t have any context and that sort of like keeps us more powerless in our workplaces.” And so I think that’s where at least some of that shift is coming from is from people who feel like they’ve been kind of like missing some context and wanting to go seek that out. I know I personally I mean I don’t—I don’t work in a company where I have coworkers, so I don’t get to talk to them about money, but I talk to people who are my peers all the time about the offers that they’re getting for jobs or like, well, you know, like, “Oh, well, I know somebody who was offered a position in a company that I think was similar and they were offered somewhere like this,” and, you know, “I’ve seen some other positions that were in this range.” And just trying to like give people more of that context so that they don’t feel so in the dark. SCG I think that’s a really good point, too, and I—I think that, you know, you—you said it maybe a little bit more eloquently than I did, but it’s also like I said, knowing your audience. So, yeah, I mean obviously for women like the pay equity thing is—is a huge—you know I’m not sure quite sure how we solve that issue but um—other than we just pay women what they actually deserve [chuckles] but I definitely do that as an entrepreneur, I’ll ask other people like, “Hey, what did you get for this contract or this client hired you, what did they pay you?” And some people are willing to open up about it and some aren’t and that’s ok. JL For me I know like Sara and I we’ve had conversations about money but, you know, those certainly didn’t happen the first time that we ever met. Um [laughter] that was definitely after many a happy hour [laughter], where you know, I felt that someone that I was like really confident in like both friend and—and working like that, you know, we could have these conversations and keep it between us and so I found it really important to find someone that I could sort of trust. Trust is such a huge part of these money conversations. SCG Yeah. For sure. Such a big part! JL So, you know, money can be very intimidating. The other day someone in like a work Slack channel said, “Every time I think about wanting to get better about it, I get too confused and I walk away.” [Laughter] I think a lot of us can relate to that. How do you suggest people get, you know, quote/unquote “better” about their money? [33:03] SCG I think that that’s what happens with a lot of people. You know I preach a lot about probably people are sick of hearing this but I preach a lot about a concept I call “Knowing Your Numbers.” So if you hate the word budgeting, I’m right there with you, I’m not a big fan of the word budget. But um, you know, the concept of knowing what cash is going out of your bank account, and where that’s going to, it gives you a lot of empowerment over your finances. And I think starting places like there where, you know, you can really have this awareness of what’s going on with your money puts you in this place of power, it puts you in the driver’s seat when it comes to your finances, and it helps you to make really educated decisions about what you’re doing with your money. But I—I do think, you know, it’s really easy because it can seem really complicated, you know, “What should I do with my money? Well, I can’t figure anything out so I’m just not gonna do anything,” but I think there’s so many resources out there. There’s podcasts. There’s so many articles. Gosh there’s books. I mean there’s apps. You name it. And it’s all about just pulling out what’s gonna work for you and throwing out the rest, because as I always tell people like money is not a one-size-fits-all. So what’s gonna work for you is not gonna work for me. And so I need to figure where there are pieces of information that maybe you have or money tips that you’re using that maybe would work for me and the rest I’m just gonna throw out because it—it doesn’t work for me. JL Yeah, I think that’s so important. I’ve been reading a ton of money books, and magazines, and listening to podcasts recently, including yours [laughter] and I just like—there’s so much information but of course not everything is applicable to me. SCG Yeah, you know, and it’s really interesting um we kinda talked about this earlier with that like idea of perfection. There’s this kind of underground movement right now happening. I just recently was—was quoted in an article about the downsides of extreme personal finance and so there’s this movement of—of bloggers and people who are saying… Dave Ramsey talks about this a lot, that you can’t have any debt to be quote/unquote “successful.” And I think that that’s really putting undue pressure on people, because I mean let’s face it, like, honestly sometimes having debt is the smartest decision you can make. Sometimes leveraging somebody else’s money actually works to your advantage. And so I think you know broad-sweeping these concepts across and telling people you know, “You have to do it this way. And you have to retire by 35. And you have to—” It just doesn’t work for everybody, and I think it puts us in this… you know more of a panic state when it’s just—it’s not applicable to our life. JL