Hello, welcome to this product school presentation on becoming a product manager. My name is Tori, a little bit about me. I live in San Francisco. I have a baby named Kiki who's 16 months, has been named Kevin and an adorable fellow, Prince Ravioli on the right. All right, so what we're going to talk about today is before we break into the steps about becoming a product manager and the product manager you want to be, we'll talk a little bit about what a product manager is and a little bit about my story and perspective for this presentation. All right, so jumping in, what is a product manager? What is a product manager? So you probably either, maybe some of you are product managers, maybe you have heard about product management, they're the CEO of the product, maybe you've heard that. Maybe you work in a company and product managers seem to be doing a lot of presentations or maybe making decisions, leading meetings, and you're kind of like, I want to do that, I want to lead. Maybe looked up the salary, fair enough. These are all fair enough ways to be interested in like, what the heck is this? But what is a product manager really? Product managers are really just here to build amazing solutions to hard problems or just delighting customers. Product managers are here to solve problems for people. And they're also here to, product managers don't just build solutions, but they have to also define the sort of parameters of where they're going to go after the solution, define what success means, and then achieve it, and then do it in the real world. So product manager ship product, it's not theoretical and just strategy. We get work out into the world and we test it. And that means we have to be practical and work within real world constraints. So it's a really fantastic and interesting role and I'm just going to give you a few examples of some products that I've been sort of thrilled by recently just to cover the gamut of a few things that you could do. So this first one, I use Capital One as my main credit card. These rewards, I never really use them. They kind of like, we're in the background and Amazon, being Amazon, we're like, hey, we could apply these toward your purchase. So I go to buy a stuffed animal for my baby and it's basically free, which is amazing. So that's a very Amazon-y thing to do. So that just made me stoked. This is a sort of silly version. There's this thing called PoolSuite.fm. That's just a website where you can listen to cool tunes and feel like you're in Palm Springs. Super fun and kitschy. This was something that solved a really actually hard and serious problem for me. So we've been struggling with sleep training with the baby. It was really, really hard to get ahold of a sleep trainer. It was expensive and I discovered this app that I actually had their work that would let me just talk to a certified sleep trainer like that day and it blew my mind. Solved a huge problem for us, really helped unlock some solutions. It was really helpful for me. Next one for something completely different. If you have ever done anything with VR with an Oculus or other VR headset, it's super fun and interesting. I don't know if Metaverse is the future or not, but I do know that playing Billie Eilish on Beat Saber is extremely fun. So all of these examples are just examples of different products that product managers are behind and work with teams to create these really great experiences. So how do you become one of these? That's what we're going to talk about today. Okay, so here's a little bit about my story to kind of show you my perspective and sort of where I'm coming from with this presentation. So I graduated in 2007. Yes, I am an elder geriatric millennial with an English major from a college that no one had ever heard of. I really didn't care at the time. I just wanted to be a writer and live on a boat. That was like my main aspiration in life. In 2008, the recession hit. I had luckily gotten a job as an editor. I tried to quit that job. I begged for it the day after because it was the recession that was like, shoot, I should probably have work. So I'm glad I did, but I really didn't like that job and it took me a long time to get out of it and figure out what I wanted to do. I applied to literally hundreds of jobs. It was really hard. By the time 2012 came around, I finally found someone I really connected with named Marnie who helped me get a six-week contract job as a technical writer at a startup that turned into a full-time job thanks to her help for advocating for me. The problem was, once I became a technical writer, I really wasn't satisfied with just writing content about product. I didn't want to write directions for how to make a product make sense when it just didn't make sense in the interface. So I kept hunting the product managers down, being like, can we change this? What's going on here? Why did you make this decision? Can we try this one instead? And it just kind of became clear to some of my colleagues, and I didn't even really know this at the time, that I was thinking like a product manager. Somebody encouraged me to apply for an open entry-level PM role at the company at the time, gave me a copy of Marty Kagan's Inspired. I read the book and almost fell off my chair.  I didn't even know this was a job. And I worked really hard to and studied for that interview, barely got it, and then barely hung on for my life. So I really didn't have any experience at the time other than my expertise in this domain at the startup. I really hope that what I've learned over the years while up-leveling myself and gaining the information that I needed to succeed in product can really help you all. I also, you know, in my role as VP of product at a startup called People Grove, as well as a manager at Udacity, I've learned a lot about hiring and interviewing entry-level and intern level of PM. So I have a little bit of perspective on what hiring managers might be looking for. Now I work for Twitter with writers and editors and publishers, and despite all the craziness in the news, I'm still excited to work there. So all right, moving on. Okay, some notes before getting started. The audience for the first few steps are more about breaking in the product, the second and more about up-leveling. So this is kind of about becoming the product manager that you want to be at the end of the day. Grain of salt, of course, these steps are all my opinion, colored by my journey. There's a lot of ways to do this. This is just sort of my perspective. And then, you know, behind the bubble, I can't move it or it'll stop my slides. These are all free. They're meant to be scrappy and kind of a lot of work, but they're also steps that anyone can do without having to pay a bunch of money to get an MBA or expensive coaching. Okay, getting started. Break into product. Steps one and two. Get started somewhere. As my writing coach used to say, if you had writer's block, just get started somewhere. Just start something. And that's what I would say to folks who are struggling to figure out how to break into product. Just be a product manager. Just do it. There are a million different ways to start a website, a product, physical product, maybe you have some data that you found, you know, there's literally publicly available data about like weather and about humans that you could put a front end in front of with air table. I mean, the literally endless possibilities. A lot of times, you know, when I've interviewed folks for internships or PM roles and they tell me they started their own thing, they kind of apologize for it. Well, only five people use it and I'm always thrilled. I'm always like, oh, thank God, this is amazing. This is somebody who's, you know, really wants to be a PM. You can see it through their actions and it's inspiring. So just do it. Start your own thing. Similarly, create something from scratch. So the product management is a very creative discipline and it's a craft. So if you are, have an idea for a screenplay, you want to organize a community volunteering effort, you want to start a meetup, all of those things will contribute to your ability to think creatively and to build something from scratch. So ship it, get something done and that will also give you some ammunition in the interview to stand out from the crowd and also just give you a little bit of confidence so that you can start kind of figuring out what it means to be a product manager. All right, next steps. So these are kind of similar to the first ones, but they're more about forming your perspective, where you want to go with it. So many different avenues and sometimes it's hard to pick which one you want to go into. So this can help you hopefully in your search. So the first one, find a problem that you really have to solve, something you're really interested in. Here are some examples. Maybe you created a hack. Could be physical, you taped something up because you didn't like the way your room was configured. Could be digital, could be emotional. Maybe you solved some really hard problem. And you could create training around that. What did you hack? What's problem did you solve? Number two, what annoyed you? What could you fix? It could be a little thing. It could be a big thing. How would you solve that problem? Number three, why do you see injustice in the world? The world is very unjust. There are so many ways to lift others up. How can you work to fix that problem in the world? Number four, maybe this isn't something that you would necessarily think of, but a friend of mine actually created a product out of something fun that we all came up with as a group, a couple hours into hanging out. Share your fun idea with the world. I think that's one thing that really surprised me about product management is if you find something amazing, others probably will too. So what problem do you have to solve? This can give you a perspective into what companies you wanna interview for. When you are interviewing for them, you probably will have done some more thinking around this problem, which will really help you stand out. Next, product managers take a lot of information and synthesize it. It's very important to read a lot, think a lot, discuss with others so that you can push back and have a perspective. You're gonna spar with engineers. It's important to be able to take a lot of information in, have a perspective about it and be able to stand up for it. So have fun with it. Build a list of books, podcasts, articles. I'm gonna share a bunch of stuff, but I'm happy to share my own favorites. You can also Google it. Read the news. Product managers work within, like I said earlier, work within a context, a real world context. It's really helpful to know what's going on in the world. Even 10 minutes, read the news every day. Watch TV, have some fun with content, consume stories, talk about what they mean with people, have fun. Reading and consuming content is actually more important than it seems. Okay, become an expert. So I've already sort of covered this, but becoming an expert, I mean, back to, when I applied for my PM role at the beginning, at the start of I was at, I was an expert in the company. In email technology, because I was writing about it, as part of my technical writing, that's one example. You know, especially when you're applying to an entry-level role, say it's a gaming company. Are you a gamer? Are you an expert in that? Because you play it all the time? That's an example too. Just become an expert in something. Find something that you're passionate about. And that will lead you to more success and also more satisfaction in your life, in my opinion. All right, steps six and seven. This is a little bit of a funny transition because it's like, I wanna be a PM. How do I get the job? And I'm like, get the job. So this is kind of a crossing the chasm moment. In my experience, there are four general paths that people tend to take when becoming a product manager. They do what I did. Get a job at a startup, become a trusted expert, and then apply for an open PM job in their company. A lot of people I know have done that. They've joined in account management. They've joined in support, technical writing, engineering, there's so many different ways, web development, marketing. I've known a lot of PMs who've come from other roles in their startup. A lot of startup founders end up as PMs. So they are entrepreneurial. They started their own product. And then they either got acquired or just kind of became PMs. Realize that that's the role that they want. Engineers end up often becoming PMs because maybe they get specs that they want to improve. They start improving them. And then they realize, actually I'm enjoying this role more and they become a PM from there. The fourth one is one that I feel like people often wanna do, which is getting an associate or an entry level PM job straight out of an MBA or college, like getting sort of placed in a role. That one in my experience seems a lot more rare and a lot harder to do. You can do it, but if you aren't in an MBA or honestly in some ways a top college, there's a lot of other ways to get yourself into the role. But that is one valid way, of course, as well. So my suggestion, this is maybe a little controversial, but this is the way that I do it. I think the easiest way to become a PM is not actually necessarily applying directly to be a PM. It's actually kind of going in from the side. So joining a tech company or a startup in a role that suits your passions. So I joined as a technical writer. Again, I didn't mean to do this going in, but you could join in marketing, you could join in doing a lot of things that you're interested in. To be clear, do a good job.  