Episode 408: We're Back

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1:02We're back after a great summer and there is a lot to catch up on. I'll share an incredible example of an organization that used streaks to achieve three times its goal. Some exciting milestones for my streaks. And then, I'm going to tell you how AI allowed me. Someone who is definitely not a software developer. To build an app from scratch, that app became my streaks money. And the story behind it taught me something important about the difference between automation and deliberate action. We'll talk about money, AI, consistency, and why sometimes doing something manually is exactly what keeps us engaged in the things that matter. All of that, coming up on the streaking podcast. Let's start streaking. What is streaking and why should you do it? Streaking is how you set up personal winning streaks. Look at who you want to be and what you need to do to become that person. This is streaking. I'm Jeff. And I'm Jamie. And we are streakers through 30 years of marriage and seven children.

2:03We have learned the power of consecutive consistency or streaking. To start streaking is simple. You just follow these three laws. Make it laughably simple. Keep a record and join the streaking community. Streaking is your hidden superpower with it. You will consistently progress and grow in whatever area of life you want. In this podcast, Jeff and I will share all the fun, exciting, serious, solemn, wonderful parts of family, spiritual, professional, and personal life, and how streaking powers it all. So join us in the conversation, join the movement, and start streaking today. Hey there, streakers. How are you doing today? It's Jeff Downs. And we are back live on the streaking podcast. I'm so excited to be talking to you. It's been just a little while since we have had a conversation. And that's because of a lot of different reasons. Summer has been beautiful. Many vacations and a lot of fun. And we've been hard at work at some of the different things that we've been working on for the My Streaks app. That's right. My streaks app is getting upgrades and overhalls.

3:04Main one being that there's going to be a My Streaks web app that will be coming out. But welcome to the streaking show. I'm Jeff Downs. I'm Millet Without My Co-host today, Jamie. And she's got other business that she needs to tend to. Well, I'd like to just chat with you tonight a little bit about some of the things that have been going on. And why we've been having the, why we've done these things. So first of all, we had a fantastic summer. We spoke at the ATD conference. And it was absolutely wonderful. We had a lot of great participants in the audience. We had 225 seats in the audience. And it's been a, it was just a great experience to talk about how you can set up streaks in order to increase the stickiness of any type of learning. And you know, if you've been in learning or if you've taught anything that getting things to stick is definitely one of the difficult parts of learning.

4:07That's why consistency and repetition come into play so much. We also have had some fantastic success with one of the organizations that we've been consulting over this summer. This particular organization had set a goal to increase, and I won't go into specifics with it, but the goal was to increase a certain number by a significant percentage. Now, I know I'm not being that, that detailed, but simply for the reason of confidentiality, I'm not going to be, but they, they tripled their goal with the streaks that they set. They got the whole organization involved. Everyone decided what streak they were going to do. And these happened to be work week streaks because this was professional streaks. And the work week streaks that they set absolutely led them to phenomenal success. Again, it was three times their goal and they're still not done. Still have it going on. That was an awesome success story.

5:07We also had several, we've now topped 50,000 registered users for the My Streaks app. And it continues to grow now. One of the things that you know, and I know is AI has stormed the world. And if you've listened to a few podcasts that Jamie and I have done, you've seen how AI has just taken over everything and we've talked about that. The reason I bring it up now, AI in its dawn, it's in its infancy, I would say. Some may say it's a little bit further along, but I would tell you that it is in its infancy has changed the way a lot of people work. And the way a lot of people behave productivity has gone up. How many percentage points we can't even measure. Sometimes I listen to those who are AI experts and realize that they're no more expert than the last expert that I listen to. Or than anyone that has used AI for any amount of time.

6:09In fact, I don't know that the experts are so expert at all because AI is changing on a regular basis, consuming knowledge and information and then giving us that knowledge and information back with all kinds of upgrades. The reason I bring it up, I have ventured into development and programming using AI. A lot of people use quad, codex is one by chat GPT. All of these are formidable coding platforms. Now, I'm going to tell you right up front, I am not a developer or a coder. And I have utmost respect for those who have taken computer science on as their profession and no one understand the language of computers. In fact, we wouldn't have AI unless we had the individuals who knew how to program AI and how to bring it to us, the large language models and so forth.

