Hello, my name is Jeff Urkevich and I'm the Director of Product Marketing at Altea. If you are designing products with embedded graphics, you probably need to get to market it in the least expensive, most efficient and performant way possible. Scaling your designs for target hardware can be very time consuming and may lead to increased cost and production delays. Your design needs to be highly flexible to make scaling fast and easy to meet the requirements of your chosen hardware. This is where Altea shines. As Altea supports hardware ranging from low power MCUs to high end SOCs, GUI development teams can leverage the same Altea GUI model across product families, space points and screen sizes. So you have one GUI model for multiple GUI projects on any hardware target. Take for example the STM32 family. We can show you how the same design can scale from the STM32H7 to the MP1 with the same performance. Let me show you Altea in action. Here we have a great looking medical demo running on a low power STM32MCU. This particular demo is running with no operating system, rendering with an Altea mini GL for chromar and is displaying on an onboard 4.3 inch TFT LCD with touch panel. As you can see the demo is highly performant and reacts instantly to touch. Altea software allowed us to optimize this complex demo to fit the requirements to the STM32H7 with little time and effort. Moving to my right you'll see the medical demo running on a very powerful STM32MP1MCU. Here we're running on Linux with OpenGLES 2.0 and an onboard 4 inch TFT LCD display with touch panel. Again the performance is excellent. So you can see with Altea we're able to scale the design from the H7 to the MP1 with the same performance. This is the power of Altea. So why would you choose Altea for an STM32 series processor? It's because Altea allows you to start with a full-featured interface and modify it to port to any hardware platform and display. It allows you to get to hardware quickly to verify performance and test on production intent hardware. Compare side-by-side performance with Altea's plug-in code generators and reuse your GUI across families of ST products. You also save time and money by leveraging your GUI across multiple programs. You can port your design to lower cost, more readily available hardware at any time during the life of your product while using Altea. And to top it all off with over a hundred million devices worldwide already using Altea's technology in industries such as medical, consumer electronics, industrial devices and automotive you know you have a production proven solution in your hands. And of course we are a proud member of the STM partner program and happy to support a wide array of the STM32 series devices as well as other platforms like the Accordo 5. Thank you for your time today. Please visit us at Altea.com to learn more about our GUI solutions for the STM32.


Hey everyone, I'm Ray. I'm the head of marketing over here at FreshPaint. And I'm joined today by Mapolo Basing who is a FreshPaint customer. Hey Mapolo, how's it going? Great, how are you? Doing good, man. Mapolo, would you mind just for the folks who are viewing? Can you just give us a quick intro and tell us a little bit about yourself? Yeah, my name is Mapolo. I'm director of product at Charlie Health. I've been in product management probably for eight or nine years now. Worked at several health tech companies and startups. And yeah, I love analytics. That's awesome. I mean, just for fun to make it personal, obviously you obsess over product marketing for work. You've been doing that for a while. What's something you obsess over when you're not working? Yeah, I think there's a couple of things right now. It's wrestling. I coach high school wrestling and we had a super exciting match last night. It ended up tie and there was a bunch of tie breaking criteria and we won on the ninth criteria. So it was a really exciting match and just a lot of working with the kids and seeing them grow as human beings. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about, you've been doing this for a while as a product manager. Can you just walk us through a little bit of how you got started? Yeah, so I actually used to be a civil engineer. I worked on hospitals and structures and I had a friend who worked at a startup as a project manager. He told me I'd be good at it and so I switched over and became a project manager. I did that for like three or four years. Really got my feet wet in the space like understanding how software is built, developed, learned a bunch of different things. I really felt like I could move into product management. So I convinced our team at Location Labs that I could be a product manager and so they gave me a shot at it. So one of the things I did was I was trying to figure out like how folks signed up for our product and we had a stream of sign up but we didn't really know where they were coming from and I thought like, well, the biggest impact I could make is just figuring out how people sign up and if I could drive a little improvement there that would be a huge win and people might notice. So essentially bribed one of our engineers who I was kind of managing another project on and I asked them to introduce a little snippet on our kind of sign up landing page to capture where folks were coming from. So this is like the URL that they were coming from. And so our product was a white label product with one of the major cell phone carriers. And so I ended up getting this massive list of like all these URLs from this carrier. And then I found through the product analytics that I think like 40 or 50% of our impressions on that webpage were coming from this one URL but compared to all the other URLs, its conversion was way, way less. It was like 5% and everyone else was like 30 or 40%. So I was like, huh, this is like really odd. So found that link and I saw on that page that we had like their page had a really strong value prop. Like, hey, this is what this is gonna solve. And then when you clicked on that link it just got dropped and you got asked to pay for the product and you didn't know what the product was. And so, yeah, I got a designer. We built like a very simple three screen carousel that they would hit before they were asked to pay. And that conversion went up higher than even like the other channels. And so because of the way all the math worked out I boosted signups for a product in like by 50% with just like, I don't know a few hours or a few days of development time. And so, yeah, it was a lot of work but without those analytics, I would have been nowhere. And so that kind of put me on that path to like find out that solution. And one thing that was fun after that it seemed like I got noticed within the product team our head of product actually made all the other PMs build out journeys for their product. So that was fun. But yeah, then I, they put me in charge of bigger and more important products after that. I love that story for two reasons. One, it's a great example of like without the analytics you wouldn't have known where to look for to find the problem. And without the analytics you wouldn't have been able to measure like if the like saliently it's a great thesis like let's just create a better experience or like if you're not able to measure the result you just wouldn't ever be able to tell that story. Yeah, the analytics in this case it was like it showed me where to look. And then I looked and then like, and then it comes like, okay, this isn't a good experience how do I make it a better experience? But like, the analytics paired with the user research paired with the design and understanding of your customers that's what kind of ties it all together. And then at the end of the day when you're done you can just show them a cool graph that says look what happened, it went up 50% and no one can argue with him. That's right. So after that you've gone on and continued this career in products. I think you've had, this is gonna be like Charlie's your fifth company now. When you start a new role like I think you've fairly recently moved over to Charlie, how do you approach that? What's your framework to approaching the new role? Yeah, so the first thing I do is try to orient myself around the customer user, the people that are using buying our product. And so what that typically looks like is all shadow if you have a sales team I'm shadowing sales calls just to see what their conversations are like. If you wanna know how your product works or how your customers perceive your product what a sales call. Cause the folks that are demoing are gonna be demoing the things that customers care about. And so I'd always start there. I'd also talk with customer success if your product has like an onboarding experience shadow those onboarding calls. And then the third thing is see what people are doing in your product. So I always lead on analytics. So I've done that. I've talked to customers. I've seen what they've been doing. I've seen sales. But then I also wanna kind of pair that and validate that with some analytics. So I try to pair like talking with customers with seeing how they actually use the product. Cause sometimes those things are not aligned. And there's a lot of interesting questions or things you wanna dive into there. Yeah, like in some ways the product analytics can just show you right away where the drop off is in the funnel and then session replays and customer interviews can help you understand like why are they dropping off there? What's happening there? And then you kind of have some ways to kind of de-rescue roadmap and prioritize going forward. Yeah. What advice, since you've been through this before what advice would you give to the PMs that are on this call? What advice would you give to them if they're struggling to get their management onboard? Yeah, so I've dealt with different ends of the spectrum on this like some places I've gone into have been like, hey, yeah, we need product analytics. And that's usually because someone up in leadership has had that in the past and seen the value of it. So it's not a hard conversation but there's definitely places, especially early stage or founders that maybe haven't had a ton of experience at other startups or other companies and they may not really understand the value of analytics or maybe they think what they have now is good enough. So my recommendation would be always start at the top and figure out what the leadership team cares about. So the one practical tip that I would give that's worked out really well for me is I just ask all the, like when I'm thinking about, hey, I need to roll out analytics. I ask all the leadership teams or all the stakeholders to write out all the questions they have about our customers. And it's very easy for them. It takes them five minutes. They come up with a huge laundry list of questions and then I'll just bucket them. There's usually like some very common themes that come up and I can say, okay, I'm gonna answer these questions with some product analytics and that's how I kind of pitch it to the team. And then that'll actually feed into when I start rolling out analytics across the organization. So almost like, because everyone will have like a set of really strong questions and basically you're saying if analytics isn't there, a lot of those questions are gonna be very difficult to answer for people. And so the next step for you to answer them, which there is an appetite to get those questions answered is let's get some baseline of analytics in place so I can come back to you with results. Yeah, and most small startups when they don't have that in place, it's like everyone has a different opinion about the answer to all those questions based on their own experience. And that's where like an unbiased data set can kind of guide folks or unify folks around what the actual answer to that question is. Is that how that conversation, like you're in the room with all the executives, maybe the founders of the startup, is that how that conversation goes? Like is it, everyone has their opinion to these questions and do you call out that like, we actually don't have a way to measure that quantitatively? So it'd be helpful for us to like pair those opinions with that actual result. Is that exactly how