Like do your role. Maybe you'll fall in love with that role too. That's also great, but if you still wanna become a PM, become a trusted expert in the company, show creativity, passion, leadership, expertise, and then a role opens, just go for it and just keep trying. After you've been at a startup for a while, even if you can't necessarily get that role in your company, I have seen people, once they've built expertise and say education or whatever it is that they're working in, pivot into an entry level PM role at another company with that same expertise. So it's still valuable to be at a startup even if you can't necessarily move into a PM role at that startup. Okay, this is pivoting a little bit into more of the how do you grow in your role? But once you have started as a PM, I would suggest that you try out a few different roles. So I have a few here, but there's so many different types of product manager. So I have a growth PM, you can't really see that there, but that's kind of about, maybe you have an e-commerce funnel and you're trying to get people to purchase. So how can you take a metric and make it go up and to the right? What sort of changes can you do to the website? A, B testing, et cetera. It's pretty fun and analytical. Platform PMs, this is more technical. So how do you build the platform that others build off of? So this could be a content management system that engineers use. It could be a product like Shopify that shoppers, I'm sorry, merchants use to sell their products. Zero to one PM, this is about growing a startup. So either start your own startup or you could join a startup within a startup and start something from scratch. There's a lot of ways to do it and I do think that because it's kind of easy to switch into different roles, trying out these different roles can be really good for your career and for understanding what you actually like out of the product management role. Okay, next step, up level. So these next steps are kind of about, maybe you've started into product management and you're trying to figure out how to be the product manager that you want to be. So it's hard enough just to get your foot in the door. So get your foot in the door by any means necessary. I mean, obviously legal and please be a nice human, but get yourself into the door and do a good job. Even if it's not exactly your ideal job, you will learn an immense amount and you will meet customers and colleagues that you love no matter what company it is and no matter if you're doing it like the right way, having a good attitude and putting your best foot forward is always good in my opinion, to build experience and to learn. And then from there, you can start to figure out how to up level. So finding communities really important. I joined all three of these communities. I ended up being an organizer at Mind the Product San Francisco. It was a really great experience. I was just at the Women in Product Conference last week. Products that count is another meetup that I went to relatively often. These are great communities. They might seem kind of like, I don't want to network, I don't want to. But honestly, it's really helpful. You'll meet people you can collaborate with who can open up doors for you. You also meet friends who will geek out about product management or even can visorate about different things that you might be struggling with. Another thing that a community can help you with is finding a mentor. So mentorship has been shown through data to be one of the most helpful things that you can ever get in terms of career progression. So, or even college graduation. So if you could get a mentor as early as possible to help you, you know, who's been there, who's been in your shoes and who really sees you and sees what's valuable about you and can help you navigate, that is super important. Mentors are very hard to come by because they're busy people. They have lives, they have jobs, but most people's is also shown through survey data, want to be mentors, like 90% of people want to be mentors. So just keep trying until you find somebody who works for you. It's very important as part of your career. So you can do that through, you know, honestly emailing people on LinkedIn, cold emailing people, you can go to communities. People grow of the company that I used to work for was actually a college career center basically where you could log in and find folks who'd already signed up to mentor you. A lot of colleges have that platform or similar ones. So you can find mentors, lots of different ways, Google it, try to figure it out, go get yourself a mentor. All right, next steps, steps 10 and 11. So know the score. I guess what this means is, you know, once you're into into your product management role, you're starting to kind of feel yourself a little bit. You're starting to be like, all right, this is hard. I get this, like you're learning, which is great. The problem is there's a bunch of other talented people out there who are also very good and who are also learning and growing as well. So you're gonna need to keep yourself sharp, especially if you're interviewing at some of these more kind of like coveted roles and jobs. All product manager jobs are amazing. There are just some that tend to be a little bit more desired. So you're gonna have to up level yourself. So that's true if you wanna be a startup founder as well, PM jobs, entrepreneur jobs, especially in the tech world, require a lot of skills, primarily technical design and business.  And I do encourage folks to try to shore those up. It's gonna be hard. It's gonna hurt, but it's good. You don't have to, you know, necessarily go back and get a CS degree, but it's really helpful to shore up some of your weak spots and just get some improvement because it'll help you day to day and it'll make you feel more confident. I have a few resources on the right that I've used. I use Udacity before I worked there. It was fantastic. I really, it really helped me learn technical skills. You can also go to Coursera, linda.com. Code Academy is really great if you're starting out learning technical skills, especially programming, go to Khan Academy. So many different ways to do it. On the left here is more about business strategy. So, Sir Techery is one of my favorite blogs. It's all about market conditions and all about, you know, what's happening that matters in the world of tech and why. And India does great analysis on it. This one on the bottom is a former associate of mine who worked at the first startup called Tristan Kroemer who does these really great and really practical pieces on experimentation. So, whether that is if you're starting from completely from scratch or AB testing, when to do which experiment in which context really helpful and very practical. So, highly recommend that. But the takeaway from this is whatever year we can, you should probably try to up level yourself and there's a million resources out there. So, organize yourself and get it done. Practice interviewing. So, this one is not very fun. Nobody really likes doing this, but it's really important because other PMs out there are doing this. And if you don't practice, it actually is kind of obvious. So, I've done a lot of interviews, especially at Twitter. And it's very noticeable if people are just kind of winging it when other people have practiced. So, you know, read, cracking the PM interview, read, decode and conquer. I'm a big fan of Lewis Lynn. You can go to his Slack community and get interview partners, which is really helpful. Exponent is another one that I've used. That's like a interview practice site. There's other great ones. Candor is another one. There's a lot of these out there. This one is free. These are relatively cheap. If you're interviewing for some of these more coveted jobs, you're going to need to practice. So, I know that sucks, but it's true. And while you do this, it'll make you a way better product manager. Like you'll bring back some really great new ideas, new strategies to your current job. So, definitely do this. All right, last step. So, this one is honestly about kind of bringing it all together. So, you've upskilled yourself. You've practiced, you know, you've been at the PM role for a while. You've tried out different things. You have a perspective of what's interesting to you. You know how to synthesize information. You know how to lead. You've got all of it. If you don't know how to bring it together with a story, it's still not really going to go anywhere. So, learning how to tell your story about where you've come from, what's interesting about your perspective.  So, it's not, you know, it might sound kind of annoying that, you know, I don't want to have to sell myself, but it's not really selling yourself. It's really just understanding what is amazing about you and allowing that to shine. So, you can, you know, how do you learn how to story tell? You practice. You practice over and over again. So, how do you do that? Maybe you go through multiple interviews. Maybe you practice out loud with your partner. There's a lot of ways to do it.  There's a lot of ways to learn to story tell, but it is important once you've, especially, when you're trying to up-level, learning how to tell your story in a way that is compelling to other people, that shows your perspective, shows your passions and your expertise, is extremely important. All right, so that is the presentation. So, just in summary, the first steps are about starting your own thing, creating something from scratch, get something off the ground. After that, or even during that, finding your perspective, find a problem that really matters to you and start researching it. Start understanding what makes the customers and users tick in that world. What solutions are out there? What could you do? Read, think, discuss, read the news, watch content, discuss what matters about what it is that you're consuming with other people or write about it. Become an expert. Just have fun with things. Fall in love with them. Be passionate. Just get involved and become an expert. It really helps you stand out in the crowd to have something that you're independently passionate about. When you're trying to up-level, definitely, oh, I'm sorry, when you're trying to break in, my advice is to find a startup and if you can't break in directly as a PM, join a startup in any role that is relevant to your passions and then do a good job. I think definitely make sure that you are in it for the job that you get, but then after a while, you can probably move into a product manager role as long as one's open and you are showing expertise in the domain. From there, get a mentor, try out different PM roles, join a community, start to kind of get a feel for by working with other folks in the community with a mentor or trying out different roles, like what paths do you really want and how can you get there? And then when you're really trying to up-level, teach yourself those skills that you're lacking. It is important to compete with your peers who are very smart people that you have at least short up your weak spots. And that also goes for practicing interviewing. Do it, it's not fun, but it's really helpful, so do it.  What are all the things that you've done and all of the things that you've learned who's made you into the amazing PM and person that you are today? And help your interviewers see that, help them understand what's amazing about you and why they absolutely have to have you on their team to build the amazing product that will thrill and excite and solve problems for the users in the real world. So that is it. Thank you so much for attending this webinar and best of luck in your PM career.


