Greetings from Rome. It's good to see you all. So today... the main topic uh is oh thanks for the sub um the main topic is going to be how to actually work smarter not just harder
And I was thinking about this because I did a LinkedIn post a few days ago about not wasting your life only at work, yet still succeeding. And I realized everyone always says... work harder or sorry work smarter not harder and then they're like oh I dropped a wisdom bomb on you I'm done and they never actually say how you should do that so I want to get into that
Because I think it's very possible to actually. Yeah, exactly. I see the comments in chat and we'll do a discussion in chat. I'm not going to use the question tool today, I don't think. Probably a small enough audience given the early hours in the U.S. More people end up watching this as VOD. So I'm going to do a couple lead-in topics. And then we're going to just do a quick stream.
on a recipe for how to actually work smarter. And then you can always choose to work hard. But until then, drink this dream as limoncello. If you're not familiar with it, it's a lemon-infused liquor or basically lemon-infused vodka, I would guess, something like that. Someone who knows more than me can correct me, but it's lemon-infused liquor. in the U.S., or sorry, made in Italy on the Amalfi Coast. It's usually eaten or drunk after dinner. It's a digestive.
Meanwhile, the card game in the back is having a dispute over who went in what order. We take our games in this family very seriously. Ciao, Zarcher. Ciao. We have a Twitch streamer. It's always good when Twitch staff drops by. I appreciate it. It always makes me wonder. See, there's a thousand employees at Twitch and I no longer can correlate people's on-stream names to whether or not I knew them. But it's always nice when staff drops by.
So let's get to the point. My family and I are here in Rome. Thank you for the subs, by the way. Hephaestus, you're up early. And a new colleague, thank you for the sub and for the nine months of subs. So we're here in Rome for a while. We've been seeing a lot of sites. I've learned something that I should have known. i consider myself a history buff and i got to admit i totally missed this um we've been going to these palaces and the different palaces full of art always turn out
Two for two. We went to a castle today and we went to a palace yesterday. They turn out to be owned by relatives of popes. So here I had this idea that like the way you became pope.
was you became like a village priest and you were very holy and then you became like I don't know you moved up and eventually you became like a bishop and then a cardinal and because of your deep faith and your acts on behalf of the church your fellow cardinals made you pope turns out that's not what happened for a lot of history so duh my bad
Instead, what actually happened is you started out as royalty and you joined the church because you had nothing better to do and it was a path to have meaning in your life if you didn't want to be a knight and you weren't in line to be like the next king or the next duke. You joined the church and you worked your way through the power hierarchy. And then your fellow people who joined the church and were also cardinals, but were also dukes and princes and whatever.
in political alliances chose the next pope. And so popes were almost always or very often former royalty. And so I didn't know this. So anyway. The palace I went to yesterday filled with art. This family has been rich for 500 years. And the guy admits it straight up. He says, yeah, 500 years ago, my uncle or my great, great, great, great, great, great, great uncle became Pope. And he made my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather what was called Cardinal Nephew.
Which who knew that even existed? But anyway, I guess he said in the recording we were listening to that this is where the word nepotism actually came from. So someone here, phone off, says nepotism strikes again. Maybe you knew. This is actually apparently where the word nepotism comes from. Is the Pope being able to designate a relative or someone? and uh them accumulating great wealth so i learned a few things i got to see some fabulous art i got to go to real castle today um
I went to Emperor Hadrian, the Roman emperor's villa. So at this point I've been to an emperor's villa, some dude's palace and some other dude's castle. And I've learned that there's a lot of wealth in the world. A lot of wealth. Hey, Kristen. It's good to see you here. And thanks for all the people who sub. So... Want to talk about that I'm done If you want to see more I've been posting pictures almost every day in the travel pictures channel Colosseum stream
Yeah, we're going to the Colosseum in a few days. I'll definitely post pictures. It's interesting going around Rome right now. It's actually quite empty. If you join the Discord, which I'll pop up here. If you're not tracking our Discord. Let's see. There's the Discord. You can go to our travel photos channel, which everyone's free to post in, and I'll post pictures when we can. Tomorrow we actually head to the city of Ravenna.
