Podcasts about powerpoint

Today on PowerPoint, we'll continue the message “The Journey of Life.” As Pastor Jack Graham explains, we can't change the past during this journey of life, but by God's grace and the power of His Resurrection, we can change the present and the future with Him. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29?v=20251111

What did you think? Text us by clicking here! We are unable to reply on this app, so include phone # or email address.This episode is the first in a series featuring recordings from the fifth OPC National Diaconal Summit (NDS), released by the OPC Committee on Diaconal Ministries.In this opening plenary session, Bob Keys became the first deacon actively serving in a local Orthodox Presbyterian Church to address an OPC National Diaconal Summit as a plenary speaker. He introduced a theme that would resonate throughout the Summit: the ministry of mercy is not simply the work of deacons; rather, deacons help lead the entire church in showing the mercy and compassion of Christ.Speaking to more than 220 deacons, deacons-in-training, elders, and pastors, Bob set the tone for the Summit by reminding the men that while accomplishing tasks is important, it is not the ultimate goal. The greater calling is to shepherd Christ's church into the compassion of Christ.Over the coming months, we will release the audio from all fourteen plenary and workshop sessions from the Summit, making these encouraging and practical resources available to the broader church.The video versions of all the Summit sessions can be found on OPCCDM.org.Resources from this episode:Handouts, the PowerPoint presentation from Bob's NDS Session and other resources from the OPC National Diaconal Summit V 2026 can be found here.You can find all of our episodes at thereformeddeacon.org. Make sure to follow us on your favorite podcast player, so you don't miss an episode. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram for giveaways and more information. Find other resources on OPCCDM.org.  Make sure to send us some feedback on your podcast player or ask a diaconal question by going to OPCCDM.org.

“You can't recreate the feeling that Josh created for me as a coach in any synthetic way. It had to have been done the way that he did it.”My guest for today's episode is Danny Mackey, the head coach of the Brooks Beasts Track Club.Almost two weeks before we recorded this, Josh Kerr ran 3:42.66 at the London Diamond League and took 47 hundredths of a second off Hicham El Guerrouj's mile world record — a mark that had been on the books for 27 years. Danny is the guy who wrote the training for it. He's been coaching Josh for eight years now and this year he's also got Brandon Miller running 1:42.19 to win in London seventy minutes before Josh's race. It was an epic day for the Brooks Beasts.This one is a coach's-eye reconstruction of how a world record actually gets built. We go back to the workouts in Albuquerque in 2024 when Danny first told Josh he thought the record was there. We get into the PowerPoint pitch to Brooks. Danny walks through how he writes training. We talk about the ninety-minute whiteboard meeting where a few grown men argued over tenths of a second for pacing and what Danny was thinking standing trackside with 350 meters to go. And finally, how this has transcended beyond the running community.The best part comes toward the end when he reveals who this was all for. We last had him on in 2023 after the World Championships after Josh won gold, so it was only fitting that we got him back on after another momentous occasion.____________SUPPORT OUR SPONSORSCORE: The CORE 2 Thermal Sensor takes the guessing out of heat training. It reads your core body temperature in real time - no thermometer, nothing invasive, and you can actually see what's happening inside your body while you train. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Take 10% off the CORE 2 with code CITIUS10 at checkout when you visit corebodytemp.com.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠VELOUS: VELOUS makes recovery footwear designed to help runners bounce back faster between sessions. Their sandals feature Tri-Motion™ Technology: a technical three-density foam system and contoured footbed engineered to cushion impact, support your arches, and help your toes stretch and relax on every step. They keep your feet and legs properly aligned after you put in all of those weekly miles. Run. Recover. Repeat. with VELOUS! ⁠⁠Get 20% off your VELOUS order with code CITIUSMAG20 at checkout including FREE Shipping!⁠⁠OLIPOP: Raspberry Sherbet is a limited-edition, nostalgic new flavor that blends tangy raspberry with creamy vanilla. Every can of Olipop contains their Olismart blend, which includes ingredients designed to support digestive health and help feed your gut microbiome. If you haven't had tried Olipop yet, grab a can and see what the hype is all about!⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Head to DrinkOlipop.com and use code CITIUS25 at checkout to get 25% off your orders.⁠⁠

In today's message on PowerPoint, hear from Pastor Jack Graham as he explores the “Great Race” we are running as believers and followers of Christ. We want to pace ourselves, run the race well, and most importantly, never give up. Ultimately, we want to finish well. Join us for this motivational message. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29?v=20251111

A face hidden in wallpaper that you can't unsee. A mysterious PowerPoint that appears after a father's death and then vanishes without a trace. An old house where footsteps, whispers, moving objects, and one seriously creepy closet make it clear the family may not be alone. This week's Sinister Sightings brings possible messages from beyond the grave, haunted house activity, unexplained phenomena, and a couple of nighttime scares that might have a slightly less paranormal explanation. Was it ghosts, coincidence, something we can't explain… or just another reason to keep the damn lights on? Got a creepy, paranormal, funny, or downright WTF story? Send it our way for a future Sinister Sightings! Email us your stories at ⁠aparanormalchicks@gmail.com⁠. If you want to introduce one of our Sinister Sightings, you can join The Creepinati @ ⁠www.patreon.com/theAPCpodcast⁠ and select (at least) the BOOtiful Creepster tier. Edited by Caden Baughman at Guestroom Studio: gstrmstudio.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A face hidden in wallpaper that you can't unsee. A mysterious PowerPoint that appears after a father's death and then vanishes without a trace. An old house where footsteps, whispers, moving objects, and one seriously creepy closet make it clear the family may not be alone. This week's Sinister Sightings brings possible messages from beyond the grave, haunted house activity, unexplained phenomena, and a couple of nighttime scares that might have a slightly less paranormal explanation. Was it ghosts, coincidence, something we can't explain… or just another reason to keep the damn lights on? Got a creepy, paranormal, funny, or downright WTF story? Send it our way for a future Sinister Sightings! Email us your stories at ⁠aparanormalchicks@gmail.com⁠. If you want to introduce one of our Sinister Sightings, you can join The Creepinati @ ⁠www.patreon.com/theAPCpodcast⁠ and select (at least) the BOOtiful Creepster tier. Edited by Caden Baughman at Guestroom Studio: gstrmstudio.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join us on PowerPoint today as we continue the story of Simon Peter. Jesus knew that if He captured this simple fisherman's heart, he would be changed forever and he would change the world forever. Jesus sees that same greatness in us. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29?v=20251111

In our last episode, we learned about Michelle Gessner's recent trial in North Carolina, where she was forced to pivot from a regular audio/video presentation, using modern technology, to a courtroom with no microphones, no TVs, no projectors and a single power outlet (already claimed by the clerk and the court reporter!). Click here to catch Episode 170 and hear the back story for today's episode. Michelle used AI to help adapt to this unexpected turn of events, asking it how to craft a visual presentation under these unique circumstances. Today, we learn how it unfolded. You could feel the courtroom change as the case progressed, and this was a quick trial: starting on a Monday, verdict by the end of day Tuesday. Literally two days. In fact, there were some assets to the old-school, analogue approach: better eye contact with jurors, fewer distractions, and more movement. Using what was learned from the focus groups before the trial, and the creative AI suggestions for presenting evidence, Michelle was able to correctly anticipate the jury's emotional reactions as the witnesses unfolded. With AI helping between trial days to make sure she'd met her burden of proof, Michelle then gave her closing argument with foam boards instead of any PowerPoint slides or technology. And the result: she won. If you want more trial prep strategies just like this, but in more depth and delivered straight to your inbox, grab my email newsletter that I send out each month: https://www.larricklawfirm.com/newsletter In this episode, we cover: How the visuals created with AI significantly engaged the jury. Focus groups provided valuable insights for trial strategy. How word choice is so important in your presentation. Closing arguments were enhanced by using visuals instead of technology. Remember to check out Episodes 128 & 129, featuring Michelle Gessner and her $21 million dollar verdict against Wells Fargo: Part 1 [Ep 128] Part 2 [Ep 129] You can also watch today's episode on my YouTube Channel: AI During Trial: Jury & Verdict. Part Two with Michelle Gessner [Ep 171]   Learn more about my guest Michelle Gessner: https://www.mgessnerlaw.com/ michelle@mgessnerlaw.com Michelle Gessner is one of the few lawyers, if not the only lawyer, in North Carolina who has both Big Law and Big Company defense experience, as well as 10 years of employee-side employment litigation experience, which she has been nearly exclusively handling since 2015.  Michelle possesses a deep understanding of the many challenges employees face dealing with wage theft and other illegal employment practices. Prior to its formation, Michelle gained extensive experience in all legal issues facing the retail, restaurant, and hospitality industries by serving as the Chief Litigation and Employment Law Counsel for publicly traded companies such as Family Dollar Stores, Inc. (FDO), Darden Restaurants, Inc. (DRI), Big Lots Stores, Inc. (BIG) and TriNet (TNET). Michelle also served as the SVP, General Counsel, and Chief Administrative Officer for Ovation Brands, a privately held $1 billion restaurant company. Follow and Review: We'd love for you to follow us if you haven't yet. Click that purple '+' in the top right corner of your Apple Podcasts app. We'd love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select "Ratings and Reviews" and "Write a Review" then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast. Have a trial or mediation coming up and want to test with a focus group? Book a free consultation call with Elizabeth to learn more: www.calendly.com/elizabethlarrick Don't miss out on the Trial Lawyer Prep Newsletter that is delivered right to your email with extra tips and 'how to' information. Join the newsletter here:  www.larricklawfirm.com/newsletter

In this Barbarians at the Gate x China Books Review crossover, Jeremiah Jenne is joined by CBR Associate Editor Alexander Boyd to discuss the latest addition to the China Archives: W. Somerset Maugham's On a Chinese Screen (1922), a collection of vignettes from Maugham's trip through China in the winter of 1919–1920.Maugham came to China and mostly found... the English. Missionaries who profess love for a country they secretly loathe, taipans dreading burial in Chinese soil, diplomats who could be posted to Peking or Bern without noticing the difference. Jeremiah and Alexander match these hundred-year-old archetypes to expats they have known, and chart the "Cycle of China Funk," the wave pattern that should replace the PowerPoint version of culture shock and adaptation. They follow Maugham's habit of recycling real people into his fiction, including handing the scholar Gu Hongming's rebuke of Western power to a stage villain in East of Suez. And they bring Gerald Haxton out of the shadows: the hard-drinking companion who made the whole trip and never appears in the book.Next month on the China Archives: Shen Fu's Six Records of a Floating Life.Keywords: Somerset Maugham, On a Chinese Screen, China Books Review, Barbarians at the Gate podcast, Gu Hongming, Gerald Haxton, expat life in China, China travel writing, British colonialism in China, China Archives

The mental load is not the doing. Everyone thinks it's the doing. It's the buy now, pay later maths you run when your partner tells you to rest — the hour you lie down and spend the whole hour calculating what this hour is costing you tomorrow. It's being the default parent, the one whose invisible labour only gets noticed the second it stops. And then, into that, walks the one who did the single most visible job in the house and needs you to see it. He mowed the lawn. He unpacked the dishwasher. Once. And he's standing in the middle of the kitchen, glowing, waiting for the medal.CHAPTERS00:00 — 'You rest, take a load off' — and why every woman's shoulders just went up01:35 — Buy now, pay later: what an hour of rest actually costs you02:39 — Dani, patron saint of this episode, and her four voice memos03:19 — Kat's dishwasher, the border collie, and the dead bird at your feet04:06 — 'Did you see the lawn?' The line that named the whole episode06:37 — The barbecue vasectomy story (you'll want to sit down)08:31 — The 3am texts, where it stops being funny — the wet bed, his one turn09:42 — 'I'm stressed about the mess. What are you going to do about it?'11:04 — The head lice question that broke everyone: 'or did you just decide that?'12:15 — Why is it always her? Susan Walzer, 1996, and thinking vs doing12:38 — He doesn't just do less. He's reading a different ledger.13:33 — Why this isn't gaslighting — and why that makes it harder to fix15:31 — What doesn't work: the chart, the PowerPoint, the tagging him in articles15:50 — What actually works: handing over whole domains, not tasks17:20 — How same-sex couples split it, and why they had to do it out loud19:55 — 'You're a bit of a perfectionist' — what he actually means when he says itWhat We CoverWhy 'you rest, I've got it' makes every woman's shoulders climb up around her ears — and the brutal maths hiding inside that hour of 'rest'The border collie, the dead bird, and the exact face a partner makes when he's unpacked the dishwasher once and needs you to noticeThe listener line that named this whole episode — and what she really wanted to say backThe barbecue vasectomy story, which has to be heard to be believed, and what six women two metres away were actually doing while he told itThe 3am texts, where the funny runs out — the wet bed and the one night it was his turn, and what he suggested instead of changing the sheetsThe head lice question that undid everyone — three little words that turned a job she'd been doing for three months into something she'd apparently inventedWhy it's her doing the tracking, the meds, the mattress — a piece of 1996 research, and a newer one that's sharper and more unsettlingWhy he isn't lying and isn't gaslighting when he says the house is fine — he's genuinely reading a different ledger, and that's the bit that's hard to fixThe three things that don't work (you've tried all three), and the one thing that does — and it isn't a better chore chartWhat a man actually means when he calls you a perfectionist — this one's going on a tea towelFree ResourcesHousehold Family Meeting Template — the closest thing to the 'hand over whole domains' conversation this episode is really about — https://adhdmums.com.au/product/adhd-household-family-meeting-template/Paid ResourcesPre-Diagnosis Workbook — for the mum who's listening to this and starting to wonder about herself — https://adhdmums.com.au/product/prediagnosisworkbook/ADHD Mums Shop — https://adhdmums.com.au/shop/Related EpisodesThe Admin Husband: 'Do We Have Parmesan?' — Part 1 of this series —https://adhdmums.com.au/adhd-podcast-episodes/adhd-invisible-load/ What We Wish Our Partners Knew About the Mental Load — And How to Truly Support Us — S2 EP75 — https://adhdmums.com.au/podcast_episode/episode-75-what-we-wish-our-partners-knew-about-the-mental-load-and-how-to-truly-support-us/Making the Invisible Mental Load Visible: How to Share the Load Without the Stress (Part 3) — S2 EP73 — https://adhdmums.com.au/podcast_episode/episode-73-making-the-invisible-mental-load-visible-how-to-share-the-load-without-the-stress-part-3/The Invisible Job: Being the One Who Holds Everything Together — S3 — https://adhdmums.com.au/adhd-podcast-episodes/the-invisible-job-being-the-one-who-holds-everything-together/References & Further ReadingWalzer, S. (1996). Thinking About the Baby: Gender and Divisions of Infant Care. Social Problems, 43(2), 219–234. https://doi.org/10.2307/3096999(The 1996 study Jane cites — women do the thinking, men do the doing.)Daminger, A. (2019). The Cognitive Dimension of Household Labor. American Sociological Review, 84(4), 609–633. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419859007(The four stages: anticipate, identify, decide, monitor — decision-making is shared, everything else falls on women.)On same-sex couples splitting cognitive labour more evenly:Pinho, M. & Gaunt, R. (2023). The management of cognitive labour in same-gender couples. PLoS ONE. (Same-gender couples negotiate the division explicitly rather than defaulting.)On the newer 'different perceptions of the same household' research:Weeks, A. C. & Ruppanner, L. (2024). A typology of US parents' mental loads: Core and episodic cognitive labor. Journal of Marriage and Family. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.13057

FLO is here, and this one's for the fans. Jorja, Renée, and Stella get into the story behind “Cardboard Box,” the PowerPoint that convinced their label to release it, and how Therapy at the Club turns heartbreak, healing, and girls' nights into nonstop bops. They also get candid about dating, dream collaborations, and girl group legacy, with plenty of laughs along the way. Then Keke tests their knowledge in “Name That Girl Group Hit” and joins FLO as the honorary fourth member for a sing-along.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Are your slides helping you or upstaging you? In this episode, you'll learn what separates a slide that actually supports your message from one that competes with it: backing up a single point, being instantly clear, and staying light on words. Learn why "Death by PowerPoint" became shorthand for a specific kind of pain, and you'll walk away with a simple test to run on your own deck before your next presentation. PeterGeorgePublicSpeaking.com The Captivating Public Speaker - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BJ8HRPWC