I dropped out. The colony had dropped out and ridiculed me, but I know this idea is going to work. Please pursue this patent, fight for me and get me this patent on this product. And I did. I found a patent for Alex Gomez and two years later he sold his idea to Metronik for a hundred million dollars. And today, his surgical lens defawner is the standard of care throughout the country and is used in millions of surgeries throughout the world. He has saved whole lives by dropping out of medical school and pursuing his dream that he never could have done as an individual doctor.


Oxygen reduction reaction provides an environmentally benign route for hydrogen peroxide production but lacks efficient catalysts to achieve high selectivity and activity simultaneously. Here, the authors report a boring doped carbon catalyst which shows great promise with outstanding performance. This article was authored by Yang Xia, Xuwenhua Zhao, Chuang Xia, and others.


So, I'm not a big fan of reaction videos, but you guys have asked me to react to Linus and Luke over at Linus Tech Tips, their Linux gaming challenge where they switch from Windows over to Linux on their PCs, and Linus especially is having a bad time of it, and you guys want my thoughts on some of the problems that these guys are experiencing, and I think you guys want this because in many ways, me and Linus were kind of like polar opposites, right? I'm a free and open source advocate, I'm a Linux advocate, I try my best to lure as many people away from Windows and proprietary software in general over to Linux and open source software, right? That's my sole mission in life. Linus is a bit of a Windows fanboy, and even though he's trying this Linux challenge, watching him on camera, I can tell his heart's not really into it, right? That's not really his mission, and that's fine, but I do want to respond to a little bit of his latest video that he put out as far as the Linux gaming challenge part two, and some of the issues he was having. So I'm not going to play through the whole video, I'm just going to highlight some things that stuck out at me when I watched the video for the first time this morning. Try to apt get OBS, the industry standard for desktop capture and streaming in the terminal. Makes sense. On Debian. The Linux distribution that I was saying. Yeah. Come with apt, because apt is for managing packages on Debian and related OSs. That's right. Making life more difficult. The message that comes up when you try to execute the command doesn't say, hey, you should probably be using Pacman, you dunce. No. Tries to install some kind of dependency for apt, then just quietly fails and prompts you to do the same thing again when you try to use it. So let's start with him complaining about apt get not working on Manjaro, of course it doesn't, right? This is not a real complaint, it's not a legit complaint. This is one of the things where I'm not sure if Linus is actually trying to troll, like the Linux community or his audience or what he's trying to do here, because, you know, he uses Windows, he also uses Macs, I'm sure he's used Chromebooks in the past, right? You can't install software the same way on Windows as you can on the Mac, as you can on the Chrome OS, right? This is not the way it works. Same thing with these Linux distributions. They're really different operating systems. They have their own package formats, their own package managers, their own way of dealing with these things. So Debian, Debian-based distributions use Debian packaging format, the .deb extension on the DebPacks, and Fedora and OpenSusa package everything using RPM packaging. Arch has its own packaging as well, and all these distributions have a different package manager depending on whether they're based on Debian and Debian packages or RPM packages or in Arch's case, Manjaro's case, Arch packaging, right? So Pac-Man is designed to install Arch packages. It works on pretty much all Arch Linux-based distributions. Apt was created to install Debian packages, and that's the package manager you use on Debian-based distributions. It's rather simple, and I don't know, it's not even a real complaint, because you can seriously Google, just type in Google, Manjaro package manager, and the very first result will be a page from the Manjaro wiki talking about Pac-Man and giving you the basic commands to use as far as installing and removing software and everything in Pac-Man. Literally would have taken him three seconds to get the answer. So I don't even know why he's complaining about that on camera other than it seems like he wants to pile on Linux and the open source community. The other thing that he's complaining about I don't really understand his complaint on is the command not found message that he got, the error message he got when he did a sudo apt-get install OBS Studio on Manjaro. Because apt-get is not the package manager for Manjaro, meaning the apt-get program is actually not installed on Manjaro. That's why you get that perfectly succinct error message that says command not found, and it'll actually tell you command not found apt-get. If he'd actually read the whole error message, it'll tell you, hey, that program, that doesn't exist here. That's not the appropriate program you should be running, or if it is the appropriate program you should be running, you need to install it before you can use it. And then he complains that he's stuck in some kind of weird loop where sudo apt-get install OBS Studio was trying to install. He says dependencies for apt-get and he got stuck where he just couldn't get out of something. But if that's the case, why didn't you post a screenshot of that? I would have loved to have seen what that actually was doing because I can't replicate it. I don't think any of you guys that are running arch-based distributions can replicate it because when you do sudo apt-get install OBS on an arch-based distribution, all you get is the standard bash error command not found, right? That's all you get. It doesn't try to do anything. It doesn't try to install or remove software or anything. So I don't know what he's talking about here. I'm not saying he's lying. I think, yeah, he's probably sincere and honest in his videos, but I do think whatever error he got, he couldn't replicate. That's why he's not showing us the actual error in his video is because when he went back to try to replicate that error, he never could replicate it anyway. So I don't actually know what caused his problem. We would have needed more information in this case. Linus also said that he thought Manjaro should have told him when he tried to run apt-get, hey, use pacman instead. And I understand why he thinks that because I don't think he understands exactly what kind of programs he was interacting with. So when you're at the command line, you're inside a shell, right? And on Linux, the default shell is typically bash, but there's other shells. You could use ZSH fish. There's dozens of shells. But the default on most Linux operating systems is the bash shell. And in the bash shell, when you type something that doesn't make sense. So you type something and it's not an actual program that can be executed. It's going to complain. It's going to say usually bash colon command not found is the error message. And so bash is actually what's responsible for that error message. Why would the bash shell tell you, hey, don't use apt-get, use pacman? The bash shell doesn't care, right? The bash shell has nothing to do with Manjaro. The bash shell really, in a lot of ways, is kind of agnostic as far as your Linux distribution, as far as operating systems. The bash shell actually runs on all Linux distributions. It can also run on free BSD, open BSD, net BSD, all the various BSD operating systems. It can also run on all the Unix operating systems. And the bash shell can be run on Mac OS. As a matter of fact, now with the Windows subsystem for Linux, the bash shell actually runs on Windows as well. How is the bash shell going to know what operating system, you know, the hundreds of operating systems out there, which package managers and, you know, you tried to run this. So you were probably thinking that this work, the way it does on free BSD, but you're on Chrome OS. So really, you should have run this command. That's not something that the bash shell should be responsible for. At some point, you're running that operating system. You need to know how that operating system works, right? I mean, Windows doesn't tell you how Windows works, right? You had to figure it out.   And this isn't hard stuff. Like literally, you could have Googled for three seconds and found out that the Manjaro package manager is Pac-Man. So the shell really doesn't need to tell you that you tried to use the wrong package manager on a certain Linux distribution.  This is basic stuff that you should already know when you install the operating system, basic, absolutely fundamental, basic stuff.  