And then after that to the city of Venice. But we're going to come back here in just a few days and go to the Colosseum. And yes, we are very lucky. Okay. second thing i want to talk about for a minute if you haven't seen the weather in the pacific northwest check it out if you're here in the eu like i am
I know you guys have had some bad heat waves a couple years ago for sure. Normally the hottest day of the year in Seattle will be about 90 degrees Fahrenheit. It's supposed to be about 105 to 108. in Seattle the next couple days. And where I live, it's supposed to be 113. So for those of you who love Celsius more, it's 45 degrees C in a place that normally is never above 30. And when I say never, I mean never.
or nearly never. And so while some of my friends remind me weather is not climate and so hot days don't mean global warming, record heat does to me mean we have a problem. So, we're going to have to do some work over the course of my remaining lifetime and most of your folks' lifetime to keep our planet livable. Just an observation.
My goal, therefore, is to help you have a successful career so that you have time, energy and money to do that. So let's talk about it. Number one, I encourage you in chat.
to add to my concepts here if you want, because I'm going to do a big LinkedIn post about it tomorrow to follow up on the one I did. And I have notes here. So you'll see me reference those. But look, how do you... actually work smarter not harder or not only harder because people tell you work smarter work smarter well what does that look like first if you're gonna work smarter
What they mean by that, of course, is, well, if you're really clever, it shouldn't be that hard. It shouldn't take all that effort. You can shortcut it. You can find a way. Some of that's true. Some things just take hard work and there's no way around them. But working smarter begins with thinking. And the first thing you have to accept is in a regular job. You can't do everything that's laying around you. When I began my career, for the first, I don't know.
Couple years I could actually basically do everything that I was asked to do when I was new to a company I could just work a lot of hours and I could do everything You'll all find this crazy, but I used to hit what was called inbox zero. So I'm sure some of you know what inbox zero is, where you clear out your email inbox of everything.
that's come into it um every day and then i used to actually and this is crazy i used to go to my outbox and file away everything that i had sent and categorize it and keep it well obviously that fell apart because i got busier and busier so the point is first thing except you can't do all the work that would be good to do and this is true in your life as well
Once you accept that, you then have to start choosing. And the real thing to first think about is, are you going to end up letting other people choose for you? Or are you going to do the choosing proactively? Because at work, there's lots of people who want to choose and in life, there's lots of people who want to choose what you do for you. Your boss wants to assign your tasks.
Your counterparts on projects want to dump work on you, whether very intentionally or only subtly. Your family. There's always more stuff to do around a house. Your friends. There's always more invitations. You've got to prioritize. And I really struggled with learning to say no. I didn't like to displease people.
And so I said yes to most requests, particularly at work, and I ended up overloaded and I ended up doing stuff that maybe wasn't that valuable. So acknowledge you can't do it all and start picking.
And don't let other people pick for you. Because if other people pick for you, you'll just end up... doing what they want you to do which would be good for them but it may not be what you need to get done and then after you do all the things they want then at night or on the weekend you find the time to do the things you want Well, that's not a great recipe. And so the first step to working smarter is to take control of what you work on and be willing to say no or to push back. So thing one.
Pick what you're going to work on. Thing two, and we've talked about this before, I've done whole shows on prioritizing. So I'm not going to go through all of prioritizing again. But... It's very tempting to work on the easiest things, the things that you most want to work on, you most enjoy, that are simplest to get done. Those are not always the most valuable.
most important and so when you're working it's important to decide what is going to have the most impact and you can go find my show on prioritizing someone in the audience may be able to recall it and point you to it or send the link to our mods I think so we've done a whole show on prioritizing. The key point on prioritizing, though, we've talked about the book Eat That Frog and do the hardest thing first in the morning when your energy is the highest.