the conversation goes for you? Yeah, I mean, usually it comes in the form of like, you're talking about a roadmap or prioritization. And so it's like, hey, I'm trying to prioritize this project or initiative or at the company or this feature. And so you're weighing different features and then each team, sales is gonna have one take on this is the most important feature. Customer success is gonna be like, hey, this is causing the most tickets and da-da-da. And everyone, there's like that tension of like which thing do we weight the most? And having an unbiased analytics take that where you can use, you're still always gonna have that, but maybe you have this other party in the room that can help, you know, squelch some of the tension or unify folks around an idea or data. So yeah, that's how it usually forms. That's cool. Do you, I know the early success story of like juicing signups by 50%, is there another time that you can think of more recently where you weren't able to answer a question, but analytics actually helped you like answer it and it had a big impact? Like, can you think of any other time? Yeah, so if we were gonna start up, board meetings are always a thing. And so like every three months or six months, if you're like leading a product team or you'll just sometimes the CEO will just slack you and they'll just ask you random questions. And you don't really know the context, but you know it's for like a board meeting and they're gonna present it at this board meeting or something where they're trying to dive into or answer some question that some board member had. So yeah, there was one situation at Osmine where we were trying to figure out, we had this kind of feature that we had piloted and we were trying to figure out some information about engagement and we didn't really have it well tracked at the time. And so it either required like an engineer to go look in a database and write some queries and so the CEO asked me to investigate. I went in, I used fresh paint to just basically auto-track the button click and it's not gonna be a precise answer about exactly how many times someone interacted with the feature, but I could very easily show like, hey, this is like in the ballpark of how many times this how it's been growing month over month and choreograph and then you're off and running. So really quickly in that case, it's amazing because I don't need to talk to engineering, I don't need to go through a cycle of sprints to get something implemented. I could get an answer to her right away and have high confidence that that data is good. Well, yeah, I mean, that like our CEOs like whenever we can like they're on the spot sometimes trying to like answer a question, right? That's really what this is about and it can be reactive. What was the outcome there? Like how did that impact your relationship with the CEO being able to like get that answer that she needed? Yeah, so I think it builds trust, you know and so much in software is developing trust with your teams, executives, leadership. You know, ultimately, like as you're trying to grow in your career, one way to grow is be an asset for your manager, for your boss. If you can prove that you can deliver on things, they'll come back to you more and more. Yeah, I think there's often a perception that managers need to manage you but often it's on you to kind of manage up, know what they need, know what they want, provide that and that's what'll help grow you in your career and get promoted. Yeah, it's really credibility and trust are so key because you need that buy-in to get, you also need that buy-in to get the time you need to figure things out, right? A lot of this is trial and error and experimentation. I love that. You've built a couple of teams now on the product side. So you moved from like self-starter, product manager and now you're leading product teams. When you're thinking about scaling your team and building that team of PMs, how do you think about your team as it relates to analytics? Like what do you look for? What do you look for in your team? Yeah, so on the product side, I think there's so many, it's a very like broad skill set. I think that you need to be a successful product manager, you need to be able to communicate. You need to be able to communicate with design and understand design, understand funnels, understand the business and what's important and lifetime value, yada, yada, yada. And then, but on the analytics side, when you're in the day-to-day and the weeds of like trying to build a product, the things that I'm looking for in analytics is like, do you understand a funnel? Do you understand what retention is and why that's important for the business? Do you understand what drives retention? So when I'm doing an interview and I'm diving into a question, like I wanna hear folks talk about, oh yeah, we implemented this thing, we saw higher engagement and then ultimately that helped drive retention on our product. Or we made this change to improve this funnel and improve engagement in the product. And so I'm looking for that story of building something, of creating something, but also an analysis that comes with it and like capturing those success metrics and using that through analytics, yeah. For me, I've been doing startups for a long time and I feel like I'm constantly learning new things. I don't have all the answers and I don't even have a playbook, right? Just some frameworks and a bunch of tactics because it changes constantly. Yeah. I imagine like newer PMs, it's a fire hose. There's a lot to learn, right? So where do you direct your team to try to like continue their learning? Yeah, so for product analytics, it's been around for a while now and it's been a growing field. So there's like so much, there's so much content out there, so much great content out there. So the places that I usually direct people is, Mixpanel has a great retention playbook and it was one of the first things I read. It's long, but it's super detailed. And I think it covers like a ton of what you need to know in terms of analytics, you can really dive in. Beautiful illustrations, well-written, it's free. It just costs you your email address and marketing from amplitude. Sorry, it's amplitude, I should say. Amplitude, yeah. Amplitude, yeah, mastering retention. I also recently took, this is a plug for the old product school, they didn't pay me anything for this. I recently took their Mixpanel course and that was super useful for myself. I hadn't used Mixpanel for a while and I had got to learn and build out charts and learn about a bunch of new functionality that I didn't know about. So there's great tools out there, just Google them, but those are two that like, hey, if you want hands-on experience, check out that Mixpanel product school class. I think it's a, you can get a certificate. It takes a couple hours and then check out mastering retention by Amplitude. That's, those are awesome tips and nice plug for everyone here who's part of product school already, so it should be something they can access. I guess the last question we have is like specifically found, implementing analytics. I've actually spent the last couple of months having a hundred plus discovery calls with product leaders around like some of the challenges that they've had. And it's difficult to get like this buy-in, it's difficult to like prop up analytics, it's difficult to like get buy-in from engineering to create new events. Like what are some tips and tricks that you can share about that? Yeah, so I would always start small. I talked earlier about creating like, getting all the questions out there from all the stakeholders. And when you look at all those questions, you can probably answer them with a handful of events. I think actually Mixpanel and their onboarding, they basically ask you to implement, I think it's one or two events and then they build like this beautiful dashboard for you. And I think it's to get at this point of like, hey, you wanted with the smallest amount of work, you wanna show that this is something valuable. And so yeah, so like I would start really small, think about those questions and then plan out how you're gonna implement those few events in the minimum amount of time possible, share those out. So as soon as you get them, as soon as you start seeing those data, share them out. Like once I implement Mixpanel, I'm like, the next week is like marketing. I'm just like, here, look at this chart, look at this chart. I'm just getting everyone to see what's out there in the org and then it kind of feeds itself. People will ask questions and you'll be like, yeah, I can do that. Let me implement another event on there. And there's also, one thing that I love about FreshPaint is they have this auto-tracking feature and they also have this historical playback. So one of the things is once you can implement very cheaply and get a baseline of everything.  You can say, hey, I have a story and it can be done in like an hour, put it on there and then I can get some baseline. And so your upfront investment is small and you can get at least a baseline of analytics. You can very quickly get a lot of information that is valuable at no cost. Do you mind if I share a visual with everyone who's tuned in? Because I think this visual helps kind of illustrate a little bit about what you talked about. Yeah, sure. So let me share my screen here with everybody. So this is, could you talk to this a little bit? Mapolo, just for everyone who's, all the PMs out there who are watching this, basically like what Mapolo is saying is the conventional way of implementing event tracking. There's a process, like you have a process here and it takes time, conservatively a month, some will pay it at much longer than a month. Can you just talk through this visual, like what you see here?  So you'll then go and like write a doc and say, hey, I want to track this event and you define the event and you say what properties you want, you write up that ticket and then you put it in the backlog and try to get it prioritized in an upcoming sprint, right?  And so you've lost all that time and you don't have an answer to your question. And so you'll just do that over and over again. And it's good to still do that over time but sometimes you just need an answer right away. What's the impact to you as a PM when you have to wait? Like, I mean, it's probably obvious but I just want to hear it in your own words. Like when you have to wait a month or more to get an answer to a question, like what's the end? Why do you care? Why do you want to move faster? Yeah, it means that like I'm working on a project and they either have to move forward with like less confidence, higher risks, less information or I say, hey, we're gonna hold and wait for this thing and then I find something out and I'm like, dang, I wish I did that four weeks ago, I would have like prioritized this higher. And so the impact is really just like in speed and speed and understanding. And if you don't have those things and in startup world that stuff matters and in a month your team could totally shift priorities and you've lost the opportunity to work on something that you might think is really important. Yeah, and I think it's probably worth just showing quickly for everyone here, like what you were talking about, that process that could take a month or more versus I just want to get the answer now. Like I want to run that analysis and mix panel right away. So Mopolo, I know you use FreshPain. We're running FreshPain, the product on FreshPain, our website. So I'm just gonna like illustrate to everybody here what that looks like. Yeah, and this is what you meant, right? Like maybe I'm building a funnel here and for us, we need to have conversations about how FreshPain works. So we have a sales led go to market strategy and getting a demo clicks is a super important one just as a point of illustration. So as Mopolo said, instead of submitting this ticket to engineering to code this button click into the code base we can just do it right now. So we'll just do, we'll just call it product school demo click. And I'm gonna limit it to the homepage. So we know that that action on that button click is related to the homepage. And then I'm just gonna save that event to FreshPain. And immediately there's no