https://youtu.be/KUPg9BuYSaM David B. Jones, CEO and Partner of Mercer Assessments, is helping organizations attract the right A-Players by making labor markets more efficient through defensible human capital insights. By combining psychometric science, workforce analytics, and AI-enabled technology, David helps employers identify, develop, and retain the right talent while empowering people to discover careers where they can thrive and make meaningful contributions.  In this conversation, David introduces The R.E.A.P.E.R. Framework—Review the Situation, Explore Alternatives, Agree a Course of Action, Execute the Plan, and Refine the Approach. He explains why organizations should begin every challenge with a thorough situation review, how collaborative decision-making creates alignment before execution, and why continuous refinement drives long-term organizational success. David also discusses how AI is reshaping talent management, why organizations need real-time workforce insights instead of static reports, and how Mercer Assessments leverages technology while preserving the integrity and defensibility of human capital assessments. — Attract the Right A-Players with David B. Jones  Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. Today, my guest is David Jones, the CEO and partner of Mercer Assessments, focused on providing defensible human capital insights and foresight in the fields of talent acquisition, leadership development, and organizational productivity. David, welcome to the show.  Thank you, Steve. Great to be here.  Well, I’m excited to have you here, especially because you are the first guest—maybe not completely from the Middle East because we had a couple of guests from Israel—but definitely from Dubai, where you are. Maybe that is also impacting the answer that you’re going to give to my question. So here is my first question. What’s your personal ‘Why’, and how are you manifesting it in your business, Mercer Assessments?  Yeah. Well, I mean, I think obviously a lot of skills around resilience and being able to think about how you maintain your own personal well-being, but also the well-being of the workforce, is something which has come to the fore in the last couple of weeks, for sure, living in Dubai. But I think very much of my North Star—by educational background, I’m a labor market economist. Although I’ve worked in HR and talent management for pretty much all of my career, I think I’m always thinking about how to make markets more efficient.  I think the labor market, in some ways, and what it takes to become efficient, is very similar to a fish market, a stock market, or any other market that you can think of. What you need to be able to make the best decisions is really good data, really good up-to-date information, both on the supply side and on the demand side.Share on X I think a lot of what we do at Mercer Assessments, and a lot of what we do in talent management more generally, is really about trying to do that. Trying to help individuals understand what their strengths are.  Trying to match them to specific careers that will be more fulfilling for them in the long term and also help them be more productive for their employers. As well as helping employers understand what the important skills are for today and tomorrow, and how they can predict how people will perform in certain environments. So really trying to bring the supply side and demand side together. I think, notoriously, labor markets have very bad information.  Typically, most people get their career guidance from their parents or their grandparents, which can be great for aspiration but doesn’t always necessarily keep them up-to-date in terms of what’s happening in today’s workplace. So I think this is really my anchor, if you like, where a lot of what we do in our innovation, our technology, or our engagements with clients typically comes back to this point. Fundamentally, how do we make labor markets more efficient and more functional for all of the stakeholders?  Yeah, that’s fascinating. So would you say that if you are doing this well, then more people will feel fulfilled in the roles that they work in?  I mean, I think that’s definitely the aspiration, right? That’s definitely what you would hope to do. I think, as individuals, I’m sure we can all think of those really, really great days where you think that you nailed it at work, and you think that this is something where you can make a really specific contribution. It just feels good, and all those people around you have the benefit of that. It becomes something which is infectious for those around you.  I think it’s important for the economy on a macro level, right? I think if we are able to provide opportunities, provide career paths, and help people understand what their unique strengths are, then this is something which helps to promote productivity and positivity more generally, right? At the individual, team, family, and societal level, it affects all sorts of dimensions.  So maybe this is kind of a side question, but I’m really wondering, is this AI revolution, as we’re going through it, influencing your work, and is it changing the requirements of employers?  Yeah. I think we’re in a very interesting time. I mean, I’m not a futurologist. I’m not a prophet. I’m not somebody who makes these sorts of big predictions about the future. But I think the case for AI, to some extent, is still unproven in terms of what it’s actually delivered to date. I mean, I think there’s obviously a lot of investment. There’s a big impact on the environment. But I don’t think we’ve had something really groundbreaking discovered by AI at this point that’s new.  It seems to be quite backward-looking in many ways, based on ingesting data from all the novels that you have on your shelf and that I have on my shelf. Maybe they’re going to ingest this podcast in the future. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem that there’s been a unique breakthrough that humanity has not been able to, or would not be able to, achieve by itself. And yet, I think the promise and the anticipation of what AI can do is quite compelling, right?  I think the way that it is impacting the labor market especially… Ironically, it’s impacting probably software developers the most today. It’s interesting that a lot of people in white-collar fields, professionals maybe, are also feeling like it’s changing the way they’re working. So there’s a big debate, I think, about whether it’s going to be an augmentation or whether it’s going to be a replacement of some sorts of tasks. I think one thing you can say with certainty is that the concept of a job is definitely going to change. If you look at the roots of the word—the etymological roots of the word “job” in the English language—it literally means “a task” rather than a role as such. Yeah. So I think we’re going to get this greater atomization of people’s roles. What used to be bundled together as one job is now going to be much more atomized into specific skills, specific tasks.  The opportunity there is that we all get to do more of the things that we find more fulfilling and less of the repetitive, dangerous, or dull types of things that we have to do in our jobs sometimes.Share on X But I think it has some second-order impacts in terms of how people develop their careers and the competence and confidence that people, particularly when they’re junior in their jobs, need time to build—the ability to operate at a higher level. So I think we’re all going to have to be leaders in lots of ways, even leaders in our own work.  Yeah, I agree with you. That’s fascinating. So, David, let’s talk about the framework. What would be a framework? Think of something that allows you to be more effective in your job—something maybe that you personally discovered or that you and your colleagues developed. Something that helps you be more effective in creating those labor market matches, finding the right candidates, and assessing them. Something that you can describe in three, four, or five steps, or maybe three or four ways of looking at things. Anything that comes to mind?  So there are a few things. I did miss a few things because I think—I don’t know if you’ve heard the news. We’re recording this, and I think the British prime minister has just resigned today. This is, I think, our seventh prime minister in 10 years. I’m sure each one of those prime ministers had their own framework in terms of what they wanted from their political leadership and how they were going to operate in government.  So I think we’re definitely operating in a much more VUCA world, right? This mnemonic is about being volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. I think, to some extent, that means that having a framework has to be something that is constantly being amended, reviewed, and updated in many ways. A lot of what we do in assessment—we have very clear statistical frameworks where we look at particular behaviors or particular characteristics, and we try to make sure we measure them. But I thought maybe that was too detailed and too comprehensive.  So one of the things we do when engaging with our clients is that we have a sort of consulting approach. It’s like a cycle. We start by reviewing the situation, so it’s like a situation appraisal, if you like. We use this internally as well in Mercer Assessments. So we try to understand what’s happening, what’s going well, and what we’re concerned about—just trying to get any data or information that we can.  Then it's important, particularly with a team or with a client, to explore what the priorities are, what's important, and what is causing them the most thought or requiring the most energy to address.Share on X So reviewing, exploring, and then agreeing on a course of action. Making sure that there’s consensus or, if you’re in an organization, making sure you’ve got the budget and the endorsement from headquarters or senior management. Then I think you can go into a planning stage. Making sure you’ve got a focus on execution and that you know what has to happen and when.  Then I think you can go into the ability to have that as a cycle and review or evaluate the plan itself. Is it on track? Is it on time? Is it on budget? Is it achieving its objectives? You can continue on this sort of reflexive cycle. So if you were to do that, it becomes quite sinister. The mnemonic becomes R.E.A.P.E.R., like the Grim Reaper or like “reap what you sow,” because you review, explore, agree, plan, execute, and then review again.Share on X So it can become, hopefully, a virtuous cycle, but it can also become an ongoing process.  I love it. So Yeah. So if you refine, maybe the last one is refined, and then you avoid repeat— Yes. Yeah.  Yeah. Oh, great.  That’s good. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, love it. So basically, what you’re looking for is helping your customers with an initial problem and then helping them generally improve their organization by continuing to refine and add to it, making it better over time.  Yes, correct. Yeah.  So it turns into a recurring engagement.  Yes, that’s the hope. Well, yeah. I mean, hopefully, if you have that relationship with the client and also with your team, you have this ability to recognize what you’ve achieved together, but you can also plan what you want to do differently next time.  So you’re the CEO of Mercer Assessments, which is the Dubai operation. Is this just a geographic branch of the Mercer Group, or is it a separate business that operates in multiple geographies?  Yeah. So actually, it’s a new venture for Mercer globally. My background is that I was one of the founders of a company called The Talent Enterprise, which was acquired by Mercer just over two years ago. It had also made an acquisition of another company before that called Mettl. So we were more of a talent assessment type of company.  We would do talent acquisition, talent development, leadership development, things like high-potential identification, succession planning, and these types of applications. Employee engagement as well, things like employee well-being assessments and stuff like this. The psychometric assessment field. So if you or your listeners are good at Greek, you would know that “psychometric” means “measurement of the mind.”  Yeah, right. So this is really what we’re trying to do. We’re accredited by the British Psychological Society to say that the tools we have, use, or develop have validity, reliability, and are statistically stable within the sorts of bounds that you would expect when measuring human beings.  It can never be perfect, but it’s considered to be predictive. Mettl was more focused on skills assessment. That was one of their big areas of focus, along with educational assessment. So coming together as Mercer Assessments, we’re now part of this big global organization. Although we’re based in the Middle East, we’re now working in Asia, Europe, North America—we’re just starting to do more work in North America—and Australasia. So this is the sort of big, hairy, audacious plan that we have.  That must be pretty intense if you’re working around the clock, essentially working around the globe. Then Mercer is… It can be.  Yeah, it can be. Even working in the Middle East, you have different working weeks. Some of our clients work on Sundays. But we have a good team. We have a big team. We have great technology. So we have scalable ways of doing it.  So what drives growth in this business?  I think it is changing. If you were to ask me that question even two years ago, I would say it’s to do with the change, the transformation, or the aspiration of the client, of the organization. If they’ve got a new operation, or they’re expanding, or they need to develop new skills, or they need to make sure their productivity and positivity are enabling them to keep up with their competitors, then these things would often trigger the sorts of interventions that we help our clients with.  That’s still true to a large extent, but what's changing a lot is what you were talking about earlier—to do with AI and expectations from technology. So I think what we're doing a lot more of now is real-time decision support.Share on X It used to be that our deliverables would look like a PDF report. They would say, “Okay, this is Steve. We’ve assessed Steve. These are Steve’s strengths. These are his areas for development. This is the sort of team or the certain type of colleague that he would thrive working with.  These are the people or the situations that he might struggle with.” That type of static report. Then either we or the client—sometimes if you’re looking at large numbers of people—you’d have to do a lot of spreadsheet work or a lot of PowerPoint work and say, “Okay, now we need to match that with your strategic objectives.” So I think what’s happening now is we’re focusing a lot more on the data.  Our technology is providing much more of a dashboard report, so Steve can access his results straight away because that’s actually when Steve is most interested in them and they’re most relevant—not two weeks later when you schedule a coach or someone to give him feedback. You’re interested as soon as you finish the last question. You want to know, “Okay, what does this say about me?” We can add lots of AI layers to that to help you implement it or understand it. Then for the organization, we now provide much more of a dynamic dashboard-type report.  So if, I don’t know, the CFO leaves this afternoon and the CEO calls the CHRO and says, “Okay, who are the internal candidates for this role?” You can come up with an answer. It doesn’t have to be something where you say, “Let me check my filing cabinet,” or, “Let me put a PowerPoint together for you and get back to you later this week or next week.” You can actually do that type of matching within the platform that we have. We have our own platform called Lighthouse, and it really helps you match individuals or teams to certain tasks or to certain ventures or aspirations that the organization might have.Share on X  Yeah. So instead of providing individual reports for individuals, you now operate this platform for your clients, and then they can look up the people involved in changes. So how is it different to scale the business with this type of approach? What makes it more complex?  Yeah. So on the one hand, it can help us a lot as our own organization because we can be much more pervasive 24 hours a day across the different time zones that we operate in. If you’re our client, you don’t always have to rely on having a meeting or a call with us in person. You can go and find that answer yourself. It’s quite an intuitive process and platform. You can access it and get value from your own data. I think that’s the key thing that I’m trying to emphasize that’s changed.  Clients are now impatient with SaaS platforms in particular when they’re not able to access their own data directly. So there’s a little bit of disintermediation going on in the enterprise software business as a whole. That’s the key trend that I’m trying to highlight here. But it also helps us to be more scalable. Just to take a step back to the previous discussion about AI, I think when it comes to using AI in your business, the key strategic choice is what you’re not going to use AI for.  For us, we made the choice actually three or four years ago that we’re not going to use AI in the assessments themselves. Not today. Maybe in five years’ time or ten years’ time we might change our mind, and we’re constantly reviewing that. But we need these defensible assessments. We need to be able to say, “This is fair and objective, and we’re coming with an external point of view that is transparent and defensible in every sense of that word.”  Yeah. You don’t want to hallucinate assessments for clients or even run the risk of that happening, right?  Yeah, absolutely. And there are some companies that have done that, right? I mean, there are lots of cases you can find where companies have said, “Hey, we just need a five-minute video, and I can tell you everything you need to know about this person, and you can make decisions about their career and all sorts of stuff,” right? I’m not saying we won’t get there in the future, but I just don’t think that’s good enough at the moment.  And I think with a lot of things that you do with chatbots now, if you’re judicious about it, you might be able to say, “Well, actually, that’s interesting, but it’s not good enough,” right? It’s not a finished product. It’s not something that I can execute on. What we can do is add a lot of value around the assessment. So we can do things like AI-based development planning, right?  When someone wants to see their results—and people normally want to see their results almost immediately after they’ve finished their assessments—you can start to say, in the flow of work, in the client’s environment, whatever their learning partners or learning architecture may be, “Okay, here’s a development plan for you,” customized and curated within that environment for your strengths, how to emphasize them, and also for any development areas or new learnings that you want to address.  We can also do things like AI-based proctoring, right? We can give the client a risk report on an application and say, you know, how genuine is this? What other software does Steve have open on his laptop? Is there a shadow in the room? Where are his eyes going? Is he looking at someone else? Is he getting help from someone else? Is this really Steve? All these sorts of things, right? We can do that. We can also develop customized case studies for the organization around its specific tasks and challenges that the organization has.  So you can come up with very specific, job-related assessments. AI can add a lot of value to all of these things. It can provide greater scale and a greater ability to sustain our growth. But with the core of what we do today, we’re saying, “Look, you need to be able to trust us.” And we want to be able to show you the answer. If you have a question about any of our assessments, we can check. There’s an audit trail, and we can show you the answer. It’s not just, “The computer came up with this idea. We don’t know.” But that’s intellectual property, and you know that it works, and you’re sticking with it. You don’t allow AI to bastardize it, basically, yeah, which makes sort of sense. So, David, what is one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business right now? That’s a great question. I mean, there’s lots of things. I think a lot of them come around, you know, what is this threshold between what we do as humans and what we use AI or other technology to help us do? And I think that threshold is constantly being reviewed. A lot of it is to do with how do you make growth sustainable. We have had massive growth in the last five or six years, and that’s a great thing.  But I think it means you have to make sure the foundations of your organization are strong so that you can move from one to another. I mentioned earlier that we’re just starting to focus on North America as one of our new markets, and I was very keen that we didn’t do that until this point or even next year because we’re not the organizational equivalent of The Beatles, right? Like, we can’t just expect to turn up in a big, sophisticated, very strong, highly cultured market and be able to expect that we’re going to do things like we’ve done them everywhere else, or that we don’t need to think about how we communicate with those prospects and those clients.  So that’s a really big step for us. And how we manage data, I think, is probably the key thing. Fundamentally, if I was to come back to answer your question, I think it’s how we manage data because I think clients are becoming much more sophisticated, much more impatient with people who curate their data. They say, “Look, you know, we know we’re generating lots of data inside the organization,” right? Which is typically what we do, right? It’s people data.  Normally in most work environments, you can tell when somebody opens their laptop, or you can tell when they walk in the office door, or you can tell sometimes even what they’re doing inside the working space, right? Their ID has got an RFID in it or something like that. So there’s lots of data that’s constantly being generated inside the organization, and clients want to get value from that data. And having a sort of third-party proxy come in and say, “Hey, we can do your payroll for you,” or “We can send a questionnaire to people once a year, and that can let you know whether they understand health and safety or they’re engaged in their workplace,” it’s not really satisfactory anymore, right?  The clients are saying, “Okay. I want to be able to get value from my data, and I want to be able to see that. I want the analytics. I want to ask questions that are not able to be prescribed at the beginning.” “And I want to be able to do these queries in real time.”  So essentially, would that require you to get integrated with your clients to some degree so that you can process the data in real time as it emerges? It’s really interesting because I think what I’m hearing from my clients is they’re actually frustrated with that. In the sort of classic SaaS world, which we’ve had in organizations now for 20, 30, maybe even 40 years, you integrate the big internal ERP systems or CRM systems, and you integrate them, and then you have to sort of work within their framework, right? And you might see a report that’s already pre-programmed, but you don’t necessarily see the data, right? If you wanted to say, “Okay, what’s the trend today over the 24-hour clock?” or “How is it changing in June compared to May?” or “How does it relate to the temperature?” or whatever, right?  You can come up with all these questions that you might not be able to predict and then plan and have a sort of pull-down standard report. So to do that, you need access to the data. And I think clients are saying, “This is our data.” This data belongs to us. We want to be able to see that directly, and we want to be able to use that as a decision-support tool, and not necessarily just have a report.”  Yeah. So they’d rather own the data and apply your tools to their data without you necessarily having access to the data or something like that?  Yeah. It’s also a source of differentiation for them, right? Because they know that if… I’m not going to mention these companies. I’m sure you and all your viewers know the big brands. It’s interesting what’s happening with their share prices recently, right? They’re all maybe suffering a little bit from a decline in their share prices, on average. It’s basically a standardized way of doing things, right?  There’s pretty much the same way that any corporation in any part of the world is going to do it because that’s the way you get efficiency through that software. But if an organization says, “Actually, we’ve got an insight into something that we think is unique and differentiated, and we want to make decisions in a slightly different way, or make them faster,” that’s a point of competitive advantage.  Does that mean they wouldn’t want you to apply their idea to other customers because it’s their unique property? They’d just want your tools to help them process their data. They don’t want to share it with you.  Yeah. There are clients like that. We do deal with very sensitive industries, and sometimes government departments, where we have to be able to certify that type of approach. I think that’s likely to become more common in the future as people become more sensitive and more aware of the value, the opportunity, and the threat of what can happen with their data.  Yeah. I mean, some people say that information is now ubiquitous. It’s the questions that are really important because that’s how you communicate with AI. Maybe the question itself can be proprietary know-how—knowing how to ask the right kind of question. They don’t want…  No. I mean… Yeah, I agree. Completely. Yeah. You’re absolutely right. Again, to go back to assessments, we’ve recently released a whole bunch of assessments that measure skills in AI as a domain. We’ve got all sorts of technical and non-technical AI assessments. Obviously, one of the skills that we look at is prompt engineering. If you’ve used some of the generative AI platforms, you’ll always get an answer.  They’re pre-programmed to give you an answer, and most of them are also pretty polite. They fluff up your ego a little bit and say, “Hey, great question.” “That was really interesting.” Then they’ll give you an answer. You need to be aware of that. You need to probe and make sure you’ve not just got an answer—you’ve got the answer. Or at least the best answer that makes sense for you. Then you’ve quality-checked it.  You’ve taken it from one platform, put it into another platform, and then into a third platform. Whatever you’ve done, you need to have that awareness and those specific skills to get the most value out of it. It’s very dangerous, and I think we can all see it. I’m sure your inbox is like my inbox. You get emails from people and think, “Okay, well, that’s not an email from a person.” It’s a bulleted email. It’s not personal. It’s not directed at you. Sometimes it’s hard to understand what it even means.  Yeah. You’re right. So David, who is the ideal customer for you that can most benefit from your solution?  That’s a good question. Personally and professionally, I like clients who challenge us. I like clients who ask questions that make us think in a different way, so we can hopefully give them value and really answer those questions. I think that’s important for us to develop. Clients who are looking for new insights or different foresights that help them in their business—those are the kinds of clients we’re looking for. Definitely the ones who are pushing the envelope and helping take us forward in terms of quality.  So if those types of people are listening to this show and would like to learn more about what you do and how you might be able to help them, where should they go? Where can they find out more?  Yeah, absolutely. You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m David B. Jones on LinkedIn. There are a lot of David Joneses. I think David Jones is the most common name for a British man—even more common than John Smith—so there are a lot of us around. But you’ll be able to find me as David B. Jones. You can also find Mercer Assessments. You can find out more about us through those channels. I’ll be happy to answer any questions or provide more information.  Is there a website people should check out? Do you have a separate website for Mercer Assessments?  We do. Mercer Assessments is part of the mercer.com website. That’s where you’ll find more information. There are also a number of books we’ve published on particular subjects to do with assessment, talent, and leadership development more generally. Those are all available on Amazon as well.  Okay. So if you’re out there and you’re looking to have a more sophisticated view of your people and their aspirations and how they fit the type of work that you want them to do, and you’d like to understand more deeply, then check out Mercer Assessments, David B. Jones. Actually, it’s easy to just put in “David Jones Mercer,” and David will pop up that way.  Check out the books that David and his colleagues have published. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then make sure you follow us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts. And David, thanks for coming to the show and sharing your experience and insights. I mean, it seems to me that you have a much more nuanced approach than most talent assessment or performance assessment organizations, and you have a lot more tools at your disposal. It’s a combination of technology and professional expertise. So that’s fascinating. Thanks for coming on the show. And if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure you follow us because we come out every week with exciting entrepreneurs like David. I will. I will. Thank you, Steve. Important Links: Davidi's LinkedIn David's  website

This week, The Gay Mix comes in hot with the most glamorous smart-light failure imaginable before Daniel drops a proper newsroom bombshell: he quit his job. After weeks of executive chaos, mystery PowerPoint math, disappearing developers, and enough stress to qualify as cardio, he finally chose peace—and perhaps a future taking happy vacation photos at Disney. Adam, already between jobs himself, naturally suggests they simply make a living podcasting. What could possibly go wrong?From there, the newly unemployed besties get entrepreneurial as Adam unveils his all-in-one podcast production playground, complete with show planning, contact wrangling, soundboards, trivia, and a UI only a developer could love. The contact segment brings Kathy Bacon's allegedly murdered backyard, suspicious celebrity-death arithmetic, Lamont Cranston's deep-cut Miss America reference, and a bold invitation to text the show pictures best left undescribed here. There are also elaborate funeral plans, a possible AI afterlife, a spicy detour through Broadway ticket prices and living wages, and a News Game performance that proves quitting your job does not automatically improve your knowledge of rivers.Birthdays bring Lynda Carter, Jennifer Lopez, and Elisabeth Moss, while Adam closes out the evening with a 3D-printing saga involving scratched light boxes, rogue nozzles, missing connectors, and emergency Walmart LEDs. Daniel teases an equally maddening mystery for the after show, the new production tool gets one last live shakedown, and everyone somehow reaches the closing music with dignity mostly intact. We hope you enjoy this week's blend of liberation, innovation, funeral catering, and technical support with just a whisper of gay panic.Email: Contact@MixMinusPodcast.comVoice/SMS: 707-613-3284