But if you do that, then you're going to at least make sure if you don't get everything done, you get done the things that matter. And so first take control. what you're gonna do and second put it in priority order now key point once you prioritize you're gonna have to take some risks
One reason people try to do everything and they try to be perfectionist is they don't want to take on the risk of saying no to something. They don't want to take on the risk of being wrong or choosing something not to do. And as a result, they don't truly prioritize. They end up swamped and they're not sure how to pick what's going to be most important. Well, guess what? One way and a viewer.
and Discord pointed this out today. One way to figure out what's most important is to think about why you're being asked to do the work you're doing. So he used an uncomfortable example. He said, hey, if you're trying, if you're trying to figure out, he used the example of, if you're asked.
to monitor how long people are in the break room try and figure out why like why is this being asked of you and maybe the idea is they want to keep breaks to five minutes fine put a timer on the room that turns out the lights after five minutes as a hint to people to get back to work his point was if you know is a bad example and he admitted that but the point is if you know why
you're being asked to do something you can often figure out how to do it better however what comes from all of this is when you make a choice of what to do you might be wrong So part of the difficulty of working smarter and why people simply work harder instead is they have to make choices to work smarter and choices are dangerous.
You might piss off people you say no to. You might pick wrong and do the wrong thing and actually miss an opportunity. But you're never going to be able to do everything. So you always have risk. So working smarter is in part about taking intentional risk and picking the things to do and picking what to invest your time in. The point is, as you do this more and as you practice and choose what you're going to work on, you will get better at picking the right things and having better judgment.
If you pick wrong, this is usually recoverable. Fine, it sucks. Now you have to go work harder, do extra time, go fix it and go do the thing you didn't pick. Or go unwind the thing you did and then fix it. But making choices is the only way out of trying to do everything. So I'm going to take a second and look at chat because I've seen a couple comments come up. So Danny Mac, ah, this is awesome. So we have to pause here.
For those of you who've known Dani, who's in our channel a lot, all the time, you'll notice she now has a wrench. So a couple weeks ago, Dani moved from Amazon Games to the Twitch ad platform. So she's now Twitch staff and shows up in our chat as Twitch staff. And good morning, Danny. Congratulations on the job move.
She was fantastic in what she did for Amazon Games for so many years. And now she's working for my old team, one of my old teams in Twitch. And so she's going to work on improving the Twitch ad platform. so excellent from now on we'll often have a staff member around because danny comes and hangs out a lot and hey now that she's at twitch watching streams is part of her job So anyway, dynamic ads, that would be fantastic. Okay, so let's see. We needed ads, yep.
Hmm. Getting paid to watch. That's awesome. There was a time where that was my job. Okay. So I want to see. My boss keeps telling me you don't need to know why. Tetsugia... Okay. I don't know what you do. Feel free to put it in chat. That's a bad boss, right? That's a boss who's got a control issue, just wants people to obey him or her.
what you do in a situation like that you can try to be good to your boss and say well i want to know why so i can try to do it better if i understand why i may be able to do even better work for you Now some bosses, even self-interested jerks like this person seems to be, may respond to that because you've given a what's in it for them. You tell them, oh, I want to know why so I can do better work for you.
But if they don't respond to that, it's time to quit. It's time to go get a different job. Construction excavation. Yeah, I was afraid of that. So look, I hate to say it. Not everyone is enlightened. And if I stereotype a little bit, you're not you're in a job where people like power structure and hierarchy. And I'm the foreman and I've been digging ditches. For 50 years or 35 years and just shut up and dig. Well, that's really sad. But construction is super hot right now.
Maybe find a place that appreciates you. They do exist in all industries. Okay. So we've covered you can't do everything. We've talked about prioritizing. We've talked about accepting risk and we've talked about asking why. And yes, if you have a boss who simply won't tell you why, even when you tell them why you want to know why. You want to move on when you can. So one thing I want to say here is prioritizing and choosing, it takes courage.
It takes the courage to sometimes be wrong and to be uncomfortable with the risk that you might be wrong. When you choose to do something new that you haven't done before, or when you choose not to do something.
or to do a project a new way there's risk that you'll be wrong now the other thing you should do is once you've prioritized and chosen and you start working and i did a poor job of this in my career i'll admit it when you find yourself doing repetitive work you need to automate it When you find yourself doing something over and over the hard way, take the time aside and do it the smarter way.