Right. I mean I get so concerned, right? Like I’ve listened to an abridged Audible book of Dave Ramsey [laughs and laughter]. I’m gonna put that out there. And I listen to and I—I remember thinking like, “Wow. If this had been the only thing I had listened to, like if this was the first thing, like I wonder what my life would be like.” Would I have just like done everything that he had told me to do? [36:01] SCG I think that happens a lot with money because I think, you know, look: we don’t normally learn about it at home, we’re not learning about it in school, nobody’s teaching us about money. And so I think that, you know, sometimes we just like glom onto the first thing. But really like I encourage people like listen to lots of podcasts, read lots of articles, you know, again like pick out what’s gonna work for you and just throw out the rest. SWB When I start trying to look at a lot of different sources to make a financial decision, sometimes it works pretty well for me. I can like read a few different things and come out feeling like, “Ok. I get it now.” I understand whatever this thing is, whether it’s like for example, you know, researching mortgages a few years ago when we bought our first house. And that’s great. Sometimes when I’m researching money things, and I would say like particularly with retirement stuff, I read a whole bunch of different stuff and I come out the other end going, “Well now I’m even less sure what I should be doing!” [Laughter] How do you recommend people kind of can make sense of what is gonna work for them or not get overwhelmed when you get all of this kind of like complicated and sometimes conflicting information? SCG Yeah, that is such a great point, especially when it comes to retirement. Most people are kind of in this like retirement fog like just not sure how much you should save or where it should go, you know? And this is really a case of it’s always a good idea to hire an hour or two of like a Certified Financial Planner’s time to figure out, ok, what actually is gonna work for you. Because somebody can look at your situation holistically. But I think it does really start with the place of—and this sounds really obvious but people forget this a lot of time—of what is the vision for your life? Realistically, what do you want your life to look like? You know, do you wanna retire at 50 or 70? Or you know I know some of those decisions are hard to think of now, but if you could paint a picture of what you want your life to look like what would that be? And then ok, now that you have that picture, how do you get your money to come alongside that picture and help make that actually happen? And I think when you start from that approach then you have this visualization and you can figure out then what you need to do with your money. What are those different steps you need to take to be able to fund that, to get you to that vision. JL So, you mentioned before budgeting. And I think a lot of the reason I think we avoid that is because it sounds like we’re just basically cutting all the fun out of life. So, how do you suggest people think about making a budget and how do they get started with that? SCG I always tell people like the only reason in the world that you’re ever going to attempt to do anything like a budget is so that you can actually fund your goals. You know: do you wanna buy a house? Do you wanna—are you starting a family? Do you wanna stop working? You wanna start a business. You wanna go on vacation. Like what are those things that you wanna do? That’s the only reason that you do a budget, because you’re incorporating those goals into your budget so that you can structure your money properly. So that you’re actually able to achieve those goals. And I tell people, like, I don’t like the word budget. If you don’t like the word budget, change the name of it. Call it whatever [Jenn laughs] the heck you wanna call it! Just understand the principle of when you are tracking where your money is going, you are putting yourself in the driver’s seat of making changes with your money so that you can drive more money towards those particular goals. Even if your goal is you wanna pay off debt, it’s—it’s just when you have an understand of, you know, the what’s coming in is the easy part. Like that’s the part we all like. The what going out part, you know, most people are like, “Well I have some general idea of where I spend my money,” and then there’s a process that I go through with people where we dial down and we actually look at the bank statements and, you know, I—I come back to them and we compare the numbers of what they thought, and what they actually spent, and it’s kind of mind-blowing at times. So it’s—it’s putting yourself in a powerful position to be able to make changes and also to be able to anticipate when, you know, big expenses are coming up and things like that, and really, I mean, it can be as uncomplicated or as complicated as you want. Some people use Post-It notes, some people use pieces of paper, some people Excel templates. Microsoft has a ton of free templates or you can use budgeting apps. I mean so it’s really kind of based off of your