wait here. We can go into the library and search for that action that we just set up. And we even capture a screenshot here so you can see what that event means because sometimes people are like, what does this mean? What event is Mopolo tracking here? Mopolo is not sure. You can know because we capture the screenshot and highlight the button. And the example here is like, we've got a couple of these events we'll just repeat that process to add them. And we can actually then push that to mix panel with one click. And the second part as Mopolo highlighted is you wanna run the analysis today. You don't wanna wait another two weeks for data to populate. So you can immediately backfill that data. We hold up to about 12 months worth of previous data because we've been tracking this event in the background or you can just limit it to a period. And so now that event is going downstream to mix panel where Mopolo or other PMs could jump in and basically like build that funnel or build that insights report and get your answer today. So that's what you were talking about, right? Like the month journey and everyone just we just did that so you could just see what we're talking about. But that was minutes. Like if I have to set up maybe five or six events, okay, maybe it takes me a half an hour to plan it out, go in and configure it. But like that's an answer I'm getting today as opposed to a month. Yeah, I mean, this is a great example. I mean, funnels are always easy examples in my opinion but like you book a demo and if you wanna answer the question like hey, what percentage of people click book a demo and then actually submit their information to book a demo that's two events. You can quickly send that event. You can see how long it takes between those events. You can see what percentage of folks drop off, what percentage of don't, which was completed, what browsers are on all that. You can get that instantly in like 30 minutes. So it's like a, it's a huge win. And I love auto tracking for that reason, a quick, rough, dirty, like relatively reliable. You can make a decision based on that data. There's always gonna be a need for precision events. Like, you know, for example, let's say you sent out an appointment text confirmation, that event is maybe sent from the backend. You're gonna have to fire a precision event for that.  And if someone responds and says, hey, yeah, I'm confirmed for that appointment. That's another precision event that you'd fire from the backend. So it's a combination of the precision and auto tracking, but there's so many times where you just need an answer like now, and that's when auto tracking is so useful. Yeah, you beat me to the punch. I was gonna ask you the question around the elephant in the room is the misnomer with auto track is that, yeah, auto track is not helpful because it doesn't solve all those precision events. And both of us share the same worldview with like, yeah, that's the wrong way to look at it. Like no one's saying that auto track solves everything. That's why companies like FreshPaint take a hybrid approach where we can auto track so you can move quickly, but then we have the ability to set up those server side events. So you have the best of both worlds. And over time as your dataset matures, you may capture more events, precision track, but you're always gonna iterate. You're always gonna launch products. You're always gonna make changes. And that's where the benefit of auto track comes in because you can actually like get that feedback loop very, very quickly so you know exactly what's working. And maybe when something's working, then you wanna solidify the dataset around that and you have the flexibility there. Yeah, yeah, 100%. For so many of just the quick, simple product questions and answers, auto tracking is great. I think one things that a lot of PMs do or I think a lot of folks in general is they over index on the quality of the data or getting the exact answer. So most of your decisions like you're not necessarily gonna have like all the statistical significance or you don't need data that's like 100% accurate all the time. If you knew it was 90% accurate, you could make the same decision, right? So I often found that we over index, we spend 90% of our time trying to make that 10% of the data perfect when really, we can just make a decision on the 90%. And so yeah, auto tracking is something that allows you to do that. That's huge. Well, I've really enjoyed the combo. I really appreciate you investing some time. I think people, I learned a lot from you and I think everybody else here did as well. So thank you, Mapalo, always appreciate you. Yeah, thank you, Ray. Take care. Take care, bye.


Welcome to the Agile People FIKAcast. We talk about how to navigate with agility in our organisations. Hi everybody and welcome to Agile People FIKA. We are meeting once a week where we talk about interesting topics and we are inviting anybody who would like to join. But today we have some Agile people here and we will today talk about agility in HR. How can HR use AI? I should have said AI in HR. And how somebody is joining us, it's David. Great, welcome David, we say. Hi there, David. Welcome to the Agile People FIKA. And then everybody can join. This is just an informal discussion. Today's topic will be AI for HR. What does it mean for HR that we now can use AI for all sorts of HR related stuff? And what will be the consequences? What are the risks? Things like that is something that we would like to discuss today. So maybe some of my teammates here would like to kick off with a question or a thought. Maybe Martin, would you like to start? Sure, I can try. AI is everywhere at the moment. It feels like I use AI a lot myself. I talk and interact with Shatgit GTP a lot to get some inspirational thoughts. So I'm sure any most things that we in our type of work do, needs and could make use of AI in different ways. So yeah, we can start with recruitment and talent acquisition maybe. That could be an HR perspective that could use AI and maybe help to streamline recruitment processes and even finding people maybe. I was thinking there are some risks associated with using AI for recruitment. What are risks that you can see? So one thing I remember seeing, it's a few years ago of course, Amazon, I think it was, they made an AI recruitment bot that was there to analyze and understand CVs. Of course, they fed the AI with data. It needs to learn based on some information and the data that I fed it with was all data that they had used to recruit people and when they did that, they also, as we do all humans, we have our biases and our behaviors in how we view different people. So that was also, of course, added to the AI and the way that AI behaves is that it sort of amplifies things. So what they got out from the result from that research at least was an AI that was super biased and not very good at seeing anyone except for white male individuals as a good candidate to any type of recruitment, which is of course wrong. But if you amplify something, that is what you get and I think that is a thing that we need to be aware of with AI in general. I know that the work has progressed of course since then so that you can reduce the risk of that but it's something that the AI engineers constantly have to work with in order to mitigate those type of biases and behaviors in the AI systems. I guess also that going through CVs is one thing and I mean there is some human interaction part of that as well to listen into behaviors that could be subtle but still important when you hire people. And of course an AI maybe can learn that as well but I'm just saying that there are things that are not factual or emotional that could be important as well. Yeah I don't, it will take some time but I saw that Tesla had sales AI which calls people who have been on the webpage put their phone number there and then it just calls that person and make the first call. That person is probably interested in buying a Tesla and then it talks to them asking them to come to a station where they can take a look at the car and you can find it on the internet. It's not super fast. You can see that there's a pause between when it's actually thinking about what it needs to say but it's super slick. Super real. Is there an expectation then and maybe just a wrong expectation that we think that AI is or we expect AI to be cleverer than it actually is. In that example that you gave there is you're asking people to look at CVs and you're asking them to say well you don't exactly tick every box of every row that we're looking for but let me be a bit clever about this and say well you know what I can see this job role and of course that's going to have those elements in it so you're asking it to exceed that capability. If I think about some of my career history then with implementing technology you always get that expectation that it's greater than it is. So for instance if we have a move to the cloud in terms of technology then I've heard clients say oh well it's just a whole load of little robots just running around processing these transactions end to end and I don't really need to do it. All I need to do is just oversee it, align it and the end result's produced and I didn't really have to do much around that so there was an expectation that only jump in if something goes wrong but hey the robots will take care of it because they're clever enough to do it. There I really think HR plays an important role because if you only leave this to the engineers you will not get to say because you need to involve people who have understanding and knowledge about the human behaviors and one thing I can see because today in some recruitment processes you use like personality test or IQ test or these kind of tests so if you don't say yes or if you don't qualify on this you go to the good buy box and I would say many of these candidates could still be a candidate for the possession so I think it's how you design the selection phase because with AI you can do so many more parameters which you don't have in your head today and you can also if you do the right design you can also eliminate some biases we have for example I think age discrimination ethnicity could be one religious could be another one which you will take more away because people might have some wear some things on their head which can be discriminating in some aspects for someone one you don't see this with AI AI I think that's a good thinking I was thinking my continuation of that thought was that recruitment does not need to be that reductionistic I mean we use IQ tests and other tests in order to it's a reductionistic way to make the recruitment process more efficient but when you make things efficient there's also risk of missing things that's important and AI could interview people potentially as a first input and gather the data and make it easier for the human to make informed decisions instead of just using IQ tests but also another thing is what you say but also today we do a lot of recruitment based on what you have been doing in your former positions it should be a little bit this is the position we have what would you like to do if you got the job and you could start describing how you could see the organization how you could see the job how you could see whatever that is important depending on the job yeah instead of only basing it on a past experience or a good addition what would you like to do for the future and how would you like to contribute to our vision, our purpose, our goals and what can you bring to the table here I guess it comes down to how we want to use AI and which decisions we leave to ourselves and what the support is we're asking for yeah I mean I see AI very much in its infancy in that respect that it's not trying to take over your job and its entirety it's taking over the heavy load or the standardized type processing and so leaves that skill to the human being who actually operates it whether it's in the design phase or whether it's in the output that comes it's really going to be your decision you're not asking AI to be a decider for you it's merely a naveler and I think it's the good thing that at this stage you're not really going to have that abuses or real requirement for regulation because you're still in