I tended to be in such a hurry that I would do it the long, slow, hard way over and over because at no given time did I feel like, oh, I have time to learn a better way to do this. I have time to automate more. That's a personality flaw. to be short-term focused like that. And please don't do what I did.
lazy engineers lazy designers we had some people in our discord channel talking about this in the general chat channel i asked what we should talk about in this show and they pointed out automate The second thing they said is if something isn't working or if you're being forced to work the dumb way, it's often a process problem. The company process, the bureaucracy, the software tools, whatever.
don't fit the task well again at all companies I know you can't change that but as much as possible you want to have the process support the work not block the work and make it harder and you want to automate and those two things will save you a ton of time they prevent you from working those are literally working dumber if you're doing the same thing manually over and over again and it can be automated
If you're doing hard, slow work that a process is forcing you to do to no value, those are things to question and try to change. And then the last thing I wanted to talk about, this idea work smarter, not harder, I keep reversing it, is phrased as an either or. You can actually, of course, do both. Some people who want to work very hard and get ahead very fast or be gloriously rich buy one of those palaces I was talking about earlier.
Even if you're willing to work very, very hard, you should get the most out of that effort and get the most out of that effort. You still need to understand why the work is being done. Think about the end goals. Put it in priority order, not by what's easiest or most comfortable or what you're best at, but by what is going to have the most end result impact for the business or the project.
And then take some risks along the way. Make some calls. I'm going to do this rather than that. Automate. But then you can still, if you want, there's nothing that prevents you from working 16-hour days. Now, I personally wouldn't do that. But there was a time in my life where I did. I wouldn't do it anymore. The point is, if you then want to push hard, at least you'll be pushing hard in an effective way.
And that's the whole story. If there's other comments in chat or questions about what I've said, specific circumstances, we can talk about those for a little while. And then I'm going to pack to go to Venice. Let's see here in chat. A lot of people are talking to Danny Mac. That's great. Why would you want to keep a job that can be improved by automation when it's time to adapt to more value added work? Yeah.
The glory of automation is it allows humans to focus on work humans should do. So it allows you to focus on the work that is uniquely... required of humans and with machine learning and artificial intelligence what can be automated is getting to be more and more quick story in the beginning of amazon when it was first a bookstore
They had human editors that picked what books to feature on the homepage and say, you should read this book, you should read that book. And they actually had people, I knew some of them. who read lots of books. They got good at reading books in pieces. They'd read the first 10 pages and last 10 pages and 10 in the middle and form an opinion of the book and decide whether or not to recommend it on Amazon.
But we found over time that actually machines did a much better job of this. And so we switched to machines. We have Twitch staff here at DaysRZero saying I'm trying to automate some process in my team to have more time, but it's hard. It is hard. Say more about why if you want.
there's often resistance automation automation is hard to get right technically to make sufficiently flexible and accurate and you get pushback from people that it's not worth it it's going to take too much time it's not going to work I agree, automation is hard, but good automation almost always pays off. And so it's a question of picking where to automate and then getting there as fast as you can to show the value.
knock 13 says i work in an industry that requires a lot of human intervention is there a framework or set of questions i should think through to identify what can be automated or made easier it's always a question of pattern So what are the interventions? Is there a decision tree? Is there some piece of it that's repetitive? Is there some task that is the most common?
read a book on this I'm not sure if it's on my book list or not there's a book called The Goal by Eli Goldratt strange name I admit that talks about something called the theory of constraints i'll see if i can find it real quick one second The goal. Great last name, Gold Rat. So I've read this book. Super good on figuring out where to automate. I'll paste it in chat here in just a second. Alright, one sec. There we go. Okay, other questions.
AI. AI will take all our jobs in the long run. Probably not, but it's definitely going to change the nature of work the way machines or other automation did. Yeah, it can be hard to work in a large company and get things done. Pissing me off here. AI will take all our jobs. We got rid of two teams after we migrated to AWS. It's great for the company, bad for employees. It's not bad for the country.