temperament and something that will keep you motivated. [40:28] JL Huh. I never even thought about other options besides like an Excel spreadsheet. SCG Yeah. There are so many of them out there. So I always tell people, like, try a bunch of things until you figure out something that actually works for you. SWB There’s like nothing more terrifying to me than having to sit down and face how much money I spent in a given month on, like, coffee. SCG Yeah I—I know. Coffee [inaudible], you know, eating out is another—is another big one. I worked with a couple a couple of years ago and they wanted to buy a house and they just—they made really good money and they couldn’t figure out why they couldn’t have a down payment ever. And so they’d handed me this like, you know, scrap of paper budget that they had made probably like a year before, and of course it wasn’t accurate. And uh, you know, after we did sort of the exercise of looking at their bank statements, I came back to them and I said, “So like, how much did you think that you spent on eating out?” And they’re like, “Oh I think we spend like $300 or $400 a month.” You know? And I’m like, “Do you wanna know the actual number?” And they’re like, “Sure!” I’m like, “Well, the last like four or five months tracking back you’ve spent about $2,500 a month on eating out.” And they were like, “What?!?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I mean—” You know, they obviously knew they were going out to eat a lot but they just—it just wasn’t realistic to them but, you know, when they realized that then they were able to shift things a little bit and they bought a house in four months. So, if I understand like how scary that can be: for sure because there are times I don’t wanna look at my money but um I think if you—if you can flip it on the flipside of things and just say, “Look: the only reason I’m doing this is because I got all these other things out here and name them and visualize them that I wanna do.” And so if I don’t look at this, I can’t get to this. [42:14] JL Ughhhhh. Having to look. [Laughing] Having to look internally at ourselves is so hard! SCG I know! I know. I know. I know. It’s—it’s really hard but I promise you like after you do it… one or two times, if you can find that positive inspiration, it does start to change. JL You know it’s true, and then you have to like remember like, “Wow. I’m so happy I know this now.” So you can like identify these things. It’s almost like the not knowing is worse. SCG You know it’s—it’s just coming to the place where you—look: before—before I got divorced, like I was the girl who never wanted to look at the ATM receipt. I would deposit money and I wouldn’t look at the receipt. And it’s dumb because there was no reason because there was money—always money in the bank account. I just fixate on numbers and so I didn’t wanna look. And then when I got divorced I was like, “All right, I gotta look at the ATM receipt.” [Chuckles] Like, I gotta deal with this and, you know, the first few times were a little hard for me and then after that it was like, “All right, I got this. I can do this.” You know? And so I think as much as you can like positively inspire yourself, the better off you’re gonna be. JL So I’ve been trying to tackle this. In like the last couple of months I’ve been like, “I’m gonna learn more about money. I’m gonna do it.” And I’ve been doing it but like I’ll read a lot of advice that’s like, “Start saving in your twenties, otherwise you’re screwed.” And as someone in my thirties that makes [laughing] me feel terrible! SCG Yeah. Don’t listen to that. It’s not true. It’s not true. There’s always a way to remedy absolutely everything financially. So… that the stuff where it’s like, ok, they’re trying to get to clickbait on the article [laughs]. We’re also in a generation where we’re probably realistically gonna live well into our hundreds. So we’re probably not gonna like, you know, put up shop and stop working at 65 like maybe our parents did and so it’s gonna look completely different. I mean some people even argue that we’re not actually going to quote/unquote “retire”. We’re just gonna keep working and, you know, with the internet and—and side hustles and, you know, we’re gonna be in our nineties like side hustling. Um— SWB Oh my god that sounds so exhausting. SCG Right?! So I mean [laughter] I just—you know, don’t—don’t freak about it. JL With—with that in mind, you know, I think sometimes we’re hesitant to save for retirement because it seems like… like it’s not ever gonna happen. SCG Yeah! It’s this taboo word obviously that we hear all the time and I think, you know, once we get into our thirties we’re like, “[Gasps] Oh my gosh!” You know even though it’s 30-plus, potentially 40-plus years away. And, you know, their life is gonna bob and weave all around around them. So I think that it’s just about, you know, again having some goals and look: if you can only save a little bit of money each year for awhile, so be it. It’s not the end of the world. [45:00] JL So, Shannah, can you tell us a little bit about this new book you have coming out? SCG Well, it’s a little bit top secret so [chuckles]. I