control of it it's not that technology is driving you it's the other way around you're still in control of what you need it to do there's a conference actually happening today I don't know where it is and they're talking about that very thing listen I know we're all talking about AI I know we see it as a threat to terrorist threat or other abuses that could come but it's about calming down we're still very much in control of it and we use it for what we need to use it for we'll get it wrong sometimes but hey that's experimentation we just keep working with it it's there as an enabler they used to be a role called computer that was a person that was yes absolutely we don't have that anymore but people are still operating and using computers to do their work and I use a calculator sometimes I don't do all my math in my head it's very good to have a calculator actually even though it's in my fault nowadays yeah but then you know how to use it what I fear a little bit with HR systems that will come is that you use your traditional way and you take your work day or success factor process and you build it into IE instead of starting with from scratch and think how can we do this differently and I saw that recently as well I was at a work human conference back earlier in the year and they did exactly that their AI tool was on performance reviews they started off with a blank sheet of paper for everyone and it was literally can I get AI to write me a bog standard performance review make it professional, make it funny make it serious, make it whatever and then it generates the text and for you as the human then go on and then you personalise it so it's basically just taking that blank sheet of paper generative text to say oh well I like that, that's pretty good but let me just reshape it in terms of the role that we're actually looking at and the way that that person performs in the role you're still using that human skill of personalisation because you know sometimes when you try to write a performance review and we've all done it whereas you're having to write from scratch and you're ripping up the paper and throwing it away and scribbling more and all that sort of stuff you know, generative text is just doing exactly that and then your manipulation there afterwards is intended I guess to be fairly minimal Yeah, I use jetki to be as a sounding board I just bombard it with my thoughts a lot of different things different perspectives and I ask it to okay, can you write something about this and then I get a very nice and tidy, I don't always agree with what I see but it makes some sort of order of the things that I have in my head with a very competent way to, much faster than if I need to write it down myself I could have done it but it's much faster doing it together with chat UTP Yeah Okay, so we move to a topic outside of recruitment for HR I have a list of things that I would like to show and see if there is some topics that you would like to discuss more in detail there are some examples on this picture that I'm showing now how you could use AI for HR So is there any specific box that you would like to comment on or deep dive more in of this specific because when you ask chat GPT about in what areas will I change HR I will just mention all areas but this is a little bit more specific it's not the performance management or learning and development or talent management or employee engagement but it's more you could do this specific thing and I like that a bit better Could I ask Pamery because I'm looking at a number of these and they're all kind of data driven of a fashion because the data exists and then you could easily pair what you need to do to drive that out if I was looking at the one that jumped out with me immediately was nurturing the company's culture just because I don't believe that that would be data based and therefore easy to determine it's probably based on data that we are feeding it with what are the values that we would like people to do more of and so on and then it will send out little nuggets or messages maybe or I don't know how it works but you could imagine that we are feeding it the culture that we want and then we ask it to what are your suggestions for how we could work with that for example and increase those values I'm thinking that many of these let's say the analyzing the state of employee engagement for instance as well it's and I see it in others as well it's a possibility I guess to get AI to to provide or to measure the health of the system we're working in so what is the flow of the company and what are the behaviors and map that to culture maybe at the end so if someone is keeping track of how all the delivery teams for instance if you're in IT set up so how are they performing how are people acting in the system how much wait time do we have for decisions you could get the good overview of how it's functioning I guess and then if you could connect that to cultural maybe you can draw conclusions about that and try to nudge the system in another direction or highlight things what the next for instance could be one thing good also you can use it like we said you I use it to create text you can create personalized information that's more attuned to specific people connected to the company culture that is more appealing to them even though it's the same thing but it's more directly aimed to a specific audience that's something you can get help from from AI I think I don't know if it's super connected here but maybe you can even do leadership coaching or leadership trainings using AI I've seen a different type of coaching tools that is using AI in order to train people to be better coaches for instance they are starting to pop up to pop up and that could also of course nurture the company's culture I actually asked JPT and they said it can facilitate communication both employee engagement personalize learning and development diversity and coaching employee well-being it's a lot of these things fostering innovation one of the things I can see is really the first one so facilitating communication because there you can do a lot and personalize it a little bit to get an individual and also you know company new processes, new values best practices and you can feed a lot of information and they tailor the messages to an department a whole company or individual so what about our current HR platforms or HR IT systems what do you think what is the current situation for them, do they keep up with the pace here or do they still need to be more mature before we start thinking about buying new IT platforms for HR. Thank you start to see some good examples of where AI has been used in some systems I think the larger ones will try and adapt not sure how they will succeed, they need to think a little bit new I think but it's a lot of knowledge also in these companies that you can use I presume but I think that in the future we will see new companies that are not there today or not known at least they might have started there. Yeah maybe building AI into the platform from the beginning and then of course it's much easier to make it work the way you want to work I think also you can use this because not everyone wants to be employed some people want to be freelancers so I think you can use this also to build in when to use freelance competence and when to use internal companies I think it will be more we will not have these standard roles in the future it will be more that we pull the competence or the skills when we need it So in the HR system that I've seen is never really fit for purpose in terms of a wholly integrated solution for the many components of HR and so as much as they try to do it what it sounds like is that either AI is going to help improve streamline that standardisation within a one product or it's still going to reside as a best of breed applications and so therefore with the fluidity or the unknowns of HR type role in the future maybe that's the way to go and AI sits above that and orchestrates the better ways of working I think you already start to see that you have systems that are good at performance or recruitment and that will probably accelerate more. I think these large work success I think they would struggle a little bit because of the pricing structure and they need to do everything So for many years there has been a consolidation in the HR system market that maybe it will now go the other way is that we will see more best of breed solutions powered by AI and that's a probable outcome and because of AI I think that is also possible now because it can grasp several systems together which was a little bit harder before because then you need to have good data warehouse to make that happen. The integration will probably be easier also to transfer data between different platforms There's been a lot of talk about the fourth industrial revolution and AI has always been one of those items that people talk about that is part of the fourth industrial revolution so I think we are only in the beginning seeing that so there will be a lot of disruptive new innovative tools and ideas connected to AI also in HR so I don't think we can foresee what will happen actually as usual as usual I guess we see it more as an opportunity than a disruption but it will be destructive it will be making traditional HR tools and I'm thinking about they will still prevail probably most likely but it's compared with Airbnb for instance and the hotel business when Airbnb managed to get into the business it was quite destructive for the whole hotel business of course they are still there and they've adopted adapted not all of them so it made other things change and I think AI will do the same so summarizing the discussion we think we will get rid of boring routine tasks pretty quickly but for the more sophisticated AI use or solutions we will probably need to wait some time and the platform for HR the market there is somewhat immature still but I would say whether we like it or not AI is here to stay and if you are in business you need to relate to it you need to adapt to it you need to understand how to use it and you can then as always as we do in agility we run small safe to fail experiments and then we learn and then we improve and this is the way we need to handle AI as well it might take and we need to follow the development of the new HR tools that are coming now because there will be applications probably that are being born that are appearing now a lot will happen in the market during the coming years but I think the most important thing is that we should have fun with it we should try different things have fun and play and see how can we get rid of the boring tasks first with the help of AI in HR I agree to that good summary so when do we see each other next time Wednesday next week we have a topic yet we were talking about discussion team development but we will put it on the LinkedIn feed as normal okay yes so next week same time Wednesday 3.30 CET maybe another time where you are we will see you again with that thank you for today thank you all of us who have been here today take care everybody take care