See if it helps you out. And moving forward, he's going to talk a little bit about Nvidia issues. Encoder doesn't show up as an option, which appears to be down to Nvidia's poop-tastic drivers on Linux. Side note here, I always kind of assumed that the Linux community was grousing about Nvidia primarily for their locked down proprietary approach to things. No, not entirely. The actual quality of the product. Yeah. All right, so yes, we do not like Nvidia because everything with Nvidia is proprietary. They don't open source anything that is part of the problem when the Linux community has a problem with Nvidia. We also have a problem with it is that it's proprietary and half the time it doesn't want to work right on Linux. That's our problem with Nvidia. And he goes on to complain like the settings manager for the Nvidia settings program is kind of a gimped version of the Nvidia settings program because on Windows you got a lot more stuff to play with and things just work right. Yeah, because, I mean, that's the way Nvidia is designed. This Nvidia is really doesn't seem interested in Linux at all, unfortunately. So in this respect, I think Linus is absolutely right that Nvidia on Linux kind of sucks. Moving on to some pulse audio issues. When we solve though, we notice this is Luke here talking. Linux can be a little problematic. We couldn't seem to get it working at all at the start. I had an option for it, but it didn't work. And Linus didn't even have that. But a few days later, I tried it again for a different project and it worked just fine. I checked in with Linus and his did, too. Neither of us know what might have fixed it, but. That's cool. All right, so I saw he was in OBS, right? And some of his input choices were not there. You know, you couldn't find some of the audio sources that he was looking for. And then a few days later, everything was working as expected for both him and Linus. So this is a situation where I think that this was just a situation that you find yourself often in is a reboot of the system typically fixes a lot of problems. So, you know, things didn't work, but now they work. It sounds like the reboot was what was actually needed to fix that problem. Linux users, unfortunately, sometimes Linux users will tell non-Linux users, hey, we don't have to reboot on Linux because that's partially correct. You know, when we update our software, it typically doesn't require a reboot. But I found that that's not exactly the case. Anytime I install a new kernel, I'm always going to reboot the machine, whether it's needed or not. That's just something I found that is actually best best practice there. And another thing is, regardless of what I've done, if I haven't actually rebooted my machine for a while, and I keep a little widget in the panel for for my machines, as far as uptime. If I notice my uptime is, you know, more than two weeks since the last I'm actually rebooted the machine, especially being on a rolling release distribution, which I'm running Arco, which is an arch based distribution, Linus, of course, running Manjaro. I would suggest the same thing to him. It's been a week or two since you've rebooted just every now and then reboot your machine. And a lot of times that will solve some of those problems, those little bugs that you're having. You can't quite figure out what's going on and moving forward here. Ended up being the software that just doesn't exist. There are third party tools, for example, that allow key remapping keyboarding masters, evidently, a popular one, but have a manufacturer driver issues is used to reconfigure RGB lighting or the liftoff distance of your mouse or not going to happen. Then get ready to install Windows in a virtual machine. Pass. Yeah, don't do that either. All right. So I'm going to pause the video. So he's complaining that a lot of his peripheral devices don't work on Linux. So the problem here is you bought hardware that requires drivers to work. And if the manufacturer of that hardware doesn't write a driver for Linux, it's never going to work right on Linux. There's just that's not a Linux problem either. That's not something that Linux can fix or the Linux community can fix. We can't just write drivers for these products that some proprietary company made, right? That's not something that's feasible at all. So either a company supports Linux or it doesn't. That's that's not the Linux community's fault. That's that company's fault, right? And this is a situation where if they don't make the drivers for Linux, then don't buy that product. If you're a Linux user. Now, when you first switch to Linux, I understand because when I switched from Windows to Linux, there were things I had on Windows that no longer worked on Linux. And but you got to understand, this is a one time pain point, right? You're only going to experience this pain one time because once you switch from Windows to Linux from that day forward, now you know, only buy stuff that works on Linux. You know, it would be the same thing was switching from Windows to Mac as well, or, you know, Mac to Linux, you know, whatever you're switching to once you've made the decision. Hey, I want to be on that operating system at that point. You have to be a little wiser and some of your purchasing decisions. And moving forward to what I thought was one of the strangest parts of the video. But wait, there's a solution. All I have to do is follow these simple instructions to download a random script off GitHub and run it. So it looks like he has some kind of go Excel, or product of some kind. He can't get a driver for it because I don't like a driver for Linux, I guess. But he found some kind of script or some kind of hack to get that thing to work on Linux, right? So he found a script over on GitHub. No indication given whatsoever for how exactly to run a script. Even the process of downloading it was unintuitive. And I know GitHub is for developers and not for users, but it's really hard to hide behind that shield when it took me less than two days to run into a situation where I had to use it. OK, so there's a lot to digest here. So he can't figure out how to run that install script that he found on GitHub. That's not Linux's problem. That's not GitHub's problem either. Whoever put that script on GitHub should actually tell you how their program works, how to install it, and then how to run it. That's just standard practice. If they didn't do that, I'm sorry, but you should actually go file an issue on that person's GitHub and complain to them. You're complaining to the wrong people if you're complaining to either the Linux community or to Microsoft who owns GitHub because none of this has anything to do with them. Then he complained that he didn't know how to download the script from GitHub because when you right click on a link and do save link as from any browser, it doesn't matter, Chrome, Firefox, pick a browser. It saves wherever the destination to that link was, and which most of the time it's another web page, another HTML page, it's going to download that complete HTML page to your computer. And that's what he was getting. He was getting a web page downloaded. Every time he right clicked on that link and tried to save as, right? This is just the way web browsers have worked since the beginning of time. This has nothing to do with Linux, and I don't even know why he's complaining about it. I mean, literally, this is the way web browsers have always worked, and Linus obviously uses computers all day every day, right? He knows how web browsers work. He's trying to just make stuff up at this point and pile on to Linux, and I'm not gonna let him do that. Now, if you actually wanted to download the script, Linus, what you needed to do was you needed to get clone that repository. If you don't know what that is, I'm sorry, but again, this is one of those things. You're gonna have to do a little research, and this is not a Linux problem, because Git can work on many operating systems, right? Is it? Git has nothing to do with Linux, and I'm sorry you don't like Git, and you said GitHub is unintuitive. It's not user-friendly, and it seems like it's strictly for developers. Yes, that's what Git and GitHub are. Git is a tool strictly for version control, so it's for people working on software collaboratively and being able to work on different branches of a piece of software and then merge them all together. It's a way for people to develop software. That's what Git is for, and GitHub is kind of a front-end to Git. It's kind of like a Git hosting platform. So it's 100% absolutely for developers. It's not for grandma. It's not for your normies out there, but here's the thing. I think Linus knows enough about technology. He could wrap his mind around how to navigate GitHub. Again, I think this is one of those things, and I've experienced this in my computer life as well. Sometimes you get so frustrated. He looks like he's really frustrated here, and I think it's starting to show in the video, and I think that's unfortunate because he's gonna get a lot of backlash, I think, from the Linux community, from the open-source community. He may even get some backlash from Microsoft fanboys for the way he talks about GitHub in this case, which GitHub is a fine product. I think a lot of this is he's just not enjoying himself right now with this whole Linux gaming challenge, so now he's looking for anything to lash out at, and I understand that. One thing I will mention, because I've seen this on a couple of Linus's videos before, is he seems to think that GitHub is like Dropbox. He thinks it's some file-sharing service where you just go find a file and click on it, and it downloads a single file to your computer that people wanted to share with you. That's not what GitHub, that's not what GitLab, that's not what any of those Git hosting platforms are. They're not a file-sharing service. That's not what they're designed for, and they would be terrible at it even if you tried to turn it into that because that's not what Git the program was designed for. Now back to some