can’t dish a whole lot but I—I’ve always like when I was—when I was writing it I was sort of writing it under the idea of the anti-money money book. So for me it’s—it’s a book that is full of inspiration that’s gonna help you feel better about, you know, whatever financial situation you’re in, and then also the book shares a lot of stories from people that hopefully, you know, somebody can relate to… who have gone through different things in—in their lives and how they’ve kind of pulled themself back up or the different steps they’ve taken, and then it’s fused together with my own story. So it’s not a book where, you know, chapter one is “how to pay off debt” and chapter two is “buying a house.” It’s just not that type of book. It’s to me it’s—it’s always the type of book I’ve wanted to write, which is really making money come to life and helping it be relatable to people reading it that they can see maybe themselves through somebody else’s story or be inspired through their story. JL That sounds absolutely incredible and I know that I am very excited to read that when that comes out. But while myself and our listeners are waiting for your book, where can they get more Shannah? SCG Absolutely! So you can find the Millennial Money podcast on absolutely any podcast player, and we would love to have you listening. We do episodes twice a week, or you can head on over to my website shannahgame.com to check out all of the back catalogue [music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out]. FYOTW KL I’m really hungry. But I’m also thinking about our Fuck Yeah of the Week. JL Well, you’re in luck, Katel, because this week’s Fuck Yeah is fuck yeah, meal prep! KL All right… tell me more! JL Ok. So we’ve all either like… are meal prep converts at this point or we’ve like read about meal prep and been like, “Oof! That sounds like a… investment of a lifestyle.” SWB The look on my face says, “Oh my god are you one of those people now?” JL I think you’re gonna like it because I feel like I’m someplace in the middle. So I’ve been reading all this meal prep and hearing about meal prep for like ever. Like, “Meal prep! Meal prep! It makes life so much easier, etc.” But I was just like, “I can’t get down. I can’t get down.” But! Like money, I’m taking those slow steps into like being like, “Well, let me try it out and maybe I can like figure out a way to make this work,” and so we’ve been like struggling in that our son needs to eat at an early hour. And it’s like right in like a weird time. And then we do bedtime, so like we would like to give him dinner at like 6:00, but then we wouldn’t eat and start making dinner until after bedtime, so then we’re eating like 8:30, 9pm, and like I’m trying to go to sleep at like 9:30 so this was— [47:46] KL Yeah, it’s like, “What are we in Spain?” [Laughter] JL [Laughing] What is going on here?!? Without, like, the glorious wine. KL Yes. JL So I mean there’s wine, it’s just not as good. So we were like, “You know what? Let’s like—let’s give meal prep a shot.” And like the thing is so we sort of looked at what we could do and—and we’ve got an Instant Pot, and we sorta became Instant Pop converts which, Katel—[laughs]. KL I wonder who helped you do that [laughs]. JL And then we’re also really into like sheet pan meals, and then the third part is um we’ve been doing these Hungry Harvest um like CSAs which are basically like they call like “ugly produce.” So like produce that stores reject for like one reason or another. Either if it’s like been over-production of something or mis-shaped apples. So they do a CSA and they deliver to your door which is awesome. So we get those delivered on Saturday, and then sometimes we’ll like supplement with an Instacart if we can’t go to the store because, again: baby. And then on Sunday we were like, “Well, let’s give this a shot.” So basically we just take all of these vegetables that we get from our produce share and we just like, we just roast ‘em with various things. And then I found a recipe for one-minute quinoa in the Instant Pot. So we do that. And then we do like one other like protein-ish thing which we freeze to then have later in the week. And then Sunday like when we’ve got time, we usually like grill something like a meat or a fish and then we’re like, ok. We’re gonna like just do the one like protein thing like… for the next two days, and then we like break out the thing that we froze from the Instant Pot. So like we tried and we’re like, “Oh!