It is bad for those specific employees, but the fact is automation is going to happen. It's more efficient. It's good for the country in taxes in long term. And those people, unfortunately, you can't stop automation. So here's a story. in uh i don't know exactly what year would have been about 1500 the french nobility were really pissed off that any idiot with this new thing called a gun could kill a knight and it wasn't very chivalrous
And any peasant could do it. And they didn't like that because it devalued knights, which only the rich could afford a suit of armor and a horse. And so it made warfare accessible to the common person, and that wasn't very glorious, and it challenged the position and utility of the landed nobility. So they had this idea, well, we'll just outlaw guns.
So France tried to ignore the revolution in firearms, the result of which is they then got slaughtered in the next few battles because they weren't as advanced in firearm technology. You can't hold back technology because it annoys you or because it threatens jobs. You're going to have to adapt to it. So I get the problem, but there will be new jobs. Okay, any tips to push yourself to study math?
Do it early in the morning. Do it when your energy is high, basically. Set yourself some rewards for it. Give yourself like, hey, if I study this for an hour, I can play an hour of video games. Or if I study this for an hour, I can have a cookie or I can go out for dinner that night. Give yourself a reward and stick to it. Give yourself a payoff and a break.
Phone off every time I come here, I learn something new. Thank you. That's fantastic. That's what I want. Kristen, healthcare industries fro. is a fraud. It's not efficient on purpose. I disagree with that. I don't know if Kristen responded to that, but I'm going to defend her. The healthcare industry is filled with overcharging.
it's not inefficient on purpose it just it's interested in itself and so it charges as much as it can because doctors want to be rich and what better equation to get rich than a have you not pay the bill have this thing called insurance magically pay the bill because as long as you're insured you want the very best health care and you don't care what it costs um
You don't care. It's not your problem. So you're very happy to have the best health care. And doctors want to be rich because everybody wants to be rich. So if they can charge a lot of money, they're going to. So this is just a case where the incentives allow one set of people to charge a lot. Your incentives are to get healthy. But if you have insurance, you don't have to worry too much about what you're paying for it.
And so your incentive is to get the best possible treatment regardless of cost. And if you think about it, when you're sick, you're willing to pay anything to get well pretty much. And so it's a system where... the balance of power is very uneven because sick people are desperate and in a negotiation where one side is desperate and the other side isn't.
You know, the doctor doesn't care if he sees you today or not. He has other patients. But if you have cancer, you really care. And so that's where the potential for exploitative pricing shows up. All right, let's see. A lot of chat has gone by. If I miss something, you can repeat it.
If you want something right, do it yourself. What do you think about this quote? I see often how it ties into this. If you want something right, do it yourself. Jindex, that's a good question. Thank you for asking it. So if you want something done right, do it yourself. The key point about that is A, you are setting your standards. And so only you can know if the work is perfectly done to your standards without asking anyone else.
But more importantly, B, no one cares about this piece of work as much as you do. It's your idea. And to have someone else care about your idea as much as you do is very unusual. That saying, if you want something done right, do it yourself, comes from the idea that you can only control you.
By the way, everybody thinks, oh, the boss at work is totally in control. The boss has all the power. So if I'm the boss, everything will be done the way I say because I can give orders. But it doesn't really happen that way. As a boss, and how do you know this? Think about how you work. Sometimes you listen to your boss. Sometimes you ignore it. Sometimes you actually work hard. Sometimes you work hard at screwing off. Bosses have influence, but...
often they cannot actually get what they want done because people ignore them or change the rules or run out of time or aren't that talented at stuff. And you can't fire everyone all the time. You wouldn't have any workforce. And so that saying where it comes from is you only control you. Now, how does that relate to work smarter, not harder? It relates in the sense that you control you. And both of these topics are about taking control of you and your time.
I learned this month at work, the more I say, I trust your work, the more people ask for and value my opinions. Man, do I agree with that. Surgeons are, oh, to 40 Pink Dragons commented about surgeons. She used to work in providing equipment to the healthcare industry. Surgeons are also very particular in their tools, so hospitals get a lot of pushback in trying to streamline because each doctor wants exactly what they want and won't budge.