of Luke's audio issues. My audio devices were just kind of screwy in OBS. My voice came across very unnaturally deep, and it sounded like my mic input had been duplicated. My voice just feels deeper now. I don't know if I've got something lodged or what. And yeah. Yeah, it's definitely been modulated down. This voice very, very deep, right? And I've actually experienced the same issue before in Linux, so audio issues on Linux. I complain about Pulse Audio, which is the default sound server on Linux. I've complained about it for years, and people think I'm making stuff up, but for most people, Pulse Audio is perfectly fine. Pulse Audio just works 100%, and it never fails most users when you don't have to do anything multimedia-related, right? As soon as you start plugging in a whole bunch of different inputs. Like I've got multiple cameras. Some of the cameras have microphones on them for audio, and then I've got one microphone hooked in today, but I can plug in as many as four microphones up in here. When you get that many inputs plugged in, Pulse Audio sometimes freaks out, and sometimes it just picks the wrong input. There have been many times I've tried to record inside OBS, and even though this mic should always be my audio input, right, it'll turn on the audio from the camera. And then I'll get some terrible nasally audio from the camera, and then I gotta go back and rerecord the clip because the audio from the camera is just garbage. And this is one of those things that Pulse Audio is kind of a mess. We're trying to get this taken care of, though. In the future, we're gonna start migrating away from Pulse Audio as the default sound server to something called PipeWire, which promises to be much better. We'll have to wait and see whether that's actually the case. Still kind of early days for PipeWire, but you're already starting to see some Linux distributions shipping PipeWire by default. And within, I would say two or three years, probably every Linux distribution will have migrated over to PipeWire. And let me skip ahead to Linus's final thoughts. Have at it, have fun, but just know what you're getting into. PC gaming already requires a certain amount of tinkering. I mean, there's a reason that more people game on consoles. You know, whether it's back down save files in some Vista era folder or... He's right. So if you're gonna do PC gaming, you're already signed up for tinkering, right? Because in many cases, you have to build custom machines and install new hardware, new graphics cards, extra RAM, you already have to play a lot with software, with drivers, with config files. You've already signed up to do a lot of extra work to really tweak your machine for maximum performance to run the games that you want to game, right? So he's absolutely right. And that's kind of the crowd, the gamer crowd. And I know he fits into that, which is part of my complaint with some of the stuff he said earlier in the video, like the Bash show, not telling him that Pac-Man is the package manager on Manjaro. And it's like, well, if you're one of these people that are the tinkers, the tweakers, right? You know how to dive a little deeper into things. And then you don't need to be handheld to that point, right? I strongly think though, that I think Linus was just frustrated and a lot of portions of the video. And if you asked him today, his thoughts on some of this, he probably would admit that as well that maybe he was a little harsh. Let's hear a few more of his thoughts here. Yeah, I think that's a good spot to leave on. Yeah, he's right. So he's saying, hey, PC gaming is already complex. But now when you do Linux PC gaming, you're adding even more complexity on top of the complexity that was already there. And yeah, I completely agree on that. But it's worth noting that I think that's a good spot to leave on. Yeah, he's right. So he's saying, hey, PC gaming is already complex. But now when you do Linux PC gaming, but it's one of those things, going back to how it's kind of unfair for him to blame Linux for driver problems for like his peripheral devices as RGB lighting on the keyboards and mice and things like that. I also think you really can't blame Linux for the complexity of gaming on Linux because blame the manufacturers of those games, right? The gaming companies, the people that actually develop these games should write their games to run on Linux. But most of them don't, right? They only write their games to run on Windows. Many cases that's it. No Mac, no Linux, right? And it's almost impossible for the community to do anything about that. Now, the fact that we have such a large company, Steam, that is really putting so much money and effort to kind of make this work because without Steam gaming on Linux would have never happened, right? But Steam wants to make it happen mainly because they wanna get away from Windows, right? They don't wanna be beholden to Windows and the Microsoft Store and all of that. Steam wants to do its own thing and it makes sense for them to base their products like the Steam Deck, for example, off of Linux, off of open-source software. So in a lot of ways, I'm really happy that we have Steam on Linux because Steam has made a lot of stuff possible on Linux that would have never been possible. Certainly stuff that wasn't possible five years ago and 10 years ago, we couldn't even dream about a lot of this stuff. But here's the thing, Steam shouldn't have to do all of this stuff. Again, these game manufacturers, they should be supporting Linux. And it's one of those things kind of like not buying non-Linux hardware, right? It don't go buy hardware that doesn't support Linux. I would also say as a Linux gamer, I wouldn't buy software or in this case games that don't support Linux as well. Now just briefly, I do wanna share my final thought on this. I understand that Luke and Linus, they're trying to do this Linux gaming challenge and in many ways what they're trying to do is they're trying to run Linux the way they would Windows, right? They're trying to do everything that they could on Windows exactly the same way on Linux and their different operating systems. This was never gonna work. These videos were always gonna turn out like this. They were always gonna be bad. One of the reasons why I really, initially didn't want to react to some of this is because I already knew how this was gonna go. You can't switch from Windows to Linux and think Linux is gonna be Windows or vice versa. If I switch from Linux back to Windows, I'd be miserable for a while because half the stuff I do on Linux, I can't do on Windows, right? Because they're different operating systems. It's completely different workflow, a completely different paradigm, completely different philosophies in many ways. And I would like to offer some friendly advice to Linus because obviously he's having a much tougher time of this than Luke is and you can tell on video it comes across that he's angry, frustrated and in many cases, his criticisms, half of the criticisms he had on this video are completely unfair. They had absolutely nothing to do with Linux or Manjaro, the Linux distribution he was running. He was complaining about things that are way out of the scope of Linux. And Linus being a media personality, he knows that that's the case, that he was a little unfair. Like if he went back and rewatched his take on all of this, he'd probably agree that he was a little harsh, a little angry. And I think sometimes as video content creators, especially sometimes when we're having a bad day that comes across on camera. So I would advise him that, you know, the next time he has one of these days where things aren't quite working right on Linux, you know, maybe taking a little bit of time before getting in front of a camera and starting to talk about it because one of the things, if you criticize proprietary software, it's not a big deal. Like if I say something negative about Windows, there's no Windows community that's gonna come after me and, you know, take my attacks of Windows personally because the community, there's no Windows community really, right? There's no community aspect to it. It's a proprietary piece of software made by a corporation and maybe people that work at Microsoft might take offense to it, but there's no community. But when you treat the open source community unfairly, we are a massive community. You're talking about millions and millions of people around the world that contribute not just to Linux but to free and open source software in general. And we generally, we know when somebody is coming after us and I don't think Linus has pushed it to that boundary, but he needs to be careful here because I've seen this many times in the past where the free and open source communities think they're under attack from someone and they respond in a big way.  Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Devon Gabe, James Mett, Michael Mitchell, Paul Scott-Wess, Akamie Allen, Linux Ninja Chuck, Commander, Angry Kurt, Diokai, David Dillengrew, Heiko Koska, Lee Maxim, Mike Nitrix, Erjaun, Alexander Peace, Archive of the Door, Polytech Raver, Red Prophet, Steven, and Willie. These guys, they're my high steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode you just watched would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm just sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work, if you like this content and want to get more of this content, please subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace.