There are roughly 100x more people who use code than who can write code. As code that “just works” becomes easier to generate, this group may be the biggest prize of all — if you can get the agentic interface right.A key trend we have been tracking over at AINews is the absolute explosion in Codex usage this year, with MAU now up >10x from Jan 2026. Less than two weeks after their July 9th launch, OpenAI said ChatGPT Work and Codex had reached 10M users combined (as we cover in the pod, Codex now powers ChatGPT Work, so all ChatGPT Work users are now users of the Codex harness, even if they aren't traditional engineers) — showing the early innings of what happens when you graduate from coding agents to knowledge work agents:We've been calling out how coding agents are “breaking containment” to do everything else this year to power every other part of knowledge work - and it started with the org chart, with a major reorg last month that amounted to two of Codex's most prominent leaders, Greg and Tibo, taking responsibility over product and ChatGPT specifically, completing a “Superapp” consolidation cycle first discussed in March.With these updates Codex is no longer just a coding tool. In June, OpenAI said knowledge workers already accounting for roughly 20% of Codex's user base and growing more than 3x as quickly as developers. A product dedicated for knowledge workers was being pulled out of the Codex team.However, knowledge work has a different set of problems and environments than coding. For decades, knowledge work has been scattered across different primitives like documents for writing, spreadsheets for analysis, slide decks for communication, and specialized applications for everything else. ChatGPT Work now enables users to work across every primitive with agents. Instead of opening an application and manually operating its features, the user can describe an outcome and collaborates with an agent that can assemble the tools, context, and artifact needed to reach it.From building no-code products at Airtable to leading Productivity Engineering at OpenAI, Akshay Nathan has spent much of his career trying to make the power of software accessible to people who do not write code. In this episode, Akshay joins swyx and Vibhu to unpack the launch of ChatGPT Work, why Codex unexpectedly took off among non-developers inside OpenAI, and the company's broader plan to bring useful agents from software engineers to knowledge workers and eventually everyone.We go deep on the shared agent harness behind Codex and ChatGPT Work, why OpenAI brought the experiences together without making them identical, and how persistent computers, artifacts, Sites, plugins, memory, and sub-agents are changing what people can delegate to AI. Akshay explains why some teams are replacing decks and spreadsheets with interactive websites, how agents can gather context across code, Slack, documents, and local files, and what OpenAI learned from personal-agent products like OpenClaw.Side note: also don't miss Abhihek's sandbox track keynote at AIE, which now powers a lot of the sandboxing for ChatGPT Work… and yes was also broken by an unreleased OpenAI model in the recent HuggingFace incident.Akshay also reflects on how AI is transforming product development itself: why more people will become generalists with a specialty, why ideas and taste become the bottlenecks when almost anyone can build, why LLMs still struggle to generate genuinely grounded new ideas, and why teams must distinguish increased motion from actual progress.We discuss:* Why Codex unexpectedly took off among non-developers inside OpenAI* Why employees felt like using Codex gave them a new superpower* The product insight that led OpenAI to build ChatGPT Work* Why Codex and ChatGPT Work share the same underlying agent harness* How their UX, Git visibility, artifacts, and sandboxing defaults differ* Why OpenAI merged its agent experiences instead of building separate products* How AI is blurring the boundaries between engineering, design, strategy, and operations* Why OpenAI wants the default model configuration to work for most users* When power users should use deeper reasoning, Ultra, or multi-agent modes* Artifacts, agentic spreadsheets, and creating high-fidelity work products* Why interactive Sites may replace decks and spreadsheets* The challenge of designing a simple interface for an agent that can build almost anything* Why users should retry tasks that models could not handle three or six months ago* How AI can gather context for performance reviews without replacing human judgment* The OpenAI automation that turns internal Slack and document activity into memes* What reaching ten million ChatGPT Work and Codex users means for the product* How OpenClaw inspired persistent environments, scheduled tasks, and personal agents* Using ChatGPT for financial planning, budgeting, workouts, meals, and household management* The design tradeoffs behind sub-agents and how much of their work users should see* ChatGPT memory, Chronicle, and long-term context* Why AI may make more people generalists with deep specialties* Why ideas and taste become more important when almost anyone can build* Why LLMs still struggle with the instruction “bring me new ideas”* Measuring productivity through quality at-bats instead of commits, tokens, or pull requests* The critical difference between AI-generated motion and meaningful progressAkshay Nathan* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshaynathan/* X: https://x.com/akshaynathan_Timestamps00:00:00 Introduction and Bringing the Power of Code to Everyone00:01:33 Joining OpenAI and Preserving a Startup Culture00:02:40 What OpenAI Learned from Enterprise AI Adoption00:05:28 Why OpenAI Built ChatGPT Work00:07:17 Codex vs. ChatGPT Work and the Shared Agent Harness00:12:07 Why OpenAI Merged Its Agent Experiences00:16:24 Models, Reasoning Levels, and Choosing the Right Default00:20:26 Artifacts, Agentic Spreadsheets, and Model–Product Collaboration00:24:22 Why Sites Could Replace Decks and Spreadsheets00:30:08 Designing an Agent That Can Build Almost Anything00:34:28 From Developer Agents to Knowledge Work—and Everyone00:36:07 Power-User Advice and AI-Assisted Performance Reviews00:40:41 OpenAI's Internal AI Memes and the Ten-Million-User Launch00:44:39 OpenClaw, Personal Agents, and ChatGPT as an Operating System00:50:24 Sub-Agents, Ultra Mode, and How Much Control Users Need00:54:39 ChatGPT Memory, Personalization, and Chronicle01:00:19 How AI Is Reshaping Product Development and Tech Roles01:03:15 Ideas, Taste, and Why LLMs Struggle to Generate New Ideas01:04:42 Measuring Productivity, Quality At-Bats, and Motion vs. ProgressTranscriptIntroduction: Akshay Nathan, ChatGPT Work, and the No-Code ArcSwyx [00:00:00]: We're here in the studio with Akshay from OpenAI. Welcome.Akshay Nathan [00:00:07]: Thank you.Swyx [00:00:08]: And with our trusty co-host, Vibhu. So you recently launched ChatGPT Work. You lead Core Product Engineering. It's been a long journey, into all this. I find it very interesting that you started with no code or low code, with Walrus and Airtable. And to some extent, ChatGPT Work is like the super app of super apps of, well, here is the ultimate no code. You just write a prompt.Akshay Nathan [00:00:32]: Yeah. It's funny how things come, full circle. I think for a long time in my career, I started my career working consumer fintech, but then after that, like, there's this hypothesis that, the things that we were able to do with code, like, as engineers, like, if we could bring that to many more people in a more, accessible way, then that would be truly magical. We were working on a startup. It's funny, like, before LLMs, before vision LLMs, on how to do automated testing with AI. It was just kinda jank, back then, but doing what we can, and then worked at Airtable for a while on the same thesis that, like, if we can bring a database or the primitives behind a database to people, that'd be really useful to them. But once LLMs came onto the scene, it became clear that, this was the missing piece, like, the missing technology required to, like, bring the magic of code to everyone without them having to know what's going on underneath the hood. And so, like, I think this launch and a lot of the stuff that we've been up to is, like, the manifestation of that.From Walrus and Airtable to OpenAIVibhu [00:01:33]: How was stuff when you joined? So you joined OpenAI 2023. Now we've got, so much more stuff, so ChatGPT, Codex app, ChatGPT Work. Have things changed?Joining OpenAI and What Hasn't ChangedAkshay Nathan [00:01:44]: I think the more interesting thing is how things haven't changed. Like, one, I joined I remember when I joined, it was, like, five hundred people. One thing I was worried about was, like, I was looking for something, more early stage and, like, was it gonna feel startup enough? And I joined, and I was like, “This feels even more startup-y than I could ever imagine.” And, like, that really hasn't changed even till now. I think the, like, level of, like, bottoms-up ambition and, like, the ability of anyone to, like, do anything or have an idea and ship it is really cool. But on the, like, mission side, I think what was really compelling to me is this mission of, bringing frontier intelligence to everyone. Like, building AGI and then bringing it to everyone. And, I think acknowledging back then that, like, that vision is gonna, not be a linear progression. Like, we're probably gonna, like, try different products and have different things that succeed and don't. But the vision has stayed the same, and the mission has stayed the same, and we're starting to see the pieces, fall together, and that's really cool.Enterprise Lessons: No One-Size-Fits-All AISwyx [00:02:40]: You worked on Enterprise. What A lot of people never touch ChatGPT Enterprise. What is something that you learned from there that you're bringing into your work now?Akshay Nathan [00:02:52]: I think how there's no one-size-fits-all solution in Enterprise. I remember in the early days of ChatGPT Enterprise, like, when we talked to customers and, like, everyone. That was, like, when I think it was a year after ChatGPT was released, and everyone was so excited to bring, AI into their enterprise. And, there were all these teams being stood up. It was, like, the AI deployment team with, like, these enormous budgets. And if you asked anyone, like, what were they excited about? Like, what were they excited about solving? Like, at first, you'd get, like, kinda like the baseline answers of, like, “Yeah, we have all this context and data and all this stuff.” But then if you ask them, like, “What was, like, a discrete use case that, like, they want AI to enable in their workplace?” You get such a different, like, variance, like, explosion of, different types of answers. And it's interesting, like, you using, like, these models and these products, you have this box, and you can say anything to it, which is the magic. But it'on the flip side, it also means that, like, you don't know what to do with it. And in Enterprise, I think a big part of that is, like, meeting the users where they are, like, what use case were they trying to solve, and then teaching them how they can use AI to, like, gain leverage there.Swyx [00:03:56]: Do you meaningfully differentiate that from forward-deployed engineering?Akshay Nathan [00:04:01]: I think there is the go-to-market side of it and then there is the product side of it. I think you need someone on the product side. And I think, like, however good we get at FDE motion, like, I think at the end of the day, if we have a user who's, like, looking at their computer or looking at their phone, like, it's our job in the product to, like, be enabling them and showing them where to go. So we're really excited about that.Vibhu [00:04:24]: Do you think there's been changes, over the past three years of adoption? So there have been, step function changes. You have reasoning models and whatnot. Is there still the same problems of Enterprise has black box, don't know what to do with it, or have things changed?Adoption, Agents, and the Next 10x MarketAkshay Nathan [00:04:39]: We're seeing now that, like, there's this huge uptake, right? Everyone is extremely excited about it. It feels like, many people are, millions, hundreds of millions of people are using ChatGPT. They understand, like, how generally to work with AI. But then, like, every time, like, a new capability gets unlocked, so now, like, we're seeing with agents, like, there is probably a contingent of, like, early adopters still who, truly get it, who are like, “ we you can do anything. You just have to make sure the right context is there, it's connected to the right tools, and that you are supervising it, but, like, anything is possible.” But then there's, like, this, like, 10x or 100x bigger market where, like, they don't yet get that, or they don't yet see that. And so I think that's the next stage here. So to answer your question, like, I think the adoption is there and growing fast, but I think the opportunity is, like, far bigger than that. That's where we wanna play, especially with ChatGPT Work.ChatGPT Work, Codex, and the Super App MergeSwyx [00:05:27]: Yeah. well, let's, let's skip ahead to ChatGPT Work. only, like, a month ago or so, announced. what was the decision process that led into it? there was this, overall merging of the super app. Is that what we're officially calling it? you deprecated the browser as well. Just, summarize your last, like, couple months of working on this thing.Akshay Nathan [00:05:50]: Yeah. It feels like forever now, but it's only been a few months. I think maybe the one, impetus that, like- Is most salient is when we release Codex, or even internally had Codex, like, it was really surprising to us, I think we recently put out some stats on this, that there was this, like, real inflection of, like, adoption among non-developers at OpenAI. And, I, through this product development process, like, would go to, like, these UXR sessions to talk to people internally. And the thing that stuck out to me is, like, one, like, you go talk to, like, strategic finance or marketing or whatever, and they're all using Codex for, their use cases. That part's cool, but the thing that really stuck out to me is how proud people were that they were using Codex. Like, how, likeSwyx [00:06:34]: It's like, “I'm not supposed to be using it, but I am.”Akshay Nathan [00:06:36]: It was that. It was, like, that they were, early to this, like, new thing, but it was also this thing of, like, they felt like they had a superpower, right? And, what we recognized then is that, like, the power of Codex, the power of agents, like, we already had this massive distribution base of people who have, come to know and love ChatGPT. Like, how do we show that to them? Like, how do we bring it to them? Which is, like, a hard product problem, and it's, like, a tricky thing, right? There's many ways you can go about it. And so that's what we called the Merge and the Super App over time, and ultimately launched it in ChatGPT Work, is how do we do that? But it came from that initial realization that, like, the power was not only for developers, like, much earlier than probably even we thought. Like, it could be extended to everyone.Swyx [00:07:17]: How do you see the products differently? So, like, who is it for, right? So Codex started out even CLI, then app. Now there's a merge of ChatGPT Codex and ChatGPT Work, so is it the opening for the average user, for enterprise, for work? How do you position it?Akshay Nathan [00:07:36]: I think we want to get it to position it for if you're doing work-related things, for lack of a better word, right?Who ChatGPT Work Is ForAkshay Nathan [00:07:42]: I think productivity is what, like, the pillar that I support. Like, that's the name of the team. And the reason for that, the reason we call it productivity and not, like, enterprise or, like, work or something like that, is because there's also personal productivity, right? And, like, I think ChatGPT Work is I've seen people do things in their personal lives that you wouldn't classify as, like, work technically, but, like, these agents are, super capable for. Like, one recent example that someone posted about, on our Slack is, like, someone had, like, a missed package, like they didn't receive it, and then they got, like, the picture of it, from Amazon or whoever the courier was, and they, like, asked ChatGPT Work to, like, find out where that package is. And, like, the agent, is extremely tenacious and, like, took the image and, like, looked at a bunch of, like, listings around their neighborhood and figured out exactly the apartment complex in which the package was, like, gave them some information. And so, like, I think there's all these things that, like, you, work-related or productivity-related things, I think that's what we want the product to be. You asked about Codex. I think we think Codex is, a durable brand, but we have a principle that, like, the user we don't want a user to get stuck in a tab or an experience where they don't get the power of the product. And so, like, everything that you can do, in the Codex portion of the product on desktop, you can do in ChatGPT Work and vice versa. But we made some opinionated product decisions on, like, how much of the Git state, if you're in a Git repo, do we wanna expose to the end user? Or how much do we wanna make the experience of seeing the agents thinking, like, diff forward so that you get exposed to the diffs out of the box. And then, like, on the safety side, like, how do we wanna think about, like, sandboxing and making sure that we have the right defaults in one state versus the other? So, there's, like, some opinions that go behind that, but we do want We don't want the user to need to choose which experience they're in.Swyx [00:09:26]: That is a good goal for AGI, right? Like, people don't want, like, to hide to choose what version of AGI they want. They just want the AGI to decide for them. can I get an answer or, like It's not super clear to me. Is the Codex harness and the ChatGPT Work harness the same? Is it just UI affordances, or are there prompt level or even deeper differences?Shared Harness, Different UX: Codex vs. WorkAkshay Nathan [00:09:49]: So the harness is the same. The harness is shared. on In both of the products, we made improvements to the harness to make it good for knowledge work, especially as it relates to plug-ins or computer use or artifacts. You get that power regardless of which experience you're in. On the UX side, there's opinionated takes that we have when you're in Codex mode, what the UX should be how the UX should behave, and some stuff around the sandbox like I mentioned, but the underlying harness and capabilities should be the same.Swyx [00:10:16]: I'm just kinda curious. Maybe we can, -- Is there a query that we can run that would look different in the two modes?Akshay Nathan [00:10:23]: Yeah. I tried to create, like ask it to create, like, a retirement calculator spreadsheet or something, in both modes. And then in Codex mode, you might have to be in a repo for this, but you'll see, like, the diffs of, like, the sheet that it's creating and stuff like that, and the file edits. But in Work you won't be able to see that.Swyx [00:10:42]: I think that's, that's super clear. And then also the other thing I wanted to dive into was your, the productivity team. what else is there? first of all, what are the top-level teams other than productivity? Isn't productivity everything?Productivity Teams and Core ChatAkshay Nathan [00:10:55]: SoSwyx [00:10:55]: Science?Akshay Nathan [00:10:55]: We have a team focused on ChatGPT. Like, the core chat experience, for consumer, which is like, not, I think all productivity. Like, there'People are using ChatGPT every day for search to, figure out how to write messages to loved ones, to think about, how to, like, learn a new topic, et cetera. And so there's so much more inside to create images. And there's so much more in chat that, the hundreds of millions of users are using that warrants, like, a very dedicated effort. And there's teams focused on enterprise and infrastructure and API and stuff like that, so.Swyx [00:11:33]: I will bring it up.Retirement Calculator Demo and Git-First UXSwyx [00:11:34]: Yeah. So I have them both running. This is ChatGPT Work. There's a Codex version here. I picked “Five Little Ducks” song, so this will take a while.Akshay Nathan [00:11:43]: Huh.Swyx [00:11:43]: I think we'll just keep it in the background and, as they finish, we'll look into some of the differences.Akshay Nathan [00:11:48]: Yeah. But immediately, I think if you flip back to the Codex version you'll see that,Swyx [00:11:53]: That it assumesAkshay Nathan [00:11:54]: Like theSwyx [00:11:54]: It assumes Git. Yeah. Yeah.Akshay Nathan [00:11:56]: The, like, dynamic island assumes that you're in a Git repo. And you might miss some stuff because some of it is, like, in the actual chain of thought with those changes and how we display that, but yeah.Swyx [00:12:07]: Is there an unintuitive like, is there a thing that you wanted to ship and then you got feedback, and you were like, “No, let's not do it?” Like, what's the thinking behind that?Why Merge the ExperiencesAkshay Nathan [00:12:14]: In, ChatGPT Work?Akshay Nathan [00:12:17]: I think one direction we could have gone with this is, like, keeping the experiences, like, completely separate. So it's like, whySwyx [00:12:22]: Different apps.Akshay Nathan [00:12:23]: Exactly, like different apps or even in the same app, like different, completely different experiences. Like, why merge it all? Like, what is. Codex, people love. Like, why bring these products together? And I think the intuition here is that, like, all of our jobs are, like, changing dramatically with AI. Like, for, like, every few months, like, I feel like I wake up, and I'm, like, doing a completely different thing than I was doing a few months ago. And my hypothesis here is that, or I should say our hypothesis is that, like, part of what we're, we're building, this technology is giving people leverage. Like, the things, maybe it's the more mundane parts of your job or parts that, like, if you were able to automate, you'd be able to share more ideas faster or whatever, like, you're able to do now. And because of that, like, that might blur the lines between someone who's, like, only writing code or creating strategy docs or, planning events or, helping with marketing or doing podcasts or whatever, right? And so, like, these things are gonna get blurred over time. And so, like, trying to draw a hard boundary based on, like, the who you are is gonna be, is gonna be tough. And, like, we should enable users to choose, but we shouldn't box them in. And so a lot of the work that went in here, like, keeping the primitives the same, like for example, plugins are, like, unified across, this product and ChatGPT and the cloud, was because of that. It's this thesis that, like, eventually things are gonna come together and we don't wanna be Like, we wanna be prescriptive about when to be in either experience, but we don't want to box anyone in.Swyx [00:13:45]: I wonder if there's users who are very tuned to the old ChatGPT harness that is effectively now replaced by the Codex harness. I can't imagine what that was, but maybe they're more the more conversational side. Can you compare and contrast the two harnesses? ‘Cause only you've seen it.Akshay Nathan [00:14:02]: Yeah. I think ChatGPT, the existing harness, like, still exists today. Like, it exists in this app,Harness Engineering: ChatGPT vs. CodexSwyx [00:14:08]: The classic, right?Akshay Nathan [00:14:09]: TheVibhu [00:14:09]: You just start a new chat, and you don't go under Work, right?Akshay Nathan [00:14:13]: Yeah. If you startVibhu [00:14:13]: SoAkshay Nathan [00:14:14]: A new chat and go to chat, then you're, you're talking to ChatGPT with the instant model.Vibhu [00:14:16]: Oh, we can technically do another. But on instant.Swyx [00:14:21]: Yeah. So this one's not gonna code or it's gonna be in line. It's on a in line in a sandbox.Akshay Nathan [00:14:26]: It'llVibhu [00:14:27]: Oh, that's coolAkshay Nathan [00:14:27]: We try to push you to go to Work if you're creating a spreadsheet. Yeah, but this isSwyx [00:14:30]: And this is a router decision? Sorry. Is it a router decision?Akshay Nathan [00:14:34]: This is the decision that, the model is making, and then, like it sees that you're able to. or you're trying to do something that would be better served in Work mode. But I think your question was like, what are the advantages of, like, the chat, like ChatGPT chat harness?Swyx [00:14:48]: It's more broadly, like, I wanna, do an oral history of harness engineering. Right? the ChatGPT harness lasted us from, let's call it the ‘01 era, until now, and now it's being replaced by the Codex harness effectively. And they're, they're overlapping somewhat, but I'm curious what changed if there is.Akshay Nathan [00:15:10]: My perspective on this is, like, there's, there's, there's there's like a constant process of, like, divergence, convergence, divergence, convergence. And in chat, like, many of the use cases I was talking about before, like, search or learning, I think we're, we're really optimizing for latency and optimizing for personality and, like, different things that, over time, like the product The reason people love ChatGPT is because we've been optimizing for those things and working on them for so long. Codex, what we learned was that, like, if you give the agent access to this infinitely flexible environment as a computer, it can do really powerful things. And so when we think about, like, okay, well, for knowledge work, like, what is which mode should we choose? It was like it felt more natural to us to bring that to this, like, computer environment and, maybe abstract some of the details of this computer away from users who might not be used to that, but, like, give them that same power. But ultimately, I think that we want the power in all places, right? We wanna meet people where they are. So I'm sure there'll be work down the road in order to get things to be, equivalently capable in all scenarios. But it's just a question of, like, what we've been focusing on the product on historically and what we're focusing on now.Models, Defaults, and the Reasoning SliderVibhu [00:16:24]: I think alongside that, outside of just harness and when to use Codex, ChatGPT, or Work, there's also the new models you've released, right? any guidance there? So people love to min-max what to use, like only use Terra on high reasoning versus, for this, you wanna use Sol here, ignore all theseAkshay Nathan [00:16:44]: There's 32 options.Vibhu [00:16:46]: But, that being said, for people that are expanding, so, productivity trying stuff for work that don't have the breakdown of what all this is what's, what's the advice, right?Akshay Nathan [00:16:59]: Well, I think before the advice, like the first thing is, like, none of this would be possible without these models. Like, the, I think you asked earlier, like, what was, like, the inspiration for work and, like, early on, like I mentioned, like, what we were seeing with Codex, but that was also because the models were getting infinitely more capable. That's happening again. I think it's like another step function jump now. And to answer the question on advice, like we want this default to be the best possible. Like, we wanna be opinionated about the default, and so we've we've chosen a default that we think is gonna be the best for everyone. And, we have for power users options under the hood. We could One could argue that there might be too many right now, and we're, working on simplifying it. But you can extend, the reasoning level, and you can change between the different model classes if you need to, but the default should be the best for most use cases. So my advice to most people would be to stick to that. And then, if you reach a situation in which you think that you could, you wanna try, a different configuration, if you're not seeing either the efficiency on the cost side or the quality on the intelligence side, then you can change the defaults and see if you can get something better. But we think that the default should be good enough.Swyx [00:18:09]: I have, I'm just gonna run something by you since you have way more experience than me. I've recently been doing Sol Lite but with goal, with the idea that the goal augments the reasoning effort, but with more terminations and turns.Swyx [00:18:24]: Is that a good way to think about it as opposed to Sol Ultra or Sol, Extra High?Akshay Nathan [00:18:29]: Yeah. It's hard to say becauseSwyx [00:18:31]: Yeah. It's like an interaction effect.Akshay Nathan [00:18:33]: exactly. It's like there's a preference on, for you as an individual, like how do you like to collaborate with the models? Like how many of those like terminations, as you call them, do you want where, you can steer or make sure that it's doing the right thing?Akshay Nathan [00:18:46]: I think generally people should try whatever works for them. I think that like using Ultra or the like multi-agent setups are best for like when you have like tasks that are either incredibly complicated, like open explorations or very paralyzable. I think even for tasks using goal, I think is best for tasks that you'll be able to make consistent progress in a way that's verifiable over time. But I think for most tasks, they don't fall into either of those buckets. And so like at least when they're starting, and so that's why I think the best first step is like trying it with the default configuration and then seeing like where you wanna go from there.Swyx [00:19:29]: Right. You guys worked on a slider, which is super helpful for reducing the amount of panic.Vibhu [00:19:36]: It's nice on mobile at least. There's a nice slider there.Swyx [00:19:38]: It's nicer.Vibhu [00:19:39]: I haven't tried it.Swyx [00:19:40]: So you have the advanced view there, but if you click advanced view. Yeah.Vibhu [00:19:44]: Ooh, it's just a nice slider. Yeah.Swyx [00:19:46]: Very pretty, very colorful.Akshay Nathan [00:19:48]: Yeah. The idea was here was like reduce it to like one dimension even though there's multiple dimensions, right? Try to project it onto a single dimension for the user. Like, something from that represents like, speed and efficiency on one side and then like quality and thoroughness on the other side.Artifacts, Spreadsheets, and the Work LaunchSwyx [00:20:04]: I am just puzzled that it uses Sol so much, like the lowerVibhu [00:20:07]: NoSwyx [00:20:07]: Grounds I would've usedVibhu [00:20:08]: I think the slider, if I'm not mistaken, isSwyx [00:20:09]: Terra.Vibhu [00:20:10]: Oh, it is.Swyx [00:20:11]: Yeah. See? So they preset Terra to only be the light one. But like I think a lot of people would more people should use Terra. One, because Sol keeps running out of capacity.Vibhu [00:20:22]: I'm the reason. Here's ten minutes of ourSwyx [00:20:24]: There you goVibhu [00:20:25]: Retirement calculator.Swyx [00:20:26]: Oh, that's the Excel thing working for you.Vibhu [00:20:28]: This is,Swyx [00:20:28]: Oh my God. Look at thatVibhu [00:20:28]: This is work, and then Codex is still cooking, so we'll get back into it. I think it'll be interesting to see the thought process, the reasoning, and also, this is eight minutes on work. Codex is still cooking.Swyx [00:20:41]: Yeah. And by the way, so I've, do Gabriel Chua? He's part of the OpenAI Singapore team. He showed me this, and I was like pretty shocked that this looks like Excel. It edits Excel files. You never paid an Excel license, right? Like, but somehow this is like workable and it's agentic Excel.Akshay Nathan [00:21:01]: Yeah. one of the big like pushes that we made for this launch was like artifacts, right?Akshay Nathan [00:21:05]: Like both on the model side, like I think if you compare this with GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.4 before that, you'll see that there's been pretty dramatic improvements in the quality of these artifacts and then also on the product side.Vibhu [00:21:16]: The UX side is also crazy, like hosted sites and whatnot. No longer needing to host your own little webpage, like itSwyx [00:21:23]: Oh, I have a story about that. I can do, a separate thing. I'll need to take the visuals here, but we-we'll, we'll