7:16Recently, as of about two months ago, I decided that I would venture into the whole AI coding extravaganza. I wanted to see if I could code an app. And I got to tell a little bit of a story about how this came about because it's been rather interesting and I've had a lot of fun. Just to be all honest with you, doing what I've done over the last two months has been a lot of fun. Because in my past, I have a technical background but not a coding background. I never wanted to be a developer. I only ever wanted to just be able to work with technology and use technology in the ways that would benefit me and others. So I had ideas and I had thoughts but never any way to really bring those thoughts to fruition on to a computer stage. And why? Because I just didn't take the time to discipline myself to learn how to code.

8:16Reminds me of a little story of one of our streaking users who set a streak to learn how to code. And the way that well, the streak was this, the goal was to learn how to code the streak was this. Program or write at least one line of code every day. Write at least one line of code every day. And he ventured off on this particular streak. He got about 110 days into it. Retired the streak and thought, I never want to code again. Coding was not for him. He found a different passion and that was actually designing and developing UI interfaces. Interesting how that streak gave him the ability to know right away, well within 110 days, that he did not want to be a developer. That's what streaks sometimes can do for us. Is they can, when you set one, help you know and understand what you don't want to do.

9:23So, AI comes out. I started using, as soon as chat came out with its first version, I started using AI then. And believe me, from then to now, and that's been about three years ago, maybe, let's see, almost four years ago, four years ago, from then to now, the progress has been absolutely phenomenal. I can't even describe the progress that has happened from when I first started using it to today. About two months ago, I had decided that, well, Jamie and I were trying to figure out how to do a money management system that we had loved when early on. The money management system that we had used was called envelopes and some of you may have used it envelopes uses an envelope budgeting system. And what that means is if you get a certain sum of money, let's just take easy round money.

10:24Let's say you have a hundred dollars, you then divide that hundred dollars among envelopes that you set out in specific categories. So, you could have savings, you could have groceries or eating out, you can have utilities, you can have any number of envelopes. And you divide them out as much as you are comfortable. You could have major categories and then envelopes. And you put money in each of these envelopes. Now, with a hundred dollars today, that doesn't go that far. But you would divide that up and then through the month, you would spend from that envelope. So, if we ate out, we would take the fifty dollars out of eating out and that would go, that would be what we would use to eat out with. We, M, the lobes, that's how I was trying, was a company that was in business when we were first married and it was an online money management system.

11:26And it was phenomenal. Jamie and I, in fact, used it to the eighth degree and got way ahead in our savings and finances. It enabled us to be able to buy our first home, to buy our second home. It enabled us to be able to save for cars, save for vacations. It was really a great system for us to be able to manage our money. Emvelopes went out of business. And that ended our opportunity to use it. And we were highly disappointed. Highly disappointed because it had given us so much control over our money management and what we did. What happened after that? Well, we tried a whole bunch of different budgeting programs. We tried Winab, we tried Simplify, we tried Dave Ramsey's money, we've tried all kinds of different things and it just did not meet the needs that we wanted.

12:28And there's a lot of people who have been serviced quite significantly and well by these particular budgeting apps. They've been, they've been great for them, but it just didn't work for us. It didn't work for us because the way that these apps typically work is you put a budget in place and then through the month you spend and you keep track of it in the budget. But there's, you're not really subtracting anything out. You're just trying to stay within budget and staying within budget for us didn't work. It was not something that we, that we did. It was just, it was just didn't work. And maybe you found this for you as well. Maybe it hasn't worked for you. So we were trying to figure out what to do for several years because envelopes went out of business long time ago. So we were trying to figure out for several years what it is that we could do in order to budget successfully.

13:32And get this envelopes. Time passes, AI advances. Two months ago, I get a notice from a chat GPT that said, hey, Codex is now available. One is probably available before them, but I just got it. I thought, you know what? I'm going to give it a try. So Codex, I brought it up and I put in two Codex, my very first project, which was, I want an app for my iPhone that is modeled after the envelope style of money management. And it was about that much that I put into the prompt for Codex. Put that in and it started thinking and processing. And that's what it says in its little prompts back to you and thinking and processing and thinking processing. And out popped version one build one of this budget of this the budgeting app or this money management app. I love it. And I had to go through all kinds of iterations to know how to test it on my computer, how to set up a test environment, a developer environment.