This past Saturday was Brenner's race for the cure and our own Anthony Scott takes us there for this week's Northwoods Adventure. Hundreds of people were at Forest View Middle School on Saturday for a 5K race, but this wasn't just any other 5K. It's a race to get to the finish line, which means a world without breast cancer. And the race was to raise money and awareness towards breast cancer, a disease that has taken the lives of far too many men and women.  And that's way too many. To raise funds for cancer research, individuals and teams signed up for the 5K event and did some fundraising on their own. We fundraised by doing our annual recitals, our dance and gymnastics. We did two this year, one in Aik and one in Crosby. And my mom used to own the studio, and about eight years ago she was diagnosed with breast cancer and two years ago she passed away. At the race for the cure, survivors were honored based on how many years they have survived, races were held for kids, and of course there was the main 5K event. But before the runners could get going, there was a new 0K where participants simply stepped over the finish line to make sure everybody could get involved. We have the 5K run, the 5K walk, a one mile walk, and the 0K and sleeping for the cure. So something for everybody. And everyone came out for the cure. It's just heartwarming to see the outpouring of love and support that everybody's given, both from the survivors and also the caregivers. Because of all the support, there has been incredible advancements in cancer research and technology. But I've had cancer two times, and they were eight years apart, and it was interesting because although it was the same cancer, the research has gone so far during that period of time that the treatment was very different. But the fight is not over yet. If the fight goes on, you know, they've made a lot of progress in the years since the Komen Foundation was established, but there's more to do. We're going to keep fighting until we find a cure for this. Reporting from Baxter for this week's Northwoods Adventure, Anthony Scott, Lakeland News. 100% of the funds raised at the race for the cure go towards cancer research, with 75% staying right here in Minnesota. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


When sociologists think about individuals, they do not think about personality or about the mind. They think about what is something called the self. The self is a little bit different than what psychologists talk about because it's really considered a social thing, a presentation, if you will, of who you are. When we also think about the self in terms of how we group people. So I wanna go over some terms to show you what the difference is in the way that we talk about groups of people and study people and study human interaction. So the first thing that term you should know is an aggregation. An aggregation is a collection of data about more than one person. So there are people who have things in common. For instance, female or a particular race or people born in Indiana or people under the age of 30. They have this in common, but they may or may not know each other and certainly don't think about each other as a group and yet collecting data on them as an aggregation can help us see patterns that become important in studying people and in their society. And this should be contrasted to something called a group category. So this group category is more than just an aggregation. It is people who have some understanding of who is in what group. So it's not just a bunch of people that were collecting data on and then we see after we've collected the data what they may or may not have in common, but rather we are essentially picking a group of people because they are defined as a group of people. And then when we look at that then we study them as a group of people. Now this does not require that group of people to think of themselves as being a member of that group. So for instance, most people in our society don't think of themselves as being the member of a particular social class or socioeconomic class. Sometimes people think of themselves as working class or middle class that they really are not identifying with that and they certainly don't have meetings for the middle class or get together or whatever. But it's still a good category to study and it still is a category that has a specific kind of understanding of who is in which group. The United States government has some very strict definitions on how to determine what socioeconomic level you're at or your household is at. So we wanna distinguish this more by saying that there are some groups which have affiliation. Now this is where you start having a kind of consciousness of belonging to a group where people, for instance, your classroom or this course is a group of people who have affiliated with each other by means of essentially joining the class, signing up for the class, and rolling in the class. So if I say to you, you're a social 101 class with a certain section number, you know who you are because you have formally joined that section. And so you still are a group category but now you have some understanding of belonging to that class. And then the last of these is something called category knowing. And that category knowing means that this particular group affiliation that you have or category that you belong in is something that's very important to you. For instance, a lot of people, gender is very important to them. They look in the mirror in the morning to make sure that they don't look too bunched or don't look too feminine. You know, there's a sense of belonging to a particular gender as being important to your sense of self. You are both, you know, you're in that group and that group is important to you to be in and you think about who you are in relationship to that group. So there are some categories that you know you belong to but you really don't identify with them. They don't become a part of how you think about yourself. And so they just are a group affiliation that you have but they are not necessarily that ultimate sense of I am a member of this group. So we wanna keep in, the reason I bring those groups to mind are that idea of how we think about things is because we wanna talk about two ideas here in this lecture. One is how people age and the other, which is closely related is how people do family. And of course, aging and family are connected with each other in part because we tend to think of particular familial relationships as being important at particular stages within our lives. And of course, this is culturally bound and can differ from culture to culture but it is still a concept that is often linked in our minds and also within sociological study. So we wanna talk about something called an aging life cycle. And I wanna put a little caveat here. In the past, we've talked about this sociologist meaning we have talked about this in a very sort of strict way like you have a certain stage in life that you go through and then you transition to the next stage of life and everybody does it around the same age and does it pretty much in the same way. We now recognize that that's sort of ethnocentric on the part of sociologists from the West that how people age differs from culture to culture and also differs from generation to generation and even from individual to individual within those categories. So I wanna talk about this in terms of these different stages but I want you to think that this does not necessarily one does not necessarily have to come after the other and that the way we talk about this is more a group category rather than a kind of category knowing in the part of the person who's doing aging. So anytime we talk about aging one of the things we talk about is when people are born and they have our membership in a certain kind of age cohort. Age cohorts are important and you probably know them better than you think you do because if you have heard the term millennial or baby boomer then you know what an age cohort is because it's essentially people born within a particular time period who is that who go through things within the history of their world around them that kind of hit the same historical event at the same time. In fact, age cohorts are interesting in terms of the sociological imagination because it is a way that we often connect to the bigger picture to you know the sociological imagination is connecting your biography to history and age cohorts are connecting your time of birth to the ways that you experience historical events. For instance, baby boomers all know where they were when JFK was shot and millennials all know where they were at 9-11. And you know so there's a kind of joint we experience this part of history at the same stage in our lives which can define a generation. And we have to be careful about this stuff because essentially people born around the same time can still experience life very differently depending upon what socioeconomic class they're in depending upon what their nationality and racial backgrounds are depending upon whether they're men or women or other genders or have different sexual orientations, et cetera, et cetera. So age cohorts is a nice little category to think about but we don't want to impose too much on that category when we're talking about people who are part of it. The other thing about it before I go on to childhood the other thing I want to just mention very quickly about age cohorts is that studying things with looking at the cohort as part of the study can sometimes show that things are changing. If older generations are still experiencing something like for instance a wage gap that younger generations are not experiencing then that can tell you that things may be beginning to change. So sociologists still use cohorts in a lot of their studies just because it's a good idea to check and see if there's a pattern based upon aging that is emerging that might give them a hint as to what's gonna happen in the future. Now when sociologists talk about childhood as opposed to psychologists we're not necessarily considering like childhood development and when we talk about socialization and we're interested in how children sort of take on the social norms of their world but really another way that sociologists to do that childhood is exactly how we define childhood and that believe it or not changes depending upon the historic period you're in depending upon what subgroup you're in what subculture you're in and also depending upon where you were born and what culture you're in. We've had a lot of changes in what we think about childhood in the last 150 years. For one thing we have far less children per parents than we used to and ironically when you have fewer children two things happen. One is that you think a lot more about the need to have a child and second that child becomes more important within the family. If you had told people in the 1850s that you're worried about whether you could afford a child or not they would look at you like you're crazy because the way that they kept the family going the way they kept the family business going and the farm or whatever was to have a lot of children. Children were economic assets. They were what helped feed everybody and helped perpetuate the family wealth and so forth. So you wouldn't think about them as having cost you anything because they were an investment and an asset that made the family survive help the family survive. But on the other hand because they had so many of them and because we have so few now there was not a lot of rhetoric around how to make their childhood better or treat them as somebody special. And there was a lot more teach them what the rules are teach them how to work hard get them out in the field as soon as possible kind of attitude where nowadays we worry about psychological development and we have self-help books to help us with parenting we worry about the impact on them and so forth and children are much more precious in the way that we construct them than we used to. This has created an entire industry but it's awesome sort of made us extend childhood to certain steps. Like we now require children to go to school until age 16 where it used to be just through sixth grade. And we also well we've extended childhood all the way out to age 26 now because you can still stay on your parents insurance out of the way to age 26. So when you become an adult it becomes difficult to define because there are things you can do when you're 16 there are things you can do when you're 18 there are things that you can do when you're 21 there are things that you can do when you're 24 and so forth and all of these things keep you connected to your parents. So making the end of childhood much later in life. And this is not true in every society this is different even within Western and European societies this is a different thing. America, the United States probably has one of the longest childhoods on earth. Most cultures and most places children take on adult responsibilities much earlier than they do in the United States. And we also have this thing called adolescence