Hello comrades and welcome back to another episode of Marxist Voice, the podcast of The Communist. I'm your host, Jack Ty Wilson, and this is episode four of Towards the Revolutionary Communist Party, our series on party building and launching the Revolutionary Communist Party this May. So for this episode, we're going to be discussing the question of revolutionary finance, how to finance the party. And we're joined by Joe Russell, who is the national treasurer of the soon to be Revolutionary Communist Party, as well as a member of the Executive Committee. Hi Joe, how's it going? Yeah, very good. I see that you've just had your breakfast there before we've recorded the podcast. What did you have anything nice? Well, I cycle a long way. So I always have to eat something when I get in just a couple of almonds, sandwich, protein, get some gains. Nice one. And how's your week been going so far? Well, it's only Tuesday. But yesterday was busy. Got my local branch meeting tonight. So long cycle again down there. But that's the highlight of the week. So yeah, branch is always the highlight of the week. I have my branch last night as well. It was fantastic. I managed to recruit a young worker from Brazil. So yeah, what's been going on in the past week then, Joe? So I think you've been reading in the newspaper on the website or anything like that. Yeah, well, there's a lot been going on. Obviously events moving fast. There's stuff that's caught my eye on the national news, but also locally, like I said, down in Croydon. The council Croydon Council is bankrupt has been for a few years. That's been in the headlines about Birmingham, but Croydon's old news. So it's not getting talked about, but got a charming letter through the post from the touring mayor yesterday. Council tax is going up another 5%. And it literally used the words we're in a dire financial situation, which is true. They're in over a billion pounds of debt, just the Croydon Council. And very dodgy backstory to how that happened as well. A lot of corruption. It was actually a Labour council. Just like Birmingham as well. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They've they've got a lot to answer for too. So you can't you can't be surprised that Labour aren't too popular, local level. Went to a local community meeting on on the youth and what we're going to do about their future, which was really interesting. And a few of the RCP comrades went down and intervened. And the conversation ended up being very political, very political. There's a lot of a lot of anger out there. And people even started saying we need we need new parties. So I whipped some leaflets out. Yeah, that's what it's all about, you know, being there on the ground in those conversations. And I think, you know, what's unfolding in Croydon, what's unfolding in Birmingham is going to be a lot of that in the next period. I read somewhere as a survey, I think of council leaders that said one in five of them believe that their council is going to go bankrupt within the next 18 months.   Exactly. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, right, you can blame the local council. And then they do have a lot to answer for. But at the bottom line, you can't stop the tide of 15 years of cuts from the central national government, right? And we're very big picture here at RCP, right, we don't want to tinker with this or that council, we want to change the whole system on a national, international level. So that's what we tried to draw the conversation towards, right? Yeah, and it feels like there's just so many different overlapping crises taking place right now, you mentioned the crisis in local government, but you know, young people right now, workers, they're facing a housing crisis, and particularly the climate crisis as well. I know you wanted to maybe mention a bit about the climate crisis before we get into finances. Yeah. Yeah, well, that's another thing that struck me in the news, right, is that earlier in the year, it was announced that this 1.5 degree threshold, that global temperatures average global temperatures shouldn't exceed 1.5 degrees more than before the industrial revolution. And if they do, it'll be very, very hard to reverse the consequences or adapt to the consequences or whatever. That's, that's what the official sort of scientific consensus is. And for the last year, the average has been now above that. Now, this doesn't this, that's not actually breaking the specific Paris Accord. Yet, what they're taking is just an average for a year. Doesn't mean that is the new global average. I'm not exactly sure how they would determine that. But the thing is that's beside the point, right? The point is, it's not over for humanity. Yeah, we're still living. And we still will be living in the future. The problem is climate change will just make it harder and harder for people in all different corners of the world. Of course, we need to go need to go carbon zero. And you can imagine what it must feel like to be a young person right now, looking at this, right? In fact, I'm just looking at the issue four of the communist right here. And there's a letter here from Zach in Oxford communists. And it mentions how every year, there's a thing called the Children's Word of the Year, and six to 14 year old to survey to sort of, you know, find out what word has been on their minds the most that year. And apparently, 10 years ago, when despicable me was in the cinema, the word of the year was minion, but you know, fast forward 10 years. And now the word is climate change. This is at the forefront of young people's minds. And this anxiety, I think that people feel around the climate crisis. It really hits, you know, hits close to the bone, basically. And yeah, it's another thing that I'm looking at right here in the in the communist paper as well, is a letter about the consequences of this climate crisis and the consequences having on, you know, the ecosystem. For example, there's recently been a UN kind of conference some sort of, you know, summit or something like that about species migration and so on.  You know, it says here that there could be a staggering 97% of fish going extinct within the next period because of manmade climate change. Yeah, yeah, but of course, you know, as you say, that doesn't mean that it's, you know, that we should just resign ourselves to kind of, you know, apocalypse and doomerism, I think is a word that's often used on social media. There is hope, isn't there? There is, of course there is. It's a bleak picture. We have to start from that reality. But that that minions example is perfect, right? Like how the future in front of young people is destroying their sense of childhood, right? Kids are so political now. It's a good thing in a way, but it's because, yeah, they have to, they have to look at their future in a much more sober, serious way than I had to when I was that age, for example. I know a guy whose kids has to cover his and close their eyes every time climate change comes on the news, because it just fills her with this existential dread. But the real, the real tragedy there is that no one is offering a positive solution to this. Of course, people feel that way.  But it's also going to have a huge effect on the ecosystem as a whole, which affects humans and our ability to live on the planet. But it doesn't wipe out our ability to live on the planet, right? There's this huge technological potential. Some recent research is saying, actually, the ability of the earth to restore its previous balance in some ways is better than we anticipated. At the end of the day, when you're looking at it from a, from a human point of view, climate change is not just about the rock we live on. It's a human problem, you know, and from a work and class point of view, it's a work and class problem.  The main problem is, and how do we treat migrants? Well, look at how we treat migrants today in a capitalist society, right? If we can create a socialist society where goods are distributed, where there's unevenness, where people are allowed to move from an unsafe space to a safe space, and we can guarantee there's enough to go around, enough jobs, enough housing, we can still produce abundance of food. Of course, we can still adapt to a changing world. Of course, we still have to be responsible and try and get ourselves back on a sustainable footing, but it's not the end of human civilization. The point is human civilization is crumbling as a result of the crisis of capitalism anyway, in a way, these conditions humans are forced to live in. Climate change is just an exacerbation of that process. All it does is raise the urgency of the task the work and class already has, which is liberating itself from this kind of barbaric competition we're forced to live under. So you mentioned there that there's, you know, there's no real political outlet for any of this. There's no one putting forward any real sort of solutions to deal with the climate crisis in a way that is, yeah, that is compatible, that is suitable with the interests of the working class and the majority of people. But how do we make it so that there is a political answer to all of this, you know? Well, I think you know the answer to that. That's what we are leading personally. Of course, we're not we're not going to be a mass party of the working class in the next year, or or anything like that. That's our long term aim, whether it will be this RCP or something else. We want to we want to work with the broadest layers of the working class in the long one. But right now we're aiming at that layer we were just talking about these kids who are desperate for an answer to all of these crises staring them right in the face, staring down the barrel of, you know, six barrel shotgun or however many crises are going on at once. And that's who we're aiming at. And we can build something quite powerful among among young workers and students that can then become a point of reference for a much broader layer of radical workers in general. And that is why this may, as we've already mentioned many times on this podcast, but this may we're going to be founding the Revolutionary Communist Party. There's going to be hundreds of delegates from across Britain, you know, meeting to discuss perspectives for the British Revolution, ideas on how to how to organize and how to build the party, and various other questions as well, international questions.  But the question that I want to ask you is, what can we do between now and then? I think there's only six weeks, six or seven weeks to go until the founding Congress. What can we do immediately? What can the listeners at home do immediately to build for that founding Congress and make it a success? Yeah, well, I mean, as has been discussed in the early episodes, the best thing you can do from our point of view is join us, become a official member, an active member and help us build the party. There's a lot involved in that. There's there's attending your branch meetings. Primarily it's to learn about Marxism, learn about the logic and dynamics and history of class struggle and a revolution. And then to see if you can find others, right, bring others along, take a load of papers, see if you can sell them, put posts in the stickers up, educate yourself so you can find other people and convince them to, right? That's the main thing we need. But if someone's in a position where they support us, they want to help. And for whatever reason, they can't do that or they don't want to do that. I don't understand that. I if I really believe something, the it's another thing with climate change. If you're really worried about climate change and it makes you feel anxious, the best thing you can do is feel like you're doing something about it. It's like when you're overwhelmed with how much you've got to do, just writing a list, you feel way better, right? Then you take the first thing off, right? Yeah, it's the same with the state of the world. First of all, join the party, get active. You will feel a lot better about all these crises when you start to realize there is something we can do as a clear strategy. So that's the main thing. But if you are not at that stage for whatever reason, we can subscribe to our paper. That helps a lot. You can order books from our website and start educating yourself. That's well read books. I could at UK website. Yeah, that's right. And then obviously if you read something, and you have questions right in, someone will want to talk to you about it. We can we can almost guarantee that. And then, of course, I'm the treasurer and we've got the Congress coming up, we'll have a big collection. I'm starting to get a bit shaky because I never know exactly how it's going to go. And we need, we need all the funds we can get where we're trying to launch a fighting campaigning organization. We're already beginning with that work and that costs money. Everything under capitalism costs money including building an organization to overthrow capitalism. So please donate as well. You can make one-off donations for that collection or you can make a regular monthly donation. But you can even set yourself a little target. How much am I going to raise to help the RCP launch itself? And you can ask your mates, we can talk about that a little bit more because I can't really do fundraising. So just to be clear then, how much are we hoping to raise for the special party launch fund and how much of that have