… This is kind of working.” And so now we—we’re saving time and we’re able to eat dinner at 6pm with our child. So we all eat dinner together as a family which is… really awesome. KL It sounds like it’s, you know, a good thing to manage sort of budget-wise also because you’re kind of looking at like …you know a week at a time or whatever length of time. So that’s like—that seems really helpful. [49:52] JL And we waste way less food. We were doing the thing like where we’d be like, oh yeah, you know, I want all this stuff. And we were trying like sort of live the lifestyle we had before like before having a kid, where it’s like, oh yeah, we can cook extravagant dinners and like make all this stuff. But like… what we’d end up doing is being like, “Ugh! We’re throwing out another head of kale?!” Like and then you just feel awful. Like for many reasons. Like, one, you just wasted food, and you wasted money, and you didn’t get to eat that kale. So like it’s always like a little bit of a bummer and now we’re like actually making sure that we’re cooking everything. SWB You know years ago Will and I were really good about planning out our meals for the week. We didn’t do like a ton of pre-prep, but we would really plan out ingredients. And also, to be honest, we were broke. Like we didn’t have that much money. When Will was in graduate school and we were in our early twenties, we would go grocery shopping every weekend together, and we would shop off of what was on the circular that week, which is like how I grew up. It was like a very like you would really look for what was on sale, and stock up on things when they were on sale, if you could at the time, and, you know, and so we used to do that and we were very good about thinking about things like, Ok, well… you know if we buy this kind of produce that is on sale this week, we need to have it in two different dinners. So we’ll like do it two different ways or whatever, right? And that worked pretty well, particularly because I wasn’t travelling that much then and so, you know, we would cook dinner together every night and it didn’t cost a lot of money. And it wasn’t perfect but it was good. And it kinda fell apart at some point because I travel a lot and we kind of stopped really doing those big shops together, and we just like stopped having as much of a plan, and so recently… I struggle with the meal prep in that like I have this piece of me that wants to like make dinner for the night that night. I really like it in a lot of ways. But I did get way better about going back into thinking through the week. What’s going on this week? How many meals can we prepare realistically? How many evenings this week are we going to be able to cook at home? And I’ve been really enjoying feeling a little bit more planned out. I’m not like micromanaging, but it makes me feel good to feel like I go into the week with like a little bit of a plan, the right kinds of stuff stocked, and a realistic sense of what I’m gonna do with all the kale I just bought or whatever, you know? [Laughter] But also like, don’t you sometimes have a plan and then you’re like, “I had a fucking Wednesday, and I just don’t wanna”? JL So, I will say this: the meal prep is new. So, I’m saying fuck yeah now, but I’m not sure if I’ll be saying fuck yeah in another five weeks. There are like points where I’m getting like a little bit tired of like what we’re eating. So now we’re trying to like think of like other things that we can do to make it different. Maybe we need more sauces, maybe we need to like, I don’t know, just expand something. So we’re gonna look into that. But like the other week I was going home and we’re like—we’re… right near some like really good pizza restaurants and this just like smell of garlic was like just coming through the air, and I got home and I was just like, I just looked at Sutter and was like, “I’m ordering a pizza.” [Laughs, laughter, laughing] I was like, “I do not care. This is just like I am ordering this pizza right now. Like that is what’s happening,” and it was so good. [53:15] KL I love that. I—we like awhile ago, Jon and I decided that we were going to try basically switching off every day. Right? So like one—like if I decided dinner and it doesn’t—it doesn’t have to be a cooked thing. It can be like you are just in charge of dinner. You’re PMing dinner. You can cook it, you can order it, we can go out somewhere, whatever. And that was like kind of great because you just like had the night off if it wasn’t your night. But then a pizza place—a slice pizza place—opened up across the street from where we live. So now it’s basically like both of our ideas all the time are just pizza slice [laughing, laugher], which does not [laughter]… it sounds fucking amazing like today. SWB It might not be like a long-term plan. KL [Laughing] It’s not a long-term plan. SWB So I think the thing about meal prep is—is sort of—it’s not even like just meal prep but it’s like kind of thinking about [sighs] how do I make sure that I have some of that time in the evening that is like good family time? Or how do I make sure that I eat the way that I wanna be eating more often? Or that I kinda stay on budget? It’s kind of like thinking about that stuff and sort of like giving yourself some space to figure out that out without, I think, without getting like too rigid about it and making it feel like another on the long list of shoulds, which I’m kind of like tired of feeling like I have all these shoulds. JL Totally. Fuck yeah. KL That’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Shannah Compton Game for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please make sure to subscribe and rate us on Apple podcasts. Your support helps us spread the word. We’ll be back next week with another great guest [music fades in, plays alone for 32 seconds, fades out to end].