cut to that later. Was there co-training, because you were moving making this big move and you launched GPT-5.6 on the same day as ChatGPT Work? Was there influence between the model training teams and the harness teams, or did they did the launch dates just happen to line up the same day?Akshay Nathan [00:21:46]: I think the we collaborate heavily with the research teams, and I think that's like one of the most magical parts of the job, like the most fun parts of the job. But yeah, just using artifacts as an example. Like, a lot of what you're seeing, like underneath the hood, there's a lot of work that went into making sure that like, we had the right infra to be able to train the models to get better at this. And then on the product side, like had the right experience for users to be able to collaborate with the model on an artifact like this. In fact, like this whole viewer, like the intuition here is that like, it's not necessarily that you wouldn't need an Excel license. This is stage one, right? Like, this is probably not what you meant when you're like making a retirement calculator.Vibhu [00:22:24]: Yeah, you can iterate very easily. Yeah.Akshay Nathan [00:22:24]: You wanna iterate and like when you're seeing it, and if this thing is high fidelity to like what you would see in or what your coworkers would see if you were to send this to Sean, like that I think makes it so easier and makes you trust the product in terms of iteration.Vibhu [00:22:39]: When you say coworkers would see, do you see a multiplayer, multi-team collaboration with artifacts? Any things you guys think about that?Multiplayer Artifacts and CollaborationSwyx [00:22:46]: You can already share it, right?Akshay Nathan [00:22:48]: Yeah. It's inter It's something that, we're actively thinking about. one thing that, we've noticed internally without talking too much about the roadmap is that like there's many times when someone will ping me about something, and I will ask ChatGPT Work the question, and then I'll ping them back the answer.Akshay Nathan [00:23:04]: And then I'll be thinking likeVibhu [00:23:04]: Like the simplest would be, the three of us are just all on one hosted.Akshay Nathan [00:23:07]: Exactly. And I'll think about like was I required in this loop or and then maybe it was, rephrase like what they were asking or pulled from certain context or whatever. But like, when I gave them back the answer, that process was also lossy, right? Like I gave them just like my interpretation of what ChatGPT Work cooked up. But like underneath the hood, there's so much context like in the rollout and stuff that could be interesting.Vibhu [00:23:28]: Yeah, it'sSwyx [00:23:28]: So like the answer was preemptively respond to every inbound request?Akshay Nathan [00:23:33]: No, it was just like literally like this is what I do sometimes as my job.Swyx [00:23:36]: I know you copy-paste and then you're just a message forwarding serviceAkshay Nathan [00:23:39]: Yeah. Yeah, exactlySwyx [00:23:39]: From AI to AI.Vibhu [00:23:40]: But I think it's interesting, right? It helps people understand the capability of what you can ask and delegate that oftentimes people don't realize until they try or someone shows you, and then you're like, “Oh, okay. Okay, I see.”Swyx [00:23:52]: I think it's als there's also like a, light security issue, where like you're the permissions layer. Like yes, I could query everything that you query, and I could get an automated response, but maybe I'm not supposed to see it. And that there's no way I would know because I'm not supposed to know what I don't know.Akshay Nathan [00:24:07]: Especially as like, with ChatGPT Work, we're, we're asking you to connect your plug-ins and, it's pulling from your local files and stuff like that. Like the amount of context that the agent has access to is like- Deeply personal and like that's something I think we need to preserve, so that'll be definitely a challenge.Swyx [00:24:22]: There's Excel, there's PowerPoint, there's Docs, the, grand trio of work. What other formats of work do you think about? like you worked on Airtable. Is there a future where there's like OpenAI Airtable? Like what does that look like if you ever ended up doing it?Akshay Nathan [00:24:41]: It's a really good question. I think,Formats of Work: Sites as Knowledge ArtifactsAkshay Nathan [00:24:43]: one that you didn't bring up was Sites, and I think that wasSwyx [00:24:46]: SitesAkshay Nathan [00:24:46]: A core part of this launch. There's one side of Sites that I think people commonly talk about, especially on Twitter and stuff or X, of like, this like prototyping tool. And like we saw that happen with this launch even. The model slider that you guys were referencing earlier, like that was developed almost fully in a Site. Like, the collaboration between design and engineering and product on that was like on a site where we play with, the affordance and figure out how it feels and all of that. But the other aspect that I think is a little bit less talked about is like Sites as like an artifact for knowledge work. I was talking to someone the other day who's on like our corporate finance team, and like we were mentioning how like now when they have these reports that they're, they're working on as a team month to month, historically those things were in slide decks and in spreadsheets, and now they're just in Sites. And like Sites is the mechanism that they collaborate across the team. And the reason is ‘cause it's like, it's like somewhat higher bandwidth. Like, at these tools like PowerPoint and Excel are like infinitely flexible, but at some point you reach the boundary of like either as a human you may not know how to use some feature or something, or the product itself doesn't support it. But with a site you can do anything. You ask for anything and you can get that. once people see that magic, I think it's been really valuable.Swyx [00:26:02]: Yeah, let me show you my case study. this involves all the hot topics including ChatGPT Work, but also GPT-5.6 token billionaires and token maxing and Sites and auto research. I'm a fan of this game called Strata. It's, it's like a little board game that youSites, Auto Research, and Research DashboardsSwyx [00:26:17]: That you play with, physical blocks, that come on top of it like that. So over the weekend I took like thirty photos and just threw into ChatGPT. one point seven billion tokens later, out comes this site with a fully playable thingAkshay Nathan [00:26:32]: WowSwyx [00:26:32]: With 3D, block placement and everything. Because it requires physical blocks and I needed friends to train on it so they can get better, so I can play against them. But also, I could also, do things like train an AI on it and that's, thatAkshay Nathan [00:26:45]: That's your auto researchSwyx [00:26:46]: That gets into auto research. So, you want to train your own AIs, and then make sure they self-play against, each other. I need to set both AIs. So this is AI versus AI, and they're, they're gonna self-play. the AIs start out bad and then you want to define a loss function and get good. I wasn't gonna supervise all this. I was at, I was down in San Mateo, attending a conference. What I ended up doing was, auto researching and on this and creating benchmarks and that there was just way too many parameters for me to read. So I started asking it for a site, and it's created this lab, panel. Where is there a, is there a shortcut for a site that is created?Akshay Nathan [00:27:28]: You should be able to go in the sidebar to Sites, top of the sidebar. The left sidebar.Swyx [00:27:33]: This one? Oh, left?Akshay Nathan [00:27:35]: Yeah. Just scroll all the way to the top.Swyx [00:27:36]: Oh. Oh, it says Sites. Oh, there you go. Yeah.Akshay Nathan [00:27:39]: Ooh.Swyx [00:27:40]: So it create, it creates the sites. I don't, I don't think this is, it is exactly what I wanted, but let me show you what it popped up, right? Like I think as a research artifact, it is very important to communicate, exactly, what is being done. Outputs this thing which I eventually started publishing. So I moved it off of Sites because I wanted more, database and infrastructure than Sites afforded me. But this is like a research output that you can start to mess with and like try to think about like what hyperparameters are you tuning for training AIs. And like I was trying to make like scaling laws and everything and doing all sorts of like game optimization stuff. And the fact that you can just throw this up as a research artifact, like I no longer need to read ChatGPT output. I read Site output. But then there's also a huge sprawl. Like look at how long this thing is. There's so many numbers. It is pretty overwhelming, so then I have to start pruning it from there. But, it's an interesting transition from Markdown effectively that you're putting out to, you're putting out a whole functional site.Akshay Nathan [00:28:41]: I think Markdown just isn't that optimal for people to read, right? Might as well just write HTML website and I don't know. I think you can do a lot with customizing this, right? You have your skills that explain what you want. Like I noticed they're quite verbose. I don't need a lot of this information.Swyx [00:28:57]: It's very verbose.Akshay Nathan [00:28:58]: So and then the nice thing of having a site side by side is, you just iterate on what you want and what you don't, right?Swyx [00:29:05]: Yeah. I don't know if, any that triggers any stories for you of how it's run internally. Am I doing this right?Akshay Nathan [00:29:11]: Yeah. I think that this is like a workflow that we're seeing like all different types of teams use, where like the canonical artifact that was previously a deck or something is now becoming a site. And like with a site you, because it's just HTML, you can like. It's infinitely flexible. And so, if you want to give more prominence to a certain thing that like in a slide deck would, feel like it was buried, like you can do that. You can have it be like the hero image, right? And so I think that like, people are starting to see that. There's more work to be done to make these things like much more easier, easy to collaborate on. You mentioned that they're very, they're long and verbose, could be broken up. I'm sure that there's still something to do there.Swyx [00:29:53]: They're super long. Yeah.Akshay Nathan [00:29:54]: Yeah. But I think we're starting to see that like there is this aspect of this is a really interesting, format, for people to use, that's like much more flexible than what they ever had before.Swyx [00:30:07]: I think your job also comes becomes meta. You're not designing the products. You're designing a product to make products, and I'm curious how you manage that.Designing a Product That Makes ProductsAkshay Nathan [00:30:18]: I think one thing that we've been Like when we look at the UX, like that we've been thinking a lot about is how can we balance like simplicity with capability? Like if we're designing a product, like you said, that like is made to make up build other things, right? You can build so many different things. But we can't put that all in front of you because you'll get overwhelmed.Vibhu [00:30:41]: Yes.Akshay Nathan [00:30:41]: And so we had similar problem or similar challenges even Chat-with ChatGPT, but especially now, like when there's so much that can be done, I think the balance that we're constantly trying to strike is like, how can we give the user enough of a UI surface where, they can be expressive, they can tell the agent what they need, they can verify that it's using the right tools, it's pulling from the right sources, et cetera, but then it gets out of the way. And then how can we build the right system such that we can show them instead of telling them what can be done? Because so much of this is gonna be like, how do they discover the next use case and the next one after that if they really want to be super powered by the AI.Games, Private Evals, and Show-Don'TellVibhu [00:31:19]: Yeah. It's interesting. I feel like everyone also just has a different way to do it, right? I made a similar version of this same game. I didn't take any pictures of board or rule game. I threw in at goal eighteen minutes, fifty-three seconds later, a lot of tokens later, I've got a similar version. not with all the auto research and whatnot, butAkshay Nathan [00:31:39]: You gotta do all the latest trends.Vibhu [00:31:40]: And yeah, I did it with, did it with Codex, not Work, but it's interesting, right?Akshay Nathan [00:31:45]: Yeah. And this is GPT Image generating the pro avatars. Very good for game design. LikeVibhu [00:31:51]: AndAkshay Nathan [00:31:52]: A lot of game designers were like really into GPT Image for assets.Vibhu [00:31:54]: I will say like the broader takeaway probably is the reason that we do this is more so just to test the tools, right? Like, this was also a test for GPT-5.6 came out. I had done the game on GPT-5.5, right? The ability for me to no longer need it to. I had to feed it the rules. It's, it's a pretty niche game. It couldn't find how to do this on its own.Akshay Nathan [00:32:15]: Oh, yeah.Vibhu [00:32:15]: GPT-5.6Akshay Nathan [00:32:16]: It is out-of-distribution, which is why I was also very keen on testing the GPT-5.6 capability.Vibhu [00:32:21]: But, this is just as work comes out, as new things come out, these are just our side ways to test things, right?Akshay Nathan [00:32:27]: Yeah. It's some private eval. That is not this private.Vibhu [00:32:31]: But also valuable because now you can send this to your friends and I learned about this game through seeing this.Akshay Nathan [00:32:36]: It's a hard game. He's very good.Vibhu [00:32:39]: It's good to when no one is competing with you. But yes, it's a classic RL problem of like self-play, bootstrapping your game AI. yeah, you see how easily work becomes personal and personal becomes work because the thing I do for personal, it directly informs people I work with because I showed it to them. They were like, “Oh, you can do that with GPT?” Which like I imagine is the growth strategy.Akshay Nathan [00:33:02]: Yeah. The show not tell is a big piece that, I think we've we're not still not fully cracked of like, showing people all the things that they can do with the product versus like trying to teach that to them through like, articles or onboarding or whatever.Akshay Nathan [00:33:18]: So meeting them in the moment.Vibhu [00:33:19]: It's a career risk for me, because I used to be in developer relations, right? Where your job is to show, and then you're like, “What do you mean? You don't, you don't need.” your job is to tell. And then. But the product people are like, “Well, we don't need you if our product is intuitive enough.” SoAkshay Nathan [00:33:37]: Yeah. that's the magic of the models. So you can tailor the telling or the showing to like specifically what the user needs, like what they care about, what they've done in the past, exactly where they are on the adoption journey. So I think that's like gonna be a super big opportunity.Vibhu [00:33:50]: Seems easier and easier now to tailor custom showing, right? People have different use cases. As much as you said you don't wanna segment different people into different buckets, right? It's also not that hard to for people that are in different categories. But the question, is you said your team is more broadly on. What was the term you used? Productivity?From Developers to Knowledge Work to EveryoneAkshay Nathan [00:34:12]: Productivity.Vibhu [00:34:12]: Productivity. So howAkshay Nathan [00:34:12]: Which is now work.Vibhu [00:34:14]: Is it work? Is there another distribution that we're not hitting? Is there a group of people that will have something different than ChatGPT, Codex or Work? Is there more that the mass isn't targeting?Akshay Nathan [00:34:28]: I see it as like a sequencing, like. The vision is like bring useful agents to everyone. We started with like developers. Like developers historically are like early adopters that are willing to put up with more friction, set things up, et cetera. Like that's where, Codex started. I think the next opportunity is like what we call general knowledge work, all the other functions around developers. I think when you go from developers to this segment, like there's inherent challenges with like, this show not tell thing that we're talking about, making the product more understandable, bringing in new capabilities that matter more for this cohort than matter for developers, things like artifacts, things like computer use, et cetera. And then I think like the same learnings, like similarly how we took the learnings from developers and brought it to, general knowledge work, the next stage will be like taking the learnings from general knowledge work and bringing it to everyone no matter what they're doing in their lives. And we're already seeing that a little bit. Like this game example that you have is, something that's like on the border of like fun and personal life to, your professional life. I use ChatGPT Work full-time at home for everything, like for whatever I'm doing. I used it the other day to come up with a meal plan and like, save that on the like computer environment that it has and something that I can continue going back to. Like is everyone doing that yet? Probably not because the thing says work on it, but eventually, we wanna get people there.Vibhu [00:35:51]: ChatGPT life.Akshay Nathan [00:35:52]: Yeah, exactly. ChatGPT cooking. But I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of opportunity there, but I see it as like, we're, we're built we built a foundation in software engineering, and we're gonna take the same learnings that we take from software engineering to knowledge work to everyone.Vibhu [00:36:07]: Do you have any power user advice? I feel like, there's a group of people that will live it, use it for everything, stay on it twenty four-seven. And then there's a bit of a gap between that crew and people that, okay, I use it for work. I use it occasionally. Sometimes I type questions. any advice, any learnings, anything you recommend or just, takeaways that you've found that help bridge that gap?Power User Advice: Push the Frontier of ImaginationAkshay Nathan [00:36:30]: I think a couple things that I've seen is like, one, that it really helps to broaden your imagination of what's possible, and this has been a learning even for me. Like, the technology has progressed so fast that, something that, like, even three months ago, like, no way the models can do this. Like, now it's like, wow, it's like it can. Like,Swyx [00:36:52]: Give an exampleAkshay Nathan [00:36:52]: We're going through right now our, like, review cycle internally, and, people always talked about this as, like, a thing that the models are good at and like, there's a cliché of like: Okay, like, no one wants to be writing reviews and, like, we just use AI to do it. But in all seriousnessSwyx [00:37:09]: And it can evaluate it as well.Akshay Nathan [00:37:10]: Yeah, exactly. In all seriousness, before it was, like, just, like, slop and, like, I think it was helpful, but, not super productive. Now I've found that, like, the model can do a much better job than me, especially in this environment of, like, pulling context on, like, what people are up to, how they've like the things that they've done to make a difference, highlighting like, wins that they've had that, like, I might may not even have seen. It has access to, like, everything, right? Like the code, like, things that they've caught, reviews, Slack, everything. And so it's, like, incredibly powerful in that domain and, like, just like six months ago, the last time we did this cycle, like, I didn't even I tried using it, but it was not at all helpful. And this time it's been, like, incredibly helpful and, like, so I think continuing to push the frontier of imagination of what's possible, even if you tried something before, I think is maybe the my biggest piece of advice. The other, thing is, like, the more you put in, especially in this environment where, like, the model has access to everything on your computer or in ChatGPT Work, like you can create, artifacts over time and save them in your library and, like, the model will continue having access to those. Like, the more information you give it about whatever domain you're in, whether it's your life or your work, the more valuable it becomes, and it'll become valuable in, like, ways that might surprise you. Like, it might pull from context in a way that, may be proactive and that you might not even have thought about. But it needs to have access to those, to that those tools or that context first.Reviews, Agentic Search, and Context GatheringSwyx [00:38:27]: One thing I just wanna talk about the review stuff because I'm still that's a very sensitive thing and you're, you're a founder, you've managed people, you've hired people. As manager myself, I'm very reticent to put out any LLM-generated things especially when it comes to people, ‘cause it feels like you don't care.Swyx [00:38:46]: Presumably at OpenAI, people are more open to being eval rated by GPT. But are there any unofficial rules around this? Like, what's the etiquette?Akshay Nathan [00:38:57]: Oh, I think the etiquette is that, like, I would never write something via, like, well, solely via AI and, like, present it as, like, a review for someone. What I was talking about is more, like, gathering context. That's the place where it's incredibly helpful.Swyx [00:39:08]: So it's just search.Akshay Nathan [00:39:09]: Yeah, exactly.Swyx [00:39:09]: It's agentic search. Yeah.Akshay Nathan [00:39:10]: It's like agentic search, but, that you can tailor and steer much more capably than you could before, ‘cause, like, the thing is it's all there's a flywheel happening, right? Because of Codex, people are able to do, and because of ChatGPT, people are able to do so much more now than ever before. And if you're able to do so much more, it's easy to miss things as well. And so, like, I think we need to use these same tools to keep up with all the impact that people are having and understand, where we can be helpful.Swyx [00:39:39]: I think the thing, like, I run a small company, so easy to search, but at the scale of OpenAI with the amount of messages that you guys put in Slack, do you think that it misses things?Remembering What Humans MissAkshay Nathan [00:39:50]: Probably, but I think that I also miss things.Swyx [00:39:52]: Like, it doesn't matter, right?Vibhu [00:39:53]: I think sometimes it'sSwyx [00:39:53]: Like it's, as it needs to be human-levelAkshay Nathan [00:39:54]: It's all relative, right? Yeah.Vibhu [00:39:56]: Sometimes it's nice when it finds things you wouldn't, right? Like right now, my Codex system prompts, they're set up in such a way that every project I have has a secret- separate, notes MD, and it just writes learnings to there. And then the global one can pull from all these. So sometimes it'll be like: Oh, there's this project you did like four months ago. Here's a note that we had, and it randomly pulls it back into context that I would never do, I haven't thought about.Vibhu [00:40:20]: And I'm like, okay, this is quite superhuman, right? Like, stuff that would. And, it'll save like hours on chunking of stuff or find something that's already been done. I'm like, as much as it might miss stuff, I would too, but it's very useful when it finds stuff. And I have like a very, non-super engineered solution to this. It's just marked down files that get pulled whenever they want.Akshay Nathan [00:40:41]: Yeah. I have a funny anecdote about this. Like, recently gearing up to this launch, the team has been, really cooking on it for a couple months, and over that time, like there's so much conversation and chatter going on in Slack and Docs and elsewhere. And, one of the members of the team set up this, scheduled tasks, like automation to like look at everything that's going on and, like, come up with the best memes and then post it in one of our shared channels. And like, there are two cool things about this. Like, the first is, like, I think the models are, over time, like starting to become like funny.Swyx [00:41:13]: Funny. Nice.Akshay Nathan [00:41:13]: Whereas like, a year ago, like that was not at all the case. The second is, it was what you were saying, like they find things that in surprising ways that you may not have thought of and like create connections that you may not have thought of. And that really helps with like the meme generation because then you can see something that, genuinely surprises you and, is funny in that way. So yeah, that's like not like the most productive, use of this the technology, but it does it does uncover this, like this capability that's emerging, which is just like to find information that you otherwise would not know of.Launch Momentum and the 10 Million User MilestoneSwyx [00:41:43]: Talking about the launch, I think, I have pretty much said this is the most successful launch in a long time. I think even more successful personally than 5.0, and they're announcing ten million users. Does it feel different? You've been through a lot of launches.Akshay Nathan [00:41:58]: I think it feels like a culmination. Well, I think two things. One, it feels like a culmination, like I was mentioning earlier, like this like vision mission that we've been on for a long time. Like I said, we saw the magic of Codex internally, and then we're like extremely excited to bring this to many more people and to see it working, to like see us reach, the distribution goal, numbers that you mentioned, like I think that's like huge and super exciting. The flip side of that is like, there's so much more to do too. Like, that's also really exciting. Like, ChatGPT as a whole, like the this product that, everyone almost equates to AI and like loves, has hundreds of millions of users. And so like ten million is really cool, but like we need to get this to everyone. Like, we need everyone to feel this magic. And so that's the next step from here. But yeah, I think extremely pumped about how it's going so far and the opportunities.Swyx [00:42:46]: Awesome. I did want to also Because I've, I've, I've been tracking the number closely, it transitioned at some point from just Codex users to Codex plus ChatGPT Work, because they're same harness. The whole point is that you don't, you can't, count them separately. Do you have roughly a billion, ChatGPT users? Why did it just jump to one billion right away? Like, isn't that the default on ChatGPT or no?Codex, ChatGPT Work, and the Developer BrandAkshay Nathan [00:43:11]: We don't default you into ChatGPT Work if you're on ChatGPTSwyx [00:43:14]: If you're free. YeahAkshay Nathan [00:43:15]: It's also only available to paid users right now. And I think there's like a process of, educating users of what is the value of this product, having them try it, learning from their feedback, and making it better over time. But the goal is to, get as many of the people who love ChatGPT today to like feel the power of ChatGPT Work. But I think it'll be a journey.Swyx [00:43:36]: Yeah. And Codex will still be alive as a brand for the foreseeable future. And we'll just toggle between them as needed for UI stuff.Akshay Nathan [00:43:44]: Yeah, I think it's even stronger point than that. Like, I think we fully intend to like, treat developer. Like, developers have been, a core market for us for so long, and like there's, there's so much more that we can do to make Codex great specifically for, software development, and we'll continue to do that. This doesn't take away from that at all. If anything, it should increase the utility of something like Codex, because now you can move seamlessly between writing a diff to creating an artifact or, doing a search over your factor.Swyx [00:44:11]: I do wonder how much this terminology leaks to the non-technical user. Like, do they have to learn to say artifact if I want artifact? Or.Akshay Nathan [00:44:20]: It's funny, like we call it artifacts internally ‘cause that's what the teams call it.Swyx [00:44:23]: It's nice. Yeah.Akshay Nathan [00:44:23]: But like externally, like no one says that, no one calls it an artifact. But I think that people like often, like describe things, whatever they're used to, right? So if, ChatGPT Work is good at creating slides, they'll say ChatGPT Work is good at creating slides, and that's what we want.OpenClaw, Personal OS, and Persistent ComputersSwyx [00:44:38]: One big Another, it's July of twenty-six. One big thing that also happens in, for OpenAI was OpenClaw, and that's I think a lot of people's first time really maxing a agent for personal stuff, but also crossing over to work in essence same way. As far as I understand, OpenClaw is still independent, but did you go through your own OpenClaw moments? Were there any lessons you took from OpenClaw to Codex or back? Whatever.Akshay Nathan [00:45:06]: I think there's a lot of inspiration. I did go through my own OpenClaw moment. I,Swyx [00:45:10]: Yeah, tell the storyAkshay Nathan [00:45:10]: Me and my wife like set up an OpenClaw to like try to manage everything in our house. Not that there's like a ton, but it was like quite useful. We gave it a calendar. It started, creating events for us and stuff. At some point, the laptop that we were running on, it died and never got a chance to pick it back up. But there was a lot of inspiration there, like, in ChatGPT Work, in web and mobile, like you get access to this like persistent computer environment where, you can store files, and those files stay around between sessions. And the idea is to be able to enable use cases like this. one of the members of our team uses ChatGPT Work for what they used OpenClaw from before, and then feel like it has like completely transitioned, which is like, workout planning and like meal tracking. which again, it's like a work-related thing, right? It's like not work necessarily, but it's like in personal productivity space. But it has all the same primitives. So it has scheduled tasks. It has the ability to store files on a file system. It has the ability to like reference those things over time. And so you start to see the same types of use cases emerge, which has been really cool.Swyx [00:46:14]: Is there a point that ChatGPT Work completely replaces OpenClaw? they're independent, so.Akshay Nathan [00:46:20]: Yeah, I'm, I'm not close to it, so I can't speak to the OpenClaw roadmap, but I don't think so. I think that there's gonna be, there's always a need for like this like incredible, like open source technology that team has built. And I think that we can draw inspiration, in the product and, ChatGPT, I think many more people have like heard about and used ChatGPT than have used OpenClaw. And if we can take the magic from OpenClaw and bring it to them, I think that'll be a success. I think that like one thing on the ChatGPT Work side that we feel strongly about is that like the core experience is that you come to this product and you have a conversation, start a session, whatever you wanna call it, with this agent. And the magic of the product is that you can do anything in that moment. And we would like to create a product where you don't have to click a button or to go to a different place, whatever, and you can get whatever functionality exists in, your finances app or where or any other product like in this one place. And so that's the goal. It's like it we want an extensible system with plugins where you can connect to the tools that you need in order to be able to accomplish like a financial task, where you can, if you're doing like science work, like we have an ability to like extend the system in such that you can like write the tech and it performs well. There'll always be like products that we support that are best in class at those things, but we want as much of the magic as possible in that core experience.Swyx [00:47:45]: Yeah. Do you think that you can do everything you used to do with Wealthfront in ChatGPT Finance?Finance, Data Access, and Centralized ContextAkshay Nathan [00:47:50]: I tried it. like ChatGPT doesn't yet custody, cash and assets for me. So that part, no, not yet. But I, there was like a whole component of like retirement planning and, like financial planning and budgeting and stuff that, we were looking into when I was there. And like with the finances plugin, like that's all possible with ChatGPT today. So, I feel