which you may think was you know I mean teenagers or people who are between ages 13 and 20 so hasn't there always been adolescence? And the answer is no it's really a 20th century invention in which the idea of the teenager as an important period in life became more prevalent. And even in probably might even argue that it didn't really come into full acceptance until the 1950s when we have the Bobby Soxers who you know are the teen angst movies and all of that kind of stuff and rock and roll and music and other kinds of commodities that are aimed at adolescence. So we have this idea of the adolescence and of course what goes with this is also definitions of when somebody commits a crime if they commit a crime before they're 16, 17, 18 years old then you know this is considered a time period when you're less responsible for what you do than when you're older and become an adult. So adolescence is a fairly new concept and it has brought with it a lot of new ideas and norms around what growing up means. And of course the next cycle stage would be adulthood and there are lots of ways in which every culture has sort of a rite of passage to adulthood. And like I said before, we have several that start at age 16 and work away all at page 26. So you might suggest that in most of mainstream culture here when you marry and when you have children is your entrance into adulthood. So that can happen at different ages for different people. And this is why there's a lot of debate around teenage pregnancies and around allowing the age of marriage and all of that kind of stuff because there are different ideas about when the normative time is to reach adulthood. And of course adulthood comes with personal responsibility and the idea that you're going to financially support yourself. And of course this can be quite difficult some families and among some people depending upon circumstances. So we do have, and of course we have this new thing now where in social media where people talk about having to take care of things as adulting and adulting is sort of a new idea of looking at what is like to be grown up. And these kind of trends are changing the way that people think about what is a child, what is an adolescent, what is an adult? Of course when we talk about adulthood we often very much talk about what are you gonna do when you grow up?  What kind of career are you gonna pursue? And usually when we talk about that people don't say, well when I grow up I'm going to be a factory worker. I'm going to be a garbage man or I'm gonna go off and work in an office all day long or work in a store all day long. Usually when people answer that question they answer it with a kind of career. And we have this idea and this is probably throughout Western culture that all of us have something that we were meant to do that's important to us and that's often called a vocation. And the word vocation really literally means voice of God, meaning that you've been called. And sometimes people will call it a calling. And for people who can't quite make money at their vocation they sometimes go off and make money in mundane kind of jobs but they have what is called an avocation. So you can think of vocation as career and avocations hobby but there's really more to it than that. It's a meaningful type of work that you do. So if your work is not meaningful the way you make money is not meaningful then you might do make enough money so that you can go off and do what you really enjoy doing what you really think is important and not have to make money at it. And of course capitalism and the way that our economy works can make different demands on adults where on the one hand they have to make money and they have to participate in the economy and that's impossible to do sometimes with some kinds of vocations. But it also you also have that pressure that you ought to be thinking about what you were meant to be. So this can lead to a lot of sort of disconnected conflicting demands upon adults. So the last stage we call old age or sometimes retirement so we're getting to old age and not retiring more often now. There's a couple of things I want to mention about how old age has changed and the way we think about old age. One is that there's a difference in the way that we are constructed in media now that old age is constructed in media. There's a good example of this when you think about the adult diapers that depends adult diapers. So adult diapers have been around for a long time because older people have become more incontinent with age but most of the time in the past when the advertising was done it was done in medical catalogs and that kind of thing. And if you read the ad it will tell you about the absorbency and how it reduces smell and all of these kind of functional kind of things.  So the idea behind this is sort of an underlying this will improve your sex life which all advertising tries to tell you that if you buy their product you'll be more desirable. But this is a very different view of old age it's saying okay you've got, yes you're gonna have more physical problems as you grow older and so forth but you can still live an active and engaged life where in the past when we talked about old age we saw it as withdrawing from the social world so that you become more and more shut in less and less active and treated more or less as an invalid. And this is all well and good and I think it's probably a positive I don't think there's anybody who's saying we should tell people that they should just go away and not be part of the world but sociologists have also taken a look at how this can be detrimental to people who are experiencing more and more disability and more and more problems as they age there's kind of a pressure to hide that now and stigmatize that instead of recognizing that there is a decline in health. So it's a balancing act that we haven't quite figured out yet and of course the profit motive is in the middle of it so that makes it somewhat difficult to have that conversation sometimes. The other thing I want to mention is that one of the things that we're facing in this country is that the population itself is getting older and the reason it's getting older is that we're having less children and we're living longer and this is going to bring some problems in the future one of the problems that gets talked about a lot is social security because every day until 2030 10,000 more people are going to be eligible for social security as the baby boomer generation grows older and they're living longer so they're going to be needing that social security support much longer and you don't have as many young people coming up or some people arguing that'll be okay because we have more machines and so forth but there is one part of this and that is what's going to happen with housing. Housing is going to be a bigger and bigger deal because our houses are not built to be accessible in most parts of the country and there's this concept called aging in place that AARP and gerontologists have talked about where we need houses that make it easier for people to get in and out of and they have to use an assistive device like a wheelchair or a scooter or a walker or a cane and then we also need to have wider rooms, wider hallways, wider doorways and so forth to make sure that people can use as devices once they're inside the house. Now, why is this important? Well, it's important because it will cost a lot more money to put people who can't get in and out of their homes into special places like rest homes and assisted living places and so forth. So we're probably gonna have a pretty bad housing crisis within the next 10 or 15 years and we already are seeing some communities that are beginning to address this but it isn't as widespread as it should be and it will create more problems because the longer you can keep somebody in their house even if they're getting some sort of assistance to be in there, it is much, much less expensive than putting them in a home and most of the time that burden of putting them in a nursing home or putting them in an assisted living falls upon the taxpayer to pay for that because it's paid for through Medicare and Medicaid. So you're gonna see a lot more of gerontologists and aging researchers are looking at this as an important aspect of where we're going with aging and it's one that's not been talked about very much in the past. Also contributing to this is you're gonna have more people aging who do not have children to help take care of them because we have fewer and fewer couples who have more and more kids. We're gonna talk about that in a minute but those sort of factors are coming together to create a kind of crisis as we face retirement and old age and as the population, the average aging population grows older. So when we talk about the life course, I wanna mention this idea of life chances and the reason I wanna mention is because oftentimes what your life chances affect how you go through the life course. Like your childhood is gonna be much different if you're poorer than if you're richer or your adulthood is going to be much different so your retirement is going to be much different depending upon whether or not you have barriers that make it difficult for you to fulfill whatever potential you have. Our life chances sounds kind of like potential but it's not really just a kind of type of potential. Potential sort of psychologically suggests that that's internal so we use the word life chances because we're looking at sort of external things that prevent people from from getting what they need and living up to what they can't do. Each culture has an idea about aging and that means that they have different definitions of what childhood is, what adulthood is, what independence is, what old ages and so forth. And of course those cultural differences will affect how your life chances will work out. Of course, there are rites of passage that every culture has. Some of them are very specific and some of them are sort of implied in what you do. And we need to understand that individuals may or may not follow those courses. They may not go through those rites of passages. They may not age in the same way. They may take on adult responsibility sooner than most people do or later than most people do, depending upon what's going on with them. But one of the factors that shapes whether or not individuals follow this idea of how to age well is that there are inequalities that create barriers and that's what we're talking about. We're talking about life chances. Life chances means that in a just society people should have an equal opportunity and in most societies we do not. And if we do not have equal opportunities we will not age and create families in the same way. So going to the ideas of looking at families I wanna go over some terminology so that you can understand the difference when we do family research. One is that a household is different from a family. Household includes all the persons who occupy a housing unit as their usual place of residence. So this can include roommates and it could include temporary people who are coming and going and so forth. And there are people who are not officially a family because they do not marry and get a state. License in order to be that they still kind of occupy a household together. So there are all sorts of ways and of course individuals can become a household simply by living by themselves. So there's also ways that people live with each other and any way that they live with each other is considered a household if they're in the same place of residence. The housing unit is the place where they live a house and apartments, a mobile home, a group of rooms, a single room, any of that kind of stuff. Anything that's intended for occupancy and somebody lives there is a housing unit. Families on the other hand are people who are related to each other either by blood or by law and a family name or may not live in the same household. So families and households get, you know interchanged sometimes in popular discourse that for our purposes, we have very distinct definitions that are not the same. A household is about the housing unit, the usual place of residence and families are about these legal and blood relationships that people have with each other. So let's talk about what types of families exist. So everybody knows nuclear family and of course, most people, politicians, people in public discourse talk about the nuclear family as if it has been here forever, that this is exactly, you know, this is where all societies have been built and so forth. But the truth of the matter is a husband, wife and children living together in a single housing unit, making up a household, which is essentially what a nuclear family is suggesting has really not been a predominant form of household for more than like 50 or 60 years. Before World War II, we had something called the extended family. And this is how most people live. And if you wanna be truthful when we talk about the way society has been built in the United States, it was not built because of the nuclear family it was built because the extended family. The