Matteus Pan, Principal Product Manager at Bina Technologies, a genomics based cancer diagnostics company, and formerly Group Product Manager at Dropbox, talks about working as a Product Manager in the Biotech space. Bina Technologies was acquired by Roche Sequencing recently. Matt has a bachelors in Economics and Computer Science Engineering from University of Pennsylvania. Some of the things that Matt touches upon in this episode include: 1. Examples of problems that biotech companies are working on 2. Dimensions to think along when considering working in biotech 3. Types of projects a PM in biotech might work on 4. Differences between PMing in Biotech vs Tech 5. Team members you work with as a PM in biotech 6. Helpful books for developing some level of basic expertise and understanding of biological systems for laymen 7. How working in this space can be very rewarding 8. Challenging aspects of this job 9. Skills and qualities in someone who would excel as a PM in biotech 10. How to decide between PMing in tech vs biotech 11. How to apply and stand out Thank you for listening!! Follow the show on Twitter @LED_Curator Website www.learneducatediscover.com/ Like us on FaceBook at www.facebook.com/learneducatediscover/ Email us at hello@learneducatediscover. We will reply!! Subscribe to the show on iTunes itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/learn…ver/id1049159321

Today we caught up with Max Schoening, a designer, developer and product manager currently working at Google. In this episode we dig into Max's background in the field, building and selling startups, going serverless, the challenges of PMing, and so much more.

Kaner and Amby get talking about playing metagaming arseholes, live Diplomacy games online, the variant Colonial Diplomacy, possible variant ideas and get more entertaining after many more drinks This episode is a back-to-back recording again at the Breakfast Creek Hotel. Amby pays homage to Aussie rock band "Midnight Oil" and their lyric about the pub in the song Dreamworld, and their disappoint in the political career of its lead singer (Peter Garrett)  (20 secs) Metagaming arseholes  Kaner gets hot under the collar about his recent experience with metagamers: people who come into a game with a preconceived alliance and will not vary from it (2 mins 30 secs) The game was the very last to be played Known World 901 game at WebDiplomacy (2 mins 45 secs) Kaner explains the difference between metagaming and multi-accounting. He talks about a useful thread on webDip that discusses this (4 mins 45 secs) Kaner blows off some more steam, and then explains what happened to the game after the metagaming was discovered (7 mins 45 secs) Variant and Lab talk Kaner goes a little off topic and discusses a new variant being put together by David E. Cohen, the creator of Known World 901 (8 mins 45 secs) Amby discusses his recent holiday and a surprising spotting of a book written by a David Elliot Cohen - is it the same guy? (9 mins 45 secs) Kaner talks about other great combined maps done by David E. Cohen, combining the Maharajah and Spice Islands maps (11 mins 30 secs) Amby discusses how Flame is setting up Pirates on the Lab so he can correct some of the issues players have raised about the variant (12 mins 45 secs) Kaner talks about how he'd like to see the minor power element of the Versailles variant brought into Pirates (14 mins 15 secs) Mrs Kaner is going soon to France. Kaner discusses his wife's French pronunciation skills (14 mins 30 secs) Amby discusses his other variant creation plans and ideas after reading a Theodore Roosevelt biography that touches on possible conflicts that never occured and how it'd make a fun variant. Basically it would encompass the Venezuelan crisis of 1902-03 where America and Germany could have come to war. Similar potential conflict almost happened over Morocco (15 mins 45 secs) Amby keeps the ball rolling talking about another variant idea after listening to