This week on Two Parents & A Podcast, we're coming to you from GEORGIA!!! We recorded Sunday night from Serenbe (a neighborhood focused on wellbeing 45 minutes outside Atlanta - If you live a direct flight from ATL and are looking for a family trip… we highly recommend!!). We flew in for a friend's kid's first birthday and turned it into a whole family weekend, which leads to a bigger conversation: every state has "pockets of magic" like this, and we share the ones at the top of our list to check out next (the Northeast in the summer!! Montana!! Yellowstone!!).  Then we get into the idea from book club this week that we're SO excited about: conspiracy theory nights!! The concept: each couple researches a conspiracy, presents it (PowerPoint encouraged), and everyone debates whether it's true. Already on the table: the moon landing, aliens, and the Titanic insurance theory we'd never heard before… (pls put your recs in the comments). Plus, THINGS WE DMED on the viral video of an entire flight rallying to find formula for a mom stuck in delays

According to Salesforce, sales professionals spend up to 40% of their time searching for the information and knowledge they need to do their jobs. For go-to-market teams stretched across multiple products, multiple acquired businesses, and a sprawling tech stack, that number can feel like a conservative estimate. So how does a solo enabler cut through the chaos and build something an entire go-to-market organization actually uses and actually trusts? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win/Win Podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Heather Darling, senior sales learning and development manager at HSI. Thanks so much for joining us today, Heather. Super excited to have you here. Wondering if you can kick us off and just tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Heather Darling: Yeah, absolutely, and thank you so much for having me, Riley. Appreciate it. My background actually started on the customer side. I spent a few years in customer success at HSI, working directly with our customers, building relationships, identifying growth opportunities, and helping them drive product adoption. So over time, I realized I really loved helping teams get better at that work and not just doing it myself. So I got my master’s, and I moved into the sales learning and development role, where I now design onboarding and ongoing learning for our sales reps and CSMs. And a big focus for me is practical application, so I spend a lot of time building programs around how to position our solutions with buyers, how to teach reps about our solutions without overwhelming them with information that they don’t need. Recently, I’ve been focusing on how AI can help sales teams show up more strategically with customers, so I’m really focused on how you turn enablement into something that actually changes behavior. And because I came from customer success, I think a lot about the full customer life cycle. So a lot of my work is in helping teams connect the dots across sales, onboarding, and long-term success. In enablement, I just think it’s important to focus beyond training and think about how we build a culture where people are continuously improving. RR: Your intro tells me we’re going to have a great conversation about how you’re bringing all of that to life. But before we do, I’d love if you could maybe give us just a little high-level view of HSI, just so we have a little bit of a framework as we’re going into the conversation. HD: HSI is a workplace safety training and compliance company in the environmental health and safety space. Ultimately, our goal is to help companies operate safer, smarter, and with less complexity. So we sell to SMB and enterprise organizations across a wide range of industries. Within those companies, our buyers are typically EHS leaders, HR and L&D teams, and operations leaders. So basically anyone who’s responsible for tracking workforce performance, compliance, and risk. RR: Love it, and that is, to your point, just about every company aims to do that, so broad customer base to serve, broad prospect base to target. One thing that you mentioned to me when we spoke last was that HSI’s growth has come from acquisition. So can you tell us a little bit about what’s challenging about working in an environment that’s constantly changing and trying to enable your teams through that change? HD: Honestly, it’s a tough environment to run enablement in. Growing through acquisition, you’re constantly dealing with new products, old branding, different messaging, new systems, and even different workplace cultures converging. So, it sometimes feels like nothing is ever fully standardized. You’re always evolving, working towards a moving target, and the teams are always needing to absorb new information. So you’re trying to help reps understand what to sell, how it fits together, and how to tell a simple story even when the business itself is still getting aligned. On top of that, priorities are shifting with a moment’s notice, products are getting rebranded, positioning is evolving. So enablement needs to stay really plugged into the business and be flexible. There’s long periods of waiting to bring a new product to market sometimes, and then suddenly it’s go time, and you need to be ready, and you have to get everyone else ready. At the end of the day, it’s just a balance between driving consistency and accepting that some level of change is always gonna be your reality. So if you wanna be successful without driving yourself crazy, you work to have a structure in place to bring consistency to your own role in those moments. RR: I would love to know what your personal process for creating consistency amid that chaos is. I think that’s something that’s often challenging to do. HD: That’s a good question. I spend a lot of time meeting with our leaders. I touch base with them at least once a month. I go to team meetings when I can. I just try to stay as plugged in as possible to all the different things that are happening within the organization. For me personally too, I have a mission, vision, and values for my team of one, and so it’s a touchstone for me to go back to. Like, “Hey, am I meeting the goals and the principles that I’ve set out for myself?” Make sure that we’re doing the things that are not out of scope, but also that we are doing the things that we need to be doing to address what’s happening at the moment. RR: I think that’s one of the things that’s really hard, and something that when you talk to solo enablers is probably one of the hardest things, is that wherever you are, enablement is a game of change. It’s a never ending project. There’s always new things for people to learn, always new things for people to do. But when it is just you, and when things are changing fast, staying true to those north stars and that scope that you’ve set, beginning of the year, beginning of fiscal, gets hard. So I really appreciate those tips for how to maintain structure, how to not go crazy, and how to keep yourself on a path that supports your work and the business. So thank you for that. You alluded to a little bit of this in your introduction. Acquisitions aren’t easy. They add new product lines, they add new collateral, they add all sorts of different branding, messaging, et cetera. So what are you seeing that cause for reps? HD: For reps, I think the biggest challenge is just suddenly they’ve got a bigger portfolio of things that they can sell, but it’s not always clear how the pieces fit together, what they need to lead with. If you’re not on top of that as an organization, rep’s confidence drops, your sales cycles get longer. You tend to see people fall back on doing and selling what they already know. People can be reluctant to bring up a new solution that they might feel like they don’t fully understand. And so again, I think that’s where it’s really important to make sure all those pieces are in place as much as possible before you bring the reps in, because they don’t fully understand something, they don’t feel confident in talking about it, so sometimes those new solutions, they don’t get brought up as much as they should. That’s definitely a challenge. For the broader go-to-market team, it creates a lot of inconsistency too. We’ve got different messaging, different positioning, overlapping collateral. It’s really easy for marketing, sales, and customer success to get slightly out of sync, and that shows up pretty quickly in the customer experience. Your risk really with that is not a lack of resources, it’s almost in having too many. It makes it hard for people to find or trust what’s relevant. So you might have reps sharing old collateral with legacy branding because they feel comfortable, they feel like that’s something that they trust. They’re measured on results, so when something is working for them, they don’t wanna risk messing that up. And so change can feel like it really slows them down or it puts deals at risk. So when you’re introducing new products, new positioning, or new tools, especially all at once, that can create some hesitation. Reps are gonna tend to default back to what they know, what they trust, what they’re comfortable talking about. RR: Hearing all of those challenges and also some of those questions that you asked, when there are so many priorities swirling around, so many new things coming in, how do you find that clarity, and how do you create that clarity? And I think one of the things that you shared was an answer to that was, “We needed some tooling.” And so you started looking for some tools to help with that, that problem of reps don’t feel confident with our new solutions. And so I think you were looking initially maybe for something more aligned to an onboarding tool, and then you wound up here with a sales enablement platform. HD: Yeah. Yeah, it was an interesting shift because early on I really was thinking about this as an onboarding problem. So how do we get new reps ramped faster, especially with how complex our business has become? But as I got deeper into it, I realized that the bigger issue wasn’t just onboarding, it’s ongoing development, coaching, creating and tracking certifications. So the challenge doesn’t stop after those first 30, 60, or 90 days. The business is still changing. We’re adding new products all the time, messaging keeps evolving, and that can be really a struggle for reps to keep up with. So there’s just so much information coming at them about buyers and products, and not to mention our internal processes that can sometimes change on a moment’s notice. So my thinking shifted from how do we ramp people to how do we continuously enable reps in a way that makes it easy for them to consume and keep up with the pace of the business? I didn’t really know, I think, that enablement platforms were something that existed. Turns out that in addition to hosting ongoing learning and coaching, an enablement platform could help us centralize content, which is something that we were really struggling with actually. So it really became clear that what I thought I wanted was actually not what I wanted. RR: So when you did land here, and you found there is a tool that will support not just the initial ramp-up on a difficult business to learn, but also will keep our reps continually enabled, everboarding as things change, and then also able to access all of the content, resources, et cetera, that they need. So you found something that worked, but that’s only step one. The next one is getting approval, getting the internal buy-in that this is the right choice, and it sounded like there was some degree of internal skepticism. There was a worry that it wouldn’t work. So how did you make the case for enablement platform and say, “We need this. It’s worth it. I promise you, it’ll, it’ll work out the way we want it to”? HD: We’ve had some challenges with platform adoption in the past, and so there was definitely some skepticism in the organization. And it’s always tempting to, we have a problem, let’s throw a tool at it. So I think for us, the turning point was reframing the problem. So instead of just, “Hey, we need a new tool to address this,” it was a focus on what the leaders were already feeling and seeing, which was longer ramp times, inconsistent messaging and branding, reps struggling to navigate a more complex sales cycle and complex sales processes. So we were incredibly lucky to find an internal champion, somebody high up and respected in the organization who also saw the problems that the sales org was facing firsthand. He believed in the impact that Highspot could have and really helped us connect the dots across leadership teams, and that made a big difference in building internal momentum and credibility. When we could confidently say, “This helps us ramp reps faster and has the potential to increase cross-sell by even 10 or 15%,” that conversation shifted pretty quickly, and at that point, it was about solving a real business problem. RR: Yeah, and there are a couple of really, I think, compelling things that anybody who’s trying to make a business case really for anything but for an enablement platform, expanding an enablement platform, anything like that. One, have a champion. That’s so huge when you have somebody who can speak the language of everybody else that you need to get bought in. Two, be able to reframe it to the value to you, as opposed to, yes, we have problems, but what would it look like in a future state if we didn’t have those problems? And so once you did have that, that buy-in, you had that moment where everybody was like, “Okay, we see the vision. Let’s move forward.” How did you drive adoption? HD: We, like I said, we’ve had a history of challenging or failed software adoptions, so I think that goes back to the idea of sales reps being a little allergic to change. So we definitely had some skepticism. And I got that. I was nervous about it. I had put myself on the line. So knowing that, I was just really intentional up front. I spent a lot of time organizing things the right way, building out Spots, overviews, Sales Plays, and Digital Room templates so that when our reps got in there, it actually made sense and it felt cohesive to them, like something that they understood and that they could use. So I created pages that, as much as possible, mirrored a lot of our internal and external resources, so it looked familiar. We used team homepages that linked to a lot of the other sites outside of Highspot that they use in their daily lives. We were integrated with Gong and Salesforce, which added a lot of value for them. So it was something where you could come in in the morning, you could open up your Highspot, you could have your links out to some of the other resources that you need, and you could start your day there. I also didn’t just blast it out to the entire organization at once. I launched to a small group of reps and got their feedback, made some adjustments based on that, and then after about a month, I started rolling it out more broadly. I spent some time with each team, walked them through some of how to use Highspot, answered their questions, got them set up linking all of their accounts and setting up profiles to make sure everything was ready to go, because I wanted to make it easy for them to engage with it and to be ready to use it to engage with their buyers. We started off slow, but reps started to see the payoff. So it was easier to find what they needed. That was really helpful. And at the same time, we gave them the ability to see how their prospects were engaging with content that they shared. That’s when I think it clicked for a lot of them. And at the same time, we reinforced that internally. So I trained our internal teams, like marketing, finance, sales ops, to point reps back to Highspot. So anytime they were asking for help locating content or processes, I asked them, “Hey, instead of giving them the answer, please let them know that it’s in Highspot and that they can easily find it.” I started to feel the shift a few months in. We would be in meetings, and people would say things like, “Hey, make sure that document you just showed us gets into Highspot.” Like, “Can you drop this PowerPoint deck in Highspot?” That’s when I knew we had crossed a line. It stopped being something that I was pushing, and it became the source of truth that sales team had been missing. RR: Can you walk us through what you built, what the platform looks like today, and then what you would point to as some of the things that have contributed to the success you’ve found so far? HD: The platform today is the central hub for how our go-to-market teams operate. We’ve got structured Spots with clear overviews, Sales Plays for all of our solutions, Digital Rooms that they’re using directly with customers. It’s really become the place where a lot of work happens. So as far as what’s driven the success, I think the biggest thing for me is having the right mindset. This isn’t a set it and forget it project. If you go in, I guess, thinking like, “Hey, I’m gonna be done with this at some point,” it’s not gonna work. It gets easier to manage over time, for sure, but it should always be evolving as your organization evolves, because you really have to keep refining, updating, and listening to your internal stakeholders. That ongoing care and feeding is what actually makes it stick and provides ongoing value. RR: And that’s, I think, the bitter truth of enablement, is that you’re constantly driving to all of these goals, new objectives that come up, and you hit one and you go, “Great. We’re done.” And then there’s a new one that comes in, and all of a sudden, again, you have that bomb of Sales Play training, Digital Room template that I need to build and equip my reps to get out there and drive that new initiative. So I think you’re 100% right to say that that is the right approach. And I would be curious, just because it sounds like in our conversation so far, you’re a firm believer that enablement is the connective tissue between marketing, sales, some other go-to-market functions that you called out. And you mentioned being in team calls and keeping a good pulse on the organization, but how have you built such strong connections between all of these teams and the leaders behind them? HD: Yeah, that’s a great question. A lot of what enablement does is really connect those dots across the business. And so for me, it just comes down to staying close to the work. I’m regularly attending team meetings. I’m joining product updates. I’m meeting with sales leaders on a monthly basis. I try to spend time one-on-one with our reps as much as I can, just to understand what they’re dealing with day to day. And that builds trust, but it also keeps me grounded in what they actually need and not just what I think they need. More importantly, I’m just thinking about how it can solve real problems for the different teams. So whether that’s helping marketing get their messaging in front of reps or giving sales ops and finance a better way to communicate priorities, it becomes a shared tool. Not just a sales tool, but a way for everybody to get things in front of sales when they need to have their attention or they need something that’s going to live somewhere people can easily access it. And I think that’s really where the connective tissue happens. When those stakeholders see Highspot and enablement more broadly as a way to amplify their own work and reach across teams, they lean in, and at that point, it stops feeling like enablement is a separate function, and it starts to just feel like part of how the business runs. RR: I really appreciate that call-out that you have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of your partners, understanding what they’re prioritizing, understanding what their KPIs are, what their goals are, what they’re driving towards, and then how can I serve that? It sounds like you’ve gotten to a point that you can be proud of, and I would really love to hear a little bit more about what business impact or achievements are you proudest of? HD: Yeah. This past year has been really exciting for us with Highspot, just to see the level of adoption and to see how often people refer to it. When we first rolled it out, our goal wasn’t just adoption. It was actually to change how our reps sell and how our buyers experience us, and we’re really starting to see that come to life. We have reached 100% adoption across our North American team, which is great, but what I’m most proud of is it’s not just surface level usage. The reps who are leaning in the most are seeing real results. So for example, reps who complete our learning path certifications are winning 15 to 20% more often. They’re generating more revenue because they’re creating and closing more opportunities. There’s a similar story with our Sales Plays. So the reps who use them are consistently outperforming. And on the buyer side, we’ve completely changed how we show up. We’ve had over 6,000 external shares this year, including more than 2,000 Digital Rooms that have gone out, and those are not only sales meeting follow-ups. Reps are using them for everything from onboarding new customers to supporting partners to running webinar follow-ups and supporting platform migration campaigns. Reps are seeing exactly how buyers are engaging with what they’re looking at, what’s resonating, and that helps them coach their champions internally. So it’s a much more informed, more intentional way of selling. Overall, it feels like we’ve built a system that’s actually driving better selling behaviors and better outcomes. RR: I think the thing that’s most powerful about what you shared just there is when you were talking about how did we earn buy-in. And you walked us through how you made that reframe, and you showed here is what is possible. And I think you threw out something there, like, “What if we could improve cross-sell by 15%?” And you can look at your data today and say, “Our training is actually increasing the number of opportunities we can create.” So that initial stretch goal that you set to earn buy-in on the vision, you have achieved, and you can prove it out, which is crazy, and I hope feels very gratifying. So with a strong environment in place, high adoption, less content chaos, an easy way to get folks ramped up, what’s next? HD: Yeah. I mean, we’re in a good spot right now. I’ve been able to start to have some fun with things because the foundation is there. Adoption is pretty strong, so the focus right now is really shifting to impact. So a big area for me right now is expanding learning, and that’s what I set out to do over a year ago. So I’m building structured learning paths with certifications so reps can prove readiness across different parts of our solution set. So ironically, my project had to take a bit of a backseat to building out the other areas of the platform, but I think that had to happen first to drive that learning portion and to see success there. So we’re also starting to scale globally. We are bringing our EMEA team into Highspot in a way that aligns with how HSI as an organization operates but also still respects the differences in their processes and products. We’ve started to explore the AI coaching functions, which is really exciting. So the goal there is to help reps tighten up their messaging faster, especially around product launches, and to support both onboarding and ongoing development. And at the same time, a lot of the focus is just continuing to evolve what we’ve already built, finding new ways to add value, keeping content fresh, refining Digital Rooms, making sure content stays aligned with the business. So I’m always diving into analytics to determine some new ways to deliver value and prove impact. I think it goes back to the idea that this isn’t a project with a defined endpoint, so our Highspot will always be evolving in the same way our products and our sales org is evolving, and I think that’s what makes it such a successful and valuable resource. RR: Such a full circle point to end on. There’s a lot to look forward to, and the one truth and the one consistent factor is that it’s gonna change, and you’re going to adapt. So who knows what’s coming next specifically, but it sounds like you’re ready to face it when it does come. Heather, it has been so wonderful to hear about your journey, the work that you’ve been doing, the way it’s showing up for HSI, so thank you so much for taking the time to come and share, and give us a little bit of a peek into your world. HD: Yeah, absolutely. So happy to be here. Thank you so much, Riley. RR: No, thank you. And to our listeners, thank you for tuning into this episode of the Win/Win Podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize go-to-market success with Highspot.

this episode we discuss the newest memoir by a woman who could well be the voice of our generation (or at least a voice of a generation) - famesick by Lena Dunham. from her meteoric rise to fame with the hit tv show girls, to the crippling chronic pain and mental health concerns that intersected with an externally perfect life yet highlighly cancellable life, lena dunham is compulsively honest in this new novel. we chat about hannah, jessa, marnie and shoshanna, the juicy details on adam driver, jenny konner and jack antonoff and of course, the infamous powerpoint.send us your voice messages here

Knowledge Project Key Takeaways The dating site story is systems thinking in one anecdote: a large dating site hypothesized longer profiles would drive more engagement They tested it. It was true. They rolled it outMany, many months later they discovered it was negative for conversion — when people knew that much about each other, they converted lessThat is a second-derivative effect, and you only find it way after the factThe combination is the whole point: know the really old stuff (the history of your field, which signals passion) and really understand the new edge. Do both and you're a power playerApplying for a marketing job at P&G or Pepsi? Know the legends of marketing and genuinely get TikTok. That's a wildly differentiated candidateThe built-in filter: if learning the history of your field sounds tedious, you're in the wrong lane. Tedium is the signal that the passion isn't thereWall Street is the buyer of the product venture capitalists create, since liquidity is either M&A or an IPO and that's where the price gets set — so even at two people on a PowerPoint, you're asking whether this thing grown up is something that buyer gets excited aboutChina has roughly 10 good open source models and the farmer metaphor explains why that matters: two agricultural societies, in one the farmers come to market, sell goods, go home. In the other, they're forced to share best practices with every other farmer. Which one evolves faster? They're open sourcing weights and publishing the new techniques. Meanwhile a lot of US startups are quietly forking those modelsThe chart that tells the AI funding story: losses of the category-leading company before going cash flow positive. Amazon was two or three billion. Uber was around 15 billion. These AI companies will be way bigger than thatBurn rate used to be the risk metric: ten years ago a million a month was terrifying. Now companies burn five billion a year, over a hundred million a month, and at that speed it's genuinely hard to know what your unit economics even areStablecoins are functionally a workaround for regulation the banks lobbied into existence. ACH takes three days, a same-day wire costs $25 and a page of forms, and credit cards charge 2 to 2.5% — “there's zero reason why it should cost two or three percent, just zero” UK Faster Payments did instant bank-to-bank 20 years ago, Pix hit 60-70% of transactions within six years, and the US built FedNow but it went nowhereBill once asked Jeff Bezos how his angel portfolio was so successful given he has zero free time. The answer: when he meets an entrepreneur there is only one question he asks himself, is this person going to do this no matter what, come hell or high water?Benchmark made the partnership flat — no lead partner, no king, no president, just five equal partners, which makes recruiting easy, actually develops new partners, and eliminates all the annual comp politics. The one huge negative: with no CEO, nobody owns anything firm-wide, which is why the site is still a single splash page 15 years laterRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgBill Gurley spent years on Wall Street, built his career as a partner at Benchmark, worked through Uber's hypergrowth era, and now serves on the board of the Santa Fe Institute, where he studies complexity and systems thinking. In this episode, Bill shares the mental models he returns to most, including systems thinking, second- and third-order effects, and the importance of understanding both the bedrock of your field and the bleeding edge. He explains what separates great founders, why storytelling and product instincts matter, how he uses AI across different models, and what he sees coming in open source, China, stablecoins, tokenization, payments, and venture capital.  ------ Timestamps: (00:00) Key Mental Models (02:02) Investing Journey and Key Players (05:21) Knowing the Bedrock of the Industry (08:50) Obsessive Learning in Founders (10:04) The Silent Edge (11:44) Surprising AI Use (13:13) The Future of AI Models (14:17) Global AI Regulation (18:12) Impacts of AI on Investing (19:53) Are There Limitations on Training AI Models? (23:04) Would You Sit in the Back Seat While Your Tesla Drives? (24:15) Non-Consensus Opinions (24:53) Are We Overfunding this Buildout? (29:40) The Role of Retail Investors and Tokenization (34:26) What is a Stablecoin? (37:58) Competitive Mode: Visa and Mastercard (39:55) AI and Debt Analysis (45:05) The Craft of Storytelling and Writing (48:07) Founder Advantage: Product Instinct (50:12) Real World Lessons from Working With Uber (52:10) Inside Benchmark's Success (59:42) What is Success for You? ------ Newsletter: The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it's completely free. Learn more and sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fs.blog/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------ Follow Shane Parrish: X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/shaneparrish⁠ Insta: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/farnamstreet/⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/shane-parrish-050a2183/⁠ Follow Bill Gurley LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billgurley/ X: https://x.com/bgurley?lang=en Check out Runnin' Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love ------ Thank you to the sponsors for this episode: +CoinShares: Delivering Reason to Digital Asset Investing. ⁠https://coinshares.com/⁠ +Granola AI, The AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings: https://www.granola.ai/shane Check out the Granola Notes +HeyGen is a message-first AI video platform that helps people and AI agents turn ideas into professional video in minutes. Try for free at https://www.heygen.com/ +LMNT: My go-to zero sugar electrolytes — get a free LMNT Sample Pack here: DrinkLMNT.com/TKP Learn more about your ad choices. 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The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com New Book - The Price of Becoming - www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Joanna Stern is an Emmy Award-winning technology journalist, chief technology analyst for NBC News, and founder of the independent media company, "New Things." She is best known for her 12-year tenure at The Wall Street Journal, and for authoring the New York Times bestseller I Am Not a Robot. Key Learnings  Joanna dedicated her book to her parents "who taught me to think for myself, and the AIs, robots, and machines that made me wonder if I really was." In an age when AI can do the thinking for us, the most valuable thing we can teach our kids is to think for themselves. Walt Mossberg invented tech journalism for humans. His first column: "Computers are too hard to use, and it's not your fault." Without Walt, we don't have a category where technology built for humans is reviewed by humans. AI won't replace the radiologist. It'll make them better. Joanna sat with her doctor while AI scanned her mammogram. The AI flagged three suspicious spots. Two the doctor had already dismissed as benign. But one was something the doctor hadn't caught. She marked it for follow-up. Then the doctor pointed to other cases where SHE had caught things the AI missed. It's not a replacement. It's a partnership. The same technology that finds cancer is the same technology that can autonomously send missiles. That's the great tension of our time. Every powerful technology has good and bad uses. AI colleagues are coming. Joanna has two employees and one AI agent. She predicts that within a year, she'll have full AI employees. Great management books haven't been written yet about how to lead a mixed team of humans and agents. Someone is going to write them. Concert ticket prices tell you everything about human connection right now. Every artist is selling out football stadiums. People are craving in-person interaction more than ever. Bot Girl Summer. Joanna tried to have an emotional relationship with a chatbot boyfriend named Evan for 48 hours. She didn't fall in love. But she noticed how easy it was to talk to something that only wanted to hear about her problems and told her she was great at everything. That's the danger. The AI therapist shut itself down when it realized there was a real therapist in the room. Joanna brought her AI therapist "Ash" into her actual therapy session. Halfway through, Ash said, "I'm sorry, I can't continue this conversation. It sounds like there are multiple people in the room." AI won't replace therapists. It'll help with the shortage and the stigma. Some people don't want to walk into a therapist's office. But they'll open their phones. That's a bridge to real help for people who wouldn't otherwise get it. Kara Swisher's career advice to Joanna: "Leave your fucking job." That was the shortest, cleanest advice Joanna got when deciding whether to leave the Wall Street Journal after 12 years. Joanna used AI as a co-founder for the biggest decision of her career. She uploaded 12 years of notes into ChatGPT and asked it to help her decide whether to leave the Journal. It didn't decide for her. But it structured the risk analysis, laid out the escape hatches, and helped her see the shape of the decision. The muscles atrophy if you don't use them. Writing is meant to be hard. Thinking is meant to be hard. If you outsource the hard work, you stop getting stronger at the hard work. Research is where you learn the most. If you have AI pull the memo for you and you get up and read it, you don't know what you're really talking about. You have to do the reps to know the material. AEI: Already Enough Intelligence. Sam Altman is obsessed with building superintelligence. Joanna proposes we already have enough intelligence to work with. Maybe the goal isn't to build smarter models. Maybe it's to figure out what to do with what we already have. The AI on-ramp for leaders: Take one document you make all the time (a memo, a PowerPoint, an email template). Upload it. Ask AI to make a template out of it. Next time you need it, you're twice as fast.  Push yourself to do the harder work. Joanna's analogy: marathon runners are insane. They just want to run. Nobody wants to do the harder work. But that's where the growth is. Joanna's champagne moment a year from now: milestones for her new company. She's already hit 100,000 YouTube subscribers three months after her first video. But she also just wants a nap. Reflection Questions Where in your work are you outsourcing the thinking to AI? Are the muscles you actually need atrophying because you're skipping the reps? If you accepted that you already have enough intelligence to work with, what would you actually build with what's in front of you right now? More Learning #679: Kat Cole - The Four Mindsets Every Leader Needs #605: Seth Godin - The Power of Remarkable Ideas #697: Dan Smith & Ryan Hawk - The Price of Becoming Podcast Chapters 00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!  01:44 Meet Joanna Stern  02:31 Teach Your Kids to Think in the Age of AI  03:25 The Parents and Mentors Who Shaped Her Career  04:16 Lessons From Walt Mossberg  05:55 Why Joanna Spent a Year Living With AI  14:47 How AI Can Make You a Better Leader  17:30 Why People Crave Human Connection More Than Ever  21:00 Bot Girl Summer: Dating a Chatbot Named Evan  25:13 The AI Therapist Trial 29:51 Using ChatGPT for a Career Change 33:29 Don't Let Your Thinking Muscles Atrophy  40:20 Sam Altman on Superintelligence, and Joanna's Case for "AEI"  42:51 Joanna's Advice for College Students  45:29 How Joanna Actually Uses AI to Write  47:17 Practical AI for the Fortune 500 VP  50:17 The Champagne Question 52:43 EOPC