we raised so far? Well, that's the thing that's why I'm shaking. I'm very in the dark, right? We explain to the branch the way we work with everything is we, we discuss the ideas, we discuss the tasks in front of us. We try to inspire people as to why it's important. And then we let them go out and find the means, right? Find, find a way of, of achieving that end. So I know there is fundraising happening all up and down the country. Just some great reports. Had a good one in yesterday. Edinburgh put on an open mic gig, openly in the name of the party and comedy, there was music selling merchandise and so on. Yeah, I don't know if it was all revolutionary performance. It's like revolutionary music. It might have been, might not be that it doesn't really matter. You can, you can get creative. And they raised quite a lot of money. Yeah, a few hundred quid just in a night. There's a guy who did a cycle ride. I had sponsored cycle ride again with a political pitch about why it was doing it, raised money from friends and family, even wrote to some old academic who he used to follow, Mark just academic who's he said was a very interesting but slightly pessimistic. So he sent me a lot of academics. Well, yeah, maybe. But well, intention because he wrote to him said, I'm not pessimistic anymore. I just do in this party. They've got great ideas, great perspectives, great strategy for what we can actually do to change the world. And the guy donated a thousand pounds to his to his sponsored cycle ride. So I don't know how much money has been raised so far. It's all floating around there in the in the ether in the branches. We've got an online target of 20 ground from the public. We're somewhere between six and seven thousand pounds on there at the moment. The target you asked for. We're hoping to raise about 120 grand by the Congress by the Congress for that to be kind of pledged by all the various branches and individuals that have been raising that money. We're trying to pay it in shortly afterwards. But there is absolutely no shortage of things we could do with that money. The bottom line is what we achieve between now and the founding Congress in May in terms of recruiting in terms of raising money will determine what we can do for six months of the life of the RCP. And can you just go into some detail then? What is that money going to go towards? How is that going to provide a strong material foundation with which the party can can fight on the on the ground? Yeah, so I always explain it when I'm talking to the branches. We have we have finance officers in all the branches branch treasurers. I explain it in the sense that there's two main pillars of finance that the branches have to think about. There is a third which is selling our literature, right? Our papers, our books, our magazines. We turn a profit on all of that. There's a huge thirst for ideas out there. And our full time as you run the bookshop can hardly keep up with the demand. Yeah, I can see all the boxes piling up every single day. Yeah. And just like the amount of deliveries they have to pack up and take the post office is hard for them to find to do the time to do much else. But that I say to the branch. Look, that's that does raise money. That's important. But that's in it. That's a political educational thing. You don't even need to think about that in terms of money. You inspire people to want to learn one like in this kind of thing. That will turn itself over that will that stuff will happen. The two pillars you have to really focus on are the membership subs, membership fees on the one hand. And that goes to covering the cost of full time revolutionaries full time wages that can run the bookshop, produce the paper, maintain the website help develop the branches coordinate the work nationally. There's I could go on there's there's a huge amount of centralized tasks required to make all of the branches around the country more than the sum of their parts, right, make them into one big fighting organization with a clear purpose and clear ideas and clear strategy. So that's the membership subs regular monthly income allows us to budget for regular monthly outcomes on those wages. We can look at that in a bit more detail later. Every other cost involved with running the party has to come from somewhere, right? Yeah. And if that money has to be raised, the vast majority that is going to have to be raised by the branches because they are what make up the party, they will make up the organization. Like I said, we've got this 20 ground target to try and raise from the public outside the branches, they can donate on the website. But like I said, we want 120 grand. That's 100 grand. We are hoping to get from the branches. We've got 1000 members, you know, yeah, 100 quid each, it's doable. Got 100 branches, you could think of it as 1000 quid per branch that they have to raise. And that goes to any other cost you can imagine, whether it's buying pens and paper for new computers, or paying rent for our office, or allowing full timers to travel around the country actually visit the branch. The last thing we want is far removed bureaucrats who sit in an office and tell the branches what works and what doesn't. When the branches are the ones out there actually trying it, right? We have to knit all of the collective experience together. That requires getting out on the ground, knowing who you're working with, what their strengths and weaknesses are, learning from the branches and educating the branches and this kind of thing. We also pay international donations to our international organization. So we come up with a figure every year, I think we're going to try and give them 100 grand this year. I think the list goes on. We're putting on big public events. We're launching the party, have to rebrand everything, right? And run as much online campaigning as we can as well. Producing posters, stickers, that could go on and on and on. As everyone who is alive today in capitalism knows everything costs money and it very quickly adds up, right? So that's the point of the fighting fund. And yeah, how successful the first six months of the party can be. A lot of it will hinge on how much we have in the coffers to launch our initial campaigns, develop new branches. Yeah, definitely. I think we are going to see a period of potentially quite explosive growth this year on the basis of the excitement, the inspiration, the determination. I think the branches are feeling right now to get out there and plant the flag of communism. But not just that, also the objective situation as well. You know, what have you got? You've got, you know, a political regime that is in crisis in Britain. You've got a Labour Party which is rubbing its hands waiting to get into power to carry out an austerity program to carry out attacks on the working class. As we've already discussed, we've got young people who are completely desperate for a way out of this dead end system. I think on that basis, all it will take is, you know, maybe one or two, you know, accidents and sort of shock events that will just sort of push loads of people towards not just revolutionary ideas, but actually getting organized in a revolutionary organization. And if we're going to be setting up new branches and new cells in various different parts of the country, perhaps even places where we haven't even got members right now, you know, we've that's already happened, I think, in the past period. How else are we going to grow unless we have a strong material foundation? As you said, you know, things like going on trips, you know, discussing with these people, sitting down, showing them how to organize a branch meeting, showing them how to sell the paper, how to write for the paper, how to speak to people, how to convince them to join as well. These are, you know, thousand and one things that are absolutely indispensable for organizing a Bolshevik party like our own. And as you mentioned, with the international donations as well, I think the exact same thing plays out on an international level as well. We're now getting, I believe people writing in from from countries where we've gotten no one whatsoever. We want to organize with us who are inspired by the launching of the Revolutionary Communist International. How are we going to be able to develop an international that has its reaches in every single continent in the world unless we have a strong international center that can also make trips, be there on the ground, go along to these meetings and so on. Yeah. So yeah, it's really good that you mentioned that. And also, you know, there are sections in our international, which yeah, are in countries that are a lot more materially deprived than we are here in Britain. Of course, you know, Britain is still, you know, a very impoverished country, or at least, you know, sections of the population are very impoverished. But you know, you're looking at places like like Venezuela or across Latin America, across Asia and so on places like Pakistan, where you've got like inflation, which is, you know, 80% or something like that, we need an international to be able to, you know, to be able to support a development fund, you know, to be able to pay for, you know, key resources, perhaps even, you know, staff and so on to be able to give them a strong foundation. Yeah, exactly. That's right. I mean, in the long one, even in even in very difficult countries, obviously, if you want to build a revolutionary by it has to be sustainable. It can't rely entirely on subsidies, but we need that backstop, right? We need that reserve to be able to support and subsidize sections when they hit difficult times during the the unbelievable hyperinflation in Venezuela. That's when the international stepped in to stop the whole thing crumbling, right? Another thing is, you know, they produce, they produce merchandise and we buy it at a kind of a British market price.  Yeah, funds are full-time for a month or something in Venezuela. Anyway, yeah, you're absolutely right. Having the international is extremely important. And it's just the same as having the national center right applied to an international level to be able to share the lessons of the class struggle between different sections, right? And that's so important with the with the national center in Britain to be able to share the lessons of the and the experiences of the different branches. And yeah, with this launch, we want people all of these other episodes that you've been producing. I've been listening back to them.  You can join us. Don't feel like being isolated is a problem. We will send you papers, stickers, a Lenin handbook, how to build a branch thing.  