extended families, of course, are multi-generational more than just two generations. So you have grandparents, great-grandparents and living in the same household as parents and children, that you also have cousins and brothers and sisters that are adults who bring in their families and so forth. So an extended family can mean any set of relations that are grouping themselves together either because they live in the same household or they live in the same vicinity of each other. A lot of times in cities, extended families would live in the same apartment complex or high-rise building. And so they would be near each other and would interact with each other and people knew who their cousins were and hung out with their cousins often. Of course, the extended family is still important in a lot of subcultures in the United States. One of the culture shocks of visiting to Las Vegas was seeing Latino families that would have the entire family come to a grocery store or to do shopping or whatever. And you didn't see that where I grew up in Florida most of the time when people went out shopping as individuals or just adults. You know, like mom might have one of the kids that are kind of thing, but it wouldn't be husband, wife and children all going into a place and into the line at the grocery store and so forth. So obviously extended families and the way people do families can be very different depending upon the subculture where my family history comes from in West Virginia, my father's side of the family. I did, when I did my research in North Carolina, one of the things the nurses talked about was that when people from West Virginia came down to go to the hospital in Northern North Carolina, instead of just a couple of people from the family coming by and visiting the patient, if the patient was in the hospital from one at night or two, there would be an extended family that would show up and want to wait out until the person got better. And so they would often have to accommodate for 10 or 15 people because they all had come down to make sure that grandma or uncle or whoever was going to get better. Of course, this is not what mainstream, this is not the way that mainstream America would necessarily do with a hospital that most of the time in mainstream America, it's only one significant person who comes and stays at a hospital in somebody's ill and maybe not even that one, maybe they just come and visit a little bit and come back. So again, extended families has historically been important, but they all also remain important for a number of self-cultures within the United States. Closely related to that, but sort of a new idea, especially since the late 1970s and early 1980s with no fault divorce, they came the way on the land so that people found divorce easier to do as we have what is called blended families and blended families are basically when husband and wife have children and then they divorce and they go marry other people who have children, you have step brothers and sisters, you have half brothers and sisters and so forth, some of the children may live in one of the households for part of the year in a different household for another part of the year and they may be weekends in one household and weekdays in another. So this is a new way of doing family because these people are related each other legally and by blood because of the children that they shared and so forth. And for a while, there was not a lot of norms to turn to to tell you what to do when there was a blended family. And so they're even in legal cases that was hard to figure out exactly what would be the best course of action if you are faced with having to deal with step children and half brothers and sisters, that kind of thing. Now, it's been about 40 years and we now start having some norms like for instance, in court situations, the norm now is to try to go for joint custody in which both divorcing parents have some responsibilities and rights in relationship to that child and that's not considered an ideal and the best way to do it. And then if there is some challenge to that, that's where the burden of proof lies. And then of course, people have gotten better about caring about what the kid needs, the kid's need in those situations. And so there are a lot of self-help books. Self-help books are a good way to figure out what norms are being developed because there's essentially ways of training people how to deal with new things in their lives that they've not dealt with before. So the blended family is becoming much more prominent. Divorce is easier than it's been in the past, even with children. Child custody and child care has become more standardized and normalized and so blended families are now very much a part of our society and people don't think much about it anymore. It's not shocking and it's not hard to overwhelm, it's just a matter of working your way through it and there are lots of ways that will support you working your way through that. There's one other kind of family that I wanna talk about which is not really necessarily related to a household that it certainly generates a feeling of family for a lot of people. And this is something called fictive kin. Now, fictive kin has a very specific idea behind it and that's something called general exchange. So a group of people who think of themselves as family even though they don't have blood are legal relationships with each other. We know that they're fictive kin because they instead of exchanging goods and services on a one-to-one basis. So I babysit for you and then you babysit for me, okay? So we have this exchange, that's called a specific exchange but a general exchange would be that this say there's five people in the group and one of them babysits and the other one does the laundry and the other one does the car pooling and they don't necessarily have to exchange with each other as long as they're giving something to the group they can expect something back from anybody in the group. It doesn't necessarily have to be the person that they gave the service to or the resources to. So essentially it becomes a group that is bonded together because people exchange things back and forth within the group, demonstrating that they are part of the group. Couple of examples of fictive kin. One example would be street gangs and this is an important thing for criminologists especially to understand because most of the time when you have people who commit crimes together and by the way, I'm not implying that all street gangs or gangs are criminals or a lot of people who get together into kind of young people having general exchange with each other and creating what we might call a gang who do not necessarily go out and commit crime but looking at the specific criminal gang because they are mostly a fictive kin group instead of a bound by a criminal group. The rules are kind of different. If you have two or three people who get together and say we're gonna go rob people and they go and do it and you arrest one of them, it's very easy to say, okay, if you tell us about the other two then we'll let you have an easier sentence and you can turn them and get them to give evidence and go after the group that way but with gangs that have fictive kin relationships that's never gonna work. This is why oftentimes the only way to break up these kind of operations is to essentially go undercover because any other way, you're not gonna, there's too much of a sense of we're in this together. We belong to each other to get them to turn on each other. That would be not just a betrayal of the particular people that they might give evidence on but it would be a betrayal to the entire group and it would be considered betraying somebody, betraying a group that you belong to. Another example of fictive kin is traditional black churches in the South which very often have created general exchange systems that have supported all of the people who are involved in that church. And then you can look at the civil rights movement as being born out of this fictive kin system because a lot of the early, well, I don't wanna say early, early because there were a lot of civil rights before the 1950s but a lot of what we think of as the civil rights movement in the 1950s including Rosa Parks was born out of the ways in which black churches generated a fictive kin relationship among the people in the church. So it was very easy to organize them into political action because they were already organized in a fictive kin relationship. So one of the ways a sociologist study marriages and families is to collect data on them and specifically to look at trends. And I've put on your canvas shell a copy of the American's Families and Living Arrangements from 2012 and the US Census Bureau which is published by the US Census Bureau in August of 2013. The 2012 data really is the latest data and this is 2018 as I record this lecture that I can get a hold of right now. I'm sure that these figures are gonna change and we're probably gonna see a report like this within the next couple of years that we'll draw upon. But for right now, this is the data that we have coming out of the Census Bureau and taking a look at living arrangements. And one of the things, if you look at this, so first of all, you can see that between 1970 and 2012, there have been a lot of changes in households and in family arrangements. In 1970, 81% of all households were family households, meaning everybody that was in the household was related to each other either by law or by blood. That's found down to 66%. Married couples with children under age 18 and 1970, 40% of all households were that arrangement. Now it's down to 20%. Now the reason it's down to 20% can be single parent or it could be that the people who are living with the children are not married or it could be that there is something other than a parent living with the children under 18 because a lot of grandparents and aunts and uncles, foster parents and so forth. But that's still a significant that it's gone down and half since 1970. Also the proportion of one person household has increased by 10 points going from 17% to 27% of all households now have just one person now. And the number of people per household which is related to the fact that there's a lot of more one-person households has gone down from 3.1 to 2.6. So the one thing that I wanna point out here is that most of the time when we think of family and when we think of a household we see in our head heterosexually married couple with children under the age of 18 but that really is only 20% of the household. So that's not typical, right? This stereotype that we have in our head is not actually the typical household in the United States. We don't have a single household type of household that we could call typical. We have a lot of different ways in which people live together. And so that's an interesting disconnect between the way people think about what a household is and that gets reflected sometimes in the way that our tax laws talk about it our politicians talk about it and so forth and the way that we actually live with each other. The way we live with each other is different. So if you're living alone or you don't have children you might consider the status sort of comforting that you are nowhere near like an outlier. There are plenty of people who are living similar arrangements to the way that you're living. And then finally, I want to mention that there is a huge variation in the way in which people marry nowadays. This is very different than it was in the past. And if you look, this is a Pew research graphic that is telling us that in some of the places in the United States and you'll see the red circle shows that Southern Nevada and Las Vegas is definitely one of these that people report this is people reporting enter marriage meaning they marry somebody with a different race or ethnic background than their own is making up quite a few of the household. 25% of all newlyweds in our area or 25% or more are marrying somebody of a different racial background. This probably includes more Hispanic and non-Hispanic than any other group together but it certainly includes all different kinds of arrangements. So this is what we call exogamy and I've mentioned in class and in other materials before that exogamy is on the rise. And this shows you that it's not uniformly on the rise everywhere but it's definitely we live in an area where that it's definitely on the rise here. And of course, the fact that people come here and get married, I'm not sure if this is anybody who's married here or if this is households who are here. So we have to be a little bit careful about the data it may be skewed to higher because people come here to get married but they don't end up living here. But this is certainly a big change in the way that people do marriage. It's not that many years ago. I think the last laws that changed were in the 1960s and 70s that was actually illegal to marry somebody of a different race in some states in this country. So this is definitely going from you can't do it to 25% or more of you are doing it is a big shift in the way that we do marriage.