Live from the GEOINT 2026 Symposium in Denver, Colorado, Project Geospatial's Adam Simmons catches up with Rich Cinquegrana, Senior AI/ML Engineer at TekSynap.Bringing deep expertise from NGA's Project Maven, Rich breaks down how TekSynap is reshaping software architecture for the federal government. He explains the power of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE)—shifting agencies away from clunky, static Microsoft Office files and Vizio diagrams into dynamic, object-oriented software environments that maximize object reuse, clarify cross-program dependencies, and streamline workflow automation.Watch the interview to get an inside look at TekSynap's "TechAccelerate Lab" sandbox (powered by the TekSynap Foundry), where engineers are actively mocking up AI development and imagery capture pipelines. Rich details how they test for adversarial spoofing to ensure a trusted chain of custody for warfighter intelligence data, all while keeping a close eye on maximizing taxpayer value.Key Highlights in this Video:00:00:43 – Meet Rich Cinquegrana and learn about his background in systems engineering and AI/ML architecture.00:01:03 – What is Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE)? Moving the government past Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.00:01:43 – Object Reuse & Dependency Mapping: Driving extreme efficiency in programmatic workflows.00:02:20 – Inside the TechAccelerate Lab: TekSynap's R&D unit and customer sandbox environment.00:02:45 – Lessons from NGA's Project Maven: Designing secure AI pipeline models to defeat adversary spoofing.00:04:19 – Unveiling the TekSynap Foundry: The building blocks powering their core technology suite.00:05:21 – A Focus on Fiscal Responsibility: Balancing cutting-edge geospatial capability with smart taxpayer spending.00:06:05 – Using MBSE to weather budget cuts and continuing resolutions through modular roadmaps.Learn More About TekSynap:

By Mario Seiglie - In this PowerPoint series, a detailed view of prophecy is given providing the establishment of the people in Latin America. Part 1 goes back to the origin of generations after the Great Flood ending with the downfall of the Holy Roman Empire. Download the PowerPoint to view in a separate tab or

If you want to live an abundant life … if you want your life to be filled with peace, balance, strength and enthusiasm for every day ... you need to learn one necessary thing: How to live in the power and presence of Jesus and the peace that He gives. Listen to PowerPoint today for this important and challenging message. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29?v=20251111

In this episode of In Depth, Brett sits down with Jon Noronha, co-founder and CPO of Gamma, the AI-native presentation platform used by more than 100 million people. In this conversation, he walks through Gamma's distinct eras of product-market fit: from a pre-AI struggle with a year of runway left, to an overnight AI-fueled explosion, to today's unplanned scramble into enterprise sales. Jon also unpacks his hard-won lessons on horizontal versus vertical bets, monetizing AI products, and why nailing onboarding turned out to be the whole game. In today's episode, we discuss: Why Gamma's all-in AI launch in March 2023 saved their startup How fixing a simple onboarding problem accidentally uncovered Gamma's entire product-market fit Why Jon bet Gamma on a horizontal product against the advice of nearly every investor How Gamma's daily signups climbed from hundreds to over 100,000 with zero paid marketing What building three pricing tiers taught Jon about monetizing AI References Canva: https://www.canva.com/ Corgi: https://www.corgi.insure/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ Gamma: https://gamma.app/ Google: https://www.google.com/ Linear: https://linear.app/ Loom: https://www.loom.com/ Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/ Notion: https://www.notion.com/ Optimizely: https://www.optimizely.com/ Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/ Slack: https://slack.com/ Zoom: https://www.zoom.us/ Where to find Jon Noronha LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonnoronha/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/thatsjonsense Where to find Brett LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson Where to find First Round Capital Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 01:47 Gamma's three-era journey to product-market fit 03:41 Spotting the blank page problem pre-ChatGPT 05:11 How Gamma survived with only one year of runway 07:17 How onboarding fixes revealed the whole product 09:31 Choosing horizontal over investors' vertical playbook 13:41 Prototyping by hand before AI coding 15:36 How Gamma builds with future models in mind 20:06 The Kool-Aid mistake of a late PowerPoint export 24:31 Why the presentation industry hadn't evolved since 1987 33:30 How Gamma solves evals for taste, not just data 40:21 Jon's hardest lessons monetizing AI since 2023 44:16 The fast leap from prosumer to enterprise 47:01 Why product still beats distribution 52:06 The metric that proved product-market fit 57:36 Pricing advice for prosumer AI founders 59:01 The toils and realities of founder life

What happens when a technical B2B SaaS company decides it doesn't need a twelve person marketing team? In this episode of Content Amplified, Jerome Stewart, a marketing leader who has spent the past decade building AI powered B2B SaaS brands in the analytics and observability space, explains how he helped shrink one marketing org from twelve people to four without breaking the work. Jerome walks through his "cover your bases" framework for deciding which functions still need a human at the helm (creative, communications, marketing ops, demand gen, product marketing), and how he builds "skills," reusable brand, PowerPoint, and social media instructions built from existing blogs, transcripts, and websites, so AI carries the last mile of production. He also digs into where AI quietly breaks down: content saturation, the em dash as an AI "tell," and a widening skills gap between AI fluent early career marketers and the business writing fundamentals that came before AI. If you're trying to figure out where to trust AI and where to still put a human, this conversation gives you a real framework, not just a hot take.About JeromeJerome Stewart began his career as a Peace Corps volunteer before going back to business school and starting out as a product manager at Microsoft, where he later moved into marketing. He lived in the Seattle area and overseas while at Microsoft, then relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area about ten years ago, where he has spent the past decade marketing AI powered B2B SaaS companies in the analytics and observability space. Jerome now spends much of his professional energy mentoring earlier career marketers, helping them pair their natural AI fluency with the business fundamentals it can't replace.Show NotesConnect with Jerome on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeromestewart/Text us what you think about this episode!

In this journey of life, we will all find ourselves down roads to “Jericho,” and we find ourselves confronted with opportunities to show and to share the love of the Lord Jesus Christ. Join us on PowerPoint today for the second part of the relevant message titled “Jericho Road.” To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29?v=20251111

Du versteckst deine Unsicherheit hinter Professionalität, dabei merkt's sowieso jeder. Die beste Verbindung entsteht nicht durch das perfekte Equipment, sondern durch den Mut, dich zu zeigen – auch wenn die Hand zittert.Wir reden seit Jahren über Authentizität, aber im Alltag gewinnt immer noch die Fassade. Diese Folge zerlegt das Narrativ vom professionellen Auftritt in kleine, ungenießbare Stücke. Wenn du ein eigenes Medium aufbauen oder dein Business wirklich spüren willst, führt kein Weg an strategischer Imperfektion vorbei.Klartext:Deine Nervosität macht dich nicht kleiner, sondern bringt dich mitten ins echte Gespräch.Wer immer nur glatt poliert wirkt, schafft keine Nähe – sondern Distanz, auch zu seinen Kunden.Echtheit ist kein Marketing-Gag, sondern ein strategischer Imperativ, wenn du im Gedächtnis bleiben willst.DenkfehlerJe perfekter dein Auftreten, desto professioneller wirkst du – falsch: Perfektion macht dich austauschbar.Gute Technik ersetzt die eigene Stimme – falsch: Die menschliche Ebene ist nicht durch Technik ersetzbar.Unsicherheit ist ein Makel, den man verstecken muss – falsch: Genau daraus entsteht echte Verbindung.KonsequenzenDu wirst nicht gebucht, weil keiner weiß, wer du wirklich bist.Mitarbeiter und Kunden orientieren sich anderweitig, weil sie keine Haltung spüren.Dein Content ist glatt, aber schnell vergessen – du landest auf dem Podfade-Friedhof.Der Markt behauptet, „Persönliches hat im Business nichts verloren“ – dadurch bleiben alle Gespräche oberflächlich.Konkurrenz schwört auf Skripte, Bulletpoints und perfekte Abläufe – aber wirkt austauschbar wie die nächste PowerPoint.Agenturen versprechen Sichtbarkeit mit noch mehr Technik – aber was niemand spürt, wird nicht multipliziert.Mehr Substanz. Weniger Bla-Bla. Wenn du in deinem Unternehmen wirklich etwas bewegen willst, ist jetzt der Moment, deine eigene Wahrheit lauter zu drehen._________________________________________________Gute Arbeit, die niemand kennt, gewinnt keinen Markt.Die meisten Unternehmen, mit denen ich arbeite, haben kein Qualitätsproblem. Sie sind besser als ihr Ruf. Nur weiß das draußen niemand.Alle zwei Wochen schreibe ich einen Gedanken darüber, wie sich das ändern lässt. Ein Thema, kein Sammelbrief.→ teddy.click/newsletterWie sichtbar ist dein Unternehmen wirklich? Der Potenzial-Check dauert vier Minuten. Danach hast du einen Report mit einer Zahl und fünf Bereichen — und siehst, wo bei euch draußen nichts ankommt. Kein Verkaufsgespräch.→ teddy.click/podsignalWenn du lieber direkt redest: fünfzehn Minuten, kein Pitch. teddy.click/terminDaniel Friesenecker baut Unternehmern ihr eigenes Medium. Podcast, Video, Strategie. Studio: TeddyLab, Linz. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/frieseneckerFolge abonnieren: Apple · Spotify · YouTube · alle Plattformen und RSS

In this episode of The Kubik Report, Victor Kubik is joined by longtime pastors Robin Webber and Darris McNeely for a thoughtful conversation about ministry, technology, wisdom, and the spiritual challenges facing the next generation. Together, they bring more than 150 years of ministerial experience to a discussion focused not simply on where we have been—but where we are going. Technology has transformed how we learn, communicate, and preach. We now carry what amounts to the “Library of Alexandria” in our pockets, yet greater access to information does not necessarily produce greater wisdom. Victor, Robin, and Darris explore how constant connectivity can weaken attention, critical thinking, and our capacity for quiet reflection. At the heart of the conversation is the importance of stillness. In a world filled with notifications, screens, opinions, and endless information, how do we become quiet enough to hear God? Drawing from Christ's example of withdrawing from the crowds, the Sabbath, and the biblical wilderness experience, the discussion examines why solitude and reflection remain essential spiritual disciplines. The three pastors also discuss authenticity in preaching, the importance of eye contact and personal connection, the limitations of overreliance on PowerPoint and screens, and the value of simply opening a Bible together. Finally, they address burnout, sabbaticals, and the danger of pushing ourselves until something breaks. Looking ahead, perhaps one of our greatest challenges will not be finding more information—but developing the wisdom to know when to disconnect, become still, listen, and rediscover what matters most.

Ben Tasker joins Jeff Mains to break down the real reason most AI rollouts fail: it's almost never the technology. From his time as Dean of AI at Southern New Hampshire University to building life-saving diagnostic tools at MaineHealth, Ben has seen firsthand how change management, human-centric strategy, and data quality determine whether AI creates value or amplifies chaos.In this episode, Ben introduces the concept of the "AI Between Times" — the transition period where organizations are leaving old processes behind but haven't yet arrived at a fully AI-integrated future. He explains why 95% of AI implementations fail, what separates the 5% that succeed, and how founders and leaders can build a culture of continuous learning that makes their organizations genuinely AI-resilient. Ben also shares a practical four-step learning cycle (Learn → Practice → Apply → Reflect) and makes the case that adaptability and flexibility — not technical expertise — are the most critical skills to develop right now.Key Takeaways[0:00] — Hook: 95% of AI implementations fail — not because of bad tech, but because of what surrounds it: poor rollouts, unengaged leaders, and broken processes that get automated at scale.[3:11] — Ben introduces the "AI Between Times" — the transition moment where organizations are leaving old processes but haven't reached AI maturity. Change management is the most overlooked factor.[5:19] — What the 5% do differently: transparent campaigns that communicate why AI is being implemented, where, how, and what not to do — plus training pathways and upskilling resources.[7:38] — Why people resist change: 66% of individuals currently hold negative AI sentiment, driven by news around layoffs, data centers, and high-profile failures. Trust and transparency are the antidote.[7:52] — The danger of a "point solution" mindset: using AI to solve one small problem without mapping the full system. Ben's pizza-ordering example illustrates how a narrow implementation can actually increase costs, erode trust, and kill adoption.[13:44] — AI doesn't fix a messy organization — it amplifies it. Garbage in, garbage out. Data quality and process integrity must come before the model.[13:45] — Ben's healthcare origin story: his first job exposed the cost of poor data infrastructure and uncommunicated change. Physicians worked around the system because no one explained the why.[15:27] — From community college to ICU: Ben's student success algorithm took 12 months just to get faculty buy-in — a timeline the data science team never anticipated. At MaineHealth, a similar algorithm flagged ICU patients for early infection, potentially saving thousands of lives.[21:11] — Why people treat AI as just a search engine: ChatGPT reached 1 million users in 5 hours — faster than the iPhone, the computer, or the internet. Accessibility doesn't equal strategy. Most people use 2–3 use cases and miss the full picture.[22:58] — Prompting is a skill. A prompt for a video, an image, and a report require different approaches. Without a learning plan, you're not using AI — you're guessing.[26:20] — AI's primary objective is to interact with you more. The more you use it, the more personalized it becomes. But that also means being thoughtful about what data you share.[31:25] — Ben's personal AI origin story: photographed workout equipment, had ChatGPT build CrossFit plans, then photographed his fridge for meal planning. That non-work use case built the prompting instincts he later applied professionally.[33:14] — AI augmentation is the sweet spot — not replacement. Most roles will incorporate AI; the job titles that don't exist yet (Dean of AI, prompt engineer) are proof the economy is already shifting.[35:48] — "Prompt engineer" has at least two completely different career paths — one for marketing professionals, one for PhD-level AI researchers. Organizations need to recruit by skills, not job titles.[42:47] — What successful large-scale AI transformations have in common: leadership engagement, middle-layer exploration, and org-wide AI literacy — treated as a cultural shift, not a one-time training.[44:00] — Context is the new data. Websites, job descriptions, PowerPoint decks — these become the data sources that AI ingests. If the context isn't clean and structured, the output won't be either.[40:13] — The Learn → Practice → Apply → Reflect cycle: where most people break down is the reflection step. Without asking "What did I learn? Did I like it? What would I do differently?" the cycle can't repeat effectively.[43:15] — Adaptability vs. flexibility: adaptability is accepting that change is coming; flexibility is navigating it once it arrives. These are the top two skills organizations are hiring for — and neither is a technical skill.[44:10] — Individuals who know AI earn a 52% pay premium over those who don't.[45:07] — The one investment SaaS founders can't skip: start using AI themselves and talk about it positively. Use your domain expertise to create context and systems that make your product AI-resilient before disruption forces the conversation.Tweetable Quotes"AI doesn't fix a messy organization. It amplifies it." — Ben Tasker"95% of AI implementations fail — and the 5% that succeed take care of the change management first." — Ben Tasker"You can use it doesn't mean you know how to use it. Just because you have access doesn't mean you have a strategy." — Ben Tasker"Data is the oil to the AI engine. Garbage in, garbage out — at scale." — Ben Tasker"If leaders aren't fully engaged with AI and using it themselves, the rollout is dead on arrival." — Ben Tasker"AI can amplify your organization, but it can also amplify your natural abilities. The two are not the same thing." — Ben Tasker"Context is the new data. If you're not setting up the system to succeed, the end result won't succeed either." — Ben Tasker"Individuals who know AI right now have a 52% premium on pay. If that's not an incentive, I'm not sure what is." — Ben Tasker"We're in the AI Between Times — not fully in the future, but moving out of the past. Change management is what bridges the gap." — Ben Tasker"It's not complete replacement. But it's also not forgetting to upskill your organization. Both have to happen." — Ben TaskerSaaS Leadership Lessons1. Ship culture before you ship the feature. Most AI rollouts fail because leadership announces the tool but skips the story. Before your team touches a new AI system, build a transparent change management campaign: communicate the why, the where, the how, and critically — what not to do. Your people will fill silence with fear. Fill it with clarity first.2. Don't automate a broken process — you'll just scale the chaos. AI amplifies what's already there. If your data is dirty, your workflows are fragmented, or your customer experience is inconsistent, AI won't fix it — it will magnify it. Map the full system front-to-back before you plug in any model. Finance, product, data, ops — all stakeholders belong at the table before implementation, not after.3. Point solutions are the fastest path to failed adoption. The pizza-ordering example is a masterclass in what not to do. When you solve one narrow problem without thinking about the full customer or employee experience, you create friction that erodes trust — and trust, once lost, is expensive to rebuild. Think in systems, not spotfixes.4. Leaders who don't use the tools can't lead the transformation. Mandatory AI training from a leader who has never opened ChatGPT is theater. Your team will follow what you do, not what you announce. Model the behavior. Use AI in your own workflows. Talk about it openly — including the failures. That psychological safety is what makes adoption stick.5. Skills are more durable than job titles. Roles like "Dean of AI" and "prompt engineer" didn't exist three years ago. The titles will keep changing. What won't change is the value of skills: adaptability, systems thinking, communication, analytical reasoning. Build a skills inventory for your organization and create learning pathways before you need to fill a role. Your next AI hire might already be on your payroll.6. The first 12–16 months are the egg — don't rush the hatch. Organizations that win with AI invest heavily in the foundation: data infrastructure, leadership engagement, org-wide literacy, and structured reflection. The ones that rush straight to implementation — running experiments with no strategy, no vision, no metrics — burn budget, burn trust, and burn out their teams. Slow down to go fast. The payoff compounds.Guest Resourcesbentaskerai@gmail.comhttps://www.bentaskerai.comhttp://linkedin.com/in/bentaskeraihttp://instagram.com/bentaskeraiEpisode SponsorThe Futureproof Series -

Claude Design went viral at launch, but has been kinda crickets since.

Good morning, folks. We have another weekend of violence to report. Two dead. Ten wounded. No, no... not Iran. Chicago. And before anybody panics, relax. For Chicago, that's practically a Chamber of Commerce commercial. Somewhere in City Hall they're popping champagne because nobody hit double digits. Yet somehow the people counting bodies in Tehran can't seem to find a calculator for Cook County. Funny how that works. The Left has suddenly become fascinated with casualty reports. They have spreadsheets for Iran. Pie charts. PowerPoint presentations. But ask them about Chicago and suddenly they become performance artists. "Violence is complicated." Really? Bullets seem remarkably uncomplicated. I got asked recently why dealing with Iran isn't as easy as dealing with Venezuela. Because they're not the same country. That's like asking why climbing Mount Everest isn't as easy as walking up the steps at Walmart. Venezuela is in our hemisphere. We've had strategic interests there since James Monroe was telling Europe, "Stay on your side of the pond." Iran has spent decades preparing for exactly this moment. Their nuclear infrastructure wasn't built in office parks with valet parking. They buried it inside mountains. Granite. Reinforced bunkers. Underground complexes that look like somebody hired a Bond villain as the architect. These people weren't planning for inspections. They were planning for survival. Which makes President Trump's strategy fascinating. Everybody expected fireworks. Instead, he's conducting surgery. One target. Another target. Economic pressure. Military pressure. Psychological pressure. It's less "shock and awe" and more "you'll wake up tomorrow and discover another piece of your government has mysteriously disappeared." Melissa made an interesting point the other day about international law and whether Trump worries about being labeled a war criminal. That's adorable. Kevin Jackson has been called, the "white-collar" Joe Rogan. Given their similar backgrounds in TV, comedy, and martial arts, it's easy to see why people enjoy Kevin's show so much. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Recorded live at CreativePro Week 2026, this episode features Theresa Jackson talking with document accessibility experts Dax Castro and Chad Chelius about practical ways designers can start creating more accessible documents. Dax and Chad begin by sharing their own journeys into accessibility and how they came to focus on helping others create more inclusive documents. From there, they explain how small decisions in InDesign, PowerPoint, and PDF workflows can improve the experience for people using assistive technology. The conversation covers document metadata, heading structure, lists, decorative elements, accessibility checkers, screen readers, and what to do with older documents that were not designed with accessibility in mind. Show Highlights: Accessibility Quickstart Tips Add a descriptive document title and review the author information in your file metadata. Build a clear heading structure with paragraph styles mapped to H1–H6 tags. Use built-in list tools so screen readers recognize and announce lists correctly. Check color contrast early, before your palette becomes embedded throughout the design. Mark decorative graphics, running headers, and footers as artifacts so screen readers can skip them. Create an object style and keyboard shortcut to artifact decorative elements more efficiently in InDesign. Run an accessibility checker, but do not assume a passing result guarantees a good user experience. Test PDFs with a screen reader such as JAWS, NVDA, or Apple VoiceOver to hear how the content is actually presented. Fix reusable documents at the source whenever possible, especially templates and recurring reports. Use automated tagging tools to improve large collections of legacy PDFs, then review the results. Start with manageable improvements and build your accessibility skills over time. Resources CreativePro Accessibility Summit, October 20-23, 2026: https://creativepro.com/event/design-accessibility-summit-2026/ Event Savings: Save $100 on any CreativePro event in 2026 with the discount code PODCAST: https://creativepro.com/events/ Chaxchat Podcast: https://www.accessibilitychecklists.com/ Chax Training & Consulting: https://chaxtc.com/ Free for Members–Accessibility Super Guide: https://creativepro.com/product/accessibility-superguide/ Membership Discount: Get $15 off one year of CreativePro membership with the discount code PODCAST: https://creativepro.com/become-a-member/