14:40So I can have it on my computer. I needed to figure out how to be able to, well, I'll hold that thought for just a second, but I had to figure out how to test it on my native computer environment. And then also how to download it to my app. Now I have a MacBook Pro and everything that I had a question about, I asked, I asked chat, I said, okay, I can't do this, I can't do this. There was one time that chat spat out this list of instructions and it was super long and super detailed. At the end of it, I said, okay, slow down. I am a neophyte in regards to development. I need these things one step at a time. So it would come with step one. I would have trouble with step one. And therefore I would take a screenshot of where I thought chat wanted me to be. I took that screenshot, put it into chat. It said, oh, I see where you are. You need to be here. And it told me where in that screenshot, I needed to click in order to be able to get to where I need to be.

15:50So I went to the live side, I clicked on it, got to there. And then one at a time, I built the test environment. I then started the app in the test environment and sought for the first time. And the very first one was underwhelming at best. It didn't fit the screen properly. There was a couple of things that it did, but I had a working app. And so I thought, okay, this is great. Let's keep going. So I told it, I told code acts, I typed it in. I said code acts, I need you to modify it. So it fills the whole screen. And it has these particular functions. And I defined some of the functions that I wanted. Again, boom, it started processing and coding opened up X code, put all the code in, packaged a little zip file for me. I put that zip or put that zip file in a folder. I double clicked on the zip file, it explode, it expanded. I've clicked on the X code file and there again, pushed play and up came the app with the fixes that I'd asked. It was working. I was highly impressed.

17:02So I started to work with it a little bit more, but I eventually got to this place where I didn't quite know how to tell code X, what to do in order to program the app correctly. So I pulled up chat on one side, I had code X on the other. And I started putting into chat, what I wanted the program to work like the app to work like this, my streaks. And by the way, we call it my streaks money. So my streaks money, I and I said, that's what I want to call it. And here's what I wanted to do. And here's some of the things that are happening. I said, and I said to chat, what do I tell code X. And it gave me this list of instructions exactly for code X. I copied that pasted it in and boom, build number five came out with a working app that was doing exactly what I wanted it to do. And I just started going from there, build after build, got up to build number 98 and then was able to have it at a place that it was highly functional.

18:13I wanted to something else to do on this app though as well. I wanted it to be able to coordinate between my phone and Jamie's phone. And so I asked chat, how do I do this? That got into a full, another technical realm of how to communicate between two phones, the same money management profile. That took that that one took a little bit longer. There were some bugs that came into play, but every step of the way I was able to ask chat what to do, what to tell code X. I put that into code X code X responded back program the app, put in debugging type program. Applications so that I could run those with some of the bugs that came up. And before you know it, there is a fully working functioning app that is that the budget is shared or the my streak's money profile, the money profile, the money management profile is shared between my phone and Jamie's phone.

19:14And so when she enters a transaction, I see it when I enter a transaction, she sees it. You can verify credit card balances, you can verify your banking balances, your credit union balances, what your financial institution balance, I put a money coach in it so that it shows you some of the different ways that you can save money or that you need to pay attention to savings. All of the envelopes you can program as savings goals, I mean, it is a highly robust app. And it has saved our bacon. We are back fully into the envelope style of money management and it is awesome. All of that was done with AI. So the reason I tell you that whole story is our world has changed. What I could only dream of, I can now put into play. And in fact, my streak's money is offered on the app store, underneath the family of streaking apps. So you've got my streaks, streak tracker, which is to track all of your streaks.

20:24And you've been using that for quite some time. And then you've got my streaks money, which is specific, a specific streak to manage your money in a way that makes you completely in control. A couple of other things on my streaks money. People have asked me as I've told them about it and been excited. Well, Jeff, does it link up to your bank. I was considering that and could have done it. There are third party platforms that I could use to link automatically to my bank so that when I have financial transactions that go into the bank, they would automatically download to my streaks money. Similarly with credit card could do the same thing. However, I made a conscious deliberate decision. And the conscious deliberate decision was this.

21:24I'm not going to have it automatically download because any time I was in automatic money mode, that was when I eventually lost control of my money. It went out of my deliberate intentional action and went to. I just didn't pay attention anymore. In other words, my mind wouldn't pay was not paying attention to the money that I was either spending or bringing in. So we made a deliberate intentional decision to not do an automatic bank transfer or credit card transfer. Everything that you do in my streaks money is built to be deliberate, intentional and manual. And by the way, it's built after a streak as well because what do you do with a streak?