So hospitals end up buying 20 different models of the same thing. Yeah, so I didn't even know that, but I believe it. Doctors can be picky, and they have a lot of the power because they have the education, and they're in demand, and there aren't enough of them. particularly specialists. So there's a lot being driven in that space. All right. Any tips on goal setting over fiscal year incorporating work smarter, not harder?
Well, first, for goals, have them. Just having some goals will put you a leg up on most people. Most people don't think about what they want to do this year or what they want to do next year, what they want to do next week. They're just living. So by having goals, you will be ahead of everyone else. And yay for you. You should be. So do that. Second, to work smarter, not harder, I would set a goal.
to measure maybe weekly or monthly, was I efficient this week? Did I do the right things this week or this month and review and use the lens of hindsight and say, can I remember? On Friday night or Saturday or Sunday, can I remember what I did last Monday? And if I can't remember, did it matter? That meeting I went to, that report I wrote, did it matter? If I can't even remember it...
And what could I have done more efficiently? So that's how I would use goals. Let's see. All right. We have a fun question. How is Rome with the Euros going on? Italy had a big party yesterday. I don't know about that. Let's see. Yesterday I went to a gallery in downtown Rome and it seemed cool. The biggest thing here is Rome seemed fine. It seemed a little more crowded than usual. But this is an important comment. Rome has been mostly empty.
Because tourism has not reopened and it's very, very hard for Americans to get here and it's impossible basically from people for the UK to get here and travel in the EU is relatively still suppressed at the moment. Almost every restaurant we go to, almost every tourist site we visit, there are only Italians there. We don't hear German being spoken. We don't hear English being spoken. We don't hear French.
i've seen a little yeah we've heard a little bit of french but basically and i we've run into one or two sets of people who are russian there's very few tourists here so italy while officially open, is still practically closed. I actually think Rome is... Oh, Italy beat Austria yesterday. I wondered if there was a World Cup match yesterday because there were a lot of people in Rome. Actually, we caught on TV here, local TV, we caught Italy versus Wales.
But I know there's two more, I think, World Cup matches coming up. So if someone knows the dates, I wanted to catch them in person. We only caught them on local TV, listened to them in Italian. The stadiums are almost empty. And they might have been Euro Cup. So, yeah. So.
In any case, I know I think there's two more Euro Cup matches coming up, but I haven't checked the dates. So if you have the dates, you can put them in chat because it was fun to watch. I'm pointing to our TV that's sitting over here. It was fun to watch locally. Me, I'm ready for the Stanley Cup finals, which is going to be the Montreal Canadiens for the first time in a long time, and the Tampa Bay Lightning.
And I'm definitely going Canadian. I want the Canadians to win this one just because I don't want the lightning to repeat. All right, let's see if there are any other questions. Otherwise, I'm going to take a break. Tour de France started today. Okay. I'm going to keep it a short show. There's a good summary of what I've said.
But I wanted to and I'm going to do another show, by the way, I wanted to make sure I talked about that. It'll probably be next Friday is my thinking, but I'm going to talk about imposter syndrome, which not everyone has, but it's worth knowing. It says Italy versus TBD in the quarterfinals July 2nd. Perfect. Well, that'll be the day that I will be doing my next show, I think, Friday, July 2nd. So that's good to know. We're going to...
We have a bunch of travel planned this week, and then we're going to the Vatican on Thursday, to the Vatican Museums, which are fantastic, but the kids have never been. And then on Friday, we're going to stay here. We're going to have a home day. use the pool and I'll stream and hopefully I'll watch that so any other questions on working smarter not harder or on anything else I'll take 10 more minutes chat about what you want
And then I'm going to call it a night, in my case, or a day for you, on July 4th stream. So we're going to the coolest place on the 4th of July. You can look it up. Let me see if I can find it. I learned about this. It was Nero's palace that got buried and wasn't rediscovered until the 1500s. And so here we go. Hold on.