  Episode: 140 RAISING PPA assessment and treatment from the Ground Up: In Conversation with Jeanne Gallée     In this episode you will discover: · Assessment and Intervention Aren't Separate — Conversation itself can double as both. By listening closely and responding to what a client offers, in a "more art than science" way, clinicians gather meaningful data and provide support at the same time, rather than treating these as two distinct phases of care. · Rigid Testing Can Erase the Person Behind the Diagnosis — Traditional standardized assessments often serve the goals of an institution or research protocol more than the person being assessed. Frameworks like RAISE and the PACT scale shift the focus toward strengths, natural conversation, and what someone can still do, rather than repeatedly measuring decline. · PPA Needs Its Own Identity and Training Path — Because primary progressive aphasia sits uneasily between post-stroke aphasia care and traditional dementia care, clinicians often receive little formal training in it. A global survey found major gaps in education and confidence, underscoring the need for dedicated resources, like Dr. Gallée's PPA roadmap, built specifically for this population. Do you ever wish you could step back in time and undo the missteps and errors of the past? What if you had the opportunity to build something from the ground up? Certainly, knowing what you know now, you could begin in a better place. But of course, there's always pitfalls with new beginnings, even with the knowledge of lessons from the past. You could, however, make a positive impact on that new beginning. Welcome to the Aphasia Access Conversations podcast. I'm Jerry Hoepner, a professor from the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, and co-facilitator of the Chippewa Valley Aphasia Camp, Blue Gold Brain Injury Group, Mayo Brain Injury Group, Young Persons Brain Injury Group, Brain In-Cog, and Thursday Night Poets. I'm also a member of the Aphasia Access Podcast Working Group. Aphasia Access strives to provide members with information, inspiration, and ideas about their aphasia care through a variety of educational resources. I'm privileged to introduce today's guest, Dr. Jeanne Gallée, who is a clinical scientist in the Department of Medicine at the University of Washington. Dr. Gallée is a licensed speech language pathologist practicing in the greater Washington state area. She completed her Bachelor of Arts in Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Wellesley College in 2016 and Doctor of Philosophy at Harvard University in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology in 2021. She has been recognized as a Distinguished Early Career Professional by ASHA and a Distinguished Scholar by the Tavistock Trust for Aphasia. Her work is dedicated to improving assessment practices and functional outcomes for individuals living with aphasia and neurodegenerative conditions. Jerry Hoepner: Jeanne, it's really nice to see you again today, and to have this opportunity to have a conversation with you as a recent recipient of the Tavistock Scholar Program, and to talk about your work with individuals with primary progressive aphasia. So, thanks for being "on" today for the conversation. Jeanne Gallée: Thank you so much for having me, Jerry. I'm really honored to be here. Jerry Hoepner: Likewise, I'm really excited for this conversation, and as I just alluded to, I wanted to congratulate you on being awarded the first Tavistock Scholar with an emphasis doing work in primary progressive aphasia, and I thought maybe I could get your thoughts on being selected as a Tavistock Scholar. Jeanne Gallée: Thank you. It feels honestly incredibly remarkable in the sense that I think it represents a shift in how we're thinking about the separate diagnoses of progressive aphasia versus an aphasia that's due to an acute injury. And I'm really honored to be a part of that. I think there have been many discussions growing over the years, and I think we're seeing that shift in how we do think about addressing assessment and intervention and general care for people across the aphasia continuum. Jerry Hoepner: Agreed, I think there's been so much growth in the last five years in that area. I can remember at the outset of the pandemic, having discussions about "What do we do with people with primary progressive aphasia who were a part of our aphasia group? Should they be a part of our aphasia group? How do we pivot to that in an online context?" and it feels like we've come so far in our conversation about where primary progressive aphasia fits in in all of those different contexts. Jeanne Gallée: Right, I entirely agree, and I think the journey of my own work has already evolved in so many ways that I couldn't have imagined, like you say, five years ago I completed my doctoral work March 2021 and just seeing the phenomenal amounts of change that have really taken place since then has been incredible, and I feel very lucky to be part of that momentum right now. Jerry Hoepner: Absolutely, it's exciting to see these things move forward. And one of the differences that I see is primary progressive aphasia started out within the Life Participation Approach, just soundly from day one, as opposed to a lot of aphasia care, which has kind of evolved from this medical model, and how refreshing it is to see something built from the ground up. Done right, so to speak. I don't know if you have thoughts on that piece… Jeanne Gallée: No, I do. I think that's a really interesting point. I think I might be part of the camp that at times feels like progressive conditions get a little bit lost in the rehabilitation space, but I think you're absolutely right. I think the absence of pharmacological treatment, or a cure that has long standing effects for these progressive conditions has made rehabilitation specialists much more attuned to focusing on quality of life, life participation, maintaining autonomy, and so forth. So, I think I forget that perspective sometimes. Perhaps from the space that I work in, I tend to be in a more interdisciplinary environment where I feel on the opposite end. I'm often asked for justification for providing these types of services, and that fits in nicely with our previous discussion on how we do see that differentiation and how people with aphasia due to a progressive condition may be siloed from people who have the more quote unquote traditional aphasia symptoms. Jerry Hoepner: Yeah, that's a really good point. And you know, referring to those previous conversations we discussed that need for primary progressive aphasia to have a space of its own. It's tricky because it doesn't fit into post-stroke aphasia quite right, and it doesn't fit into the Alzheimer's and dementia world quite right. So, yeah, it's nice to see this developing in the Life Participation kind of context, really excited about Anna Volkmer's conference dedicated to primary progressive aphasia. Yeah, what an excellent point, that even though we feel like it's great to build it from the ground up, there's still people in that interdisciplinary context, who are very much looking at this, like,"Justify this. How is having conversations and doing activities with someone justifiable, as a, you know, as a skilled intervention?" Jeanne Gallée: Right. I think a lot of it comes back to misunderstandings about the scope of our profession. So, coming from the speech language pathology standpoint, we may have a perspective that other providers may not. And it's interesting, particularly when that confusion or disconnect happens in conditions that are communication led, where we see the symptoms primarily touching upon our ability to interact verbally or non-verbally to communicate. And it's fascinating, and I think speaking to that silo, we see PPA having been a relatively new and still considered very rare condition, but there's so much overlap with other conditions, right, in the kinds of symptoms that we see and there's so much where, as any speech pathologist with experience in acquired neurogenic communication disorders, we can see that we can apply our skill set, but again, likely due to the terminal nature of the condition, we end up seeing providers taking it a different route, or saying either there's only the pharmacological route, or we just let it lie or let it be as is, which we wouldn't do with any other condition. We wouldn't say that for someone with ALS. We would want to provide them the supports, even if they're temporary, to improve quality of life. So, it is an interesting, almost cultural phenomenon as well. I think. Jerry Hoepner: Yeah, that I think it's really fascinating, and I'm so glad you brought that up. It reminds me of kind of the phrase, the company we keep, right? It's easy to be amongst, you know, people who are in the [Life Participation Approach to Aphasia] LPPA world, who think the way that we think, and who do the way that we do. And I do a lot of work in the area of cognitive communication disorders with acquired brain injuries, and so forth, and there's been a remarkable shift in the last five years there as well towards a more Life Participation bio psychosocial approach, and some of the work that I've been passionate about for years has been more and more accepted. So you feel like when you're in that company of all of your people that everything's all good, but it also reminds me of something that my friend Natalie Douglas always says, which is that "We need to be out there amongst others who need to understand the importance of this kind of a perspective, and sharing that." And when you talked about those other professionals, I really didn't think about that until you said that. Right, really important to get them on the same page, and to help them understand why this is so important. Jeanne Gallée: Right? And I think that's where the conference that you mentioned, the first PPA only conference that's taking place this summer in London, is so special because one of the reasons why we were so motivated to have this type of a conference is that there wasn't really the space at the typical aphasiology conferences, and then the larger neurology-based conferences, or more broadly dementia-based conferences, also didn't quite feel like a home. I think, especially their studies of quality of life, in particular, we're really not seen as rigorous in those contexts. So, this conference, what's nice is that we have that uniting force of everyone being focused on PPA, but it's super interdisciplinary, and that I think will really promote some fantastic conversations. Jerry Hoepner: Wow, that's really encouraging and exciting to see that move forward. I'm not in the primary progressive aphasia world, although when we're at aphasia camp and things like that, certainly that's a part of my role. But as soon as I saw the call for papers come out, I'm, you know, texting and messaging all of my PPA folks to say, "Did you see this? This is great. Are you doing something?" It's very exciting. So, I'm excited to see where that moves in the future and to hear how things go this time around. That's great. Jeanne Gallée: Likewise, I'm really excited, and I do really believe it will lead to a whole future cascade of collaboration. Jerry Hoepner: Yeah, amazing. Well, before we delve into your amazing work, I've been reading your articles, and it's been just a pleasure to read it. I'm always impressed with how certain themes of importance can come across in different areas of our field, and it's been fun to see that. I wonder, because I'm looking at the list of collaborators, just some incredible collaborators on that list, in those papers, I'd love to hear a little bit about your mentorship, both in primary progressive aphasia and kind of thinking about the Life Participation quality of life kind of context as well. Jeanne Gallée: Yeah, I think in hindsight my mentorship experience seems more linear than it did in the moment. And I think it goes back to my original journey in my doctoral program. The program I was in, the Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology program at Harvard was a little bit different from others, where we didn't apply to work with a specific mentor, but truly just to get into the program. And they encouraged a pretty extensive shopping period to work with a variety of mentors to get a feel for topic area, mentorship style, and so traditionally first year students didn't even have any experiences, they just focused on the very time-intensive and rigorous coursework. I came in and started my first experience with Evelina Fedorenko at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who had worked with an undergrad. And that I think from the get-go gave me a very holistic view. I think, of the ways in which we could think about language, and in particular, the language network. So, there I was working on MRI studies of what activations do we see in the language network. In response to linguistic stimuli. And we were working with undergrads at MIT who were all healthy between the ages of 18 through 30, and I just felt at a certain point that I had this growing interest towards thinking about what happens when something goes wrong. So when it's atypical processing of language. I first thought I might be interested in pediatric population, so I was all over the place, but through the partnership that my program had with the MGH Institute of Health Professionals, I ended up having this amazing opportunity to be mentored by Evelina Federenko, as well as Sophia Vallila Rohter at the Institute of Health Professions, as well as the Frontotemporal Disorders Unit at Mass General Hospital, through my actual clinical training. So I had this quite hefty consortium of mentors, and I think that has its own set of challenges, right? It's a little bit less mentor-directed and more on the student to say, "This is exactly what I want to work on." But I think that allowed me to build a network of experiences and mentors, and that just has bled into every experience I've had since then. I also think the pandemic, you brought that up before, had a huge role in this, and all of a sudden people were very, very open to virtual meetings and connections and wanted connection. I think everyone felt very stuck at home and wanted to find more people and to find meaning and Anna Volkmer and I had the opportunity to meet at the Academy of Aphasia in Macau in 2019. And honestly meeting her in our connection has been also one of those launching pads for me to really jump out into the world of international collaboration. So all that to say, I think a lot of chance encounters and just a lot of plunging into possible conversations head first has led to this phenomenal mentorship team. And a lot of people who I collaborate with now I see as my inadvertent mentors, and that includes Anna, that includes Maya Henry at UT Austin, Amy Mooney in Oregon, just people who have consistently volunteered their time to mentor me in ways in which I can only say I would have never expected. Jade Cartwright and I have had such a phenomenal collaboration over the past few years as well, where we just had the same interests, and Zoom allowing, we were able to build on those. Jerry Hoepner: That's really an amazing answer to that question. I love the term inadvertent mentors, because I just think that those are the best mentors, where you're as much a mentor to them as they are to you. And it's just this really reciprocal relationship, but it's also built on this organic, like passion and interest for the same kinds of topics. Where it's not forced and that's a really nice kind of look back on your entire process. I was also struck by the term "mentor shopping", or "mentor shopping period", whatever. And I think that's really great that you had an opportunity for that not to be so mentor-led, and I mean it clearly shows through when you talk about your clinical experience and how that was connected to your research experience, and kind of all used to create this amalgamation of who you are. I mean, it's clear in talking with you, it's clear in reading your work that you have that strong, multi prong kind of basis. It's not just research, it's not just this specific area of research, it's really broad and the clinical connection is there, so that makes a lot of sense when I hear you talk about that, for sure. Jeanne Gallée: Oh, thank you. Yeah, I think in hindsight, again, it seems more linear, and in the moment it sometimes felt a little wild, I will say, in terms of just wrangling what do I actually want to pursue, and how. And I'm still figuring that out. But I think this community of collaborators and mentors is truly what has kept me in the field and as well. Jerry Hoepner: Yeah, I think when you can connect with other people who are passionate about the work that you're doing. I can't imagine sitting at alone in my office doing a project, and I mean it's just so much more fun when you're doing it with other people. And other people who can expand the way that you think, which I'm sure everyone that you've mentioned on that list really does, when you can say, "Well, I think we should do it this way" and someone says, "Have you thought about…" and it just completely wrecks your world in a good way, "Like, oh my gosh, I didn't think about that, that's so exciting!" and then you just get into this back and forth. Yeah, very fun to hear about that. And again, it clearly shows through in the work that you do. In our previous conversations, you also mentioned this idea, and this again built on those clinical foundations that your initial mission was really to help develop interventions for people with primary progressive aphasia, and then you kind of got not off track, but inadvertently focused on working on assessments. You mentioned that there's just such a need, and this is so common in a lot of areas, but there's a need for more person-centered, ecologically valid strength-based assessment, and that the traditional measures just don't tell us enough. So, I'm really excited to talk about the work that you're doing on assessment, and how that brings us closer to what we need from an intervention standpoint, too. Jeanne Gallée: Yeah, so that really is at the heart of what has been my experience. Also, right from the get-go, we started talking about the differences, or the possible differentiation that the field has historically taken in thinking about post-stroke aphasia versus primary progressive aphasia. One of my first real PPA projects in my doctoral work was meant to be a naming treatment study for people living with PPA, and one of the roadblocks I kept hitting was also my mentors and reviewers telling me that I was trying to add too many things. And in that process I realized I don't think just using something that exists for post-stroke aphasia is going to be the best way to address the patients I'm seeing right now. And it's not because there's something wrong with that treatment. That treatment was not designed for these individuals. And that led to many more rabbit holes, and you know me really just feeling this existential crisis of "Well, why are we working on the stimuli that we are, and why are we asking questions about these ones?" And I have so much respect for the assessments that exist, and the individuals behind them, and the time they invested in making them. I am also of the belief that we can move forward and improve our processes. There are certain assessments that may be widely used and have so much again power behind them. You know, we have best associated certain assessments with characterizing a diagnosis, but what I ended up seeing in my placements and throughout my clinical work is that many assessments serve more of a mission of an institution or a research protocol than the person being assessed. And in the face of a person with a terminal condition who is using their precious time to serve you in that space, I just think it's so much more important, or that much more important, to really consider what is most functional for them. What will serve them? And how we, how can we give back to that person? And again, part of that emotion, I think, comes from having worked in many research-centered spaces, where someone might not get intervention afterwards, or they might not understand why they are participating in up to five hours of assessment, and I think that's where that passion for focusing on reprioritizing the patient or the client really came from. Jerry Hoepner: I think that attention to "what's in it for them", is really important and clearly based in kind of where your heart is at and where your clinical mindset is at. Because it's easy to go in and say, "Well, we need this data. We need all the data that we get." but to what end, right? Like, how is it going to help? And how is that going to give us any more information about how to help this person, then what they can't do, right? So, I appreciate that mindset a lot, you know. It makes me think, and this is a little off track, and we didn't talk about this question earlier, but what a shift it will be clinicians working with people with primary progressive aphasia, and how they'll be able to shift from using kind of the existing tools that were out there for other purposes to moving towards tools that are designed specifically for people with PPA, and maybe just a snapshot of your thoughts about that piece. Jeanne Gallée: So I think it's really important to know where the field comes from, the work in which it was grounded in. So, I think it, it makes sense to talk about standardized assessment scores. It makes sense to talk about, you know, the specific assessments that can help us quickly differentiate presentations or needs, right? So, using the symptom-led approach, can we identify specific behaviors really quickly in a standardized way? I think the issue comes in when we stop being dynamic in how we use them. It's very easy to use an assessment in a way that feels rote. It feels just like a test, and it's like you said, "just collecting data for the purpose of collecting data." And lose that aspect of humanity. And maybe I'm putting words in other clinicians' mouths, but especially when a certain condition is rare, like PPA is. You may not have very much experience with seeing someone with PPA, or any type of progressive condition, and feel really stuck and needing to be in the motivation of being really professional, sticking to a certain set of tests. "This feels right." Right, this is what someone told me to do. I can fill this out, and there's something very potentially vulnerable or scary about just going with your gut in those moments. And what Anna Volkmer and I have spoken about so often is just the power of having a conversation with someone, and seeing what you can learn from that conversation, not only about the person themselves, but their communication behaviors. And how you can get so much from that conversation, including the trust and comfort of the client in front of you. Jerry Hoepner: Absolutely, yeah. One of the things that I think about when you're talking about that is, in working with people with acquired brain injuries and traumatic brain injuries one of the things I've learned is they will tell you, or they will ask, right? They'll say, "What is this? "What kind of information is this giving you?" "Why do we have to do this stupid test?" And I think that's good. I think that's a mindset that we should have when we're thinking about all of the assessments that we do. Why are we doing this? Is this really necessary? And they're very willing to say, "If it's necessary, that's fine, I'll do it, but are you getting something from this that I'm not seeing?" Right, I love that question, and I think it speaks to what you just said, right? Like, there's so much information that we can gather from conversations, from our interactions with people, we should be thinking about getting that, and if we're doing something else, we should have a why directly following, yeah. Jeanne Gallée: Yes, the why is so important, and you're right. Sometimes we do just need to get certain information. I think for me, one of the most striking moments early on in my training was having small talk. You know, just conversation with a person with semantic variant primary progressive aphasia, and thinking, "Wow, this all feels quite typical. I'm curious about why they're here? What their testing will look like…" and then moving on to the Boston Naming Test and immediately seeing the challenges that came. That dichotomy is really helpful to have in those moments, but again, there's the argument of why are we asking about the name abacus, right? Why are we using that right now, and how does that represent how someone is performing functionally in their everyday life? Jerry Hoepner: Absolutely, yeah, totally. I agree. Can you share a little bit about the RAISE framework, which I really love, because it relates to the way that I think about assessment from the standpoint of counseling, like you build on relationships and connections. William Miller is famous for saying, "The last thing you should ever do at the beginning of a session is assessment." You're beginning of a relationship with someone, don't assess first thing. So, I love that piece, and then thinking about the pact, and I'll let you kind of expand those, but I'll let you unpack them – ha ha- but how that starts to move us towards intervention. Jeanne Gallée: Right. So the RAISE assessment framework was really built out of those conversations, and I guess realizations on my own part about that discomfort with the really rigid end that assessment can…I'll restate that. The rigidity that assessment can have, so again speaking to really, really standardized sets and rigid protocols of specific measures that someone uses, and like you said, having the experience of multiple research participants, as well as patients, asking "Why are we doing this? I know I'm not good at this. Why are we doing it again and again?" And in those moments, not feeling like I had the power to really justify exactly why we were doing everything, apart from, "Oh, this is important for the research study." Which it was, but just feeling like there was that aspect of humanity that was missing, and coming up with my own toolkit in those moments to fill in those blanks. So right after the completion of my PhD, Anna Volkmar and I started speaking a lot more about the power of conversational assessment. And then that led into conversations where we worked with Anne Whitworth, Deborah Hersh, and Jade Cartwright, where again, through the power of Zoom across all times. I was pregnant with my first, and meeting everyone usually at midnight my time. I already was nocturnal at that point!  Where we would just be discussing all of these issues, and what was amazing about this is that, particularly Anne and Deb come from more of the post-stroke aphasia world, and had these amazing principles grounded in those populations where Deborah Hersh had also really come forward with the concept of therapeutic assessment. So as you had said assessment and intervention shouldn't be separate, they belong together and coexist at all times if we're smart about it. And what we ended up doing, first informally and then formally through the more official Delphi process is coming up with a set of principles as a framework for assessment. So, to take a step away from, "Oh, it's just Lucy Goosey, we're having a conversation and chit chat." What we're actually promoting is a pretty structured set of principles to guide the ways in which we can cultivate assessment for individuals with PPA and their loved ones. Jerry Hoepner: Yeah, absolutely. I was kind of scanning on my computer, I was trying to think of the name. I love this name of the article, where it says, 'Please don't assess me to death, or something like that. Jeanne Gallée: Yes, yeah. Jerry Hoepner:  Yeah, and, and thinking about that whole entire process from beginning to end as a relationship, as you know, not discreetly assessment, not discreetly intervention, I think it's just really important. Can you talk a little bit about the PACT and kind of where that has moved things in terms of the assessment piece, but also kind of set a set up for intervention and what that looks like? Jeanne Gallée: Great, so the PACT the Progressive Aphasia Communication Toolkit kit builds off of what we put forth with the RAISE assessment framework. So with RAISE we promote that the relationship might be temporary, it might be a single interaction, or it might be long term, and we cultivate that through conversation and then the PACT is a set of scales that leverages that conversation, we take that natural or as natural as can be interaction and use it to come up with a concrete framework of communication strengths. So that might all sound very esoteric. To make that more concrete, there are four scales to the PACT. They're all clinician ratings, where the clinician is asked to look at a pre-recorded conversation that would occur naturally in a clinical or research context, and then on a scale from four to zero, rate the person speaking's strengths. So within the domains of speech and voice, as well as language and social pragmatics, as well as discourse, and the point or the purpose of that was to really anchor a person's communicative ability in one of these more natural environments with a provider. We collect so much phenomenal qualitative data, but at times it can feel challenging to quantify it and the hope with the PACT is that we can quantify our very real, possibly subjective evaluation of a person's communication at a certain moment in time. Jerry Hoepner: Yeah, and what I love about that, and you might have a slightly different thought about this, because you're deeper into it, but from an assessment standpoint, you can then do that all the way through. You can say, "Here's where they are this year, here's where they are next year, here's where they are the year after that, or you know, two years ago, or whatever your lens is at that point." You can do that without kind of this constant repeating of, "Okay, let's see how bad you are today compared to a year ago, or compared to two years ago." Just a very different mindset. And I love the focus on "What can you still do? What what's working? And how can we leverage what's working to really help you to actually communicate today?" As opposed to saying, "Oh boy, the ship is sinking." which is kind of the typical approach. Jeanne Gallée: Yes, that exactly what you're saying. The tendency tends to focus on what's no longer there. And while that might be helpful in clinical trials to characterize a person's performance diagnostically and the trajectory of a diagnosis over time. It really does not serve the person who goes home after the assessment, nor their loved ones to help them maintain that autonomy and quality of life, and also caregiver burden. And that is actually one of the points I really love about the PACT, is it builds on that RAISE aspect, that final tenant of evolution or adaptation over time. There's no repeat measure conflict here, where you know something might seem familiar. One of the unique parts of the PACT is that the clinician doesn't fill out the scale while they're talking to the person, they're really just recording them talking, so it is on the clinician side where, as often as they'd like to, they could implement the structured prompts of the PACT and then fill out the scale and see how performance might vary over time. They might see effects of context of the conversation, or the environment, or maybe the time of day, you know, phase of life, but it remains a way to use that really important information you gather through these conversations without recreating a testing environment frequently. Jerry Hoepner: I really love that framework. I think there's a lot of room for that to be used in other contexts as well. I just think it's really a wise way of thinking about it. I also, you just mentioned caregivers and caregiver burden in this context, and how does that fit into this entire RAISE framework, the PACT, and so forth. Jeanne Gallée: I think for both the RAISE assessment framework as well as the PACT the carers play an essential role in the sense that if they are available and present in the patient's life, then they are involved in the process. And so within the RAISE framework, the care partner is involved to provide feedback or to be given feedback, and in the PACT the same occurs, where if they are present at the time of the conversation, they are involved in the conversation. What I tend to do in the people I have piloted the PACT, I say come in as you would naturally, but then also take a step back. Let the person that with PPA that we're talking to take the lead, but I want you to interact as you would naturally. And then they're separately also asked to comment on the strengths that the person with PPA has. Their feedback is so integral because if they are present in a person's life, they play an essential role in promoting anything that we do work on in speech therapy. Jerry Hoepner: Absolutely, yeah, really well said. And I wanted to dig in, partly because I have envy of this figure, the roadmap figure for PPA, and I think it really sets up well for as we think about professionals out there too, like what's the roadmap, not just for the person and their partner, but what's the roadmap for clinicians, future clinicians, all of that. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that figure. Jeanne Gallée: I'd be delighted to. So, this was one of those, I would say classic for me moments where I had an idea and went to PowerPoint and started playing around with a visual of what I was thinking. The roadmap paper in no way is meant to be the only guide for how we can work with a person with PPA, but was really born out of discussions with Amy Mooney, as well as Zoe Ezzes, and Kristin Schafferr Mendez through the National Aphasia Association about the possible gaps in education or preparation a person might experience when first working with people living with PPA.  There are so many ways in which we could say, "Oh, just work on this exact task. Work on these.." and that can feel so lost and unanchored, unmoored moreover. And I wanted to provide the clinical toolkit that I've been using to help me think about my broader approach. So to not get lost in the weeds, but just generally think about what's my purpose here, what's my journey, and so at the center of this road that I created is the tenant of providing that person-centered care, like we aim to with the RAISE assessment framework, so really bringing it back to establishing that honest and holistic and person-centered relationship with your client and their care partners. And focusing on creating a journey that's unique to the client that I think can feel hard when there are so many unknowns with a condition like PPA, where you're always working with an interdisciplinary team. Which you may or may not have contact with. So the first part of this roadmap is really defining your role. Who are you as a professional, and what kinds of support can you provide, and part of defining your own role includes defining your role relative to the rest of the interdisciplinary team. How can you provide a different approach from the neurologist or the neuropsychologist who play vital but very different roles in a person's care journey? Part of that definition also includes advocating across professions, so a classic conundrum that people with communication-led disorders face is that they may not have certain challenges in other domains, but their communication results in a domino effect of difficulties. And so, as the speech language pathologist, coming up with ways in which you can provide supports to other providers or your client to improve their communication can be essential for that comprehensive care. That might include coming up with a communication notebook that has a single page related to specific questions or common topics when talking to the neurologist or the physical therapist or other providers. And then part of this roadmap includes referring out. So having the humility and confidence to say I can't help with this in the ways that you may need. I will either refer you to a specialist within our field or outside of our field to help with these specific aspects, and I think that's just responsible care. Jerry Hoepner: Absolutely. Really well described, and such a perfect. A segway to my next question. I always tell my students, assessment isn't just the first and last session that you're working with someone, and the same goes for intervention, right? It's not excluded from the beginning and the end, right? Like, you can't do intervention on day one, you can't do it on the last day, right? I think we kind of silo those things as well, you know, we assess and we intervene every day side by side. Can you share a little bit of your perspectives on this? And, and how that relates to kind of what we just talked about in terms of that roadmap? Jeanne Gallée: Yeah, I think part of the challenge with some of these concepts is that it's very helpful to have experience in working with individuals, whether it is through formal speech therapy or elsewhere, to feel comfort with the unknown. Because a lot of it relies on your ability to listen and to respond to what you notice. You may inadvertently put in assessment by asking follow-up questions to a point a person made when you were talking about their commute. Ad you may offer different technological supports or just visual supports to your client in that conversation in a way to build up supports to see, "Oh, do we see a difference in how they're responding to what I'm saying? And how I provide support? Or when I dial it back, do we see a completely different direction?" So, it is this beautiful, possibly more art than science approach of responding to what a person is giving you. And there are so many individual differences in all of us.  I always joke about how when I used to collect data on the picture description using both age match controls and people with PPA, I would almost burst out laughing when some of the controls provided responses, because I would get one to two sentences sometimes because see the difference in motivation. A person who does not have a communication concern, does not see the need to show exactly what they can do. And would benefit from some encouragement to show exactly how much they can say, whereas a person with PPA, who might have an Aphasia Quotient that recognizes their aphasia, might speak for five to 10 minutes to show exactly everything that they can accomplish. And so I think having that in your back pocket is really important when it comes to thinking about coming up with your recipe of all the ingredients of your assessment and intervention approach and counseling approach. So, I think that's where most of my work comes from, is that there is no one size fits all, but there are certain ingredients or components that we need to apply, and the exact ratios depend on the person you're working with. Jerry Hoepner: That is such a good description of dynamic assessment and intervention and how that I agree, probably more art than science. And that's hard for people who want a black and white answer, like "Step one…" but it's so true, and, and being effective in working in this context, that really moves us nicely into a recent paper that you did, those global perspectives on the management of PPA, and I was struck by the numbers here. Only 40% of respondents said that they had received training in primary progressive aphasia at their university, and they identified all of these needs, right, like online instruction, sample tools, and activity dealing with end of life care and trainings for end of life care. When you mentioned counseling, that totally relates to what we're up against in terms of counseling, right? No one feels confident or has very good self efficacy. Tey don't know if what you know the lines are, what part is theirs and what part is someone else. And I think just really important to like I said, lay out a roadmap and help people to understand what we were just talking about in terms of that art and science of how do you navigate this space when it has to be individualized for every person, and that can feel uncomfortable for a lot of people. So, I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on that, and kind of what you learned from that context. Jeanne Gallée: Yeah, so this research study. Was really an amazing endeavor on part of everyone who was involved. It felt like a grassroots effort to find the speech language pathologists around the world who aren't associated with a particular institution who do work with primary progressive aphasia. So of course it will never be a fully representative sample of every clinician who does so, but I do think we worked very hard to cast a wide net. So we used a snowball method. I contacted almost 40 institutions and governing bodies to find speech language pathologists who do have experience with PPA, because while more and more non-specialist providers will be seeing this patient population, we wanted to hear from the people who currently are in the field and creating their own expertise and toolkits to work with these individuals. So, what we found is that a lot of people are out on their own creating their own wheels, so to speak. And it just really led to that beautiful conclusion of now with the power of our globalization of education and sharing of resources, we can come up with a resource that's shared worldwide. Of course, there will be adaptations to fit different contexts, cultures, languages, but one of the issues has been that the systems of care for PPA have often relied upon very specific individuals. And that's reflected in the educational level. Even I was in the master's program between 2017 and 2019, I didn't hear about PPA formally in my coursework, and if it was mentioned we did not go into any of these aspects of specialized care. Part of that might have been because I didn't take very specific courses that then you know were optional or precluded, so I might have missed it, but I really didn't receive that education in the classroom. I received it through my clinical training, which I would argue is possibly even more valuable, right? You have that experiential training. But I think for clinicians who might want to transition in their careers, or you know, inadvertently in their place of work, are transitioning based on who shows up, that is a huge disservice. Jerry Hoepner: Yeah, agreed. And it's a complex issue, right, because I can remember actually teaching about this back before Tom [Sather] was in my department. I taught the aphasia class and the acquired cog class, and I was thinking, like, where do I talk about primary progressive aphasia? Do I talk about that in acquired com? Do I talk about that in aphasia? Do I do it in both? Where do I talk about end of life care, and like, how does that fit in, because that's, you know, at that point I was teaching dysphasia, too. Believe it or not, and I'm like, it's kind of there, it's kind of here, it's kind of, it's kind of in counseling, it's all right. So that makes it tricky to have kind of a uniform message when it's all over the place. And love to just get your thoughts on that too. Like, where do you put that stuff? Like, it's it's PPA, it's end of life care, it's aphasia, it's right, it's counseling, it's so many things at once. Jeanne Gallée: It is so many things at once, and I do think that speaks to the fact that it may well need its own class as part of progressive conditions. Jerry Hoepner: Yeah. Jeanne Gallée: But I do think a large part of what we share there is that understanding of we may also need to shift the identity of who we think about when we think about life care. And when we think about a progressive condition. Since a huge flavor, so to speak, of PPA is the fact that it is early onset, and especially with our cultural shifts, and you know, people starting families later in life. The face of a person with PPA looks very different from, at least in my childhood, of what looked like typical Alzheimer's disease dementia. And it's a younger, possibly more dynamic working person, possibly with little kids at home. And I think that's where that symptom-led approach has been most beneficial for my practice. Where we think about "What are you experiencing and how is it impacting your life?", rather than saying "This is the diagnosis, let's put you over here in this box." Jerry Hoepner: Yeah, the idea of putting it in a box and siloing things really resonates in this context, and I love what you said about identity, right? The identity - what we all have in our mind's eye when we think about end of life care is not the typical person with primary progressive aphasia. Like I can remember as an elementary school student visiting the nursing homes and singing to the residents and things like that, and this was not, this was not the group of people that we were thinking about in that context. Very, very different, and I just think that's a really good mindset shift to recognize how actually broad that is. I'm sure there's people listening to this who work in, you know, end of life pediatric care who want to slap me in the face right now, but right, we have such a different mindset when we're thinking about end of life care, and that reset that you just made super important. Jeanne Gallée: Yeah, yeah, and easier said than done, I think, As well as just seeing who shows up to the University of Washington support groups, and just the own perspectives that individuals bring there. But I think we can do it. I think, as a field, that will be the way in which we can become the best generalist provider, so to speak, where we take general principles of addressing symptoms or situations, and then apply those to diagnoses across the spectrum. Jerry Hoepner: Absolutely, really well said, and a great place to kind of wrap up our questions, but I want to give you the opportunity, are there points that you want to share before we kind of close our conversation? Things that we missed. Jeanne Gallée: I think the general thread throughout our conversation has just spoken to the power we do have as providers or researchers working with patients with primary progressive aphasia or related conditions, I think when we feel that our expertise in the newest theories or approaches might be lacking, we can always rely upon our empathy and full body listening, just to bring in elements that go across the lifespan, and that in of itself can lead to so many honest and transparent choices in our clinical care that can best serve our communities. I think we are much more empowered than we think we are. Jerry Hoepner: Absolutely, that's a really important thread through many places where clinicians feel uncomfortable. They've got it there and they just have to gain that confidence, and being empowered to step into those moments. Well said. Well, Jeanne it's been just a really fun conversation. I'm sure we could talk all afternoon, but I look forward to catching up to you at future conferences and things like that. It's been my pleasure to have this conversation. So, thank you for being a part of it. Jeanne Gallée: Right back at you, Jerry. Thank you so much. This has been a really fun conversation, and like you said, I hope to meet in person in the near future. Jerry Hoepner: Agreed. On behalf of Aphasia Access, thank you for listening to this episode of the Aphasia Access Conversations Podcast. For more information on Aphasia Access, and to access our growing library of materials, please go to www.aphasiaaccess.org. If you have an idea for a future podcast series or topic, email us at info at aphasia access.org Thanks again for your ongoing support of Aphasia Access.   Resources and Readings 1) The RAISE Assessment Framework: Gallée, J., Cartwright, J., Volkmer, A., Whitworth, A., & Hersh, D. (2023). "Please Don't Assess Him to Destruction": The R.A.I.S.E. Assessment Framework for Primary Progressive Aphasia. American journal of speech-language pathology, 32(2), 391–410. https://doi.org/10.1044/2022_AJSLP-22-00122  Gallée, J., Volkmer, A., Whitworth, A., Hersh, D., & Cartwright, J. (2024). Applications of the R.A.I.S.E. Assessment Framework to Support the Process of Assessment in Primary Progressive Aphasia. American journal of speech-language pathology, 33(5), 2280–2290. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_AJSLP-24-00085 2) A roadmap for clinicians just starting to work with PPA: Gallée, J. (2023). A Roadmap to enhance care for people living with primary progressive Aphasia: What Can Be Done Now?. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, 8(5), 847-862. https://doi.org/10.1044/2023_PERSP-23-0002  3) Aspects of language functioning in early and late-onset Alzheimer's disease dementia: Gallée, J., Gibbons, L. E., Choi, S. E., Lee, M., Scollard, P., Trittschuh, E. H., Mez, J., Saykin, A. J., Foldi, N. S., Mukherjee, S., & Crane, P. K. (2025). Facets of language performance in early-onset and late-onset Alzheimer's disease dementia. Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association, 21(9), e70705. https://doi.org/10.1002/alz.70705 4) The Progressive Aphasia Communication Toolkit (in production at Alzheimer's & Dementia, but here is the preprint): Gallée, J., Cartwright, J., Henry, M. L., Mooney, A. R., Stark, B. C., Volkmer, A., Dietz, A., Nakano, C., Battista, P., Beales, A., Beber, B. C., Cadório, I., Caldwell, M., Davies, K., Ezzes, Z., Gauch, M., Graney, T., Grobler, S., Haley, K. L., Hausmann, A., … Crane, P. K. (2025). The Progressive Aphasia Communication Toolkit (PACT): A Strengths-Based Approach to Multidomain Evaluation for Intervention. medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences, 2025.11.25.25340904. https://doi.org/10.64898/2025.11.25.25340904 5) A global survey on SLP perspectives on the management of PPA: Gallée, J., Cartwright, J., Grasso, S., Jokel, R., Lavoie, M., McGowan, E., Pozzebon, M., Beber, B. C., Duboisdindien, G., Montagut, N., Norvik, M., Sugimoto, T., Townsend, R., Unger, N., Winsnes, I. E., & Volkmer, A. (2024). Global perspectives on the management of primary progressive aphasia. Scientific reports, 14(1), 19712. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-70156-5 6) Aspects of language functioning in early and late-onset Alzheimer's disease dementia: Gallée, J., Gibbons, L. E., Choi, S. E., Lee, M., Scollard, P., Trittschuh, E. H., Mez, J., Saykin, A. J., Foldi, N. S., Mukherjee, S., & Crane, P. K. (2025). Facets of language performance in early-onset and late-onset Alzheimer's disease dementia. Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association, 21(9), e70705. https://doi.org/10.1002/alz.70705