And that's that's why we need full-time is the most dedicated worker Bolshevik, right? Who has a full-time job? It doesn't matter how committed they are, they can't go and spend a week showing a group of three people how to set the branch and how to run a paper sale, you know, having long conversations with them about strategy, history, showing them in practice how to talk to a contact, how to recruit contact, all this kind of thing. There is no substitute for that. So with the organization we're trying to build. Yeah, we need centralization. We need full-timers. Yep. And just before we move on to the next question I want to ask, you just mentioned there a lot of the resources that we can provide to people who want to try and build a cell where they are, any listeners at home who are feeling inspired by what the RCP has been doing recently. If you want to get yourself a communist cell starter pack, we do have those on offer. You'll have a handful of papers, our theoretical magazine in defensive Marxism, the Leninist Handbook that Joe mentioned as well, as well as posters and stickers and all those sorts of things. So if you had to the link in the show notes of this podcast, you can get your hands on one of those. Yeah, just check it out. So this actually brings me then. So we've discussed the fighting fund and so on, but this now brings me to a question that we've had from a listener of the podcast who has a question about the amount that we charge in terms of membership, membership subs, membership fees. Sure. So I'm just going to play that right now and I want to hear your thoughts on what they have to say. Hi, so we're talking about partial finances the next week. I was wondering, do you not think that the current ask of 50 pound a month is just too much and unrealistic for most working people right now? Yes, you say that you need to, you know, get to the cause and what not, but realistically, of so many people having to pick between heating and food and they're just not going to be able to afford it. And if the goal is to build as much mass membership as possible, do you not think it's a bit shooting overboard kind of thing? So that's a question from Luke and Joe, what do you what do you make of that? Would your response be to that? Well, it's a valid question. It's a good question, because first thing to say is we do not demand or command things of anyone without explaining it. So, you know, you got welcome that question because I wouldn't ask anyone to give 50 pound a month. We actually asked workers to give 60 pound a month. We're aiming for an average of 50 pound a month. We ask students to give 30 pounds a month as a starting minimum and workers 60. It's not an iron rule. I'll get to that in a second as well. But we don't ask this stuff without explaining it. That'll be mad, right? The whole point of our organization is to politically explain, politically inspire and then make an appeal. This is what we need. Can you can you do it? Right. So these targets are not plucked from the sky. They are they actually start from a political end. The financial contributions are just a financial means to a political end. And that political end is a certain amount of centralization that we need. So the bottom line is, yeah, we need an average sub of 50 pounds. Where does that come from? Well, we've explained why we need full timers, right? In general, the kind of things that they have to do is produce the paper, maintain the website, run the bookshop, maintain the accounts, you know, keep track of the membership lists. But most importantly, we are the purpose of our organization. The only reason we exist is our ideas, right? The point of the Marxist Party is to be a vehicle for the necessary ideas into the mass of the workers movement, right? The Marxist Party can almost be summarized as the memory of the working class. There is 150 years of or more of industrial working class struggle. There's many, many more centuries of history and revolution to study, right? And our ideas are not plucked from the sky, they're plucked from the development of history and the real experience of the working class struggle and this kind of thing. So the working class every generation where it's forced to throw itself into struggle again, it often has to learn the same lessons over and over again and waste precious time within the time that is allowed by allowed by a revolutionary crisis. The point of the Marxist Party is to throw itself into that struggle, into the working class struggle with its own lessons from the past already digested, allowing it to skip steps, right? And draw the necessary conclusions within the time afforded by that revolutionary crisis, right? So that's the only justification for us existing as a separate organization to the mass working class organizations is to provide those ideas. And so if if our full timers do not have the time to actually develop themselves politically, theoretically to develop the branches politically and theoretically, well, then we cease to be the organization we even are aiming to be at all, right? So this is we've explained why we need full timers, but this is why we need a certain concentration of full timers. To give you an example, if we had a average sub of 20 pounds, I should have written this down, I did this calculation a while ago, if we had a sub of an average sub of 20 pounds after our international dues, because for every subs paying member, we pay the international a small portion of that. I think when we hit 1000 members, if our average sub was 20 pounds, we'd have eight full timers on minimum wage, right? We all get paid minimum wages as full time. We're revolutionary. We don't do this for the money.  So what was it saying? 20 pounds a month. Yeah, we'd have eight full timers trying to run an organization of 1000. We would not be the organization we are. If that was the case, how can eight people produce a fortnightly paper? We need to go weekly because events are moving so fast. Again, everything we do flows from what is required. And then can we find the means, right? We need a weekly paper. Not a fortnightly. We have to maintain the website. We have to have an editorial board that commissions articles around the country have to distribute the paper to the branches. We have to run the bookshop. We have to run the accounts. And then like I said before, most importantly, we need time to think strategically time to read a lot, right? Time to take practical part. No good after all time is not taking part in the branches not taking part in demonstrations, political work in general. The last thing we want is far removed bureaucrats. We need people who are politically developed and in conversation with the branches and actually know the people in the branches, right? If we had eight full timers to a membership of a thousand, none of us would know who any of our members were, right? Again, you'd just be giving abstract, far removed commands rather than knowing the actual people you're dealing with, what are their strengths, what are their weaknesses, what help they need. And most importantly, raising the theoretical and political level of the party as a whole. And so we aim to have every 30 to 35 members funding one full timer on the minimum wage. That's where the number emerges. That would mean on average, they would have to pay 50 pounds a month. After international dues, that allows us to pay 30, 35 people allow to pay one full timer, the minimum wage. So that's where it flows from now. Of course, we are aware that that's a lot to ask. Of course, we know that trade union, you'd probably pay about 15 pounds a month or something like that. But our ambitions are much greater than that of the trade unions, right? We want to overthrow capitalism. And look, if someone wants to dedicate themselves to the building of our party, they want to be an active member, they want to recruit and they literally can't afford to pay 30 pounds as a student, 60 pounds as a worker. Well, we wouldn't bar them from membership. What we would do is say this is what we asked for. We're asking you to seriously consider. Can you afford that? What would you have to give up to afford it, right? And would that be worth it? Because the way we see it is there is nothing. Once you've fed and watered and you've got a roof over your head, you've had a bit of fun, right? What is more important than the future of humanity? Let's think about what we're just talking about with the climate. What is more important than overthrowing this six six system? And the opportunities will present themselves. Whether there is a party of the right type with the right ideas at the right time is the most important question of all. And that's I think 50 pounds a month is a very, very low price to pay for that. Again, if someone absolutely can't, you know, we'll have a conversation with them about it. We won't bar them from entry. We're actually thinking about changing our the way we phrase it to one day, pay a month, one day's wages, one day's wages a month, which actually on minimum wage amounts to about 60 quid a month. So we're not we're not far off from where we where we should be and what we're asking now. And the last thing to say on it is we don't ask we have no means of coercion, right? Like we can't make people do anything. We we try and explain inspire and then say, will you do that? Right? And the point is that this this average, we're about just over 40 pound average and we need to be at 50. But the majority of our active members are paying 30 pounds of students, 60 pounders workers or more sometimes much more. So this is a position that we've conquered, you know, and we don't ask people to do anything. We wouldn't we don't do ourselves anyway. So we're saying this is a position with conquered and we don't want our new members to force us to retreat on that, right? This is what we do. Will you do it with us? And if someone absolutely can't have an open conversation about it, it's fine. Right. So don't let that be a reason not to get get in touch. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully that puts in its context a little bit. Yeah. And one thing that was mentioned in the question is that, you know, people now in Britain are choosing between heating and eating. And of course, we have just been through, you know, a big cost of living crisis. I mean, I think we're still going through that now, even though it's not in the news anymore. But I remember a couple of years back, we launched, I think it was last year, actually, we launched a campaign to buy the office that we're currently in right now, the international headquarters of the of the revolutionary communist international. And as in the British section, we had an ambitious target of raising 200 grand that year, you know, largely through asking for donations from our members and supporters. And I remember the reaction to that when we successfully raised that money from some people on the left even who said, you know, this is this is disgusting, you know, how can you, how can you raise this money for an office to buy property at a time when, you know, the British working class are suffering, you know, shouldn't you be giving that money to food banks, for example, or giving it to a trade union strike fund or something like that. That's going to make a real material difference to people's lives. Yeah, how would you respond to that? Do you think I think it's a very good question? It's a question that I've heard quite a few times from from from people who want to join as well. Yeah, it's an understandable instinct, right? Like most people are on the left or communist because they see the poverty, they see the vulnerability, they see the unnecessary hardship or outright suffering. And they want to do something about that, right? And the most immediate thing that jumps to mind is if you've got a load of money, you can help feed people who can't feed themselves, right? You can help provide services and support for people who need it, which is true. But we want to abolish poverty, right? The way I just explained it is it's unnecessary suffering, right? There's more than enough food produced in the world. There's more than enough housing. We haven't forgot how to build hospitals or train teachers, right? And yet schools are overcrowed and you can't get a doctor's appointment for a year or something ridiculous, right? So like the potential to solve these problems for good does exist. And the only barrier is a political one, right? So there are lots of people out there to their credit who put time and money into alleviating the suffering of people, right? Food banks, charities, mutual aid groups. Great. That's a very honorable thing to do. And in fact, I would say it is testament to them and it's testament to human potential, what we're willing to do for others. And it's a little it's a little glimmer, a little glimpse of what human nature is capable of and then what socialism could unleash. Imagine if all of those projects were properly funded. Now, the amount of money that we raise and are able to raise at this stage is negligible compared to the amount already going into those charities and support groups. However, the amount we can raise this 120 grand or aiming for, for example, the Congress will make a huge difference to our ability to build that political tool, that political weapon that can play the decisive part in solving those problems for all. So we're just playing a much longer game, right? And fewer people are doing that. So yeah, I think I think actually that that's that's the real Bolshevik attitude when times got harder and the cost of living crisis began to be really felt by everyone. And that was the word of the day really cost because he lives or whatever everyone was saying. We could the easy thing to do would say, oh, yeah, times are hard. We get it. Let's just ease off, right? Let's lower the subs. Let's ease off