This place is Domus Aria. I will pop it up here in just a second. So this place was buried and... hidden for many many centuries and then it got found in the 1500s and all these artists yeah Nero was a tyrant that's true But then a lot of the emperors were tyrants. So he built this golden palace and then it got buried. and wasn't rediscovered for basically 1500 years and then when it was rediscovered a lot of the frescoes and plaster were still there
And they influenced the art throughout the Renaissance, all this rediscovery of old Roman art in this buried palace. So, all right. Oh, Kristen, you're ready to talk about flow. Well, cool. I'm glad you're done with the book. So you go ahead and do your prep and we'll do it when I get back in July. Or maybe we'll even do it from here. We'd have to figure out how to make the timing work. Maybe I could do a weekend.
But it'd be fun to do that. And hey, at least I have good internet. I'm here in like a farmhouse, 45 minutes outside of Rome. But the internet here has been good.
All right, well, I haven't talked about it yet, but we're still doing the mentoring program. We have a set of developers and UX designers volunteers who are... putting together the technology to allow us to scale up our mentorship program and i have two people i need to go mentor here in 30 minutes so i'm probably going to take a break so that i can get ready to mentor them
and do that in my next hour. Let's see what else we got here. It'd be interesting to hear your thoughts about the Amazon App Store being integrated in Windows 11. This is going to be harsh because I ran the Amazon App Store for five years. We also integrated at one point with... We allowed the App Store to be placed on BlackBerry phones after they had fallen for grace.
And what I think I would say is Windows 11 and the Amazon App Store are both also brands when it comes to Apple and Google. And so what you see there is a marriage of desperation between third and fourth place players. trying to make themselves relevant. And I would unfortunately class that as sad. It's not that I don't love my old team. It's that they're basically...
they're basically trying hard to figure out a way to be relevant, and that's true of both of them. It was the same as BlackBerry at that point. Real quick, I see Kristen, you say it might be a two-part stream. Maybe hit me up in Discord and tell me about that. I'd love to start talking to you about it and we can rough out a stream. Or at least know where it's going to be two parts. Volunteers, why not pay people? Two things. Number one, I'm paying them a reputation.
And that I'm trying to give them a project. But number two, I'm happy to pay people. The mentor network is for this audience. It's not something I'm going to make money off of. And so I could invest money in it to get it built. But I'm not trying to build a business out of it. So I'm trying to set things up so that people can help each other.
The real reason, though, is when you start paying for technology, you quickly run into hundreds of thousands of dollars. So either the community cares enough to build this for itself or it doesn't. If I wanted to hire a staff and build a startup and build a company out of it, then I'd pay people. But I'm not trying to build a company to make money out of the mentorship network. So that's all covered in some YouTube videos you can already go see.
But that's why we're using a volunteer staff. It's not lack of willingness to pay. It's that I'm not building a business. And so why would I spend money when we have a community of people who wanted to volunteer? And how they're being paid is the chance to get a reference from me about the quality of their work they can use on their resume, which may in fact turn out to be more valuable to them than what they'd be paid to do the work.
so you may like that answer you may not but um since it's for the community if the community doesn't choose to build the tools to support the mentor network it's no skin off my nose if it doesn't get built I'll be sad, but it's not economic for me. Work smarter, free software recommended. I don't know. I don't know. I don't have a software solution. Seeing how the program helps me. I try it out as much as I can. Thank you. Thank you for doing that.
sans from 81 uh you're paying them just not with money yes that's true how do you measure the success of integrations i feel like the metrics lag a bit yes there have been like Partnerships between third-place stores or third-place businesses rarely work out. They try it all the time.
But the metrics on an integration, there are integrations that work, but they're rare. I'm trying to think of one right now where two companies made a partnership and it was world-changing for one or both companies. I think you could probably find that where like technology has been integrated into cars. Maybe there's certain places where technology being. You're looking for books? Maybe? Proxy? So.
Yes, an EU friendly stream. Unfortunately, you've arrived at the end. So we've had good talk, good questions. I hope to see you all next Friday. I think that's when I'll do the stream on imposter syndrome. If you want to follow the pictures of what we're doing around Europe. Check out our...