Germany looks like Europe's most attractive battery storage market on paper: deep power price volatility, a fast-growing renewables build-out, and nearly three gigawatts of batteries already live. In reality, developers are navigating uncertain grid connection queues, gruelling commissioning phases, and a tolling market still working out how much risk is fair to price in.Christina Hepp, Director Strategy, and Leandra Boes, Director Asset Management, both at Green Flexibility, join Ed Porter to unpack what building and operating batteries in Germany actually looks like once the PowerPoint slide meets the grid.They cover:- What a Flexible Connection Agreement actually is and why this kind of trade-off is fast becoming the norm in Germany.- Why grid operators and battery companies have historically struggled to "speak the same language", and how a shared framework like REGIOlink helps translate one side's needs into the other's terms.- What actually happens in the final weeks before a large-scale battery switches on for real: the software integration, testing and last-minute troubleshooting that never makes it into a press release.- Why choosing to sell power on the open market versus locking in a steadier, pre-agreed deal is a much bigger and riskier decision than it sounds - and why Green Flexibility is betting on the option most peers shy away from.- Just how enormous Germany's battery storage pipeline has become: enough grid connection requests queued up that regulators have had to start filtering out the projects that aren't actually going to happen.Want the data behind this conversation? Ask Ko, Modo Energy's AI analyst:https://modoenergy.com/sign-up?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast_apps&utm_campaign=green-flexibility&utm_content=ko_signupChapters:00:00 Introduction01:20 Common Misconceptions About Building Batteries in Germany02:24 FID Prep and Commissioning: What Doesn't Make the Press Release03:25 Flexible Connection Agreements (FCAs): The Ski Cannon Example07:54 Germany's FCA Market Standardization10:36 Battery Commissioning in Germany: Lessons From the Toughest Phase14:29 Merchant vs Tolling: Germany's Battery Revenue Models19:30 REGIOlink: Integrating Batteries Into Distribution Grids23:11 Battery Data Sharing With Grid Operators26:27 Germany's Project Development Shakeout29:32 Co-Located Battery Projects: Pros and Cons31:47 Germany's Zonal Pricing Debate for Batteries34:32 Contrarian Views: Merchant Strategy and the German Power Market as "Barbie"

Germany looks like Europe's most attractive battery storage market on paper: deep power price volatility, a fast-growing renewables build-out, and nearly three gigawatts of batteries already live. In reality, developers are navigating uncertain grid connection queues, gruelling commissioning phases, and a tolling market still working out how much risk is fair to price in.Christina Hepp, Director Strategy, and Leandra Boes, Director Asset Management, both at Green Flexibility, join Ed Porter to unpack what building and operating batteries in Germany actually looks like once the PowerPoint slide meets the grid.They cover:- What a Flexible Connection Agreement actually is and why this kind of trade-off is fast becoming the norm in Germany.- Why grid operators and battery companies have historically struggled to "speak the same language", and how a shared framework like REGIOlink helps translate one side's needs into the other's terms.- What actually happens in the final weeks before a large-scale battery switches on for real: the software integration, testing and last-minute troubleshooting that never makes it into a press release.- Why choosing to sell power on the open market versus locking in a steadier, pre-agreed deal is a much bigger and riskier decision than it sounds - and why Green Flexibility is betting on the option most peers shy away from.- Just how enormous Germany's battery storage pipeline has become: enough grid connection requests queued up that regulators have had to start filtering out the projects that aren't actually going to happen.Want the data behind this conversation? Ask Ko, Modo Energy's AI analyst:https://modoenergy.com/sign-up?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast_apps&utm_campaign=green-flexibility&utm_content=ko_signupChapters:00:00 Introduction01:20 Common Misconceptions About Building Batteries in Germany02:24 FID Prep and Commissioning: What Doesn't Make the Press Release03:25 Flexible Connection Agreements (FCAs): The Ski Cannon Example07:54 Germany's FCA Market Standardization10:36 Battery Commissioning in Germany: Lessons From the Toughest Phase14:29 Merchant vs Tolling: Germany's Battery Revenue Models19:30 REGIOlink: Integrating Batteries Into Distribution Grids23:11 Battery Data Sharing With Grid Operators26:27 Germany's Project Development Shakeout29:32 Co-Located Battery Projects: Pros and Cons31:47 Germany's Zonal Pricing Debate for Batteries34:32 Contrarian Views: Merchant Strategy and the German Power Market as "Barbie"

In a massive two-hour display of pure firearm autism, the Rimfire Radio crew attempts a live PowerPoint presentation on Rumble that predictably goes completely off the rails. The hosts kick things off by introducing Gatlab as "senile but butt-loaded" before transitioning into a deeply serious discussion about the tactical viability of fanny packs. The gear highlight of the night features a 130-year-old youth rifle saved from a literal garbage dump, which triggers a live "desk pop" video demonstration and pairs beautifully with Gatlab's tragic realization that he ruined his vintage tube-fed rifle by threading it for a suppressor. The show then derails into a chaotic centerfire detour where the guys aggressively debate whether ultra-short AR barrels under 10.5 inches are a viable home defense option or just loud toys designed for range retards. To wrap up the chaos, Dan brags about losing weight just to fit into his appendix holsters, while Dusky proudly flashes his nipples to the audience to celebrate his new tiger-stripe Beretta holster from Klecker Tactical. Finally, Dan cracks a joke about running up to police officers to scream about your gun collection, before the crew invites their remaining twenty viewers to come buy them drinks at the upcoming GOALS conference.

The MAFFEO DRINKS Podcast is a leading drinks business podcast, listened to in 120 countries worldwide with 125+ episodes. Honest conversations about how the industry actually works, from the bar and what it means for the boardroom.This Episode is hosted by Chris Maffeo and brought to you by MAFFEO DRINKS.Paul Thomas is Global Consumer & Shopper Insight Director at Imperial Brands, formerly Global Insight Director at Beam Suntory.Why do bartenders know more than a hundred-thousand-pound research report?How does the Japanese concept of Gemba change the way brands gather insight?What actually happens when marketers stop hiding behind PowerPoint and go to the bar?Find all episodes featuring Paul Thomas at themaffeodrinkspodcast.comBottom up. Wanna know what the conversation above means for your team? It's in the paid section.For €100 a year you get access to Maffeo Confidential (Private Podcast) and get this analysis and access to the full archive of 125 episodes, each one translated from industry conversation into the commercial decisions underneath it. Find out more at maffeodrinks.com

Today on PowerPoint, Pastor Jack Graham begins the series “Winning Life's Battles.” He teaches that as believers, we don't have to wring our hands and worry, but rather we can rest confidently and securely in the fact that Jesus is coming again. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29?v=20251111

Send us Fan MailThe most shareable segment of the panel. Each investor shares the most memorable pitch they ever received — a collapsible cup prototype that wowed on every fact but failed basic physics, a 12-year-old's DJ business PowerPoint that hit credibility, clarity, and whimsy better than most professionals, and a founder who went from childhood paralysis to top-10 Halo gamer to tech CEO. Then the full panel answers the question every new capital raiser needs: how do you attract serious investors when you have no track record? Six investors, six answers — and a close that every founder should hear.About Family Office ClubThe world's largest investor club in the family office space. 19 years. 300+ events. 16 million members. $1B+ in community transactions.

We're in a battle for our culture. It's a battle for our families and our faith. Join Pastor Jack Graham for today's PowerPoint as he brings a message encouraging us all, old and young alike, to take a stand for Christ in every area of our lives. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29?v=20251111

Great public health professionals are often called upon to teach others, but expertise in a subject area does not always translate into effective instruction. Kaylin Clonch, workforce essential learning director at the South Carolina Department of Public Health, tells us about the agency's approach to strengthening its training culture. Drawing on her experience as a classroom teacher, Clonch explains how adult learning principles, instructional strategies, and learner engagement can transform workplace training from “death by PowerPoint” into meaningful educational experiences.Home | Public Health Careers.orgPH-HERO Workforce Resource Center | ASTHO12 Things Health Agencies Need to Know About Enterprise AI | ASTHO

In this episode we're discussing the speaker is the presentation, not their PowerPoint slides. While your slides should aid you and your talk, your audience's sole focus shouldn't be on the visuals, otherwise you've lost them. We'll discuss: Why dense slides can hurt your talkHow to simplify dense slides (which can mean different things to different organizations)The real purpose around slides and how great communicators interact with themThe slides are there to help guide your audience, give them something else to engage with, and be your speaker notes, but they shouldn't be the main show.

Each one of us was created by God for a cause. Join us for today's PowerPoint with Pastor Jack Graham as he shares the powerful story of Esther, encouraging us all to find the purpose and the plan that God has for our lives. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29?v=20251111

On today's PowerPoint, Pastor Jack Graham brings a message of God's grace to forgive even in spite of our greatest weaknesses as he tells of the rise and fall of Samson. It's a message of hope and grace for all, but especially those who are bound and defeated by sin. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29?v=20251111

Who will God use? On today's PowerPoint, Pastor Jack Graham shares the story of Gideon, revealing that God uses unexpected people in unexpected places, and, like Gideon, sees you not for who you are, but what you can become. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29?v=20251111

What is your Jericho? We all have walls that stand between us and the blessings that God has for us. Join us for today's PowerPoint as Pastor Jack Graham continues the series “Epic Adventures,” bringing a message from the life of Joshua, encouraging us to call on the Lord to bring down the walls that separate us from Him. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29?v=20251111

Creating a presentation doesn't have to take hours! In this video, I'll show you how to use Canva AI to generate an entire PowerPoint presentation in just minutes. You'll see exactly how I create a presentation from scratch, customize it to fit my brand, and save hours of work without sacrificing creativity.The Premium Brand Blueprint Webinar happening Wed, July 8th @ 12pm CST: https://bit.ly/ThePremiumBrandBlueprintBusiness Audit: https://forms.gle/dWKUCJcaJMFP5jHe8Join The Vault & get instant access to 125+ courses, monthly LIVE Q&A sessions, monthly accountability calls, thousands of Canva Templates, new courses added throughout the year, and so much more! https://bit.ly/TheOfficialVaultGrab your FREE copy of my book, ‘Boss It Up Babe!'https://bit.ly/BOSSItUpBabeBookHost Bio:Kimberly Olson is a self-made multi-millionaire and the creator of The Goal Digger Girl, where she serves female entrepreneurs by teaching them simple systems and online strategies in sales and marketing. Through the power of social media, they are equipped to explode their online presence and get real results in their business, genuinely and authentically. She has two PhDs in Natural Health and Holistic Nutrition, has recently been recognized as the #2 recruiter in her current network marketing company globally, is the author of four books including best-sellers, The Goal Digger and Balance is B.S., has a top 25 rated podcast in marketing and travels nationally public speaking. She is a mom of two and teaches others how to follow their dreams, crush their goals and create the life they've always wanted.Website: www.thegoaldiggergirl.comInstagram: www.instagram.com/thegoaldiggergirlFacebook: www.facebook.com/thegoaldiggergirlYoutube: www.youtube.com/c/thegoaldiggergirlCheck out my Facebook groups for those that want to build their business online through social media, in a genuine and authentic way:Goal Digging Boss Babes: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggingbossbabesLeave a review here: Write a review for The Goal Digger Girl PodcastSubscribing to The Podcast:If you would like to get updates of new episodes, you can give me a follow on your favorite podcast app.

God has given each of us a purpose for living – our God-given dream. Join us for today's PowerPoint as Pastor Jack Graham brings a message of inspiration for all who seek to pursue that purpose and live the dream God has for our lives. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29?v=20251111

On today's PowerPoint, Pastor Jack Graham reminds us of the value of being alone with God. Like Jacob, we, too, can find God in our darkest times of struggle and learn to lean on Him. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29?v=20251111

This week: Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan passed away at the age of 100. Today: Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spiers, and Emily Peck examine Greenspan's legacy and the way it's being emulated by the Fed's current chair, Kevin Warsh. Then, the hosts discuss succession at JPMorgan now that CEO Jamie Dimon's latest heir apparent, Marianne Lake, has left the company. And finally they look at the latest PowerPoint from SoftBank's Masayoshi Son and try to understand if a goose has value and if eggs can lay more eggs. In the Slate Plus episode: The New Meme Stock on the BlockWant to hear that discussion and hear more Slate Money? Join Slate Plus to unlock weekly bonus episodes. Plus, you'll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Slate Money show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/moneyplus to get access wherever you listen.Podcast production by Jessamine Molli. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.