the fundraising. But that's that's basically what we would call liquidationism. Obviously, when times get harder, the revolutionary party is needed more. And times are going to keep getting harder. And we're going to have to keep building a strong discipline fighting organization. Again, we start with what's required, right? And then through political inspiration, we decide what's possible, not based on what's possible, what's easily possible, right? But what's possible on the basis of hard work and political inspiration? And another thing is, you know, again, this is instinct, you want to help the most vulnerable in society. And we do too. But the most vulnerable people in society are not necessarily the best equipped to fight for revolution, right? Marxism understands that the work in class are the most powerful social force. It's not because we just romanticize the work in class. It's because of their role in the economy, you know, their social role in production, their methods of struggle as a method of struggle through the collective organization in the workplaces and this kind of thing. And yeah, the the homeless and people who are really struggling and on benefits and this kind of thing, they might have the most to win from socialism, but they're not necessarily the best equipped to dedicate time and money to that struggle. So if you know, if it means at this point, we're dedicating people who can afford the time and money to build a revolutionary party great. In the future, we'll throw the doors wide open to people who might be slightly less active and contribute slightly less. When we are a mass party, we're aware that we're not a mass party. We're building we're building a unit of soldiers basically, right? And that requires sacrifice, hard work. And yeah, if someone has more time, less money, they can still join them all. They'll prove that they'll prove that they're worth that way. If someone has less time and more money, we might say, right, okay, you've only got three hours a week to contribute. But can you up your subs, right? Like, everyone's got got what they have to give. So yeah, that's the way that's the way we look at it. So yeah, in the face of crisis and hard times, we can't afford to back off, right? And that's why the struggle goes in ebbs and flows. We're looking for the hardest class fighters, basically. I think you're totally right that the amounts that we're talking about right here are absolutely negligible, not just compared to the money that goes through bourgeois charities. I mean, for example, you know, it's not uncommon for a CEO or a director for a charity to be on a six figure salary, for example, I mean, look at the what's that guy during the pandemic? Was it? What was his name? The guy, the old guy who did the laps around his? Oh, yeah, was it John? Yeah, something like that. You know, the, you know, he's family started a charity at the end of that. And then what did they do? They embezzled the money and put it towards a bloody spa, a private spa, for example. But there's many examples like that of the corruption of bourgeois charities and so on.   The piles of money that are plowed into these elections so that the ruling class can have the representation that they feel that they need is absolutely enormous. I mean, I just read, for example, the other day, that Jeremy Hunt, our esteemed chancellor in Britain, while carrying out an austerity budget, he's actually just plowed 100 grand of his own money, his own personal wealth, which again just shows you, you know, which side his bread is better done, that that's just fair change for him. He's plowed 100 grand into his own constituencies Tory party, because he's facing the potential of not being elected in the next general election, right. That's just what one individual is giving to one local Tory party to in order to get reelected this year. And that's what we're asking for, you know, 100, 100 grand. That's more or less what we're asking for for half a year to fund the entirety of the revolutionary organization that will lead the British Revolution in the future, I would say. Yeah. Is there anything else you'd like to say on that before we wrap up? No, well, that's an important point. It's one I make a lot. It's like, who else is going to do it?  Like you say, the the capitalist are willing to, I mean, I say sacrifices, not really a sacrifice is it, but they're willing to give up a lot of their large slice of their profits to make sure they have political representatives. That will allow them to make more profits, right, in the future. Well, we have to think like, if we are determined to overthrow this system, to end all this suffering for good, yeah, we have to sacrifice a portion of what we have now for what we need in the future. No one is going to fund the revolutionary Marxist party, apart from revolutionary Marxists. And the bigger we get, we're at the stage now where we're trying to draw more and more from a wider periphery. But the backbone is always going to be and should always be the active membership itself. And that's what the membership subs are all about. So yeah, I think that is a really good analogy. And it leads me on to this Trotsky quote, right, like what was saying before people have different things to give. And yeah, what is it that makes a revolutionary, you can't do what we need to do without sacrifice, right? If it was easy, capitalism would have been thrown over throwing a long, long time ago, building a revolutionary bodies that I would say it's the most fulfilling thing you can do. It's fun. It's exciting. It develops you as a person. It gives you an amazing perspective on the past and the future. But yeah, it's not easy. It's hard. Otherwise it would have been done a long, long time ago, right? And Trotsky said you can have revolutionaries old and young, wise or coming with the way it is ignorant. There you go.  And so that's the type of person we're looking for. And the more involved you are, the more you become willing to give because you realise that, if I do say something myself, this is the real deal. We're building something really, really serious here. And every challenge in front of us, we've managed to overcome it, including the cost of living crisis, buying a permanent premises so we're not pissing money away to a private landlord anymore. And this kind of thing. So yeah, there's an amazing tradition of sacrifice within our organisation. Although I would say within the British section, again, it's not really sacrifice. We're an international organisation. And you look at the conditions people are forced to live in, you look at the situation in Gaza right now. You look at our comrades in places like Venezuela, like Pakistan, like Indonesia, that they are really sacrificing, you know, a lot for maybe not even their own future, you know, just for the future of humanity, the future of their children, the future of people they don't even know. All we're asking is that you make a committed contribution, right? Perhaps there'll be bigger sacrifices in the future. But but it's not demon gloom. It's the most positive thing you can do. And I would encourage anyone who is dissatisfied about the state of the world to contribute their time and money to build in this party because nothing will make you feel feel better and more fulfilled. And this can be done. That's the thing. This can be done. There will be revolutionary movements. There will be huge class struggles. And a revolutionary party has a very important role to play in that. Alright, well, thanks very much for that, Joe. I think we'll wrap it up there. But before you head off, I just want to make a few quick announcements. So yeah, as we've already said, plenty of times on this podcast series, if you're feeling inspired by the ideas that we've discussed on this podcast, if you've been reading our website and you agree with what we have to say, then you need to get organised in the revolutionary Communist Party. It's no good just sitting there at home feeling bad about the world. You need to be with other like-minded people fighting to change the world. So if you want to apply to join the revolutionary Communist Party, please head to communist.red forward slash join to fill in our application form. And as Joe mentioned earlier, we will send you resources. We will send you a full time revolutionary to help you organise a cell on the grounds. And yeah, as we've already mentioned as well, if you want to give a strong material foundation to this party, then you can take out a subscription to our newspaper, our magazine, you can buy books from our book shop, well-readbooks.co.uk, and you can also donate to the organisation as well. You can make a one-off donation to our special party launch fund, or why not set up a regular donation as well? Whatever suits what you can give. And lastly, we want to make this podcast series as interactive as possible. So if you have any questions whatsoever about what the RCP is about and how to build a branch or sell up the RCP on the ground, then please do let us know. We want to hear your questions, your reports, your advice and so on. So head to communist.red forward slash right and select the category that says podcast and we will play your question or your report on the show. So thanks very much to our listeners for tuning in and make sure you stay tuned to Marxist Voice for future episodes covering Marxist theory, revolutionary history, current events and party building, brought to you by The Communist. See you next week.


Willis keeping, breaks a tackle. Willis to the 10, spitting to the 5, driving, being pulled into the end zone. Touchdown! Titans! Jordan Ruse took him home to Peter for the first time in his career.


Hopkins came in, I believe, seventh in the nation in kill percentage. They hit like 265 as a team, and tonight we held them to 134. But it was our block at the net, and really it was our serving. Our serving, putting us in a position. If your serving is on and you can get them out of system, it makes the block so much easier and the defense so much easier. And that's one of the things we're able to do tonight. We had some great serving, and I told the girls, we missed 12 and four sets, so that's three a game, but you have to serve aggressively if you expect to side them out. Sure, it didn't by design, but typically when you win the first set kind of handily, it's not a good omen against a good team like Hopkins. And we were fortunate to win the second set, and really Meg Wren came off the bench and sparked us in that third set, and we almost ended up, we actually had game point. We had match point, and didn't get it, but that's how mentally tough I think we are. We had match point, didn't get it, got back to work in that fourth set, had a couple of huge blocks. Victoria Prokick had an incredible game. They locked at the box score last night. They say, well, number five is not going to get the ball. Well, she hit over 400, had seven blocks tonight, so she had an incredible night along with Mariah Savage on that outside, stopping number 14, their best player, and who was a phenomenal player and just a freshman, and I thought that was one of the keys to the game. As Brent Whitehead says, this is not the Annika Swartz show anymore, because their best player had 53 swings. Annika had 32, because Katie Leffridge had 11 kills. Annika had 12, Mariah had six, Lauren Weaver had eight. So, again, spread out between everyone, and Chelsea Ireland's blocking at the net. The chances are we're going to see them again if we both get to the NCAA, because they're so close in proximity, wherever they go, we're going to go. That was more a pride match, and if we are fortunate enough to get to the NCAA, that will help us seeding-wise. Putting that in the win column, we've got that home-winning streak going that you keep printing, and they'd won 18 matches in a row. So, it was a great test. It was a great test. They're a great team, so I think everybody saw a great match, and I would be remiss to say, if the crowd was not here, absolutely that was the seventh man tonight, because they were huge. I haven't heard this place rock like that in years, and that was a phenomenal thing, and the men's hockey team started it, and everybody else just chimed in and had a great time tonight.