22:26A streak is something you do every day. It's laughably simple. And what's the laughably simple streak that I have? Check my streaks money. Open the my streaks money app at least one time every day. And by the way, when I'm in there, I record a transaction. Now when I go out, for example, to get gas right after I fill up, I record the transaction right in my streaks money. I record the spending from if I go into the grocery store and I pick up some groceries. I record that right into my streaks money. It comes right out of the grocery, but the grocery envelope has money in it takes the money right out of that reserves it on the credit card so that when I make a credit card payment, that money is already reserved. And I can see that in the my streaks money app. All of it deliberate and intentional. And this is what I would encourage you to do. If you have not had a satisfactory experience with any other budgeting app out there and you may have, I give you a invitation to download to purchase and download my streaks money.

23:37Put it in the app store is 1499. It is the best $15 you will ever spend if you choose to do it in the streaking style of doing things, which is every single day you are opening my streaks money. You're logging transactions, you're keeping up to date, you're verifying balances, all of those things. We love it. We absolutely love it. And I think it is something that you will love to if you haven't already found a budgeting app that works for you or if you're not using a money management app at all. And by the way, this is different than a budgeting app. It is truly a money management app. I had a question the other day as I think I, well, I was showing someone the app and they were asking, so it doesn't divide it up inside of your bank then. I'm like, nope, this is strictly for you and your phone to manage your money.

24:41It does nothing for your bank. Now, one of the things that we put in there, and this is kind of cool. You can, if you choose to, download after you've been entering transactions for a while, you can download all the transactions. There are envelopes that you pulled money out of all the spending and everything else. And you can upload that into your AI of choice. Now, some people may be saying, Jeff, privacy. And you know what, that may be something that you choose not to do. That's why we don't have it automatically link up. Nor do we have an AI agent that's going in and telling you stuff. Now, the money coach has a little bit of programmed knowledge, but it's nowhere, it's not an AI agent. It is simply looking at some of the different things that are going on inside of your finances and the money coach makes suggestions. But if you wanted to get an analysis of your spending and where you might either cut back or be able to save some more, what you can do is go to my street, download the my street's money and then paste that in the AI of your choice and ask for a financial analysis to say, this is, this is the spending and income I've received over the last two, three months.

26:01I'd like for you to do an analysis and help me know where I might be able to cut back or where I might be able to save some more, whatever the case may be, help me see what it is. I'm not saying to have the power of an AI that goes out and grabs information from experts that have put information out there on the web and then uses that information to tell you what you can do in order to get better at saving. And really managing your money in other words becoming wealthy every single day, it is powerful. My street's money has been a wonderful, wonderful app that we put in. Well, I had such a wonderful time with that. It was such a great success. There was another problem I was having that I wanted an app for that I thought, you know, if I could have an app that would do this particular thing, that would, that would be great.

27:03And what is it? What was that particular thing? Well, I will share that with you in our next podcast. This one was all about my street's money and AI and how it's helped me. But in the next podcast, I'll share with you one that really did unlock the opportunity for me to improve a particular weakness that I have. And I'll share that with you in our next podcast. As I said, the summer was wonderful. We've had some great success. Strieking is real. Remember, set a streak, reach for your goals and out of streaks, fall to heavens. That's what you're striving to do. It is to be deliberate and conscious in your mind. Well, until we talk together again, please take a look at my streets. If you haven't downloaded that, my street's money app, if you don't have one, pay the 15 bucks and it's worth it. Go in, start budgeting, deliberately are managing deliberately your money today.

28:05And until we talk again, I hope you have a marvelous, fantastic, wonderful day. And as always, keep screaming. Oh, it's the little things that make a better you. In Austin, March 15th through the 21st, South by Southwest is the place where unexpected connections, discoveries and opportunities are always expected. Every corner, the next big thing is happening from innovation and the future of business to live music, first time screenings or a passing conversation that changes everything. You never know what you'll find. That's South by Southwest serendipity. Get your badge and see where the experience takes you. Visit sksw.com to learn more. Right now at Subway, try the 499 sub of the day. Get a different 6-inch sub every day for just 499 each, like Meatball Marinera on Mondays, tuna on Tuesdays and the BMT on Saturdays.

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