How I Get By

Maneesh Seethi runs the company Pavlok, which produces wearable products to help keep you on task, including waking up in the morning, and they also offer coaching. It goes back to when they introduced the Shock Clock into the world. Maneesh spends about half the year in Medellin, Columbia, these days, and works with a remote company team that's based far afield, including in the UK, Asia and the U.S. He talks about the influence of the book The 4-Hour Work Week on his life, his objective with his wearables, which includes a different way for people to rewire their learning habits, how he manages to live on only about $2000 a month while his company "owes" him about 100k, and how he's going to be doing Pavlok until the day he dies.

Brian Gurien, a comedian and improver living in Brooklyn, talks about the reality of having a day job, which is currently a full-time, but not long-term, gig helping to set up passover camps in a couple of locales. Brian's admission that being in entertainment is NOT a long-term career option is unusual, and he's sticking with both comedy and improv for now regardless. He also talks about his past gigs, how he got into credit card debt, and what it's like when his co-workers ask him to tell them a joke.

In part 2 of our conversation with Caitlin, she talks specifically about working at Google as a software engineer, including everything from what she actually does in her job, what her work days are like (including the special Google perks), how much she earns, what her colleagues are like and what it's like working there as a woman programmer. She also talks about Google's larger reputation as a corporation, and how far along she is in paying off her grad school debt.

Caitlin is a dancer and choreographer, and she's also a software engineer at Google in New York. In the first part of two episodes, she talks about her various living situations over the years in New York, and a three-year stint in Denver, including her current one with a roommate in Brooklyn that she's much more happy with; learning to code, getting a masters degree at NYU and the steps that led her to becoming a Google employee; how technology may factor into her future dance projects; how hard it is to make a living from being in modern dance, and how it's hard for anyone to, ultimately, be satisfied with what they do.

Melody is a stay-at-home mom of five kids in Peoria, a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. She talks about managing the family's finances; how she and her husband re-structured their lives around his becoming an electrician and the path they've taken to get to the point where he makes six figures; how she networks online for free clothing and sporting goods for her kids, as well as big discounted group vacations; how she and her husband and saving for retirement, and not necessarily for putting anything away for her kids' college educations so much as facilitating the careers they become interested in; and how they donate a big portion of their savings to charities through their church.