two podcasts (12 Byzantine Rulers and The History of Rome) about the tetrarchy of the Roman Empire when it was governed by four separate emperors. A system that eventually brought them into conflict (19 mins 15 secs) Kaner discusses his interest in the Byzantium Empire and the Black Death (21 mins 50 secs) Back to Metagaming The guys talk about whether an aspect of metagaming is acceptable based on your prior experience against a player (23 mins 50 secs) Kaner talks about players that rub him the wrong way (27 mins) Amby explores a situation whether metagaming could be done in a potentially positive way  (29 mins) Kaner flows off the discussion with a story about his first Diplomacy game against his father and brother (31 mins 40 secs) What the Dr Recommended update - part 2 of the Top 100 at WebDiplomacy The guys follow on from episode 14 and attempt to pronounce player names from #20 to #50 (33 mins 45 secs) Amby discusses how he's been thinking about playing an Ancient Mediterranean game on WebDip (38 mins 30 secs) Live games Amby does another holiday flashback and how with a bit of spare time on his hands, played a live Classic game at webDip (38 mins 55 secs) Amby discusses this was his first ever live game, although he'd tried to get this happening once before on the basis of having a Drunk Diplomacy game (where all players have been drinking) (40 mins) With so many players at webDip its a lot easier to get a live game going, the same with PlayDip (40 mins 50 secs) Amby drew Russia and explains why he likes playing Russia in Classic (and hates Austria and Italy). Kaner also gives his views on which countries he likes playing in Classic (41 mins 20 secs) Amby expected a 45 minute game, but found out that was not the case! (42 mins) He talks about the challenge in a live game of competing real life demands that get in the way of preparing and submitting orders (43 mins) Amby explains he had a lot of fun playing a live game. cspieker as Turkey won with Amby coming second (43 mins 45 secs) The game used the draw size scoring system. Amby explains he has no idea how that works, or sum of squares. The guys talk about how they need to get someone from webDip on to explain it without too much highbrow maths. Amby asks Kaner to organise zulta or another informed webDip person on (45 mins) Back to the live game. Amby explains how he was doing alright as Russia but Turkey was starting to make moves his way. One of the big problems was the amount of CDing in the game, although generally replacements popped up really quickly (46 mins 45 secs) Amby explains his gameplay to avoid attacking Austria and blitzed Scandanavia and started taking SCs off England. Only for Austria to start attacking Amby, quickly followed by Germany doing the same. Amby explains his attempt to send gunboat messages of peace out to England failed. Kaner asks about Germany's rapid rise followed by rapid decline (48 mins 55 secs) Once it became very clear to Amby he wasn't going to win, he set himself some personal goals, including Russia making its way to the Iberian peninsula. The guys then talk about their future plans on playing more live Dip games (51 mins 45 secs) Kaner talks about the importance of hitting the refresh button in live games (55 mins 45 secs) The guys discuss their games Kaner briefly touches on his Sengoku tournament situation (57 mins) Amby similarly discusses briefly his games: Bourse, WW2 and Indians of the Great Lakes (57 mins 30 secs) The Colonial Diplomacy variant Amby quickly segues into a game of Colonial Diplomacy he recently finished (58 mins 40 secs) He describes how he hasn't played it for a couple of years. Kaner says the Trans-Siberian railway and Suez canal rules have been coded into the game (59 mins) The guys give a shout out to those who brought the Colonial variant to life: Peter Hawes for designing the game,  Oliver Auth for the php coding and Tobias Florin for the Trans-Siberian railway and Suez canal coding functionality (1 hour 00 mins 00 secs) They talk about how the special rules work for the Suez canal and the Trans-Siberian railway. That said in the podcast the guys totally forgot to mention the special rule for Hong Kong: it counts as an SC if occupied by any country except China, in which case its considered a non-SC territory (1 hr 1 mins) The guys get increasingly pissy as they move onto drink number six... and it starts showing on Amby's memory of the game (1 hr 03 mins) Amby does however remember his overall strategy playing as Japan and what he was trying to achieve and how he managed relationships with other players (1 hr 4 mins 40 secs) Congrats to Matticus13 who won as China with Amby coming second (1 hr 6 mins) Amby discusses his mid-game plans and how we tried sending gunboat messages of peace to Holland and France (1 hr 7 mins 45 secs) Amby describes how it was a really fun variant and would be interested in playing again as another player (1 hr 9 mins 30 secs) Kaner asks Amby's thoughts on naval vs land based warfare in the variant (1 hr 11 mins) After some initial pissy rambling, Amby reads some of the End of Game statements to explain the players' thoughts on this game and old-man flash backs from Amby about the fall of the Berlin Wall (1 hr 13 mins 15 secs) We then get onto the EoG statement from England, the winner of the game (1 hr 18 mins 15 secs) Amby discusses the fortress nature of Singapore as an SC (1 hr 20 mins) After Kaner's dismal attempt at a joke, Amby slips in a drunken joke or two (1 hr 22 mins 40 secs) After being at the pub for over 4 hours, the guys acknowledge this is a good time to wrap things up before it gets messy, before suggesting listeners send their best jokes by PMing or sending a comment (1 hr 26 mins) Venue: Breakfast Creek Hotel, Brisbane Drinks of choice: Kaner - Carlton Draft and XXXX "off the wood" Amby - Riddoch cabernet sauvignon from the Coonawarra, South Australia Don't forget if you're enjoying the podcast please hop onto iTunes and give us a rating and a review so we can get the Diplomacy message out. If you have any suggestions on what you'd like to see covered in an upcoming podcast, or something you'd like to see regularly covered, please contact us or leave your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks to Dan Philip for his rockin' intro to the Diplomacy Games podcast.

Ohho I finally had a lot to say about the administration. New Mexico Recap, Georgia O'Keeffe work and PMing (0:17), Muslim ban and illogical aspects (12:00), getting visas (20:00), dumb protest signs and hashtag campaigns (23:49), H1-B limitation and stupidity (29:04), Trump's mouth causing volatality (37:00). Intro: Nirvana - About a Girl (Live at Pine Theatre)

You asked for it, you got it! Egoraptor of "Awesome" fame shares some BTF-exclusive news about his upcoming project, his addiction to health food and Disney theme parks, his response to the waves of criticism on his humor and animation style, and how he got started doing voices as a kid. Not to mention his four-minute commentary on recent movies. Oh, and he sings Pokemans.DOWNLOAD HEREPlease forgive us for the unplanned second half; we got pretty off-track after 30 minutes and lots of caffeinated beverages later.Note: This interview ended up being longer than usual (45 minutes), so please right-click and "Save Target As" - not only does this help conserve bandwidth, but it will ensure that you can listen to the interview uninterrupted.You can now subscribe to the podcast via iTunes by entering http://feeds.feedburner.com/BehindTheFlash into the RSS feed space.Also, a big thank you to everyone who has been PMing and e-mailing me with suggestions for which Flash artists you want to hear on the show! I've already got guests booked for the next several weeks, but I will take all suggestions into consideration for future interviews. Please consider linking to this site if you enjoy the content, and thank you for all the support so far!